Mamet and Martial Arts
Posted by Zina Saunders at 7:16 am on May 14th |
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet's new movie, "Redbelt", tells the story of a down-and-out Jiu-Jitsu academy owner in L.A. The film was inspired in large measure by Mamet's own conversion from boxing and wrestling enthusiast to studying Jiu-Jitsu for the past six years.
Today's Wall Street Journal has an interview with him about his fascination with martial arts and all things Redbelt, accompanied by my portrait of him.
I found that he has sported a beard and a not-beard in recent times, so I gave them a few options of a variously hirsute Mamet.
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Some sketches |
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The Grapes of Wrath Opera
Posted by Zina Saunders at 7:41 am on April 28th |
After the premier of their opera, The Grapes of Wrath, Ricky Ian Gordon and Michael Korie are well on their way to being considered the stars of modern American opera.
When Neal Persinger of Hemispheres asked me to do a portrait of Gordon and Korie for the May issue, I was excited. The Grapes of Wrath was the first Steinbeck book I read as a kid, and he became one of my all-time favorite writers.
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Edward Sorel Profile
Posted by Zina Saunders at 7:44 am on April 16th |
Another of the founders of Pushpin Studios, Edward Sorel, age 78, reveals a hint of irony when he insists that he couldn't draw until he was in his 40's but can't disguise a sense of wonder when he talks of what he learned from Laurel and Hardy.
"I got pneumonia when I was nine years old, this was pre-penicillin, and I was laid up for about a year. By the time I got well, I was an artist. In those years, the shirts used to come back with cardboard and that was what I used: a box of crayons and shirt cardboard.
"Then when I was about 10, my mother heard about a class for poor children, that was being held in the Little Red School House on Saturdays.It was sponsored by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. So every Saturday I went down there, from the Bronx. I was given a set of oil paints and canvas and could paint whatever I felt like painting. That was the last time in my life I painted whatever I felt like painting.
"Of course, the art schools ruined me. All they cared about was design. And the abstract expressionists were in the saddle, so clearly the last thing you needed was to learn how to draw. And in point of fact, I didn’t learn how to draw until I was in my 40's. I went to Music and Art High School, and Cooper Union after the Second World War, when illustration was considered the lowest form of art, and drawing was considered totally unnecessary.
"When I came out of school in the 50's, it was impossible to fail, there were so many jobs around. I mean, you got fired from one job and you got another job that paid more money. There were a lot of people walking around thinking of themselves as great successes and self-made men, but the truth is it was impossible to fail in the ‘50s.
"I started Push Pin Studio with Seymour Chwast and then Milton Glaser came, and we were very successful and then I left to freelance and I hustled and I was a bottom-feeder for a couple of years. I just kept swiping from other artists until finally I did a picture that didn’t look like anybody else. I never did any work that I was really happy with until I was in my 40's.
"That was when I realized that my sketches have more artistic value than my finishes. My wife and I did a book called, 'Word People', which was about people whose names became part of the language like Sandwich and Boycott and stuff like that. And there turned out to be 60 or 70 such people. When I did that book, I resolved that I would do it direct, without tracing. And I think for the most part I did. So suddenly I had a book that looked like nobody else’s, sort of like a signature. If you don’t trace you get a signature.
"I'd realized that tracing was death and I tried to do more and more direct drawing, which is possible to do if you don’t have to have too much information in the picture. If you don’t have to compose Custer’s Last Stand, you can work direct; if you have to paint Custer’s Last Stand , then you have to do a lot of preparation and a lot of tracing. And composition is always very hard for me. That’s why I do a lot of parodies of great painters, because they figured it all out and all I have to do is make fun of them.
"Composition is very difficult. It’s the hardest thing. Gesture is hard because nobody pays enough anymore for you to hire models. I have all these movie books and the one I use most often is Laurel and Hardy because they were essentially mimes and so they have wonderful gestures. And that’s really what illustration is all about; illustration is really about gestures. And if people called it gesture drawing maybe they’d be closer to it.
