Zina Saunders

Steven Charny Profile

2008-07-21T11:19:34+00:00

Senior art director Steven Charny's lifelong fascination with Rolling Stone began when he would pore over its pages in his room as a teenager—now he's assigning its illustrations and designing its pages.

"I grew up reading Rolling Stone -- I've been a subscriber for almost 30 years—and I’m really into music, and it’s always a great thing when you can work with a subject matter that is true for you. Part of what’s so gratifying for me at Rolling Stone is just working with musicians’ stories—people that I really admire—and politics. The subject matter is really terrific.

"I've been drawing from the moment I could hold a pencil. When I was a little, little kid, I was really into monsters, like Frankenstein, the Mummy, Creature from the Black Lagoon; all that stuff. And then I was into comic book super heroes, and I would make my own little comic books, with my own super heroes.

"When I was, like, seven, I had a guy called Money Man, and he wore a green costume with a big dollar sign on the chest. And he had a sidekick, Captain Currency. And the bad guys were the Taxman and Inflation. I don't know how I came up with that; maybe it was because it was the seventies, and there was all this bad economic stuff going on.

"In college at Syracuse University, I was accepted into a special 5-year double major program (Advertising Design & Photography) that was supposed to be very prestigious and difficult to get in to. I had no idea at 18 years old what the hell one did with such a program, or even if I wanted to be a photographer, but it sounded cool so I did it.

"But I was terrible at photography. I couldn’t do it at all: I was really bad with the technical stuff in the darkroom.

"I had a friend who was an illustration major who really liked it, and that’s what I wanted to do anyway. So I switched my major to illustration and dropped design and photography. I never actually took any magazine design classes at SU because they were just not interesting to me—I wanted to draw and paint, and that’s all we did as illustration majors.

"When I got out of school, I tried to be an illustrator. I had a cartoony style, which is kind of hard to sell, and I went to all the magazines, and I ended up basically being a bartender. I just wasn’t getting any work. So to supplement, and also to get a foot in the door, I started doing mechanicals.

"My first real job doing that was with the Will Hopkins Group, a big designer who had this great design studio. He did all kinds of different magazines, and I started doing mechanicals for them. What happened was, he was doing a redesign of Food & Wine Magazine at the time, so I went over to Food & Wine and I was working with them, and when their assistant art director left, they asked me to take the job.

"I think in those days it was pretty common to go from paste-up to art direction. I guess the same thing is true today with freelance design or production people who are sometimes asked to take staff positions when someone leaves. You become familiar to the people on staff, and when there’s an opening, they think of you. I got along very well with everyone there, and I had a great deal of interest in food, spent a lot of time in the test kitchen talking to the chefs there, so when the time came to hire someone they asked me. At that point in my life I was realizing that I was not going to make a living as an illustrator, but I loved the magazine business and I had a background as a visual artist, so the transition was pretty easy.

"At Food & Wine, it was all about hiring photographers. It was really being a photo editor: I was hiring photographers; I was hiring the stylists; I was coming up with conceptual stuff for the photography. Here at Rolling Stone, it’s strictly design, strictly doing page layout, because there’s a whole separate photo department. We just get the photos. We don’t really have much input on the photography.

"What’s more creative for me is the hiring of illustrators. When I work with illustrators, there’s more freedom to do stuff, to experiment and try things.

"I like getting mailers from illustrators. Or sometimes emails, though I don’t love getting cold emails. The truth is that I’m just not a big fan of email—I guess I’m kinda old-school that way. When I get a mailer and I like what I see, I’ll go on their web site and bookmark it, and then I’ll throw out the mailer, because I do everything on the internet. I have this huge, long list of illustrators.

"I don’t love phone calls so much. And I don't even like looking at physical portfolios anymore. I prefer the web sites.

"The great thing about working here is that nobody ever says no, unless they’re really busy and they have a major project they’re working on; otherwise, everybody says yes. People are excited when you hire them—it’s a nice feeling that you can make somebody’s day."

Trying Something New

2008-07-10T17:07:03+00:00

I've been playing around today on a series of portraits I'm doing for an old client who doesn't pay a whole lot but lets me do anything I want. It's a good trade-off, as far as I'm concerned, at least when I have plenty of other work coming in, too.

I'm not sure which I like better, the black and white version or the color...

I love trying new stuff, experimenting, messing around. And when I get paid for it -- well, there's nothing funner!

