Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/765720
P E R S P E C T I V E | J A N UA RY / F E B R UA RY 2 0 1 7 25 in print Clockwise from top left: Wilbur Farrell rendering the raised detail on scenic doors. An unidentified artist at Warner Bros. in the 1920s aging a foreground roof to match a scenic backing. Michael Denering, also shown working at Warner Bros., is one of the artists providing an oral history for the book. It was an early morning in the winter of 1974. The Triangle Studio paint shop was unheated and dimly lit. The coffee on the hot plate was bold and coarse, but warm and much needed by this sleepy eighteen-year-old scenic apprentice. I was alone in the studio's color kitchen except for a few pigeons flying high overhead in the rafters of the cavernous three-story-tall and timeworn paint shop. As the only apprentice, I had many chores to complete while providing for every need of my scenic masters, which seemed at that time to be impossible. I had recently entered this unique brotherhood of talented, complicated, challenging, and taciturn artists and taskmasters. As I reflect back, their occasional gruffness is to be forgiven now that I understand the difficulties of articulating that which you don't yet understand yourself and the intimidating challenge of a new work that is certain to test one's knowledge and abilities. Just imagine launching into a giant blank canvas armed with only a paint sketch, string, charcoal, brush, sponge, spray gun and buckets full of color—and on a deadline! Such talent and the requisite tenacity to succeed requires the confidence of an experienced journeyman artist, one who has spent thousands of hours standing before the paint frame and who has become fluent in the application of his profession's techniques and many tricks of the trade. It is both an original and yet ancient art and craft. Fundamentally, its traditions and methods have been practiced in a similar manner in artist ateliers, civic buildings, churches and caves ever since mankind first began to communicate through art. My workplace, the timeworn Triangle Studio, was built in 1916 by pioneer filmmaker Mack Sennett for silent film star Mabel Normand. continued Photographs courtesy Art Directors Guild Archives; Marc Wanamaker/Bison Archives