posted: February 1, 2012

Terri and I have been on a couple cruises in the past.  The one to Alaska in '06, on Holland America, was great fun.  The other one to the Carribean, on Norwegian, so so. Terri was attending a seminar/workshop event that was starting out of Sydney, on a Holland America again, and winding its way around the Fiji Islands.  I found myself coming along for the ride but not looking forward to leaving work behind and scrambling on return (didn't matter because the scrambling happened anyway).  It was going to be warm, so my packing was going to be light as far as clothing was concerned.  So my other suitcase was a chunk of my studio.  Brought along work that needed to be done for a book of Presidential anecdotes and also brought along a lot of paints- watercolors and acrylics- and brushes, the usual ammo of pencils, and my moleskin drawing and watercolor pads. The pads I kept to no larger than 9"x12".   Still.it was enough to put us into overweight category and pay extra.  I could only imagine what the overweight fee would have been if I hadn't edited my supplies. 
The illustrations were fine distractions from the rituals of cruise entertainment- namely food and more food, which held the potential for great abuse.  Daily workouts in the gym and on the decks and pools didn't save us completely from adding a few pounds.  But as I had no interest in shopping, sun bathing, or the casino while Terri was attending her lectures, making time each day to finish my work for the book was a no brainer and very productive in terms of concentration.  But what I really looked forward to as often as possible was to grab the paints and exercise those skills on the truly magnificent skyscapes, seascapes and landscapes encountered on the journey.  My goals were modest- painting, with a capital P, is not what I do all the time- and I had no desire to go for grand statements.  I just wanted to have some fun and play and screw up but try to capture in some small way the glorious light and colors and movement of the elements if possible.  It was difficult at times not to think of fellow Drawger and friend, Robert Hunt, and imagine how he'd be blowing my attempts away if he had an easel next to me. 
The colors of the ocean and beaches and foliage were of a variety and intensity I've not experienced before.  They almost seemed unreal.  On many occasions, by comparison, they made the colors of the Carribean, with all due respect to the Atlantic, seem anemic.  I could have spent my entire time just trying to come up with the right mixture of paints to replicate what was before me.  As it stood, it was obvious to myself that I was failing.  But it didn't bum me out, it just made me want to keep trying.  Interestingly, I soon abandoned the watercolors preferring instead the plasticity and potential for impastoing that the acrylics afforded. 
Since returning home, there's been very little time to scan and prepare something for a posting, what with work and deadlines being what they are.  I'm starting slow here and will more than likely keep adding to the posting as time permits. Hopefully I will find a sketchbook or two that seem to have been missplaced since the unppacking and add some relevant material from them as well.  Enjoy.  It was great fun.

posted: December 23, 2011

This will probably be my last post for the year. These last twelve months have provided opportunities to further explore how I’d like to spend the remainder of my life in this profession.  The work done during my embed in Afghanistan this summer was certainly the high point.  Unfortunately the drawings and text haven’t graced these or any other pages as they get pitched to publications.  But once something runs, look out.

 

2012 should prove to be a brutal and mean spirited election by November.  Rage controls all politics now and civility, reasonableness, compromise and bipartisanship have all become empty words especially when uttered by politicians.  The good people at ROLLING STONE continue to provide me with choice assignments for the ‘National Affairs’ column and we’ve had real fun tackling the issues- corporate and banking malfeasance, environmental issues and of course, politics- all the while hoping to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.  The last two assignments this year tackled the environment and politics.  No one has been spared, least of all President Obama.  The article by Tim Dickinson on Obama’s can kicking decision over what to do with the Keystone tar sands oil pipeline from Canada to Texas was renamed “Obama’s Pipeline Limbo” after one of my sketched ideas clicked with the editors.  A couple of lucky breaks searching for reference on Google which allowed me to play with the exaggerated pose and a spiritual link to Tex Avery and Robert Clampett provided the content for Obama’s expression.

