Uncanny Valley: The Oil Paintings of the Late Eyvind Earle Still Have A Resounding Influence on Artists & Viewers Today
There are many occasions when language fails me, when a poet’s hand seems what is needed to get to the truth of a thing—a man’s life, a work of art, a life of art. This is such a moment. To call the oil paintings of Eyvind Earle “landscapes” is accurate but very sorely wanting. For more than seventy years, Earle turned his unique refracting eye on what he called the “stupendous infinity of nature,” interpreting what he saw through a long lens shaped by a very particular kind of mythopoeia.
Earle’s gift for myth-building led him to create landscapes that are not merely a setting for an unfolding drama, but the drama in and of itself. Light is a muse that stretches, dances, and twirls, flouting natural laws for attainment of higher reality. Color answers with a superhuman brashness born of confidence, practice, and poise. Inky shadows, sharp as knives, lie across soft, downy fields like a threat, full of menace and mystery. Rocks and sea take many guises, rising like beacons of Martian authority or slouching along the horizon like a cattle rustler’s hideaway; crashing against the shore with the violence and high style of samurais, or lying in cool, precise striations like the digital daydream of lonely A.I.
Trees play myriad roles: they flank hill tops like murmuring, whispering bandits, hatching plots and hiding treasure; they stand like monks bearing solemn witness to rising mists and falling snow; they stand rise from firestorms while jewels of light spread along their trunks like veins; they reach surreal heights with smooth, slender limbs outstretched, as lithe and ethereal as a company of dancers; they linger on the sideline, old and wise, gnarled beyond time, and draped in patchwork coats of unearthly lichen.
Earle is a world-builder. His landscapes do not capture a single moment of bucolic splendor, they conjure multitudes. Each canvas is like a window onto a universe. It is impossible to see them without wondering about the practical magic of such a place, the hyper-natural laws and physics that must shape it, the glorious lifeforms that must be shaped by it, and the inevitable adventures that will unfold. And yet, as unusual as Earle’s landscapes might strike us—as futuristic, ancient, mythic, or outer-worldly they might seem—they are also achingly familiar because they are real, rooted in places on earth we have seen. They are, in fact, realer than real; because beyond the light, the wind, the stone, and the trees, they also convey what we know, dream, imagine, and feel about a place. Is it any wonder that lovers of fiction and fantasy—filmmakers like Guillermo del Toro and Peter Jackson, authors like Ray Bradbury and Dean Koontz—are among Earle’s collectors and most avid fans? Or that Walt Disney was so affected by the work, he actually changed how Disney made animated feature films?
Earle was born in Manhattan in 1916. His father Ferdinand Pinney Earle II, a wealthy, well-educated Bohemian with both talent and temper, moved the family to Hollywood when Earle was two. Earle grew up soaking in the atmosphere of movie-production lots at MGM where his father created special effects and glass matte paintings for silent epics like 1925’s Ben Hur. Sadly, Earle II’s reputation for artistry was no match for his reputation as a hedonistic megalomaniac and risky hire. Things grew risky at home, too. Earle’s mother Charlotte, Earle II’s third wife, eventually took her sons and fled, plunging her boys into their first of many experiences of poverty.
When Earle was ten years old, his father bundled him off to Mexico City under the pretense of a weekend visitation. The parental abduction, which lasted for four years, became an artistic crucible that would shape and solidify young Earle’s work ethic for life. While drifting through Mexico, Cuba, Spain, Corsica, England, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, and France, Earle was ordered by his father to paint one painting every day or read fifty pages of a book. Earle chose to keep his head down and do both. For his hard work, the fourteen year old earned an exhibition in France. There, in France, Earle finally escapes his father and, with the help of a relative, returned to his mother in Los Angeles. Fatefully, the Great Depression and a polio outbreak also awaited across the sea.
It is easy to look back on a long, rich life and see where trials result in treasure. Earle says that the facial paralysis he suffered due to polio made him keep to himself and his art, always reaching for greater skill and deeper understanding. Poverty forced Earle to leave school early and take modest work as an assistant sketch artist for United Artists Studio. Poor and restless, Earle pedaled his bicycle hours beyond Los Angeles in search of new vistas that would one day turn Disney’s head. When his first interview proved fruitless, he decided to keep riding, embarking on a cross-country trip that took forty-two days and resulted in a one-man show of forty-two watercolors in Manhattan. He was twenty-one. It may have been an impulsive gambit, but it paid off.
