Cathleen Toelke

The Dreaded Orphan Works Bill PASSES in Senate. Please Contact House Representatives NOW

2008-09-27T15:18:46+00:00

FROM THE ILLUSTRATORS' PARTNERSHIP on Friday evening Sept. 26, 2008:
Orphan Works: Risking Our Nation's Copyright Wealth
THE SENATE HAS JUST PASSED THEIR VERSION OF THE ORPHAN WORKS BILL.
Now we must try to stop the House Judiciary Committee from folding their bill (HR5889) and adopting the Senate version.
We've supplied a special letter for this purpose.
PLEASE EMAIL CONGRESS TONIGHT.
USE THIS LINK
http://capwiz.com/illustratorspartnership/issues/alert/?alertid=11980321
-Brad Holland and Cynthia Turner, for the Board of the Illustrators' Partnership
__________________________________________________
For ongoing developments, go to the Illustrators' Partnership Orphan Works blog: http://ipaorphanworks.blogspot.com/
Over 70 organizations are united in opposing this bill in its current form. Illustrators, photographers, fine artists, songwriters, musicians, and countless licensing firms all believe this bill will harm their small businesses.
The Capwiz site is open to professional creators and any member of the image-making public. Sample letters have been provided. International artists will find a special link, with a sample letter and instructions as to whom to write.
If you received our mail as a forwarded message, and wish to be added to our mailing list, email us at: illustratorspartnership@cnymail.com Place "Add Name" in the subject line, and provide your name and the email address you want used in the message area.
Please post or forward this message in its entirety to any interested party.

Portrait for The Wall Street Journal

2007-07-11T14:16:31+00:00

A self-styled and noted American entrepreneur was the subject of this portrait for The Wall Street Journal Weekend Edition's front page story "Riding the Tiger" on Saturday.

Fredy Bush is the CEO of Xinhua Finance, Ltd. in Shanghai, the company she founded out of an alliance with the Xinhua News Agency, the Chinese Communist Party's primary media organ. Originally a divorced mother from Utah, hers has been a success story of an enterprising American being in China at the right time.

Recently however, Ms. Bush and her media company have been under fire over certain highly profitable transactions. Even Ms. Bush's background seems askew at this point. Despite that, the Journal wanted to stir away from controversy in the portrait, perhaps indicating her transition from Utah to Shanghai.

Some folks would like to see the portrait in context, so within the limits of my scanner width, here's how it was used.

New Book Cover

2007-05-24T19:44:00+00:00

Cellophane, a bawdy novel set mid-20th century in the Amazon, is a story where magic, science, and destiny collide. It's published this month by The Dial Press. I loved reading the book, and the author, Marie Arana, is a Peruvian American who knows how to weave a dense and engaging comic tale.

Don Victor Sobrevilla, at the age of 12, was handed a mysterious fortune from a gypsy monkey, La Negrita. As an engineer, Don Victor dreams of building a paper mill on the Amazon. He moves his aristocratic family and all their eccentricities into the heart of the Peruvian jungle, where he proceeds to build his empire. Beliefs, values and culture are auspiciously contrasted, but tongues, desire, and all hell break loose when Don Victor discovers the formula for that transparent wonder of the 1950's, cellophane.

The cover is printed as painted, with the original green and blue colors, but I'm choosing to show the cover for portfolio purposes in reds.

Portrait of a Harvard Novelist: Kaavya Viswanathan

2007-04-10T17:12:56+00:00

A portrait I did in February was recently published for an article in 02138, a quarterly magazine targeted to Harvard alumni but independent of the university. While alumni magazines often sing praises of their luminaries' accomplishments, "The Hubris Hall of Fame", highlights some of the most embarrassing Harvard students and alumni. The story:

In 2006, Kaavya Viswanathan was in the news as a beautiful, brilliant, Harvard sophomore and chick lit novelist who landed a reported $500,000 two-book deal from Little, Brown, and a movie deal from Dreamworks. Shortly after the first novel's publication, she fell from glory when it was discovered that she'd plagiarized entire sentences from several other novels--especially those of a Random House author she'd been a big fan of during high school, and a story line similar to one of that author's books. Responding to pressure, Kaavya claimed on national media that she had a photographic memory and must have "internalized" details from the other books (about 40 plagiarized sentences were eventually documented). Little, Brown withdrew all copies of her book and the movie deal was canceled.

My Studio

2007-04-05T12:35:49+00:00

Here's a picture of my studio taken a while back, only now the mess is worse with a new computer set up in addition to the one that's there on the left. The other 1/3 of the studio, which you can't see, has more stuff stacked up on work tops and in closets. It's not that I'm disorganized, I just like to collect. Fortunately, the work tops are modular and can be pushed or rolled away to accommodate large projects, but it's time to weed out or get an attic! The rest of the house is quite tidy, I promise.

Color Study-O-Rama

2007-04-02T14:57:17+00:00

I've often done color studies for my work executed in that unforgiving medium, gouache!