 

The current assemblage of candidates for the GOP presidential grab is the topic of the year-end double issue of RS currently on your stands now.  A gift from the editors as they had the idea in mind, just didn’t know how it would look.  I again pulled the spirits of my favorite animators at Warner Bros. to inspire the configurations of the candidate pile up.  The cliff getting ready to break off is pure Road Runner.  I had way too much fun doing this one, especially because it allowed me an opportunity once again to caricature Ronald Reagan.  I love doing his face; it’s a bottomless gold mine in terms of manipulating all the shapes and creases that are such a part of his expressions.  Not to mention those backstage makeup cheeks.  It’s quite a sad commentary on the current crop of candidates when Reagan and Goldwater are viewed as voices of reason and restraint.  Like I said, 2012 may just provide ringside seats for watching the collapse of our version of the Roman Empire. 

 

As always, a privilege and pleasure to work with Steve Charny, Joe Hutchinson, Matt Cooley (on occasion subbing for Steve), Eric Bates and Will Dana. 

 

Anne Russinof, whom I have known since her days working at SPORTS ILLUSTRATED, called me for an assignment for the WALL STREET JOURNAL.  A fun piece/commentary on how politicians in general make terrible writers of fiction.  To tie them together in some sort of unifying image I had the selected authors dressed as either Shakespeare or, in Barbara Boxer’s case, George Sand.  My decision to toss in old Bill Shakespeare himself clinched the composition for everyone at the WSJ.  Thanks Anne.

Finally, I was fortunate enough again to be part of another Troops First Foundation Thanksgiving week tour of bases in Kuwait, doing what I usually do on these visits- portraits of members of the US Armed Forces that wind up getting sent home to family and loved ones when I return to the States in time for the holidays.  Our original plans had been to go again to Afghanistan, but problems with logistics forced Rick Kell, founder of TFF, to improvise and head to Kuwait.  In comparison to previous tours, and especially my embed, this was a remarkably calm and low-keyed trip.  The bases we visited were processing the final troops leaving Iraq for transition to either back home or other points of interest.  There being no war going on, conditions were relaxed to say the least.  Not once did I wear body armor or even a helmet.  It was especially strange to walk around bases where everyone was not carrying weapons at his or her side.  I’m including here a selection of drawings that turned out pretty well.  This was my first experience where there were lines of people waiting to be drawn.  Quite a daunting task for one of me.  To be honest, not every portrait was a home run the first time.  I smartly took pictures and redrew back home whatever proved unsatisfactory on reinspection.  These good people are all on long tours- 12 months or maybe more- away from family and friends.  The fact that they’re not getting shot at every day does not make the separation any less real or relevant.  They deserve our thanks for the sacrifices they make.  Thanks to Rick Kell for making this trip happen, to my co-conspirators on the journey, the scary and confounding mentalist David Magee, good friend and awesome country singer/songwriter Matt Snook, our escorts during the week, Sgt. Mike “YaAzzhole” Tinsley, Sgt. Casey O’Brien, Pfc. Chris Knight, and our driver with a million stories, Markas Morton.

 

Hope you all have an incredible 2012 no matter what the politicians do.  I’ll be starting it off in character, bringing my studio with me for a working vacation on a cruise off Australia for the New Year.  And, of course, many thanks to Mr. Zimmerman for making this fantastic site and forum possible. 

posted: December 2, 2011

When Chelsea Cardinal from GQ Magazine called me in early October to explain the concept of the project for the upcoming issue, I tried my best not to have a seizure in the middle of her description.  I’ve done any number of wrap-around book covers, usually anthologies, with multiple casts of characters.  The turnaround time on them would often be three weeks to a month.  The vision, as passed down from the editors, that Chelsea was describing- a spoof of the Sistine Chapel, saturated with noteworthy politicos, cultural figures and cast of hundreds scenes- all due in about a week-was causing me to have that old caught-on-an-amusement-park-ride-getting-ready-to-barf physical reaction.  I felt a brain freeze coming on and my natural reflexive response of,  “I CAN’T DO IT!” taking hold.  Funny, 58 years old, almost 38 years doing illustration and I’m still capable of relapsing to the terrified 8 year old of my childhood.

