Biography
George Glasser
a,k.a G-tigerclaw
by
Ros Jones
George Glasser was born in Florida in 1945. He derived his earliest creative influences from his family circle. His mother made marionettes and ceramics, while his aunt and uncle ran a business producing commercials, animation and graphics for local television advertisers. While still in school, George used to help out there.
"The main thing I remember from those days is my uncle letting me work on some stop-frame animation they were shooting for a Christmas spot. The experience of making something come alive and move really inspired me."
After that, regular education didn't seem so interesting. "I spent a lot of time in school making little animated flip-books during lessons. I would get my knuckles rapped with the nun's ruler - often - for not paying attention in class."
Over several years, George also enjoyed an informal apprenticeship with a family friend who was a retired signpainter from Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus. The circus would winter in Sarasota, making repairs and preparing new acts. Carl Willis' skills were much in demand and they would always contact him to do touch-up work and paint new banners.
"To a child's eye, Carl was absolutely amazing," Glasser remembers. "I've watched him paint a 20' x 40' banner for 'The Human Cannon Ball', complete with gold leaf frills - and he just painted it; he just sketched it out and went to work. That was a revelatory experience for me. Then when he wasn't doing work for the circus, Carl painted signs around town. I would clean his brushes and do fill-work on his signs."
Glasser's formal education ended at 16, when his mother developed cancer and he became the family bread-winner. He worked as a sign-painter, broadening his range of skills to include silkscreen printing and techniques for making neon signs.
When his mother died, Glasser attempted to return to formal education. Technical school provided him with an introduction to art history. "I never knew who any of the great artists were, before that," he recalls. But three weeks into his second term, one of his tutors advised him to leave. "He called me aside and told me I was wasting my time: I already had the skills. This guy had been an art director for some of the big Madison Avenue agencies. He told me to go out and get a job with an art department, and work my way up in the advertising business."
Before he could pursue this advice, Glasser's path took a detour, courtesy of the US Armed Forces. It was 1964: the Vietnam war was escalating and Glasser was due for the draft. He volunteered for the Air Force and was assigned to McClellan Air Force Base in Sacramento, California. As so many soldiers before him, Glasser found that travel broadens the mind. "The first three-day pass I got, me and a friend hitchhiked over to San Francisco. I had never been to a major city before."
San Francisco in the mid-60s wasn't just any city, it was riding a cultural bow-wave. "I wound up in North Beach first and then ventured into the Height-Ashbury, the heart of all the strangeness that was happening, the psychedelic scene. That was exciting. I could feel the creative energy in the air, and I knew that I had to be there. So that was the end of my glittering military career."
One year later, discharged from the service and living in the Filmore district of San Francisco, Glasser was working at a major silkscreen printing company and dabbling in underground film. "No, I wasn't a hippy, I hooked into the established North Beach bohemian scene. Some of the film-makers discovered that I could do copy camera work and hand-set type, and they were after me to do titles for them." So busy did Glasser become, helping other people to produce films, that he didn't have time to make his own, but the contacts he made at that time would prove useful later on.Unfortunately the vision of a New Age of love, peace and creativity in San Francisco disintegrated into hard drug abuse and confrontations on the streets. By late 1967, the Vietnam war protests were becoming more and more violent, and there was also civil unrest along racial lines. Glasser moved along down the coast, to Balboa Beach and worked for a little silkscreen shop in Costa Mesa which specialised in T-shirts.
"The Endless Summer", Bruce Brown's cult surfing documentary, had been released in 1966, and surfboard manufacturers expanded their merchandising in its wake. "We did some of the original "Endless Summer" T-shirts," Glasser remembers. "We did it the hard way in those days: with an ironing board and inks that took twenty-four hours to dry. Hand-printing four- and five-colour designs, we probably lost two or three shirts out of every ten we printed."
By May of 1968, the police response student rioting had become intrusive for local residents. After being arrested several times on his way home to from work, Glasser decided to move on. "I got a ride on Route 66 from Santa Monica to a truck stop in Flagstaff, Arizona. At the truck stop, I noticed an old milk van with extravagant signage saying: 'Frank Copeland - Sign painter & Artist.' With my background, it was perfect for a ride across the desert, if he was going in my direction.
"I found him touching-up a sign on the side of the Café. He was headed East to Chicago, and was happy to give me a ride in exchange for some help. I really didn't care much where I was going as long as it was as far away as I could get from the brewing trouble."
