Bruce Alcock, founder and Creative Director of Vancouver design studio Global Mechanic, is an experimental artist whose animated shorts – Impromptu, Vive la Rose, At the Quinte Hotel and Wrong Number Phone Message and 54 Hours – have won accolades at festivals worldwide. Bruce’s wide-ranging background in music and art expresses itself in a varied and inventive approach to every project. His design-based TV commercials have led to award-winning campaigns for clients like Coca-Cola, Molson, Chrysler, Bell and Proctor & Gamble; his art projects include an interactive film for Canada’s pavilion in the Venice Biennale of Architecture, multi-screen typographical animation for the dance/ theatre/poetry/music piece The Four Horsemen with Toronto’s Volcano Theatre, set design and projection work for Art in Times’s I Send You This Cadmium Red and ongoing gallery shows of his paintings and installations.
Bruce studied tuba performance and comparative literature at the University of Toronto, then moved to Barcelona, where he apprenticed with animator Dirk Van de Vondel. He also designed the font Soupbone, distributed by FontShop International. Global Mechanic is his third production company; he co-founded Cuppa Coffee Animation in Toronto (1991) and Tricky Pictures in Chicago (1995). The studio is an environment where multiple modes of production inform one another, mixing the organisational rigour and budget of commercial work with the creative spirit and critical aesthetic of art projects.
Twitter and Instagram: @brucewgalcock
ILLUSTRATIONS: WAITING PROJECT
Drawings made on an iPhone 6 while waiting for coffee, airplanes, waiters and the like. Digital fingerpaint using the ZenBrush app.
PAINTINGS: ICE MEN
Paintings after Bruce’s NFB film 54 Hours, based on the great sealing disaster of 1914. Procion fabric dye on raw linen burlap with untreated bar-steel hanger.
ILLUSTRATIONS: SOLO PIANO CD Original artwork for solo album by Bill Brennan. Digital paint.
PAINTINGS: PAINTING MOTION
Reactions to Global Mechanic and NFB coproduction Vive la Rose, after the French Newfoundland folksong. Oil on linen.
ILLUSTRATIONS: TALES OF LA JUANA CD Original artwork for jazz album by Bernardo Padron. Mixed photography and paint.
ILLUSTRATIONS: SOUND ADVENTURES CD Original artwork for children’s World Music album by Sophia Grigoriadis. Vector drawings and painted texture.
CONFERENCE CALL DOODLES
Yup, done while on actual conference calls.