 

But I also like working for GQ, and didn’t want to walk away from what appeared in so many ways to be a blast of an assignment.  After asking Cjelsea to email me the basic information and whatever copy was available I slept on it (actually I didn’t sleep at all that night fretting) regrouped and came back to her with some observations.  One, that doing the entire Sistine Chapel with a cast of thousands was going to be problematic within the time/deadline constraints. Two; that even if it was possible with two/three weeks to get everything onto the image, it would reduce to irrelevance on a two-page spread, let alone the one page that was being allotted for space.  There was no disagreement from Ms. Cardinal.  I proposed treating the image more like a detail from the masterwork, dropping a lot of the extraneous characters and focusing on enough of the main personalities that we could actually see their characterizations.  Obviously we would use the Creation of Adam portion of the painting as the central point from which the illustration would expand.  There was concurrence on the points and I proceeded with a more relaxed and focused sense of confidence.  Amazing what a little sense of being in control of a problem can do for follow through.

 

Even with the edited number of characters and scenes it was important, given the time constraints, to work within a manageable size.  An 18 by 24” sheet seemed right.  For the sake of efficiency, and with the understanding of where certain elements would be placed in the picture, I decided to work up a sketch good enough to move right into finish if approved, rather than redoing the whole damn thing and trying to replicate what was already working.  Good bond paper was the perfect choice, sturdy enough to handle many mediums and transparent enough to develop a drawing over previous sketches and selecting the parts that worked. 

 

The great thing about spoofing the work of great masters is that you already have fantastic drawing and composition built into the original.  If you’re smart you’ll enjoy building on the already established foundation.  Working from the Michelangelo was an opportunity to reacquaint myself with his figure studies and have incredibly focused fun drawing and adding the caricatured heads.  By coincidence, I already had in the studio a book devoted solely to the refurbished Sistine Chapel paintings and it was quite an eye opener, yet again, to examine not just the original drawings but the original colors, stripped of the classic grime from the old art books we were familiar with growing up. With all that darkness removed they certainly lost some of that gravitas but gained a more contemporary sense of liveliness a result of the freshness of the colors.  Often my thoughts turned to what a great illustrator Michelangelo was, as were so many of the old masters.  The gestures, the expressions, the application and choice of color all told stories, complemented narratives for the public to understand. 

 

Obviously, an accurate representation of the ceiling painting was impossible as persons and events portrayed are spread apart.  I played a game of attempting the illusion of the ceiling painting by picking and choosing elements and sort of jamming them together.  Eliminated a fair amount of the faux architecture and kept what I felt was just enough to identify the work for what it was.  A few nods were given to Will Elder and Harvey Kurtzman and the old MAD Magazine philosophy of filling scenes with side gags and inside references.  So, Michelle Bachmann’s portrayal is a spoof of Botticelli’s Venus and Colbert and Stewart are details of Raphael’s angels.  Had there been more time this picture would have been a perfect opportunity to include non-sequiturs galore. 

 

The editors were pleased beyond their expectations with the sketch and relieved that it was going to work.  Contrary to my original intention I redrew the picture- again, the benefits of layout bond paper- making necessary tweaks to the faces gestures, etc., and then dry mounted the finished drawing to 4 ply Strathmore paper and proceeded with the watercolors.  I don’t find bond paper a perfect receptor of watercolors, but with the proper playing around and patience a richness of color can be built up.  I factored about 4 sleepless days to meet the deadline and was pleasantly surprised with how everything was falling into place.  A couple days into the color and Chelsea called to know if I could do a couple extra spots.  I didn’t flinch much at the request as the watercoloring was progressing at a better pace than my estimations. 

 

The finish was scanned in sections on my Epson tabloid scanner- a replacement for another tabloid scanner that had died earlier this year and one of my best purchases in a long time.  The sections were then photo merged in Photoshop and the file sent to Chelsea.   Were I a better multi-tasker and tech skilled I would have videoed portions of the work process as there was a surprising amount of logic behind the procedure in this assignment. 

 

I didn’t get a chance to see the issue while away in Kuwait and didn’t realize it had already printed when I returned.  Fellow Drawgerite and Renaissance man himself, Marc Burckhardt, cued me to a posting by Nobel winner Paul Krugman, one of the notables portrayed in the piece, on his blogsite at the NYTimes.  I found myself reading the comments section on the posting and was surprised with the seriousness of the critiques and analyses.   One that appeared in several commentaries, and a spot on good one, was the question about why Grover Norquist hadn’t been included in the image. I regret that omission and am not even sure if he was mentioned in the original notes.  Had I been less focused on meeting a deadline I definitely would have included him as well as others who’ve made the headlines.  Indeed it is Norquist, the originator of the No Tax Pledge, who has so many members of Congress, mostly Republicans, by the balls and sticking to their no-compromise stance.  He certainly deserves inclusion even though he’d be zero fun to caricature.  He’s what we would call white bread- bland, featureless, boring looking.  But a creepy blandness of a guy who would seek mail-order brides. 

