American Public Media produces a program called, “The Story,” that airs on Public Broadcasting Stations nationwide. On Friday October 12, 2012, it carried an interview with me about, “Three Fragments of a Lost Tale.”  It comes in the last 12 minutes of the broadcast entitled, “The Day I Fell From the Sky.”  It’s an interesting show and we were really happy to get the coverage. You can listen here.

STOP MOTION

Filmmaker John Frame plans each shot with incredible precision and then takes it. Then he plans his next shot. He tells producer Phoebe Judge what inspired him to begin his stop-motion project…..

Stop. Snap. Move. Repeat for, Oh, 10 or 20 Years.

Stop-Motion Animation: ‘Goodnight Molly,’ ‘Halfland’

By ROBERT ITO | Published: May 18, 2012  |  The original article is here

A figure appearing in John Frame’s project “The Tale of the Crippled Boy.”

FOR the last seven years, John Frame has been working on a film in his home in Wrightwood, Calif. Its cast includes a cockeyed skeleton, a bespectacled monkey and a horned man sporting a cloak adorned with eyeballs. Mr. Frame made all of the characters himself out of wood and found objects, built the sets, even composed the score. When he discovered that his characters were going “wherever they wanted to go,” he let them. For the first four years of the project, he worked completely alone, driven by what may have been a muse or “daemons,” he’s unsure which; not even his closest friends and colleagues knew what he was up to.

Mr. Frame is part of an underground group of stop-motion artists in Southern California who labor in the shadows of the major studios. Long the center of studio-backed stop-motion animation made by artists like Ray Harryhausen and Art Clokey, the area is now home to scores of solo practitioners more interested in creating highly personal art pieces than commercial works. This year looks to be a strong one for stop-motion features, with big-budget releases including Sony Pictures’ “The Pirates! Band of Misfits,” Laika’s “Paranorman” and Disney’s Tim Burton film “Frankenweenie.”

Unlike the creators of those movies, Mr. Frame and his colleagues work alone or with the smallest of crews, creating makeshift studios in their homes. On a typical day, Mr. Frame can film from 1 to 10 seconds of footage,

Read the rest of this entry »

CULTUREPHILE: PORTLAND ARTS

Fantastic Mr. Frame: Video Interview with Visionary Sculptor/Filmmaker John Frame

Editor’s Note: I’m reposting this video because John Frame is back in town on Saturday for his sixth sold out behind the scenes tour. His exhibition has proved so popular that the museum keeps bringing him back, and it’s well worth getting the tour first hand—there’s magic in watching him bring the puppets to life. If you lobby, they might just bring him back a seventh time. Or you can watch our video.  (Read on or watch the Interview Here.)

The California sculptor comes to town on Saturday to talk about creating his fantastical exhibition at the Portland Art Museum, which closes May 27.

“Fine art is that in which the hand, the head, and the heart go together” – John Ruskin

On the opening day of “Three Fragments of a Lost Tale: Sculpture and Story by John Frame,” on view through June 20th at the Huntington Museum and Gardens, I emerged from the darkly lit Boone Gallery into the bookstore to find a nicely dressed older woman looking at me expectantly. “Are YOU the artist?” she asked.  (Read More Here.)

Artist John Frame Installing Characters from his “Lost Tale” at the Huntington Library Photo: Carey Haskell

Artlandia: A cultural getaway in Portland

By Michael Upchurch | Seattle Times arts writer | Original article is here

ELLEN M. BANNER / THE SEATTLE TIMES

At the Portland Art Museum, the Mark Rothko exhibit includes 45 works of the highly regarded 20th-century painter who spent part of his life in Portland. Cultural life is singularly concentrated in Portland. Walk just 20 blocks and you can hit most of the city’s major museums, galleries and performance venues, plus scores of restaurants and cafes.

Sure, there’s arts activity happening elsewhere in the city. But for the out-of-town visitor, especially anyone arriving by train, it’s a great feeling to exit Portland’s Union Station and know so many attractions are in strolling distance.

Portland Art Museum: ”Mark Rothko” is the big-name draw here, but “John Frame: Three Fragments of a Lost Tale” is the unexpected knockout. Both exhibits are up through May 27.

