Disney's Dike

In the antlike studios of Walt Disney Productions Ltd. at Burbank, Calif., Phil Dike is one of the more important ants. He is Disney's ace color coordinator. On the side, he paints water colors of his own. Last week Phil Dike had a one-man show at Manhattan's Ferargil Galleries. Technically expert, untroubled by surrealist neuroses, social struggle or pneumatic nudes, Dike's splashy water colors of mountains, windswept beaches, palm-plumed countryside were sometimes reminiscent of Japanese landscape prints, were as brightly lush as a Montecito bougainvillea.

Ash-blond, store-clerkish, 34-year-old Phil Dike, son of a California real-estate promoter, started his art career by imitating his grandmother, who used to paint reproductions of picture postcards. At 21, he won a medal in a local watercolor exhibition, shipped off to Manhattan, where he studied with oldtime U. S. Realist George Luks. After a spell in Paris and Italy, mostly sitting in cafes and talking, Dike returned to Southern California, settled down to teaching art.

Six years ago Disney hired him to teach drawing and composition in the training school on the Disney lot, soon promoted him to the job of color coordinator. His main job: matching Technicolor reproductions with original colored sketches made by other Disney artists. When Disney went to work on his artistically ambitious Fantasia, Phil Dike made sketches for Toccata & Fugue, Night on Bald Mountain, Ave Maria.

Artist Dike is not even tempted to bite the hand that feeds him. He thinks Disney's Night on Bald Mountain "the most mature statement" ever made in animated cartoons, believes that Disney's mouse-opera presents a great future for artists--perhaps the missing link between the artist and the public. Says he: "You feel as though you were part of something pretty big and important when you work on a Disney film. One of the greatest things Disney offers an artist is the discipline of having to sell his stuff by making definite and specific statements in simple, uncomplicated language, pictorially speaking.

It s an obvious fact that cartoons reach a much greater audience and therefore have a bigger influence than the single picture exhibited in some museum. I'm not ready to say that a Disney film is better than a Rembrandt or vice versa. This business is really too young to tell much yet as to how far an artist can go if he makes a career of it. I'm inclined to think, however, that in time artists will be developed in this field who will be just as great as some of the past masters whom we use now as source material."

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