Legend
Dominic Carter talks to the renowned visual artist about his varied career and influential approach to anatomy
When you’re watching animation from Disney, Marvel or Warner Bros., it’s likely Glenn Vilppu has had a hand in it somehow. Not only has he worked on film and TV productions for all three studios, the internationally acclaimed artist and animator’s approach to life drawing and gesture has gone on to become a standard across the industry.
We caught up with him to learn about his journey, and some of the approaches he teaches aspiring artists through the online Vilppu Academy.
Can you tell us a little about your background as an artist?
I’ve really never done anything else except being an artist. Well, outside of part-time jobs and things like that to get myself through school.
My father was an engineer by profession, but he was also a Sunday painter. I remember being six years old and watching him work on a portrait of my mother while I was on the floor and tracing things out of one of his books. That was the beginning. But first of all I needed to learn English. My background is Finnish, although I didn’t learn Finnish until I started school. Although I was born in the United States, we moved over to Finland right away. And so when we finally came back to Finland in 1939, I lived in a Finnish community where I didn’t have to speak English.
Drawing was one of the things I did to compensate for not speaking. I took art classes on Saturday when I was in high school. Originally I started out at what is now CalArts, and then the ArtCenter College of Design where I had a full scholarship. I chose not to continue on after graduating from high school though, because I was too young and wasn’t ready for the rigours of the school.
I went into the navy for a couple of years, then came back and went to ArtCenter. I would eventually start teaching there as a student. After I received my bachelor’s and master’s degrees while teaching, I taught at the ArtCenter for 13 years. Many of my instructors were born in the 1800s, and I started there in about 1959.
I finally left in 1974 and started my own school. My primary reason for leaving at the time was that I felt they were downplaying the fundamentals of drawing. Everybody was going totally abstract. There was no need for fine artists to be able to draw.
At my own school I focused on nothing but drawing and painting, and part of that was learning about anatomy. I
