Art Clokey - Biography

Biography

Clokey was born Arthur Charles Farrington in Detroit, Michigan. When he was nine years old, his parents divorced and he stayed with his father, Charles Farrington. After his father died in a car accident, he went to live with his mother in California, but his stepfather had no interest in raising another man's son, and so Arthur was sent to an orphanage. When he was 11 or 12, he was adopted by Joseph W. Clokey, a classical music composer and organist who taught music at Pomona College in Claremont, California. He schooled Arthur in painting, drawing, and film making while also taking him on journeys to Canada and Mexico. The aesthetic environment later became the home of Clokey's most famous character, Gumby, whose name derives from his childhood experiences during summer visits to his grandfather's farm, when he enjoyed playing with the clay and mud mixture called "gumbo".

At Webb School in Claremont, young Clokey came under the influence of teacher Ray Alf, who took students on expeditions digging for fossils and learning about the world around them. Clokey later studied geology at Pomona College, before leaving Pomona in 1943 to join the military during World War II. He graduated from his adoptive father's alma mater, Miami University, in 1948.

Art Clokey also made a few highly experimental and visually inventive short clay animation films for adults, including his first student film Gumbasia (1955), the visually rich Mandala (1977) — described by Clokey as a metaphor for evolving human consciousness — and the equally bizarre The Clay Peacock (1963), an elaboration on the animated NBC logo of the time. Consisting of animated clay shapes contorting to a jazz score, Gumbasia so intrigued Samuel G. Engel, then president of the Motion Pictures Producers Association, that he financed the pilot film for what became Clokey's The Gumby Show (1957). The title Gumbasia was in homage to Walt Disney's Fantasia.

Clokey is credited with the clay-animation title sequence for the 1965 beach movie Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine starring Vincent Price and Frankie Avalon. His son, Joe Clokey, continued the Davey and Goliath cartoon in 2004. In March 2007, KQED-TV broadcast an hour-long documentary Gumby Dharma as part of their Truly CA series.

In 1995, Clokey and Dallas McKennon teamed up again for Gumby: The Movie, a feature film. The movie was not a success at the box office and was widely panned by critics.

In the mid-1990s, Nickelodeon signed a contract with Art Clokey to air every episode of Gumby for its anchor spots at 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. It was on top of their ratings for over three years.

Clokey died in his sleep on January 8, 2010, at age 88, at his home in Los Osos, California after suffering from a recurrent bladder infection.

On October 12, 2011, which would have been Clokey's 90th birthday, Google paid homage to Clokey's life and works with an interactive logo doodle in the style of his clay animations, produced by Premavision Studios.