How about this one, Rob? Better?

Here's another one, Rob, as requested!

Jim Miller for Art Talks

2008-07-08T12:58:58+00:00

Jim Miller, art director at Serino Coyne, the top-of-the-line advertising agency for plays, producers and performing arts centers, didn't come to New York to make it on Broadway ... but he did anyway.

"When I was 11 or 12 years old I fell in love with comic books. I started off by copying comic book characters ... DC comics did a super realistic style of drawing, which intrigued me very much. In high school I got involved in the high school annual and all that kind of thing, and I went to school for a couple of years to study architecture at the University of New Mexico. My father had an architectural firm in Nevada, and his hope was that I would slip in and replace him someday.

"My schooling was interrupted because I had to go into the service for a couple of years and when I got out, one of the architects who worked with my father knew about my drawing ability and said I ought to look into this place in Los Angeles, called the Art Center. I ended up going to the Art Center and just arbitrarily picked advertising design and J. Walter Thompson used to come out there and look at the graduating students and offered me a round-trip plane ticket and a night at the Roosevelt Hotel to come and interview with them.

"I had never been east of Ohio and I was blown away by New York. Not so much by the bigness of the city, but by the brownstones on Upper East Side; I felt like I was in a Bernie Fuchs painting! I told J. Walter Thompson I was really flattered that they'd offered me this opportunity, but since I’m here I’d like to look around at some other places. They said, 'Be our guest! We’re the biggest and the best in the world and if you want to look at other places go ahead.' I ended up at Kenyon & Eckhart because at the time they were looking for art oriented people to get into TV production and so I became an art director/producer on TV commercials; I would go from designing a storyboard to going out on the shoot and producing it and it was a great experience.

"I would work with the writer more times than not and we would kick it around and come up with an idea and I would sit down and storyboard it out. I loved film. I had no use for print. I thought print was amateur time. I traveled a lot and shot all over the world.

"I left my reel with a head hunter at one point and she called and said that Ogilvy & Mather were very interested in me. So I decided it’s time to move on and I accepted the position. I hadn’t been there three days when they put me on a plane to Chicago to meet with the Sears people, which was a big account of theirs. I went with the writer and the account executive and they were formulating what they needed for the upcoming year and it was all print. On the plane coming back I said to the account guys, 'I’ve never done a print ad in my life!' And he goes, 'Are you kidding us??' I panicked and I called a good friend of mine who was an excellent art director and did a lot of print and I spent the weekend with him learning what point sizes and picas meant.

"I was initially disappointed to be doing print, but then I really got into it and I grew to appreciate and understand it. After a while I decided to leave Ogilvy & Mather and I was freelancing a lot and I started my own art studio. Many, many moons ago I did a storyboard for Serino Coyne, when they were handling the show Grease and they continued to use me through the years and I got to know the principals, Nancy Coyne in and Matthew Serino, and we kind of became a thing and eventually they absconded me and talked me into coming over here.

"At that time it was automatic that any Broadway show was accompanied by a TV spot; that's not so true today because the media is so fragmented that it’s everything now: it’s print, it's broadcast -- we do a lot of radio -- and email blasts, and a lot outdoor -- outdoor being buses and billboards around Times Square -- and subway posters. We still do television for a lot of shows, but it’s become very expensive.

"More times than not, we start the art development project for the show before there even is a show. We have five or six art directors and some writers and we all kind of go off and read the script and then we’ll have two or three internal meetings and put stuff up on the wall, and reject things and accept things and alter things and ultimately come up with a presentation that we’re comfortable with.

"With the advent of the computer you have clients now who look at your ideas and say, 'I don't like that font; send me the file and I'll put my own font in.' There's no mystique anymore, so the concept is the only advantage you have.

"Sometimes it's better to give them loose sketches. We did that recently for a musical: all we presented were loose sketches. We did about 20 sketches of just ideas, and it really works, because people don’t obsess on what font it is or what photo you've used. They just see the ideas, because you're not trying to force an execution down their throat. I’ve even gone backwards: I’ll come up with something on computer and I’ll slip it under a tissue and trace it, and they say, 'Oh, we really like that!' and then the next week, I'll show them the computer version I started with.

