When Ron Campbell was in Australia, animating and directing the ABC cartoon show, “The Beatles” in 1965, he would have been stunned to learn that more than 50 years later people would still be enjoying his work. Now in retirement, Campbell, 77, creates painting inspired by the work he did on “The Beatles,” their 1968 movie “Yellow Submarine” and several beloved shows that entertained kids on Saturday mornings for decades.
He will bring his art show to downtown San Jose’s Kaleid gallery at 88 S. Fourth St. on Jan. 20-22, and he’s looking forward to meeting people who may have never realized they were big fans.
“One of the great pleasures I get in traveling around the country is that I’m actually meeting the audience in person and the audience is meeting one of the people who was responsible for their entertainment as children,” Campbell said in an interview from Fresno, one of the stops on his tour. “There was that joy of Saturday morning. There’s a tremendous affection I’ve received from people who look back on those happy moments as children.”
After “The Beatles,” Campbell went on to have a hand — literally — in cartoons that spanned generations, “Scooby Doo, Where Are You” in the late ’60s, “The Smurfs” in the 1980s and “Rugrats” in the 1990s.
Going from animation to painting has been an interesting transition for Campbell, too. “I spent 50 years and one month doing cartoon films with nothing more complex than a pencil,” Campbell said. “Doing paintings is a totally different task, but it harks back to my own youth in art school and skills that had gone dormant.”
With today’s modern emphasis on computer-generated animation, Campbell said it’s unlikely he would enter the field if he were just starting out. “It’s a long way removed from the work of an artist,” he said. “The animated by computer films look a lot to me like they were puppets moving around not drawings. Yet there’s a tremendous amount of artistic integrity in them.”
Campbell will be doing live paintings at the show — everything will be available for sale — but he sometimes delights in making a quick drawing for youngsters who come to the gallery. And for Silicon Valley kids, it might be good for them to see that art comes from the hands of people and not just gadgets.
SPECIAL DELIVERY: Snow, rain, heat and gloom of night may not deter a postal carrier, but Highway 17 mudslides and Los Gatos traffic proved to be no match for Pizza My Heart delivery dude Daniel Javier Christjansen.
Laura Quenneville-Brown and her 11-year-old son, Blaze, were on their way home to the Santa Cruz Mountains and got caught in gridlock in Los Gatos after mudslides Wednesday partially closed Highway 17. After three hours barely moving, she and her son were very hungry – and did I mention that Laura’s nine months pregnant, too?
“I never thought in a million years it would take 5½ hours to get home,” said Quenneville-Brown, who works not far away at the Stanford Health Care facility on Samartian Drive in San Jose.
They wondered if they could have a pizza delivered to their car and called the Pizza My Heart on North Santa Cruz Avenue. The crew said the traffic jam made it impossible for a delivery driver to traverse the roads by car — but they had a different mode of transportation with four wheels available.
After making the pizza, Christjansen took off on his skateboard, found them and delivered dinner. Pizza My Heart owner Chuck Hammers said he was “stoked” that the Los Gatos team was able to help the family get through a long and frustrating trip home.
In a Facebook post after the pizza rescue, Quenneville-Brown said, “I was literally brought to tears by the generosity and willingness to help those of us that were stuck in Los Gatos.”
RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME: Tricia Creason-Valencia, who’s teaching classes on video production and the history of documentary film at Santa Clara University, was happy to pitch in Thursday when colleague Michael Whalen asked her to be a last-minute sub for him in his Short Fiction Production class. Besides her inherent generosity, Creason-Valencia’s delight may have been helped by the identity of her co-teacher that day: award-winning actress and playwright Anna Deveare Smith.
Smith is a scholar-artist-in-residence at Santa Clara this year and will be overseeing students working on an artistic winter production. But she’s also engaging with other classes, including photography and creative writing. The students were pitching her their modern takes on classic fairy tales and Creason-Valencia said Smith provided feedback that was “hard-hitting, deeply felt and powerful for the students to hear.”
“I was already planning to attend the class to observe, so I jumped at the chance to co-teach with her,” said Creason-Valencia, who teaches a class on women and filmmakers of color. “I’ve long admired her work, use it in my classes and had seen her on stage at the Berkeley Rep years ago.”
MULTICULTURAL MISSION: The Multicultural Arts Leadership Institute, a network of more than 100 Silicon Valley arts professionals, will be taking Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s concept of a “beloved community” — a society based on justice and equal opportunity — to heart Monday, the day set aside to honor his memory.
The public is invited to join them for “STAND!: A Day of Art and Solidarity,” at the School of Arts and Culture at San Jose’s Mexican Heritage Plaza to make art, perform and declare solidarity with the most vulnerable residents of San Jose. The daylong event will include music, dance and visual arts workshops for youth and family. Lunchtime will include poetry, music and storytelling from a diverse group of artists.
“These times call for organizations to take specific action in support of communities that are currently under attack,” School of Arts and Culture Director Tamara Alvarado said. “We want people to know that the School of Arts and Culture is not only a safe space for creativity but also organizing resistance and building coalitions that strengthen families and uphold art as a viable platform for civic engagement.”
The event, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. is free to attend, but space is limited. Register at https://stand2017.eventbrite.com.
