Tim Burton Exhibit at the MoMA inspires

The weather was beautiful last November when we were in NYC.  After the Thanksgiving Day Parade, we were able to walk down the normally traffic crowded streets to have an afternoon stroll. The day after when everyone else was shopping on Black Friday, we went to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) to see the Tim Burton Exhibit (by the way, the Tim Burton Exhibit is at MoMA until April 26th, 2010). When you walk into the lobby, there is a large inflated sculpture there to greet you.


(Photo Credit: Submitted to Flickr Group the MoMA Project by woicik

I don't know if the mystic around Tim Burton being very dark and tortured is of his making or of the media's making. But I think a great deal of it is probably myth because if you take your time walking around the very first part of the exhibit, you'll learn that Tim Burton was a marching band geek. His very first poster was for the local marching band.

Completely dispells the "tortured artist" childhood for me. I absolutely related to the band geek I saw staring back at me - I wore a similiar uniform when I was in the high school band.  I felt like I knew him - he was the kid I played in the marching band with who had a quirky take on the world and was always drawing.  I could see how he turned the suburban life he was living on its ear with his art.  It was a true insight into how he developed his art.

As I was staring at each caption of the early band geek era, I heard one of the curators of the exhibit talking to a patron. He said they had an unprecedented number of his early works because his mother had saved all of his works (yes, I have a similiar set of boxes full of my son's work). She had presented him with these boxes and he had presented the museum with them. Tim hadn't seen or known that his early works still existed.

Very cool.  Thanks, Mom!

I once read an article on Tim Burton where he said he never drew like the art teachers wanted but that didn't stop him. He drew because he liked to draw and no one should stop drawing just because someone else doesn't like it. I remember reading the article to my son who was 10 or 11 at the time. To this day, we give each other knowing looks when someone says something we enjoy isn't up to par. It's not going to make us stop, we enjoy it. It was a great piece of wisdom. It's why we both love Tim Burton.

So here's Tim Burton on Tim Burton. See if you aren't struck by the artist spirit he has that he never let others snuff out. We should all hold onto our creative spirit as he did.



Make sure you go to theMoMA website to check out their other videos!

Let's close with a little song from one of my favorite Tim Burton movies - Beetlejuice!