"I was teaching, in the ‘70s. I was teaching the children of dentists in Great Neck, and all they wanted to do was dye their hair purple and smoke pot. They had no ambition. I mean, Milton, Seymour and I were the offspring of lower middle class families, and we were in business to be a success. These kids had no need to be a success, they were going to be supported no matter what. And I hated them. So I only did it for about a year, I think. It was fun hearing the sound of your own voice for a few weeks, but after that it was tiresome.
"I don't think of myself as a great success. I was telling a friend the other week that when you are a loser when you are young, you are always a loser. There are some guys who think of themselves as great winners, guys without talent, guys without anything, and they see themselves as tremendously talented, even if the world hasn’t recognized them. It’s a puzzle. I mean, maybe I wasn’t breast fed long enough.
"My problem these days is that I’ve reached a point where they won’t tell me that I’ve done a bad drawing and very often they don’t know that I’ve done a bad drawing. This just happened yesterday when I delivered a job and they were very enthusiastic but I'm going to do it over, anyway. It’s the one bad thing about being famous: nobody really looks at the work critically and says, you know, you could do this, you could do that. A few weeks ago I did a cover for the New Yorker and got paid for it and then there was a small revision they needed, and they sent it back and I begged the editor not to run it. I just didn't want people to see it. They didn't run it. And they didn't even ask for the money back!
"Because I never mastered life drawing, I’m at the mercy of the reference I can find. Getting the right gesture is crucial, so I spend a lot of time going through a lot of books and now you can use Google. But I never know if what I'm doing is good till it's done. But while I'm working on it, I'm filled with doubt. Working out of fear is something that I’ve done all my life, and I still get scared of the job after all these years. But what can I do? My only consolation is that Fred Astaire got scared before he danced, too."
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Andy Hampsten for Bicycling Magazine
Posted by Zina Saunders at 8:24 am on April 8th |
David Speranza of Bicycling magazine asked me to do an illustration for an article whose headline was "The Day Strong Men Cried." I haven't actually seen the issue yet, so I don't know if they stuck with that headline, but it's pretty accurate.
The story is about Andy Hampsten, who was the first and only American to win the Giro d'Italia, twenty years ago. The picture is of him braving the steep Gavia Pass in the middle of a freak blizzard.
There is only one known photo of Hampsten during the snowstorm, a grainy shot of him coming straight-on, which is on the web. David Speranza wanted me to re-create this intense part of the climb, so I tried a few different angles in the sketches.
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Some roughs |
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Dan Smith, WSJ Art Director Profile
Posted by Zina Saunders at 7:11 am on April 2nd |
Dan Smith's lifelong love of illustration is gratified by working as an art director at The Wall Street Journal, where he collaborates with some of the best in the field. But having entered the business in a digital world, he missed getting his hands dirty. Bookbinding and designing the old fashioned way -- with paper and pencil and movable type -- has satisfied that urge.
“I kind of came into art direction through the back door, because I was very proficient on the Mac and that’s where I was making my money, with the Mac skills, working with designers and constructing everything for them. I wound up down here at The Wall Street Journal doing some freelance work for them and it seemed like a respectful place to work – very different from some other publications.
“I’ve always loved illustration. I’d go to museums and shows to see various illustrators and when I started here at The Journal 12 years ago I had an opportunity to work with some of these people and it was such a big thrill.
“I went to art school, and after I got my two year degree in Connecticut I came to the city and started taking drawing classes at the Art Student’s League and design classes at the School of Visual Arts and things like that. But you always had to make a buck, so I was doing photographic retouching for a living. And then when the Macs came I just jumped on.
“When I started making a living with the computer, I really missed using paints and brushes and keeping my hands busy like that, and it became more of an effort to take drawing classes. I learned a lot about design working on the computer but something was missing.