Copeland was about sixty years old and had been painting signs along Route 66 since 1935. He introduced Glasser to his next major influence: pre-Columbian, Meso-American art. "Frank patterned his work after the Oaxacan, Mixtec Indian style of iconography. He thought of himself as an iconographer rather than a sign-painter. 'Over the years, I developed a style and people like it,' he told me. 'There are hundreds of sign-painters who lay everything out by the book. When it's done, it's technically perfect, but it looks like every other sign on the block. My work may not be perfect, but every piece is unique.' You know, old Frank had the most extensive public art gallery in the world, from Flagstaff to Chicago on Route
66 and down to Louisiana on Highway 61 - and each piece was different."Frank Copeland's work appeared in many magazines, and several published collections of vernacular art as another nameless folk artist. "But he could do whatever someone wanted: carve angels on gravestones, sculpt a ten-foot armadillo out of cement and chicken wire, paint a voluptuous bathing beauty on a billboard. And if there was no art-work needed, he relied on his parrot. Mescalito, was a bilingual Amazon parrot he picked-up in Chiapas, Mexico. Mescalito could always get us a free meal, doing tricks and singing Hank Williams' songs at some truck stop cafe."
"And you know, Frank was never without a gallon-jug of rose wine, a jar of Mexican benzedrine and a stash of weed. That old milk van would only do about fifty miles an hour, but by the time we got through with the morning regimen of Frank's preference, it felt like we were flying!"
Glasser's surreal three-month adventure with Copeland ended in New Orleans, from where he made his way back down to St. Petersburg, Florida, determined to pursue the Mexican connection Copeland had opened up for him. Over the next two years, Glasser used his free time to travel around Southern Mexico, visiting ancient sites and living with the indigenous people.
In 1971, a colleague from San Francisco days offered Glasser the move he had been waiting for, back into art-work. "Gary had started an animation and film graphics studio in Oakland, California, and he had a job for me. The next day I was off! I drove almost all the way without sleeping, I was so excited. When I arrived at the studio, I found that Gary had built a combination animation stand/optical printer, so not only could we do animation and standard titles, we could do special effects."
The partnership with Gary Richardson and the company Effects For Film lasted for five years, during which they worked for most of the major national advertising agencies based in San Francisco, designing and executing graphics and special effects for national advertising campaigns. "We even won a Cleo for some rotoscope animation we did for Levi Strauss."
Effects for Film was also contracted to teach animation, special effects and motion graphics at the College of Arts and Crafts and the San Francisco Art Institute. While Glasser found the opportunity to pass along his skills enjoyable, he ended up putting himself out of business. "By 1976, we had become a victim of our own success. Many of the people we taught became our competitors and were underbidding us."
In 1976, Glasser moved to a post as a lab technician with a prestigious Highland motion picture processing laboratory and returned to experimental film-making. Now he had state of the art facilities to work with. "My reputation as a designer was established and people would bring me in to work on their experimental projects. It was a fun time. We were developing ideas and pioneering techniques that were maybe five years ahead of the mainstream commercial market."
In 1979, Glasser saw an opportunity to weave his visual skills back into his other creative love: music. He had noted the emerging music video market, and approached Bay area musicians, such as Marty Balin of the Jefferson Starship, Commander Cody, John Handy, and the Tubes, among others. "With my background in animation, I had an advantage over the average film-maker: I knew how to time and edit film to music. Nothing much happened with the big names mainly, because the record companies didn't want to cough-up a decent budget to produce anything - back then and those guys never seemed to have any money to cover the basics."
Eventually, Glasser teamed up with a studio musician, Boots Houston, to produce four music video pieces, titled "The Krazy Hearts Suite" (1981). "That collaboration was probably the most exciting and creative project I was ever involved with," he enthuses.
"What was Krazy Hearts Suite? Well, we were experimenting with a style we called 'Metrosync' where we edited pieces to various timings using a metronome, So, let's say a tune was 80 beats a minute, either the bass or the drums would automatically sync-up with the major changes if they stuck to that timing. This was a radical departure from the standard animation technique of syncing the animation to the music. Out of all the musicians I dealt with, Boots was the only one who grasped the theory."Also, several colleagues and I had been experimenting with visual concepts like persistence of vision, and processing anomalies like reticulation and solarization. We developed others such as subtractive
colorization, and experimented with colour separations and scratching animation directly on film."We knocked out two or three pieces and Boots began experimenting with the sound. One day, shortly before Valentine's Day, Boots invited a producer for KPIX television news to a session. He saw one piece of metamorphous animation with dancing hearts. He loved it and asked if we could get it packaged-up by Valentine's Day and he would get it shown on all the news programs on that station.
