By 1951, when Earle was hired as a background painter at Disney, he was well known among the studio artists for his greeting cards. He rose quickly, soon contributing designs for Peter Pan and Lady and the Tramp, then earning an Academy Award for an animated short. When he was given the reins to Sleeping Beauty just a short time later, it seemed a perfect fit: Walt Disney wanted every frame to be a work of art, no matter the cost. Earle would deliver; but cost it did.
It is believed by many that artistically speaking Sleeping Beauty has never been matched. Drawing on Gothic French, Italian, and pre-Renaissance tapestries and architecture, Earle—with his exaggerations of line, color, and form; his attention to detail, down to wood grain, leaf vein, and needlepoint stitch; and his uncanny ability to bring life to stone—forever defined the look of “fairytale” in our collective conscious.
By the time Earle was handed the studio’s crown jewel, his painting technique was highly refined. Inky black shapes sat at the heart of it all. He always began with acrylic, roughing in lighter shapes in the distance. Once dry, he switched to oils, sharpening his graphic outlines, his high-contrasting plains of color, always keeping the layers as smooth as perceptively possible. Then, with a very fine brush, he brought in detail with tens of thousands of tiny, bright specks of color. The final and finest layer of dots was achieved with the tip of a pen. He finished the canvas by smoothing the paint with layers of glaze.
Earle hand painted every background for Sleeping Beauty using this technique. Some were as large as bedsheets and as ornate as European masterpieces. The Disney Paint Lab was forced to develop new hues that could glimmer like the gem-tones
Earle envisioned. For the first time, Disney characters were drawn to follow the laws of their surroundings: The horses, the ladies at court, even the magnificent Maleficent came to reflect Earle’s cohesive vision. It was hard won. Sleeping Beauty took nearly ten years to complete and nearly bankrupted Disney’s animated feature department. It would be the last Disney feature created with hand-inked cels, and the last Disney princess fairytale until 1989. Earle left Disney before the movie’s premiere.
In 2015, when Earle was officially anointed a Disney legend, his daughter said that he would be honored, but I wonder if it would have given him any pause.
In the years after Earle left Hollywood, Earle rambled from coast to coast, soaking in sights along the way. Despite a rustic demonstration of technique broadcast on Disney’s TV spot Adventures in Art, Earle did not paint en plein air. He depended on memory, and flights of ever-widening fancy, to improve his subject matter. And improved they were. After leaving fifteen years of working in animation, Eyvind Earle had embarked on the most prolific leg of his career. Over the next several decades, he created so many paintings that nearly three dozen one-man shows have only scratched the surface. Much of Earle’s work has yet to be seen by the public. It’s a little staggering to contemplate: All those worlds waiting to be discovered… or more deeply discovered, as the case might be.
When Earle finally settled down in a small town along California’s central coast, his excursions north and south included some of this writer’s old haunts. I know because I recognize the landscapes, not by the curve of the land or size of the cliffs but by the way the paintings make me feel way down deep in my bones. He captured the golden light and oversaturated skies, the flowering gums and wizened oaks, the violet meadows and violent seas but, more crucially, he captured the myths I have spun since moving away so long ago, the nostalgia I feel for things both unforgotten and never known, the very essence of this person’s “place.”
“There is no separateness apart away,” said Earle at eighty. “There’s but one ocean, sky, eternal day, one undivided being, self, thing.”
And it’s all in there.*
This article first appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 54, which is sold out. Get our latest print issue by subscribing to Hi-Fructose here.