“In the past few years I’ve gotten into bookbinding and design. When I was learning design at school it was all on a computer: I never had the experience of drawing on a full sheet of paper to figure out how I wanted to put together a layout; you had to set up the grids and do everything on the computer. The computer is a fantastic tool, but to get a greater grasp of the concept, you want to go back to the pencil and paper and draw out what you want the layout to look like. It’s nice to have a big piece of paper in front of you and to draw out what you want to do. Then you can approach it on the computer again in a different way.
“I’m working on a few book projects, which include doing the actual bookbinding, design and printing with letterpress. One is a personal project, a limited edition ABC book that I’m printing on a Vandercook. I’m also working with Randy Enos on his Mocha Dick project and it’s a fabulous book. I’m also doing a book of Joe Ciardello’s portraits of blues singers ...wonderful, wonderful drawings. It’s a thrill to be working with these artists, seeing their drawings.
“Art direction for a newspaper has got to be quick, it’s gotta make an immediate connection. Society of Newspaper Designers gave a seminar with Bob Newman of Fortune magazine. I was especially interested in what Newman had to say since we cover the same territory. He starts off shaking his head and says 'The daily is tough; real tough to do original work.' I’m thinking, 'Shit, I know that. You gotta give me something, Man. Come on.” Eventually the seminar was very helpful, but when you come into work in the morning without a concept or story and have to spin something out by the end of the day, that’s tough. It's a challenge.
“Sometimes we’ll get a request for a same-day illustration and all it says 'We need an investor-type in a bank vault with no cash'. You get a sense that the story hasn’t fully developed yet but you still need to get going with the assignment. With things like this, we’ll try to glean out some more info before getting an illustrator going in the wrong direction.
“The Journal has a motivated reader, and art directors in the daily have to make sure the illustration engages the reader and identifies the section, as well as follows the story’s content, and doesn’t get in the way of it. For some stories you want to signal the reader that this is a lighter piece, so you use a somewhat cartoonish, funny illustration. Using a more straightforward portrait might indicate it’s an interview. But mostly you have to avoid the disconnect between the story and the art; if the reader is looking at the headline and it doesn’t quite match up with what the art is, they might just turn the page and keep on going. So you are just really trying to avoid that big discrepancy between the story and the art.
“Digital rendering has really changed the look of illustration. It’s more of a graphic look, it’s a cleaner look. You can’t get so much expression, but it’s great if you’ve got something that needs a lot of type or if it’s just a very simple action that you are trying to portray. The painterly things are, again, a little signal to the reader that it’s more of a fleshed-out piece, that it’s taken a little longer. The photo illustrations are just great, because they can really convey the concept very quickly and just basically slapping on a face into one of these environments and you are done. And people can get very expressive with those collages.
“My favorite things to assign are the ones that are a little bit more of a challenge; they can be more rewarding when you hit the right note. It’s very difficult to predict what the editors are going to like; it has to go through a number of editors and everyone’s sensibilities are different. So you just don’t know which way it’s going to go, but when you hit the right note it really works out well.”
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Martin Hayes for The Journal
Posted by Zina Saunders at 8:29 am on March 27th |
Last week I did this portrait of Irish violinist, Martin Hayes. Since I usually use such strong colors for skin, I thought it would be fun to do his really white.
His music is lovely, if you'd like to check it out at Compass Records.
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A couple of the sketches |
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Barry Blitt Profile
Posted by Zina Saunders at 10:20 am on March 5th |
Barry Blitt, age 49, sees illustration as a fatal attraction: it's killing him but he can't stop going back for more.
"I drew a lot as a kid and I got a ton of reactions to it from the family. My grandfather used to draw – he used to copy Norman Rockwell paintings – and they made a fuss, just like you’re doing right now. And that was fun. A little fuss was fun. I don’t think so anymore; I’m quite tired of the fuss. But you can’t live with it and you can’t live without it.
"Puberty was difficult. I still haven’t really come out of it – everything was going so smoothly until then! I was a big sports fan, and I used to draw professional hockey players' and baseball players' pictures. I’d do caricatures of them and try to find out where they were staying when they were in town so I could bring them their drawings. Then I’d become friends with them and they’d get me tickets to games and give me bats and balls. You probably couldn’t do that now, but it was a more innocent time in the 1930's or whenever it was.