"Still, when my ideas get shot down, I always feel wounded. Back in my Art Center days in school, I thought I was a hot shot and I could really draw. One time, an instructor gave us an assignment to do a travel poster for San Francisco and he said, 'I want it made out of torn and ripped paper.' So I spent the whole night carving and cutting this trolley car up and I thought, 'Man, this is so good!' But I'd misconstrued the assignment: it was to make it abstract and mine was like all perfect details. When everything was put up on the wall, he came along and the first thing he did was grab what I had done and throw it on the floor. It crushed me. And I still have the same reaction today. But there are those little rare moments where something really clicks and you are a big hit and, as you know, it compensates to some degree.

"I think the highlight of my career was about ten years ago, when there were maybe eight Broadway musicals running and of the eight, five were ours from this agency and of the five, I had done three, and I was standing in Times Square and looking at them, and I thought, 'Wow, that’s pretty cool for a kid from Henderson, Nevada.'"

ICON Roadshow Goody Bag

2008-07-01T14:33:31+00:00

Here's the free give-away that I had made up for the ICON Roadshow. I know that in the interests of fair play I should offer a McCain tote bag, but, honestly, how many New York ADs are likely to want to carry around his mug on a bag?

Here he is, decked out in an Old-Man-in-Miami powder blue suit, with encroaching thunder clouds...

Marshall Arisman Profile

2008-06-26T12:12:36+00:00

Marshall Arisman, 68, known best for his dark images of death and violence, finds that his art is in the process of moving into the light. He also talks of a struggle with his ego, and says his work is at its best when he leaves his ego behind and becomes one with his painting.

"I did nothing but play the saxophone until I was 18. I was brought up in a small town where art classes were full of what they called 'slow people', people who could only take metal shop, or motor shop. I had a little bit more than the slow people, in terms of talent, but I had no real interest in it. I took art classes, but it wasn’t anything I cared much about.

"When I was a senior in high school, I went to Buffalo and heard Charlie Parker play, and I thought I should apply to art school as a safety net. I didn’t care much about it, but it was the only other alternative I seemed to have. So I applied to Pratt, and got in, and then they said to me, pick a major, and I had no idea what they meant. But, like most people, I had worked on my high school year book, and I remember my teacher saying that what I was doing on the yearbook was graphic design. So I signed up as a graphic design major. I spent three or four years in the major, thought I liked it, had a portfolio, graduated from Pratt, and got hired by General Motors in one of their experimental design units. It was a great job, designing handmade books for the president and special projects; we had nothing to do with the cars.

"That's when it actually hit me that I didn’t like working with people. And that I didn’t love graphic design. And it also hit me that I was never going to get any better at this. I didn’t care about it. So what I came out of that job with was, the problem wasn’t graphic design, the problem wasn’t General Motors, the problem was me. And the only thing I could figure out was that I was the most happy when I was alone and drawing pictures. That’s all I knew. And so I went to Europe and floated around.

"I got drafted, and when I got out of the army, I didn’t know what to do. So I came back to New York and my ex-college roommate was freelancing in illustration. And he said, 'You don’t want a full-time job! Try freelance illustration; make a portfolio.' And so I did. It was 1963, and at that time you could live in New York, working two days a week at anything.

"So I lived in Brooklyn and put together a portfolio of sort of rip-offs of European poster artists, like Savignac and Andre Francois. I mean, I couldn’t draw, but I found this way of making images; they weren’t cartoons, but they were humorous illustrations. And I think I made $3,000 the first year and $3,000 the second year and $2,800 the third year. So I failed. And this was after truly doing everything you should do: sending out promo cards, seeing people, bringing around my portfolio, listening to people, changing things, whatever.

"It was just I had found a formula, and it wasn’t going anywhere–it wasn’t based on anything. I mean, it was based on a formula. And so when it collapsed, I thought, well, there are a couple of things you can do here. One is, you can learn how to draw; as a graphic design major at Pratt, drawing wasn’t really important, so I didn’t really know how to do it. And then the other thing I could do was figure out what my subject matter really is. So I spent a year teaching myself how to draw.

"I’d draw wherever I was. I'd draw people on the subway, and I'd go to the Museum of Natural History and draw animals. It was really fun, because for the first time, I think I actually looked at stuff. I learned how to look at photographs and translate them. I learned the basics.