When I started painting illustrations in the early 1980's, I was influenced by the bright colors of California orange crate labels, as in the studies above. My work then was almost exclusively in advertising, for travel, real estate, and related subjects, so the palette worked well. I made lots of little swatches figuring out my palette and paint formulas.

I continued in the California vein for a few years, but when I started to get editorial work in the mid '80's I developed a more serious palette. I really did a 180 when I saw a major Picasso and Braque cubist exhibition at MOMA. I loved all the brooding grays of the two artists' abstractions, and Picasso's blue-greens. I was DYING to get somber. I got serious book cover assignments, the more obtuse the better. Please, I hated those cheery colors!

By the mid 90's, I calmed down from the grayed colors and just worked on developing combinations that appealed to me from my numerous color experimentations, as in those above. More little swatches!

In the 2000's, the work has gotten more graphic, and the palette brighter again (go figure).

My Drawing Process: Sketch to Final

2007-03-26T15:05:29+00:00

Here's a series of scans I made for an art school PowerPoint presentation that demonstrated how different illustrators' sketches relate to their final art. These are from an assignment done a few years back, but I had saved a good progression that's fairly typical of my process.v

This is one sketch on a page of many thumbnail ideas for the cover of a book about twin sisters, one of whom develops a bad attitude that makes a mess of her life. I used the device of a mirror to express how the other twin tries to find ways of getting her sister to take a look at herself and turn her life around.

This is a thumbnail, only about an inch square, that's the starting point for a more refined sketch that I show to the client.

I'll do other rough pencil sketches on tissues, larger than the thumbnail, experimenting with layouts and details. This one is on tissue, about 3 1/2" x 4 1/2".

Here I've been refining the drawing and deciding on a final cropping on a tissue overlay. I might have drawn the faces separately on paper, then combined them here with the mirror. I added another hand holding a cigarette and the girl blowing smoke as a symbol of rebelliousness; I later changed this to more obvious smoke coming up from the cigarette. My figures and other elements are largely made up, but I usually use a rough magazine clip, photo or other reference of some sort. I remember drawing my own hands here. About 3 1/2" x 5".

This is my final working pencil drawing, about 5 1/2" x 8 1/2". I submitted this sketch to the client in a cleaner, but less refined and cropped form. You can see the crop marks inside the drawing, indicating where the intended trim for the cover should be. When the sketch was approved, I just refined it on top of what I submitted to the client, and I decided to expand it for the final painting.

For many projects, especially for those that will be executed in gouache, I reduce my final drawing and do a small color study, about 3" x 4". I rarely show these to the client, but will, if requested.

Gouache is a very unforgiving medium the way I use it, so I got into the habit early on of doing these studies to avoid a mess if I changed my mind. This is where I experiment with the color pallet, contrasts and shading. Sometimes there's more than one layer of paint, and not all my studies are this refined. I really enjoy doing these, as they're more spontaneous than my final paintings in gouache. When I use other media or paint, I usually skip this step.

By the time I get to the final painting, the experimentation is usually over and I'm just executing the image in a larger, more refined form. I did this original 8" x 10" in a less cropped form, as i originally envisioned. I usually paint close to reproduction size, and normally allow very little cropping.

College Days: Black & White

2007-03-21T12:14:42+00:00

I knew nothing of what I was headed for when I decided to go to art school.

I had a childhood spent collecting pollywogs, picking strawberries, learning the flora and fauna, and riding in the back of my Uncle Frank's pick-up truck with my cousins to get ice cream cones. It was an wonderful, rather rural setting in Upstate NY. I was surrounded by aunts, uncles and cousins. Each of our 3 families had built a house on a piece of my grandfather's old dairy farm, an increasingly rare situation even then. At 17, I headed off to live and study in an urban environment. It was culture shock.

I went to New York's Buffalo State, entering in tumultuous times , with anti-war demonstrations and experimentation in everything, including art. The school was located across the street from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. I had never been to an art museum, let alone one known for significant contemporary and modern collections. At the time, the gallery was stuffed with pop, op, and kinetic art and boasted the famed "Mirrored Room". There were works by Pollack, Davis, Shahn, Dine, Frank Stella, Nevelson, Lichtenstein, Rosenquist, Motherwell, Segal, De Kooning, Rauschenberg, Warhol, and a giant wooden Baby Girl sculpture by Marisol. The art students were crazy. Their apartments were art works, with murals or op patterns covering rooms. One memorable kitchen with a floor of black and white tile squares, was painted completely in the same checkerboard pattern--walls, ceiling, cabinets, fixtures, pipes, hot water heater, refrigerator, clock--only slightly crooked, so that the dimensions of the room were lost. All of this made a big impression on me in my first week. A lot of the kids in the art program were from the New York area. They grew up with Larry Rivers' murals in their Long Island shopping malls and went to the best museums on the planet. Some went to the High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts. Needless to say, I felt behind. But everything was such a stimulating and grand adventure, it didn't take me long to catch up.