"I’d find out what hotel there were in, the Sheraton or the Queen Elizabeth, and I’d go down and wait in the lobby and the hotel security would try and kick me out, but I would just run back in. Some of the players were very into it and other guys would just tell you to fuck off. Sometimes the players would tell their team, and I did a couple of programs in yearbooks for teams. That was my first published work: I illustrated the Philadelphia Flyers1974 Stanley Cup year book and they paid me $5 a drawing. They were terrible. The heads were real realistic, in pencil, and then I would outline the head in pen and then draw a body in pen. They were bad.
"Once the big-head-small-body-hockey-player thing was out of my system, I think I wanted to do something more serious; I thought that my funny impulses didn’t belong in my work. I was stupid enough to think I could do high realism or something that I’m not capable of. But the work that looked tossed off always got the biggest reaction.
"I got a scholarship from Leo Burnett ad agency while I was at Ontario College of Art, between my third and fourth year. I didn’t even know what it was for, I just entered it and I got it and I worked at Leo Burnett as a visualizer for my fourth year at college. I hated advertising; it was demeaning. I mean, they’d ask me to draw lettuce and then ask me to make the lettuce look crispier. That wasn’t for me.
"After school ended I went to England. There was so much great work coming out of London at the time, and I thought I would go there and get inspired by that and maybe I’d find my style or my niche there. But when I brought my portfolio around, I stupidly went to Leo Burnett there, too. And they offered me a job doing the same thing I had done in Canada and I took it because I didn’t know anyone in England. So I was drawing crispy lettuce and stuff like that, and I hated it. I worked there for about a year and then came back to Canada and somehow started bringing my work around and just did my bit.
"I had one style that was sort of black and white charcoal that was serious and then there was the crazy stuff in pen and ink. More and more the pen and ink seemed to be favored and I could put some humor in that, but at first it was all little spots and Canadian Business Magazine and stuff that. Some of it was just so bad. I didn’t even care. Sometimes I just don’t care. I’ll work on something and I just won’t want to be doing it, and I’ll have a bad attitude. I’m trouble: you have to stay away from me.
"I don’t think I necessarily choose my assignments well. Sometimes it’s hard to say no. Some of these people, they don’t want you to say no. But it’s really important to choose the right things for yourself.
"Back then I had more time to do self-generated projects and stuff. I remember I was doing these crazy biographies of my heroes, just one page each, anyone from George Washington, to Gustav Mahler, to Stravinsky. I did a whole series of those and they were fun and I didn’t care. I think part of the not caring thing is I have to sort of fool myself into not caring about a drawing. I do my best work when I'm not thinking about it, when I'm not worried about it. So any New Yorker cover I do, it’s just a crazy emotional morass. I’ll draw it seven or eight times and I’ll start painting each one, and this one’s better than the other one, and then I’ll go back to the first one (the first one is always the best one). I still haven’t learned to let myself make mistakes and that’s where the best stuff comes in.
"My first New Yorker cover I sent François [Mouly] was an idea about smokers, when smokers were being told to smoke outside. I put them standing on window ledges, so there was a cityscape and there were all these people on window ledges. And I was calling her about something else and she said, 'Oh yeah, by the way, do the smoker’s cover, it got approved'. And so I did it a million times, really badly, out of my head. When I brought it in, she said, 'This is terrible!' I sent her something again and she called me, and said, 'It’s not working, obviously.' And I said, 'I know.' She said, 'Why don’t you call Ed Sorel -- go talk to him.' I said, 'I’m not talking to Ed Sorel, I’m afraid of Ed Sorel.'