"So I got enough skill together to be able to then say, okay, now that you can actually draw something, what are you actually going to draw? And I made a list of the things I felt I had real knowledge of. The first thing that came up on my list were cows. I was brought up on a dairy farm, and at 28 I had never drawn a cow. The second thing that came up on my list were deer. We hunted deer, we butchered deer, we ate deer, but I had never drawn one. The third thing that came up on my list were guns. My whole town had guns, everybody had a shotgun, my brother carries a gun. And I thought, that’s weird, I've never drew a gun. And the fourth thing that came up on my list was psychic phenomenon. My grandmother was a psychic. She lived in a town called Lillydale, where you have to be a psychic to buy a house–it's a town law, and there's a board, and you can't get in unless you're a psychic. You can go into any house at any time and get a reading. But I didn’t know what to do with the fourth category.

"So I picked guns and started doing a series of drawings about guns, and then the series turned into violence that we do to ourselves, and violence we do to each other and suddenly at the end of that year I had 45 drawings about guns. And it never occurred to me that what I had was a portfolio. And so I ran around and I finally found a little publisher who published it and I got 900 copies and because I had a mailing list of all those art directors that I had been haunting when I was freelancing, I sent them out copies. I sent one to JC Suarez, the art director at The New York Times, and the next day I started getting commercial work that would have fit in my book. And I thought, this is very strange. I mean, I would have actually done this for myself! So I think at that point I categorized myself as the gun guy, and I’ve stayed commercially in that category ever since. I’m the guy that people call for death. Death, violence, murder, prison, whatever. Which is fine, because becasue I get total freedom in that category. I have never had to deal with having to change this and change that; people are buying an emotional take from me.

"The addiction I have to painting, are those rare moments when I lose my ego. That’s why I paint. I mean, my ego gets me into the studio, it gets me in front of a canvas, but my ego can’t paint. And when I recognize that it can’t paint and it all collapses, then there are minutes where I actually am the act of painting itself. It’s the same thing a marathon runner does: at the beginning of a race, runners are thinking about running and by the time they hit what they call the zone, they become the act of running itself. So there are moments for me when I'm not judging the painting but being the painting.

"When I look back at my work over the years, I can see that it's been a curious process of going from dark to light. I spent a lot of time in the dark. There was a moment when I clearly understood that I had dug a hole too deep in terms of the darkness. I had begun to mix dirt into my paint and I suddenly thought, 'There is no light in here anymore.' I suddenly realized that I had closed the door and become enveloped in the darkness. Now the work has become about light.

"About 20 years ago I started seeing auras. But I didn't really want to attract the 'New Age' audience that painting auras would bring. So I began to run little lines in my dark work, that were auras, and it was my secret. Not an aura, really, just a colored line, but I knew what it was. And that was fun for a while, because people thought it was a technique. And they would write to me, 'What tool you used to get that line?' And I'd lie. I’d say, 'Go buy a motorcycle strip which makes lines.' A motorcycle strip is a tool, but it doesn’t work. I actually got the line by rubbing oil paint on the edge of a piece of cardboard.

"Anyway, eventually I thought, maybe it’s time to really paint auras, to actually paint what I am seeing. And so I started those paintings, and then I realized that my focus had become light, and I think suddenly for the first time in my life, color made sense to me, in that it was in relationship to light and not to color. I mean, I only painted color for many years because people said, you should paint color.

"I suddenly realized that painting these auras was really a color issue, does that make sense? I mean, it doesn’t mean much to anybody but me, but that kind of started me out of the tunnel.

"I think anger is probably the most accessible emotion for me to get to. It's also dangerous because it’s the most high energy emotion and so I think most of my early stuff was probably therapeutic, to get the anger out, but sooner or later you start to realize that the anger is too accessible; eventually it will eat you. What I'm accessing now is just energy: a neutral, egoless sort of energy, not anger energy. And the energy you put into a painting stays with it–it doesn’t leave, it stays there. So 50 years from now, when somebody’s in front of it, that energy is still receivable. I like that idea."

Yippee!

2008-06-18T19:26:49+00:00

Whoa! I got five of my ART TALKS portraits into the Communication Arts Illustration Annual! I'm very happy!

I've posted them all before on Drawger, and they can be seen along with their interviews in my Illustrator Profiles Gallery.

Yippee!

A Tormented Teacher for The WSJ

2008-06-05T14:01:13+00:00

Here's a fun piece that's on the front page of today's Money and Investing section of The Wall Street Journal. It's for an article about SallieMae's Big Cheese, Albert Lord.

