James (Jim) McMullan is a influential artist especially amongst the Meathaus crowd because most of our founding bunch met at the School of Visual Arts in NYC where McMullan taught figure drawing for decades. He distilled his thinking into his own method of instruction called High Focus Drawing which is also a book of the same name. At least one of his former students, Mike Matessi, has adapted those methods specifically for animators with his Force series of books and teaching. Personally I was one of Mike’s students in the animation program at SVA, but I know a lot of the Meathaus illustration pals were in Jim’s classes and you can still see the influence of those years in their figure studies.
Michael in the Office of Communication at SVA sent Meathaus over the catalog for the recent Masters Series show on James McMullan that was up at the SVA gallery. It’s a nice selection of work (as usual I’m drawn to early, raw, graphic and scratchy work, above middle, and the bold mixed media drawing/painting of the bottom piece) and you can see more McMullan at his website. Thanks Michael!
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Jim was easily the most influential teacher that I had at SVA. And having Mike first was a nice gateway drug for me
Nice, you got to study with both. Tom could have too since he was both in the animation and illustration/cartooning departments I think.
I also had Stephen Gaffney, who was sort of my therapist while in my intense relationship with McMullan