“Poet Guitar” screens at the International Film Festival

Filling ‘down-time’ on the bus leads artist to poetic interpretations in an animated film

By JAN WILLMS

Lisa Rydin Erickson is a multi-tasking mom living in the St. Anthony Park area. Her multi-tasking is reflected in the variety of artwork she creates—paintings, drawings, prints, and animation.

And all of those artistic skills have resulted in a short animation film that will be shown in the 35th annual Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival, running Apr. 7-23 at St. Anthony Main Theater, 115 SE Main in Minneapolis. Other venues are at Metro State, McNally Smith, Rochester Gallery 14, the Cathedral of St. Paul, the Basilica of St. Mary and the Uptown Theater.

Photo left: Drawing of a Hagstrom guitar by Lisa Rydin Erickson. Created on an iPad, artworks such as this make up the animated film she has created. (Photo by Jan Willms)

Erickson’s film was shown Apr. 10 at St. Anthony Main and will screen Apr. 16 at Rochester Gallery 14. Titled “Poet Guitar,” it is described as an experimental short of poetic interpretations of Hagstrom Guitars drawn on an iPad and set to music inspired by the real-time playback of the drawing process.

Erickson, who has combined her artwork with motherhood and employment as a dental hygienist, said she started drawing on an iPad around 2011 and took it with her on her bus ride to and from work.

“It was just a way to have some down time, 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes in the afternoon on my way home,” Erickson explained. She said the drawing app on her iPad allowed her to draw on the screen. “It’s an old app, and it’s just like finger-painting,” she said.

A lot of Erickson’s drawings have been placed in various stores, and some of them were at the American Swedish Institute (ASI) in Minneapolis. “The Institute had an exhibition last summer of Hagstrom guitars that are made in Sweden,” she said. “ASI asked me to do some drawings, so I drew 12 different guitars with different kinds of poetic interpretations of Swedish themes, and part of Hagstrom and part of midsummer, things like that. That’s where the animation came from.”

Erickson decided that the only sound she wanted with the animation was Jimi Hendrix-style guitar playing. “My husband builds guitars and plays them, so I told him I really wanted him to play some loud guitar music for the film, and he did.”

“I thought ahead with the staff at ASI, so I just went there and had the images right there. It took me a couple weeks to draw them.”

Erickson said she used a system of researching, looking and pulling images together. “I looked up a lot of things about guitars and Scandinavian history, and I started going off that with the drawing.”

Photo right: Lisa Rydin Erickson looks through her guitar sketches as she reflects about her animated film, “Poet Guitar.” (Photo by Jan Willms)

In her research, she discovered that the Hagstrom family had an accordion factory in Sweden. Karl Erik was sent over to the United States in the 1960s to explore the accordion market.

“He went home and told his father there were no accordions; there were guitars, electric guitars.” Erickson said one of the guitars is named after Karl Erik; another is called Pearloid because this was the material used where the keys are placed on an accordion. “They use that on the fronts of their guitars,” she said. Others are names, like Goya.

Erickson said one guitar was called Corvette, but they could not use that name, so they changed it to Condor. “So one is called Corvette Switch Condor,” she said. “Switch is also the name for a part of a guitar, but they also switched the name.”

One guitar is 12-string, and Erickson said the reference is like the Scandinavian weaving on the guitar.

“With this film, you can watch the drawing being made. It’s like a playback of finger-painting on the iPad. You can watch it being drawn and erased, forward and backward. I just kind of strung them together—a pretty simple kind of idea—and then just added music to it. It is image after image being added together.” she explained.

Erickson’s background is rich with various art forms. She studied painting and printmaking in school.

“During the time of having kids I worked kind of sporadically at their schools and at the Arboretum,” she said. She did a variety of arts and science projects with a group now called Nature-Based Therapy at the University of Minnesota. “At the time it was just horticulture-based therapy; now it’s nature-based. That’s a project I have stayed with for a long time.”

Painting backdrops for a dance school in St. Paul has also been a long-time project for Erickson. She has put together other animation shorts, some in stop-motion working with John Acre of Sloppy Films, Inc.

Erickson has also taught at the Galtier Elementary School, the first school in St. Paul to get iPads. She did a science-technology-English-Math (STEM) project.

“The science teachers had the kids write stories researching endangered animals, the English teacher helped them write the stories, and we did frames per second for the math. We put the iPads on music stands so the little camera would shine down. We painted backdrops and puppets. The kids made all the animations and did the recordings,” explained Erickson.

“I didn’t realize when I first studied art that I would be doing this kind of art now,” Erickson reflected. “I still paint. But the iPad is sort of a portable studio. When I was raising kids, it was either having a studio and having my paints out all the time, which would be great, but I was also working all the time. So the iPad would instantly allow me to do what I want to do, and I’m the boss. The color, composition, design and drawing are all right there. That was a pretty good discovery at a good time.”

The most challenging part of animation for Erickson is the time, or lack of it, because she loves doing it.

“When I do paintings, it’s wonderful but it seems like they go really quickly, which is good,” she said. “When I do prints that seems to be more of the business end of it. And when I do animation, it’s like ‘Well, what do I do with that?’ So I have been able to do projects, and that’s really fun.”

Her next project is creating a notebook of drawings for a dog run that is being built at the Arboretum. “There may be an animation with it,” she said.

Once she had completed Poet Guitar, she came across Film Freeway, in which filmmakers can submit their film online. “I sat down one night and submitted the film to festivals all over the world,” she said. She said she didn’t realize that would open up the door to weekly rejections. But then one Friday she found that her film had been accepted by MSPIFF. “I opened it up, and I was accepted, and it was to the Minneapolis-St. Paul Festival. I was excited. That was the best.”