Art & Creativity Quote by Norman McLaren

McLaren isn’t romanticizing craft; he’s staking a claim about authorship in a medium that usually disperses it. Film, especially in the studio era he worked alongside and against, is famously industrial: cameras, crews, labs, schedules, committees. By invoking the painter and the canvas, he tightens the relationship until it becomes almost bodily. The point isn’t that cinema can be “art” too; it’s that he wants to touch it directly, to remove intermediaries between impulse and image.

The subtext is a quiet rebellion against film’s default distance. A painter drags pigment across a surface and sees the mark immediately. Traditional filmmaking inserts machines and workflows that translate intention through lenses, chemicals, and technicians. McLaren’s intent is to collapse those layers. In his practice at the National Film Board of Canada, that meant making animation by hand, scratching and drawing directly onto film stock, treating frames like brushstrokes. “Closeness and intimacy” reads less like sentimentality than like a technical ethic: stay near the material so accidents, textures, and micro-decisions remain yours.

Context matters because McLaren helped define a modernist lane for animation: not Disney’s illusionism but cinema as graphic art and music-in-motion. The painter metaphor also signals a refusal of narrative obligation. A canvas doesn’t have to “tell a story” to justify itself; it has to cohere as an experience. McLaren’s line gives film permission to be tactile, abstract, personal - and insists that the filmmaker can be a solitary maker, not just a coordinator of parts.