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• W2078774004 abstract "Gerald Mc Dermott Patricia Dooley Click for larger view View full resolution Despite the many awards won by Gerald McDermott's animated films and picture-books, his work remains controversial for the best of reasons: it is original, thoughtful, and makes few concessions to common children's-book conventions. Both praise and criticism have attended McDermott's attempts to charge the picture-book with some of the dynamism of modern art, and to keep alive what he believes to be the child's spontaneous response to abstraction. The artist creating a picture-book has an opportunity—and a special responsibility—to nurture the development of his young audience's visual perception. But this development cannot occur, [End Page 1] McDermott stresses, so long as we ask only for an art that is easily accessible and realistic in the most trivial sense.1 The result of McDermott's quest for a non-trivial realism can be seen in the four films he created between 1965 and 1973.2The Stonecutter (1965), Anansi the Spider (1969), The Magic Tree (1970), and Arrow to the Sun (1973) were uncompromising in their sophisticated graphic design. All were later adapted and published as picture-books (Arrow to the Sun won the Caldecott Medal in 1975), and in this medium only has all his subsequent work for children been done.3The Voyage of Osiris appeared in 1977, and both The Knight of the Lion (Four Winds) and Papagayo the Mischief Maker (Windmill) will be published in 1979. Except for the last (an original story using folk material) all of the films and books are retellings of myths or traditional tales. It is, indeed, the mythic version of reality, the mythmaker's alternative to naturalism, that McDermott has sought. He was drawn to mythology because it offered a starting-point that was filled with mystery and magic and transformation.4 Those very qualities made the animated film a natural vehicle. Although he had had art training since the age of four, at the Detroit Institute of Arts and later at Cass Technical High School and New York's Pratt Institute, McDermott taught himself filmmaking, experimenting first with live-action films, then working as a graphic designer for [End Page 2] Channel 13, and visiting European animation studios. Some early experience in radio, and years of music training,5 lie behind the outstanding soundtracks accompanying the films. The music used is original (commissioned), but employs traditional instruments and native modes, making a perfect complement to the artist's similar reworking of traditional graphic motifs and design. Stylized geometric shapes and a restricted palette are part of the vocabulary of an artist formed, as McDermott was, in the Bauhaus manner. The artist also cites Matisse (especially his cut-paper work) and Klee as influences:6 perhaps it is their ability to combine appealing color with purity of form, to achieve a kind of austere sensuality, that makes them sympathetic figures. McDermott's own colors are vibrant and brilliant, even fauviste. Unlike much mass-market illustration today, however, his color is not splashed around to compensate for careless design: it is subordinate to, and a functioning part of, the overall graphic and symbolic plan. The use of color as an adjunct to meaning is particularly successful in Arrow to the Sun. McDermott's combination of discipline and liberty in color and composition brings him closer to Blair Lent or Leo Lionni, for example, than to Brian Wildsmith. Perhaps he owes something also to the influence of the Douanier Rousseau. Like the stylized shapes richly colored and organized by the artist, the tales too disguise complexity beneath simplicity. Anansi the Spider is clearly about wholeness7—but so also is it about family relationships, interdependence, and the skills of civilization. The Stonecutter is about man's insatiable ambition and thoughtless abuse of power—but so also is it about the relationships balancing the natural world, and the limits of perception. The Magic Tree, The Voyage of Osiris, and The Knight of the Lion are all about loyalty and betrayal, especially the loyalty between husband and wife. Mavungu aids the enchanted people of the tree, Papagayo aids the night-creatures when..." @default.
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• W2078774004 date "1979-01-01" @default.
• W2078774004 modified "2023-10-17" @default.
• W2078774004 title "Gerald Mc Dermott" @default.
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• W2078774004 doi "https://doi.org/10.1353/chq.0.0661" @default.
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