 

Even with the time pressure this was one of those assignments that reminds me why I like doing what I do and why this is such a great career to have.  Working with Chelsea Cardinal (for a first time assignment this is a good omen) and Fred Woodward at GQ is a total pleasure because they belong to a select group of art directors that get it.  And a tip of the hat to the editors who were also totally on board and made this far easier than I could have expected. 

posted: November 2, 2011

It only gets better.  Rick Perry just keeps serving up feasts of stupid behavior for commentary.  Sounding stoned and semi-incoherent, or just plain uninvolved, in debates, or weirdly giddy and goofy as during the recent appearance in New Hampshire at Cornerstone, he manages to spotlight a glaring inconsistency with the squinty tough Texas cowboy image he projected entering the campaign.  His attempt to reactivate the Obama birth certificate matter demonstrates a  remarkably lame and tone deaf move (who are his handlers?) considering the matter has been long put to rest.  Even The Donald, very proud of himself for employing the bottom feeder issue, was satisfied with the evidence.

He also inadvertently tells the truth during one of the debates by admitting more or less that it takes more than $5000 to buy him.  Matt Taibbi essentially follows that thread.   Along with skewering Perry’s financial and political connections to right wing Christian Fundamentalist groups, Taibbi details his career as a power and money driven politician.  These obsessions are hardly limited to Perry- politics is rife with greed- but his tenacity in knowing who to tap and growing his political war chest by laying down the terms for getting his attention and cooperation are impressive by any comparison.  Matt’s article is in the ‘National Affairs’ section titled, “The Best Little Whore in Texas”, of the current ROLLING STONE, with Eddie Murphy on the cover.  Matt is brilliant in following the money- any dirty money- and he brings that same doggedness to the Perry story as he has done with the Wall Street thieves and liars.  As Taibbi makes it clear, everything is for sale when it comes to Rick Perry.  The image suggestion of Perry working a tent at a flea market came along with the copy.  This was a rare time when there wasn’t much feedback needed from me in terms of idea content and my concerns were therefore concentrated on making the image read well.  This was the last in a number of Perry caricatures for various publications and I just wanted to see if I could catch something in him that I hadn’t in the previous three.  I found some reference of him with a real cat eating the canary grin and thought that would be a nice expression to explore.  I also switched to pen and ink, normally my second choice nowadays in terms of tools; after seeing the Ed Sorel exhibition in NYC last weekend, it may move down to third or fourth.  The line work and watercolors turned out very satisfactory and his expression pretty spot-on.  Steve Charny provided the astute art direction.

 

Perry’s connections to and advocacy of those who clearly butter his bread and against the easy targets of the “1%” and how they tie into his evangelical politics is also the focus for an article in the next AMERICAN PROSPECT.   It didn’t take long into the reading of the first draft of the copy to visualize a reverse take on the icon story of Christ clearing the Temple of the money lenders and merchants.  Only in this situation, it’s the money lenders and GOP bigshots who remain and the poor and underrepresented who are expelled by a very fierce Perry in the Jesus role.  Even though I searched Google for famous artwork relating to the story, and found some good options, it was pretty apparent from the start that my heart was set on using the image created by Gustave Dore.  It was great fun finding the right mean expression for Perry’s mug to complement the vehemence of the gesture.  Always fun to work with art director, Mary Parsons, who makes me feel like I'm actually allowed to play.

 

I really don’t want Perry to implode too soon; he’s such rich material to lampoon.  He’s got such a great face and physical persona- or more correctly- personas.  And judging by his significant campaign contribution stash, he doesn’t need to drop out any time soon.  Most other candidates without Perry’s financial reserves would be history after so many flubs on the campaign trail.  For now, Rick can continue to afford making a monkey of himself.