The school offered fine art and art education...no commercial art of any kind. I experimented with everything from op to graphic abstractions and sculpture, but kept coming back to my figurative work, focusing on drawing, painting, and printmaking. I was influenced by "crossover" artists like Warhol, Avedon, and Penn, and work that was drawing-based like Marisol.

Printmaking and black & white photography were great for developing my sense of composition. I don't have my large paintings, save some bad slides, but I have drawings, and prints of various types. It's funny that most of my work in those years was in black & white. Here are some more examples.

Junior High: Painted Faces

2007-03-06T17:15:14+00:00

Here's something scarier than the Halloween witches I drew at age 5: three faces painted in tempera, probably done around jr. high. Scary, because it looks like I've been doing pretty much the same painting since then!

I'm not sure what the influence was here. I knew nothing about modern or contemporary art, except maybe who Picasso was. I never went to an art museum before college. My school library didn't have art books, save an old, faded, poorly printed classics series. I vaguely remember a couple of small pamphlets on modern art with tiny, even worse reproductions. It was frustrating.

The stylization in these faces might have been more influenced by the sights during our wonderful family summer vacations in Cape Cod. We loved going into Provincetown, the old seafaring beatnik/hippie art colony on the tip of the Cape. It had a weird mix of scrimshaw, driftwood, fishnets, souvenirs, and artists' paintings. Although Provincetown boasted many famous painters in an earlier era--Hopper, Milton Avery, Motherwell, Franz Kline-- by the time I was a kid, the town was an enclave of drop-outs, or at least seemed that way. This painting looks like Provincetown tourist art combined with an attempt at fashion.

With Provincetown as my role model, I did a lot of art of abstracted fishing piers and boats. Then I did bad abstractions of people. I didn't know what I was doing because I had never seen really good art.

Around the tenth grade, I discovered I could draw very well realistically. Our family vacations had taken us further south, to the boardwalks of Wildwood, NJ, Virginia Beach and Atlantic City. Atlantic City was awesome, with its piers of huge signs, rides and bygone dance halls, its decaying grand hotels and riot of odd attractions. I was fascinated to watch the boardwalk portrait artists, and the speed at which they worked. They worked from little hole-in-the-wall studios or from no studios at all. One year, with great anticipation, my parents had my portrait done in charcoal, and it came out quite well. I got the notion of trying it myself at home. I did a shaded pencil copy of a black and white wallet-sized photo of my first boyfriend. To my shock, it looked just like him! It was the same feeling I had when I was 5 and drew the Halloween trick-or-treat bag. And it wasn't difficult! It was just a matter of carefully observing the proportions. So I did more, and more after that, of friends, teachers, and family in pencil, watercolor and pastel. I worked from both my fat collection of wallet-sized photos and life. The pastels were a good as what we'd seen on the Atlantic City boardwalk. That brought me to my senior year. I could draw and wanted to go to art school. My art teacher was a realist landscape watercolor painter, like John Pike. No one knew about art careers except for the fashion drawings in our local newspapers, John Pike, and teaching art. I knew about Provincetown and the Atlantic City boardwalk artists. I didn't want to be a starving artist. I was a girl and I was artistic, so everyone figured teaching art was my best bet. I applied to a state college that offered art education and off I went.

The Epiphany, Age 5

2007-02-15T15:21:26+00:00

As clearly as if it happened last week, I can remember sitting at my family's kitchen table one afternoon, making Halloween pictures with my sister. I had just turned five; my sister was 9 and a good drawer. Not only could she draw rings around me, but being almost 5 years older, outdid me in every way. I tried my best to keep up. We had pencils, crayons, colored paper, tape, and brown glue that came in those funny bottles with the red rubber tops. I had a new scrapbook, my first one, and so far it only contained pictures I had cut out of magazines. That day, however, I was making my own pictures in it. I drew lollipops in crayon and cut witches out of colored paper. My new thing was doing profiles, and the witches had roundish heads with triangle noses, mouths and hats. They stuck out their arms to stir a cauldron of brew. I kept glancing over to see what my sister was doing. She was drawing witches in pencil. Her witches had warty noses and chins and looked sooo much more sinister than mine. Since I tried to emulate my sister at everything, I decided to switch from cut paper witches to drawing one in pencil. I drew a random bumpy line and put a dot near it. To my amazement, it looked like a real witch's profile, and I remember thinking to myself, "This is a CINCH!" It was just a matter of making the right choices. I was thrilled and finished the drawing which you see above.

Spurred on by this victory, I decided to use what I had learned to challenge myself in creating something sister hadn't thought of. I drew a rectangle on brown paper. At the top, I made lines with circles at the top, and rectangles, all partially hidden by the top of the big rectangle. Wow, it really looked like what I had intended: a trick or treat bag filled to the top with candy. I knew it wasn't a realistic bag, but knew the important thing was that I had made a convincing symbol for one. And it was easy to figure out! It might not seem like much, but it was this two inch drawing and Halloween witch that hooked me on making pictures. I felt I could do anything.