Not long after, the Met acquired a painting and Williams Carlos Williams—the modernist poet intimately associated with the likes of Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Wallace Stevens, and Carl Sanburg—commissioned Earle to paint a mural in his home. More exhibitions followed. Still, Earle was living hand to mouth. He decided to start a Christmas card company based on the linocuts he created for friends; over time, more than three hundred million of those cards would sell. But not yet. It was 1943, the year of the first Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the execution of anti-Nazi youth leaders in the White Rose movement, the year Earle was drafted.
It is perhaps unsurprising that Earle turned to spiritual philosophy. Like many artists who lived through the WWII, he sought solace and meaning by seeking universal truth. Like the Beats, he studied the works of Jesus, Buddha, Laozi, Greek mythology, Plato, Shakespeare, Vivekananda, and even Edgar Casey. Aesthetically, though, he was worlds apart from the Abstract Expressionists who dominated his generation. While his peers created visual howls from the existential depths of the human experience, Earle found inspiration in the “inextricable miracle of a trillion stars sending their light to shine on every single dew drop.” He sought richness, wonder, and awe more in keeping with post-war Latin American authors like Gabriel García Márquez and Jorge Luis Borges than Willem De Kooning or Jackson Pollock. Earle’s brush was dipped in magical realism, often abstracted but always determinedly fantastic.
By 1951, when Earle was hired as a background painter at Disney, he was well known among the studio artists for his greeting cards. He rose quickly, soon contributing designs for Peter Pan and Lady and the Tramp, then earning an Academy Award for an animated short. When he was given the reins to Sleeping Beauty just a short time later, it seemed a perfect fit: Walt Disney wanted every frame to be a work of art, no matter the cost. Earle would deliver; but cost it did.
It is believed by many that artistically speaking Sleeping Beauty has never been matched. Drawing on Gothic French, Italian, and pre-Renaissance tapestries and architecture, Earle—with his exaggerations of line, color, and form; his attention to detail, down to wood grain, leaf vein, and needlepoint stitch; and his uncanny ability to bring life to stone—forever defined the look of “fairytale” in our collective conscious.
By the time Earle was handed the studio’s crown jewel, his painting technique was highly refined. Inky black shapes sat at the heart of it all. He always began with acrylic, roughing in lighter shapes in the distance. Once dry, he switched to oils, sharpening his graphic outlines, his high-contrasting plains of color, always keeping the layers as smooth as perceptively possible. Then, with a very fine brush, he brought in detail with tens of thousands of tiny, bright specks of color. The final and finest layer of dots was achieved with the tip of a pen. He finished the canvas by smoothing the paint with layers of glaze.
Earle hand painted every background for Sleeping Beauty using this technique. Some were as large as bedsheets and as ornate as European masterpieces. The Disney Paint Lab was forced to develop new hues that could glimmer like the gem-tones
Earle envisioned. For the first time, Disney characters were drawn to follow the laws of their surroundings: The horses, the ladies at court, even the magnificent Maleficent came to reflect Earle’s cohesive vision. It was hard won. Sleeping Beauty took nearly ten years to complete and nearly bankrupted Disney’s animated feature department. It would be the last Disney feature created with hand-inked cels, and the last Disney princess fairytale until 1989. Earle left Disney before the movie’s premiere.
In 2015, when Earle was officially anointed a Disney legend, his daughter said that he would be honored, but I wonder if it would have given him any pause.
In the years after Earle left Hollywood, Earle rambled from coast to coast, soaking in sights along the way. Despite a rustic demonstration of technique broadcast on Disney’s TV spot Adventures in Art, Earle did not paint en plein air. He depended on memory, and flights of ever-widening fancy, to improve his subject matter. And improved they were. After leaving fifteen years of working in animation, Eyvind Earle had embarked on the most prolific leg of his career. Over the next several decades, he created so many paintings that nearly three dozen one-man shows have only scratched the surface. Much of Earle’s work has yet to be seen by the public. It’s a little staggering to contemplate: All those worlds waiting to be discovered… or more deeply discovered, as the case might be.
When Earle finally settled down in a small town along California’s central coast, his excursions north and south included some of this writer’s old haunts. I know because I recognize the landscapes, not by the curve of the land or size of the cliffs but by the way the paintings make me feel way down deep in my bones. He captured the golden light and oversaturated skies, the flowering gums and wizened oaks, the violet meadows and violent seas but, more crucially, he captured the myths I have spun since moving away so long ago, the nostalgia I feel for things both unforgotten and never known, the very essence of this person’s “place.”
“There is no separateness apart away,” said Earle at eighty. “There’s but one ocean, sky, eternal day, one undivided being, self, thing.”
And it’s all in there.*
This article first appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 54, which is sold out. Get our latest print issue by subscribing to Hi-Fructose here.
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