WALKER & REINIGER: Cut-Outs, Silhouettes and Fairytales

WALKER & REINIGER: Cut-Outs, Silhouettes and Fairytales
Saturday, January 21st 2023
Live Class: 14:00-16:00 GMT (LONDON TIME)
+ 7 Days Recording Access
Donation Tickets
Taught by Karolina Glusiec and hosted by Frances Stanfield
In this class we will shine a light on the life and works of Kara Walker and Lotter Reiniger – two outstanding and pioneering artists who used the power of silhouette and shadow images in visual storytelling.
We will be using paper and ink to draw with scissors and create our own symbolic characters – playing with life and shadow and exploring the possibilities of animation and shadow theatre.
Kara Walker (born 1969) is an American artist and is considered one of the most significant and acclaimed artists working today. She has shone a light on the representation of African American heritage and experience through her work, exposing the part of history that, even though visible, was always put in the shadows behind the ruling policies of white colonialists. She is a painter, printmaker, animator and academic, best well known for her life size cutouts of silhouettes and shadow puppets. Her use of black figures and black in and her drawings became a signature element of her most well-known works. At the age of 28 she was awarded MacArthur fellowship which made her one of the youngest ever recipients of the award (1997).
Lotte Reiniger was born in Germany in 1899 and before she escaped the country during WWII she was already an acclaimed inventor of animation techniques and an acclaimed filmmaker. Her most well-known film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed from 1926 was the first ever full-length animated film, preceding Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. She collaborated by various musicians creating works for musical scores. Reiniger’s work is truly uncompromising of means, of beauty, of resourcefulness – the flat and constrained silhouettes stand almost against what they are made of and turn into life in a form of incredibly fluid, free-flowing movement. She has invented the first multiplane camera that took a pioneering form into the future of animated filmmaking – combining backgrounds with stand-out silhouettes.
Her work also reflects on complex times she had to live and work in. She lived in a Nazi – Regime country which she left during aking one of her films. It also does appear in her work in how the freedom of making choices and cutting out and putting together fragments of reality that we know only from the fairytales can help people survive.
YOU WILL NEED:
– Scissors
– Ideally Black Paper but any kind of paper will do
– Black ink and brush for drawing
– White paper for the background
– Some a4 paper for making ink drawings
– Drawing pins or other type of pins
– Surface to work on – tabletop / deskspace / floor – somewhere with lots of room to play with 🙂
– A desk lamp
Optional – For building your own animation stand:
– A piece of very sturdy cardboard and a pile of books. For example, a shoebox and a pile of books
– Masking tape / duct tape
Here’s some guidance on that but we will be going step-by step on making this during the class with a great tutorial by Lizzy Hobbs!

A stop-motion app on your phone / tablet:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stop-motion-studio/id441651297
This class will be easier to participate in fully, if you use your computer to view the livestream and use your phone for animation. If you’re only able to use your phone, Karolina will be demonstrating the process step by step, so you can make notes, cutouts and then make your own animation after the class!
Tutor for this class will be Karolina Glusiec! A multidisciplinary artist based in Deptford, south-east London, UK whose practice emerges from drawing and animation branching out into mixed media, structural and site specific objects and artworks. She is also a teacher and runs dept.con.temporary art gallery together with Jamie Temple from their flat in London. She won Jerwood Drawing Prize in 2012.
Everyone is welcome to join this Pay-What-You-Can class. We suggest a donation of £20 (all of which goes to our tutors) however we understand that may not be possible for everybody. Please be honest and pay what you can afford so that we may continue to offer our sessions on a donation basis.
You will receive a confirmation email and be able to access the event via your eventbrite “Online Event Page”. You can do this by signing into eventbrite using the email that you booked with.
(Please note that the recording can be viewed anytime within 7 days)
IF YOU HAVE ANY PROBLEMS THEN PLEASE EMAIL : londondrawinggroup@gmail.com
And that’s it!
We’re really looking forward to you joining us.
Love,
LDG