I was back up to London today where I was headed to the Design Museum, somewhere I had not been previously. My first thoughts on arrival were that I didn’t think much of the design of the place itself, which seemed pretty ordinary, but there clearly had been quite a bit of design thought gone into the urinals!
I was there for the Tim Burton exhibition, someone whose work I like enormously. It was a winding walk through the exhibition showing off plenty of his work in the form of sketches, paintings, pictures, and models from his many films.
This being late moring on a Saturday it was pretty busy inside the exhibition with a real mix of people: parents with children, teens, those dressed like an extra from a Burton movie and me. This meant elbowing your way through in order to get close to the pictures, however, after exiting the first room things got better as people spread out.
A Shared Date
I learned one interesting tidbit immediately I went in though, and that was that Burton and I share a birthday, although not in the same year. He was certainly born in the right place in Burbank, California, the home of animation behemoth Disney. In fact some of his earliest work was with them as he worked as an animator on The Fox and the Hound drawing foxes which was clearly a waste of his talent but I guess you have to start somewhere. As a side note I remember The Fox and the Hound as being the first film I took my eldest son to see at the cinema and it being not very good with poor animation!
I was blown away by Burton’s drawings—not just the imagination and the detail but also the sheer quantity of them. I am assuming that this is only a small proportion of them too. They reminded me of the work of Gerald Scarfe which has not only that crazy outlook but also a similar style. I was less enamoured by his photos which didn’t grab me in the same way for some reason.
There were quite a few pieces that were apparently done while on set directing a movie which strikes me as a person that has a creative brain that they really don’t know how to switch off!
This exhibition has been touring for quite some time, since August 2014 in fact despite which it was right up-to-date including recent works such as Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Wednesday. I believe that this is the exhibition’s final stop and it closes at the end of April so if you want to see it you need to get your skates on.