The AD, Dan Smith, wanted me to show Lord as a beleaguered teacher...well, if I don't know about beleaguering a teacher, who does? It was right up my alley.

Stop Before You Kill It

2008-06-02T11:21:46+00:00

Here's a portrait I did last week for The Journal, of Jonathan Miller, the British theater and opera director. It's a little looser than some of my portraits, and as I was restraining myself from fussing with it more, I kept hearing an echo in my head of my dad's voice admonishing me, "Stop painting! Just put your brush down -- you're gonna kill it!"

He first said that to me when I was a teenager as I was painting a picture of him hunched over his drawing board doing a Wacky Pack for Topps. I was working in oils and after an hour or two he came over to take a look. He told me to stop, that it looked good and it was going to be overworked if I kept messing with it. To me it looked like it was still a sketch, and I argued with him about it -- but he won out, and he was right. I've heard his voice in my head on nearly every painting I've done since then, telling me to stop before I kill it.

Inside the Library

2008-05-27T12:24:57+00:00

In the Nineties, I was up at the Picture Collection in the Midtown Manhattan Library three days a week, pawing through the folders of magazine and book clippings in search of reference for costumes and locales and animals and anything else I needed to illustrate at the time.

Then I got a computer and discovered the Web. As the internet was expanding my horizon with images and ideas and information from around the globe, I found my world was also shrinking — increasingly I was looking for my reference online and no longer getting out of my studio for a couple of hours every other day to go up to the library.

I went back to visit The Picture Collection last week and met up with Jay, one of the librarians who used to regularly help me hunt up just the right paper reference.

“I think being a librarian is the kind of thing that not too many people choose as a first career. Most librarians have done something else first, and not liked it or not done well at it. And most librarians get along well with people on a one to one basis, but might not work well with large numbers of people. They are sort of like rebels, in a quiet kind of way, although I do have to admit that some of the dullest people I've ever met in my life are librarians; though if you wanted to be more charitable you could say they are self-contained. But with most librarians, you could say that the interesting parts of them are very much inside.

“I had a degree in Asian Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, and after that I spent four years as an officer in the Navy, in the intelligence service. It was like what you see in the movies, where you keep track of enemy ships and planes and tell the pilots about where to fly and that sort of thing. It was interesting in its own way, but there was a lot of structure and organization and every day was planned out ... for somebody who has imagination and who likes difference and doesn't like monotony...it was very, very difficult to deal with. So I didn’t like it.

“When I left the Navy, I came back to live with my parents, and one of my friends told me that he was going to school to be a librarian, and I looked at the books he was studying, and the classes he was taking and the homework he had to do, and I thought, ‘I could do this.’

“So I went to school to get a librarian degree in Texas, and they sent recruiters from New York to some of the job fairs down there. All my life I’d wanted to see the city – New York is a place most people around the world would give an organ to live in – and they hired me and I came here.

“I had a lot of the standard misconceptions about the city fostered by TV and movies; like I thought that everyone in New York lived in a really spiffy apartment, and had a picture window view of Central Park and the Empire State Building.

“When I first came, I worked in smaller branches, like a branch in the Bronx for five years, but then a job opening was announced for the Picture Collection, and I decided to apply for it, because I had been given a brief tour of it during an orientation for the library and it seemed like something I would like to do.

“A lot of the patrons have very specific things in mind, and they think there’s already a picture like this existing and we have it. Well, sometimes we don’t, so you have to help these people find something close to it, or things that they can combine into it. Like somebody asked us for a picture of an astronaut with a wooden leg, because they wanted to convey the image of a space pirate, but I told them that if somebody who worked for NASA and was an astronaut somehow lost their leg, they would probably get a better fake leg than a piece of wood like a pirate. So basically they got a picture of an astronaut and a picture of a pirate and combined them. Another time, somebody said, 'I need a picture of a tsunami just before it hit the shore.' 'Who took this and lived?' was my answer. But we got pictures from a surfing file that showed a close-up view of a huge wave, so generally it’s divided between people who need very specific stuff and they know what they need and people who have very vague sort of concept ideas.

“I have no formal art training at all, but ever since I was a child I liked to draw and I liked books with pictures in them. I used to like to try to draw the pictures out of the books and then when I got a little better at being able to draw, I tried to invent things from my own mind. I have a little trouble with the technical aspects of drawing, but I can basically draw anything I can imagine. If I can imagine it, I can put it on paper.

