Two naked, miniature wax-figure women frolic in Soft Orange, a quasi-kinky stop-frame animation made in 1968 by the late American sculpture Robert (Bob) Graham and the British painter Antony Donaldson. Filmed in Los Angeles where the two artists met, the short was later cut in London, before doing the rounds at galleries and museums across Europe.

“I met Bob in 1966 when I was living in LA; he’d moved down from San Fran, and I’d moved over from London, and we quickly became close, lifelong friends,” recalls Donaldson. “We were playing around with elements of censorship, because it was naked ladies, obviously, and the codes in LA at the time about what you could and couldn’t film were very specific. We were testing the limits and seeing what we could get away with.” 

The film was featured as part of the Tate Gallery Artist film series, and an accompanying brochure perhaps sums it up best: “Soft Orange, an extraordinary animation, is a celebration of the guilt free sun and sex ambience of California in the sixties.”        

Antony Donaldson’s Of Memory and Oblivion opens at The Mayor Gallery, London, September 8, 2015. 
The artist’s retrospective at Château Lescombes, Eysines, Bordeaux, runs from October 6 – December 13, 2015.
Cinema Paintings and Photographs of Los Angeles 1966-67 at Art Elysées, Galerie du Centre, Paris, runs from October 22 – 25, 2015.