April 26 - Eyvind Earle

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On this day, in 1916, Eyvind Earle was born in Manhattan, New York. When he was just two, his family moved to Hollywood, California. When he turned 10, his father, looking to stimulate his young son's mind, gave him an ultimatum: read 50 pages every day or paint a picture every day. Eyvind thought a moment before replying why not do both? His dedication paid off sooner rather than later. At 14, he had his first one man show at a gallery in Paris.

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When he was 21, Eyvind moved from Hollywood to New York City, traveling the entire way by bicycle. Naturally, he paid for the trip by painting and selling watercolors all along the journey. When he finally reached the East Coast, he had a showing at the Charles Morgan Gallery. Each of the next two years saw another showing at the same gallery, the 1939 one ending with the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchasing one of his works for their permanent collection. Throughout the Forties, Eyvind had a contract with the American Artist Group and produced over 800 different Christmas cards for them.

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In 1951, Eyvind signed on with the Walt Disney Studio as an assistant background painter on Peter Pan. By 1953, he was no longer an assistant and was earning credit for his work on films like For Whom the Bulls Toil, a Goofy short, and the Academy Award winning Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom. He kept busy for the next few years doing the backgrounds for more shorts like Paul Bunyon and Working for Peanuts and features like Lady and the Tramp.

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As work began on Sleeping Beauty, Eyvind was basically given free rein to develop the look and color scheme of the film. He took inspiration from medieval tapestries, adding his own flair to create the movie’s highly stylized look, purposeful in his intention to not adhere to any current beauty standards. As part of his work in the film, he also created the dioramas that can still be seen throughout Sleeping Beauty Castle in Disneyland. His artistic vision didn’t come without controversy, though. As Sleeping Beauty’s production schedule dragged on, changes kept being made in the leadership on the project. When Clyde Geronimi became supervising director rather late in the process, he was less enamored of Eyvind’s backgrounds than his predecessors. The two men had extreme creative differences over how much detail needed to be included, with Clyde’s specific complaint being that he needed backgrounds for the important stuff, the animation, not Christmas cards. As a result of the fighting, Eyvind would leave Disney in March 1958, before production was finished, and Clyde would have Sleeping Beauty’s background paintings softened up a bit before being filmed. The end results are still pretty stunning.

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Eyvind began working for John Sutherland Productions after his hasty departure from Disney (John was a fellow former employee of Walt and was probably quite sympathetic to Eyvind’s tales of woe). John Sutherland Productions produced mainly instructional cartoons for Harding College, but Eyvind also managed to do other types of work as well. One notable project from this period is a 1963 short he animated for a Tennessee Ernie Ford television special called The Story of Christmas. Contemporary reviews declared it beautiful and thought it should be aired every season for years to come. That hasn’t quite happened, but it was digitally remastered in the late Nineties

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In 1966, Eyvind retired from show business permanently to focus on painting. Over the next 34 years he created hundreds of paintings, sculptures and drawings, working steadily right up to his death. In the mid Seventies, he began releasing limited edition prints based on his work, but even with those series, and all the one man exhibitions he had over his lifetime, the majority of his work was never presented to the public. His estate continues to release prints of ‘new’ works to this day based on pieces held in private collections. In spite of walking away from the industry after only fifteen years of work, the Annie Awards presented Eyvind with the Windsor McCay Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998, his contributions over that short period of time were that significant. In 2015, he was declared an official Disney Legend for bringing his spectacular style to Sleeping Beauty and Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom. His Legendary status was bestowed posthumously, though. Eyvind had passed away from esophageal cancer at his home in Carmel-by-the-Sea on July 20, 2000. He was 84.