"We completed the whole thing in about two weeks. I already had some experimental animation and special effects work in the can. That project came together like magic. At the time, it wasn't my favorite piece; it was just some stream of consciousness stuff I scratched out on film and colorized, but in the end, it turned out to be the biggest money-maker.
"My agent also sold it to several cable television outlets and CNN picked it up for Valentine’s Day. My agent said that people wanted to see more of this type of work, so we produced three more pieces which did well in the market place."
However, the major players in the industry had yet to wake up to the possibilities of the medium. On the advice of his agent, Glasser moved to Los Angeles in 1981, but, as he puts it, "No-one was interested in anything in the '80s except cocaine! Nothing was happening for me and I had better places to be." Glasser took an extended vacation in Mexico. "I always loved it there - the desert, the mountains and the jungles, and especially the indigenous peoples. Did you know that over five-hundred indigenous languages are spoken in Mexico?"
Back in St. Petersburg in 1982, Glasser began painting in the Mixtec style. By 1983, he had showings at the infamous Beaux Arts Gallery and his work was selling steadily at the Santa Fe Gallery in Sarasota. "I used to mix all my own colours from cyan, magenta and yellow water-soluble printing-inks, to get the most dynamic shades possible. I wanted my work to bounce off the canvas. I even used printing-inks on ceramics, with clear acrylic as the varnish. Those ceramic plates were my most popular pieces. Conventional glazes tend to crackle with age, and then the work loses some of its impact. The method I used will outlast most glazes.
"I think that one of the brightest moments of my life was the exhibitions at Beaux Arts. It has had a reputation as a meeting place for artists since 1914. It was regarded as one of the oldest, most prolific, coffee houses in the United States.
"In the 1950s and 1960s people like Jack Kerouac, 'Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Jim Morrison (of The Doors), and Fred Neil frequented the place, and it was even said that Marilyn Monroe had visited there when she vacationed in St. Petersburg.
"I used to hang around there when I was a kid - you know - catching the folk singers and occasionally watching a Jean Cocteau or Fellini film. Yeah, back then, the place was open all night on Friday and Saturday nights - sometimes the entertainment was so hot, sessions went on well past sunrise. Having my work shown there was special for me."
In 1985 a chance fishing trip to East Tampa Bay set Glasser off in a totally new direction. "I used to go fishing and crabbing there as a young boy and you could always bring home a good catch, but that day there didn't seem to be any fish to be caught and the water didn't look right. I contacted an environmental organisation and discovered it was pollution from the nearby fertiliser factory. It was killing the fish - and almost everything else."
Glasser became an investigative environmental journalist. Over the next 15 years, he built up an extensive knowledge of the impact of fluorine pollution on the environment, and many other water quality issues. His writing has appeared in many international environmental publications and he has testified before government committees, both in the US and abroad.
He moved to England in 2001, to marry a long-time friend and fellow-activist, Jane Jones, at that time Campaign Director for the National Pure Water Association. Their time together was immensely productive, but brief. In 2004, Jones died from a breast cancer-related condition.
"At that point, I lost interest in writing on environmental issues. It can eat you up, trying to save the world," Glasser observes. "I felt like I'd been neglecting my art-work, but I didn't want to go backwards. The techniques I used to use are all computerised now, anyway. So I looked for something new. I'd been reading about Kirlian photography and decided to try it out."
His initial results were disappointing. "A bunch of fuzzy finger silhouettes!" he chuckles. "A friend and I experimented for about two months, trying to make something happen. Then one day we scanned the images and did several simple extrapolations in Adobe Photoshop. There was a transformation! I immediately saw the potential to create some very striking and powerful images through electronic extrapolation of the initial Kirlian photo."
His enthusiasm rekindled, Glasser got to work on what became the collection Probable Realities. "I chose the most vivid photos and evolved them, both metaphorically and metamorphically. I don't think I've detracted from the Kirlian principle, just illustrated some alternative dimensions - other realities, if you will. This collection is probably the beginning and end of my Kirlian experiment, but the potential of electronic manipulation of photographic images has me excited, still, and I intend to explore other areas. That's where I'm going next."
Glasser present offering is Digital Graffiti of which he says, “I did a lot of research into the current styles of Digital Art and wanted to do something different.
“The problem I had with most artists was the sameness. Most digital art that I looked at had a readily identifiable attempt at flawlessness – an airbrushed face in a cosmetic advertisement. Most of the artists were attempting to achieve pixel by pixel perfection. However, with attempting to create the perfect image, spontaneity and visual excitement is lost. I produced Digital Graffiti as an adventure, an exciting visual trip not a somber and laborious attempt at perfection.”- ENDS