The Rothko retrospective reveals that before Mark Rothko was “Mark Rothko,” he was Marcus Rothkowitz, and before he was an abstract expressionist he was a figurative painter. He came to Portland from Russia at age 10 in 1913 and spent about a decade in the city before heading for New York. In 1933, the Portland Art Museum gave him his first one-man museum show, and he had family ties to the city for most of his life (1903-1970).

“Mark Rothko” starts with a rather tame still-life from 1926 and ends with two black/gray abstract canvases from 1969 that all but spell “dead end” (Rothko killed himself the next year). In between, however, there’s an energizing evolution of visual ideas, gradually morphing from fanciful, distorted figures to ever-bolder abstractions. By 1950, he finds his signature style: huge pulsating lozenges of color that seem almost to vibrate off the canvas while pulling you into shadowy realms.

As illuminating as the Rothko exhibit is, the John Frame show is even better. Frame is a California artist who works with puppets, photography and stop-action animation. The show is theatrically spot-lit in the dim gallery. Oddball hybrid creatures made from found materials come to spooky life as a soundtrack scored by Frame plays in the background.

(Original article is here)

Arts and Life: Multimedia Artist John Frame

By Ifanyi Bell | April 20, 2012 | Original article here

John Frame visits OPB and discusses his latest exhibition at the Portland Art Museum.

John Frame is first and foremost a sculptor. But like many artists, inspiration can come from a variety of sources. In Frame’s case, it was a very lucid vision which brought him the idea for his latest collection of work, ”Three Fragments of a Lost Tale.”

“At the end of a nearly five-year blocked period, I had a particularly large download of information that came in the form of… not a dream, but a kind of ‘waking’ dream,” says Frame. One of the works that resulted from this vision is The Tale of the Crippled Boy, a 12-and-a-half minute piece of animation made up of short vignettes. Frame says that this animation has set the stage for something that is ongoing.

GO SEE IT!

John Frame: Three Fragments of a Lost Tale

• Through May 27, 2012
• Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park Avenue, Portland
• Visit website

“It is our goal to build a feature length set of these vignettes over the coming months,” says Frame on his website.

Frame’s new exhibition at the Portland Art Museum brings together his sculpture, animation and filmmaking into a multimedia experience that has proven to be quite popular. In fact, this month marks Frame’s second visit to Portland in as many months in order to reach more fans.

“The museum added this [trip] because the talks over there sold out right away, so they wanted me to come back up and meet the audience a couple more times.”

To learn more about John Frame, listen to the Think Out Loud interview.

AIR DATE: Monday, April 16th 2012 | By: Dave Miller

John Frame has undergone some major artistic shifts. He initially wanted to be a writer, but decided he couldn’t cut it in literature. So, he turned to visual art. After two years digging into art history and critical theory, he dived into sculpture. For decades, that was his medium, but after experiencing a long artistic block between 2000 and 2005, he threw in the towel.

John Frame — The Unanswered Question
Not long after that, he had an artistic reawakening when he began an animation project. Once again, he delved into researching a new medium, and began to experiment with filmmaking and stop-motion techniques.

His exhibit at the Portland Art Museum showcases the current stage of that project. The show is a collection of photos, sculptures, and videos featuring fantastical characters that come alive in the animations.

Have you been to John Frame’s exhibit at the Portland Art Museum? What was your experience with the work? What questions do you have for the artist?

(Original Interview is here)

JOHN FRAME – THREE FRAGMENTS OF A LOST TALE

Our guest is California based sculptor John Frame who for the last five years has been working on his ambitious project, The Tale of the Crippled Boy. The end goal? A feature length collection of animated and live film vignettes.

Now on exhibit at the Portland Art Museum through May, Three fragments of a Lost Tale, presents the work on this project. It includes installations, stage sets, stills, music score and film. The self-taught Frame’s work isn’t conceptual, expressionist or crafts person per se, but rather a mix of all three led by the use of intuition.  ( original interview is here )

JOHN FRAME’S THREE FRAGMENTS OF A LOST TALE

TAYLOR DENT

Imagine a post-apocalyptic landscape as envisioned 16th century villagers: darkness envelops a once refined civilization as the townspeople lapse into superstition. Illiteracy rises as Shakespeare’s dramas disintegrate inside a mad scientist’s library. A troupe of actors, the Tottentanzers, performs a morality play where God and Satan depict themselves on an archaic stage set. A skeleton-like torch wielder frightens off rusted citizens from breaking into the tempting Gate of Desire. (Read the Review Here)