"I thought, why would he want to talk to me? And then the phone rang like two minutes later and he said, 'Come over, I’d love to help you, we’ll have lunch and talk.' So I brought my drawing over, my bad, bad, bad finals that I had done for this cover. And I showed them to him and he said, 'No, these are terrible. You're approaching it all wrong.' I was happy to hear it – I'm still dying for this kind of information. He said, 'This is how you do it.' And he went and got some books off the shelf. He said, 'You can’t make buildings up out of your head. Some people can do that, but you can’t, and I can’t either, so let’s find a cityscape,' and he chose one and he said, 'Maybe we’ll put a guy with a pipe here. This is how I would do it.' And it was just invaluable. And then I went and did it a bunch more times and then it got published and I was delighted, I mean, I wasn’t happy with it, but I was happy that it happened. And then I saw him maybe half a year later and he said, 'I saw your cover.' And he said, 'We can't all do our best work all the time, but, you know ... good try.'
"At this point, I'm just doing one thing after another; it’s sort of soul destroying, in a lot of ways. And I've sort of pared my style down a little bit. Less looseness and less line work. Sometimes I look at old pieces and say, 'Oh shit, I wish I was still working like that.'
"I don't take any time off, and I don’t really want to. I’m not a leisure type person. I play music a lot, though, and that takes up a lot of my time. Near where I live there was a local jazz trio and quartet I used to play with regularly. But it became like illustration. I mean, it’s really fun to sit down at a piano and it should be that much fun to sit down and draw and it probably was at one point, maybe 20 years ago. But there have been a lot of deadlines since then, and a lot of the fun's gone out of it.
"I'd like to stop, but not for too long. I think I’d miss it a lot if I had to stop. It’s nice to be part of the culture and contribute in some minute way. It’s fun to open a newspaper and read stuff and say, that pisses me off and come up with an idea about it and submit it and it’s published. And it’s nice to work with great writers. I mean, it’s very gratifying to illustrate a great piece of journalism or fiction or something; that side of it’s nice, to come up with an idea. And that you turn it in and it’s printed a million times is very cool."
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R. O. Blechman Profile
Posted by Zina Saunders at 5:50 am on February 27th |
R.O. Blechman, age 76, talks about what it's like to be highly visual and at the same time struggle to render what he sees. Over the course of more than 50 years, his passions for writing, animation and film-making have competed with illustration for his soul.
"As a kid, I had no interest in being an artist whatsoever. I wasn’t even a cartoonist except in high school and that was just to show off. It only occurred to me very recently that the only reason I went to the High School of Music and Art was that I was in love with my next door neighbor, a beautiful blond French girl who was an artist. I loved her. She painted her walls and had murals everywhere. She'd painted a donkey’s behind on the wall and the switch was where his ass was and she would ask me to, 'Turn on the lights please'. This, to me, was what art was all about!
"When I was in college at Oberlin, I was doing political cartoons, but it wasn’t art, it was really junky stuff. But I liked the idea of making political comments with my artwork. And there was a class ball, I guess you’d call it, and I remember that I decorated the entire hall with my own murals on paper, drawings of everything I loved; like I was crazy about the film Alexander Nevsky, so one mural was of that. But again, I never thought of myself as an artist.
"The Korean war was on, and after I got out of college I knew I’d be drafted. I didn't know if I'd be called up in a few months or a year, so I figured what the hell, I’ll just goof off and do what I enjoy doing, never thinking that it might be a career.
"I wasn't so much an artist as a cartoonist. My ideas were brighter and funnier than they were beautiful, because I just didn’t know how to draw well. And I wasn't, nor am I now, a natural artist. I am very visual, but I don’t have the hand. I work very, very hard to get things, which is probably true of many, many artists.
"I was shopping around my stuff and surprisingly selling it. I'm still amazed it sold, but the stuff was, again, very bright, because I’m clever, and very funny, because I had to compensate for the fact that it looked like hell. I've made a career based on the whole notion of breaking free of the text and interpreting it; I was on the cusp of that and that helped me a hell of a lot.