“I don’t think what I draw is that good, but it's a lot of fun to do and I get an incredible amount of joy out of it. I’ve been working on a huge science fiction story ever since I was 12 years old and I have lots of illustrations for every aspect of the world in which it takes place.

“Being a librarian at the Picture Collection, I really like the mixture of quiet behind-the-scenes work where we cut out and label the pictures and put classifications on them, and the other time where there's the interaction with the public at the information desk. It’s one of the few jobs in the world where you get to see the result of what you do. When people check out and return pictures, you see they’ve taken something that you’ve thought of to clip and it really makes you feel useful.

“I like to talk to the artists, I like to get their business cards, I like to know what they’re working on and what the pictures are for. Some of them will come back and say, this is what I made out of the picture, this is a magazine cover or if you see this play, the costumes were from the Picture Collection. Or the circus costumes this year were inspired by this picture.

“I have a good visual memory. I can remember the poses of people in one thing and I can see where an artist has used them in something else, or I can tell if an artist has composited something from something else. In fact, I think I may have actually found something that no one ever noticed before. There's a 19th Century Japanese woodblock print artist who did a series of pictures that are almost exact copies of American paintings from 100 years before that. He did an engraving of a battle involving Samurai, but the positions of the people in the picture are exactly the same as an American artist’s picture of the Battle of the Bunker Hill. And since the Japanese artist did these pictures just after Japan was opened to the West, it might say something about what kind of books were available to people in Japan at that time. I’ve looked at books that show those pictures and none of them mention this connection.

“Sometimes there’re people who have a very specific idea of what they need. And if we don’t have exactly what they need, it’s the old question of, 'Well, what are they paying you for? You’re useless, you don’t have anything!’ Now the best thing that ever happened – and we joked about this happening, and finally it did – we were saying, one of these days, somebody is going to be at the desk working on a pile of pictures and a patron is going to come in and ask for something incredibly obscure, and it’s going to be what you are working on right at that time and you are just going to hold it up and say, ‘Oh you mean this?’ and they are going to be utterly flabbergasted. And it did happen once! I can’t remember what it was a picture of, but it was some obscure way that a person was dressed in a certain city in a certain country at a certain time and I just held it up and went, ‘Oh, this?’ And they were amazed, because they hadn’t expected to find that at all.

“I like the interaction with the people across the desk. I meet some of the most interesting people. I feel like, in a small way behind the scenes, we contribute very much to the cultural life of the city and the country, because what we do finds its way into everything imaginable, and it’s just a neat opportunity to be very useful to people — it can be helpful. People like what we have and they like finding it.

“Sometimes I’m afraid that with all the images on the Internet, a lot of people think the Picture Collection is an esoteric sort of a frill, but it gets a lot of use and the people who use it are very grateful for it. They say the difference between us and the online stuff is, the online stuff is all the standard iconic things: Marilyn Monroe, the soldier kissing his girlfriend at the end of the war, stuff like that. But we have lots of stuff that the Web doesn’t: we have every day objects viewed from odd angles, we have all sorts of plants and creature and costumes, and pictures of every day life in the city, pictures of furniture …

“We’re keeping up with the times. Because we deal with paper pictures, we can only assign them one heading, so the only way to put more copies of something into the files is to buy more copies of the books we cut them out of. But now we’re digitizing our stuff that’s 100 years old or more, because it’s copyright free. Those are going to be put on the Internet to make them available to more people and that also means they will able to be given multiple subject headings for one picture. So there will be a lot of access points for them and they won’t only be in one file.”

Roger Hertog for The Journal

2008-05-19T11:34:04+00:00

This portrait of philanthropist businessman Roger Hertog ran in The Wall Street Journal over the weekend. I don't usually scout out the printed version of the paper when one of my pictures run, but on Saturday I passed by a newsstand and gave it a look.

It ran in black and white and really looked good! And it was big, which always feels nice. They had to cut out my signature, though, to wrap the type in a pleasing way, but I got the credit line so the baby stays home with me.

Mamet and Martial Arts

2008-05-14T11:16:37+00:00

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.

The Grapes of Wrath Opera

2008-04-28T11:41:52+00:00

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.

Teaching Art

2008-04-19T18:49:09+00:00

Guess who?