"Now this was a really crazy thing– in 1952 I did what’s now called a graphic novel, that was immensely successful. I mean, I couldn’t believe it. It was called The Juggler Of Our Lady and it was about a person who couldn’t do anything in life but juggle. I suppose I thought I couldn’t do anything in life but draw funny cartoons. The Herald Tribune, which was then comparable to The New York Times, gave it a full front page write-up. I mean, I was interviewed and blah, blah, blah and of course, it put my career in a tailspin, because I was too young to have that kind of success. For the next 10 years I didn’t come out with anything because I tried to copy what brought me the success, thinking that it was the book, not the person who made the book.
"Filmmaking has always been my real passion. When I was 19 years old and in college, I took a course in humor taught by a colleague of Buñuel, Augusto Centeno. And at that point, in a flash, it occurred to me that the future of our business is animation. I thought, 'This is what I have to do.'
"So, after college and my big book success, I freelanced a little and I went into the army for two years. And then, when I came out, my very first job was with an animation studio, Storyboard Studios. I was doing storyboards, but the storyboards were then given to artists to re-render because my stuff was considered unanimatable, because of the broken, jagged line I use.
"After that I was a freelance animator and illustrator, and in 1960, because I loved graphic design, and because I was bright and restless, I was part of a design team and we had our own studio for a short time, called Blechman and Palladio, which I loved.
"That broke up after a year. So I was doing commercials and a few books thrown in, and nothing much was happening in my career, but then I was lucky enough to produce an hour-long Christmas show for PBS called Simple Gifts. It was tremendously gratifying because I was able to use the artwork of many people I admire, like James McMullan and Seymour Chwast and Maurice Sendak. Being the producer and director, I did one of the segments, myself.
"After that I founded an animation studio called The Ink Tank. And that lasted up until a few years ago. I loved working with other artists, and I still do, as a matter of fact. And it’s fun to commission good stuff. I was able to do a few things of significance there, and the Stravinsky film, The Soldier's Tale, was the most gratifying of all the things I was able to do.
"I always felt that my skills, such as they are, are as much literary as visual – maybe even more literary than visual, because I always enjoyed language a lot. As for my drawing skills, if I work hard I can do very well. But I am very lazy, and I am not interested in art very much. I'm really not. I mean, I love it, but unless somebody says, 'Go do,' I don’t.
"I love both drawing and writing, but again, I tend not to draw unless I’m asked, but I write just because it’s immensely satisfying. I love it. I wrote a biography of Steinberg, that almost got published. I got a contract and an advance, but I ran into trouble with the Steinberg Foundation. It was tough, when it fell through, but I’m used to a lot of failures like that. I mean, I was blessed with a difficult childhood that prepared me for the freelance life. I had a psychotic mother: occasionally she’d lie on the floor and go into a spasm. I would run upstairs to the doctor who lived in our building, and he'd be eating and I’d say, 'Would you please go down, my mother is just lying on the floor screaming!' and he would finish his appetizer and main course and he would then finish his dessert. He knew my mother. She was a nut.
"My father was very cut off. Listen, if you were married to a crazy like that, you would be cut off, too. And he wasn’t a nice guy. He was a mean son of a bitch, particularly to my older brother. We were not the happiest family, but it prepared me for the freelance life and all the rebuffs that would happen. I've had my share of them and that's the way it goes.
"I've had some proud achievements in illustration, of course: some of my New Yorker covers were really very good and then the 10 years I did every single cover for a magazine called Story; I loved doing that stuff. It was fantastic. But I have not begun to fulfill my ideas about animation, which is my real passion. Even still, every few years, hey, I’ve got another idea for a feature, and it’s got to be done and I’m still hacking away at it. I’ll never stop."
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Ashin Kovida for The Journal
Posted by Zina Saunders at 6:07 am on February 18th |
Here's a portrait I did last week for Kate LaVoie at the Wall Street Journal of Ashin Kovida, a young activist monk who helped organize protests in Mayanmar after the police there fired warning shots at monks in September.
One of my sketches featured the Shwedagon temple in Yangon, where he led daily protests, and that's the one they chose to run with.
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