Edward Sorel Profile

2008-04-16T11:44:14+00:00

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."

Andy Hampsten for Bicycling Magazine

2008-04-08T12:24:23+00:00

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.

Dan Smith, WSJ Art Director Profile

2008-04-02T11:11:57+00:00

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.”

Martin Hayes for The Journal

2008-03-27T12:29:10+00:00

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.

Barry Blitt Profile

2008-03-05T15:20:28+00:00

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."

R. O. Blechman Profile

2008-02-27T10:50:01+00:00

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."

Ashin Kovida for The Journal

2008-02-18T11:07:15+00:00

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.

Seymour Chwast Profile

2008-02-13T11:48:36+00:00

When he talks, Seymour Chwast, age 75, doesn't sound like a revolutionary. But his quiet, understated introspection belies the impact that he and two classmates from Cooper Union had on the world of illustration after they founded Push Pin Studios.

"The first drawing I remember doing was a profile of a woman’s head that I did with an eyebrow pencil in a beauty parlor where my mother was getting her hair done. It was on a piece of cardboard, and I think I must have been about six.

"After that, it was Walt Disney, Snow White, Pinocchio and comics, as well. I remember doing a drawing of Pinocchio after seeing it in the movies, and I did a series of adventure comics that featured my own characters: Jim Lightnin' and Lucky Day.

"When I went to Abraham Lincoln High School in Brighton Beach, I was in a graphic design class with a terrific teacher, Leon Friend. He was very important to me and to a lot of other people; Richard Wild from SVA and Alex Steinweiss , who invented the concept of album cover art at Columbia records and Gene Federico, who did terrific advertising design. Leon Friend was a little guy, but he was very charismatic. He'd come from Germany, probably early, in the 1930s, and he gave us the incentive to work hard by entering us in every poster competition. There were a lot of competitions then, and there probably still are, and I entered them all. My first published illustration was in Seventeen magazine, for an 'It's All Yours' issue. That means the readership submitted their own work. I did a drawing of sort of a party of young people playing records and dancing. Though for me that was a fantasy: we didn't have a lot of parties and we didn't own a phonograph. We were too poor.

"After high school I went to Cooper Union. I thought I was going to be a cartoonist, but I also learned about Cassandre and all the great poster artists, and developed an interest in classic poster design. So that’s what I wanted to do, I wanted to design and draw.

"I was also influenced by some painters, like Ben Shahn, Georges Rouault, George Grosz, people like that. There has always been some sort of political component to their work that I liked, because most of the other kids in Brighton Beach where I lived were sort of left wing. But then I also gained an interest in typography, especially in old stuff that hadn’t been mined at the time, like Victorian wood type.

"After college, I got together with some of my classmates from Cooper, Milton Glaser and Ed Sorel and a few others, and we all hung out in a loft in the East Village. At first we had day jobs and were freelancing on the side. My first job was working in the promotion department of The New York Times, under the art director George Krikorian. It was a very good first job because I was able to do both drawings and layouts for them.

"After that, I was working at a day job at House and Garden magazine and Milton and Ed and I would put out a little promotion piece every month or two which we called the Push Pin Almanack, aimed at getting freelance work for us. And it was successful; we started getting freelance work. The phone number that I gave on the Push Pin Almanack was my job phone number; I remember doing business while on the job at House and Garden.

"I was getting fired a lot from my day jobs and so was Ed. Milton was sort of working freelance for a packaging company in a small studio. In 1954, we decided at that point that we would be a studio, which we called Push Pin. It was tough in the beginning getting work. The biggest things that we were doing were slide shows, educational film strips for schools which paid $15 a drawing.

"I couldn’t have started a studio or even been a freelancer, if not for the support of my classmates. It's part of my nature to worry, and I couldn't have done it alone. Ed Sorel left the studio after about a year and a half, and we eventually got an agent to get us work. It became easy. By the end of the 50's we started hiring people, like Paul Davis and Jim McMullan, and that enhanced our reputation, and we were coming along nicely.

"When I look back ... one thing's never changed. When something goes out, I'm not sure whether it's good enough or not. But I think I've gotten lazier, so I'm more satisfied with work now that might be totally mediocre. The problem is, it’s gotten hard to get ideas. And now there's this generational difference, and trying to figure out what people will respond to. I don’t like the idea of trends and I don’t want to have to just follow what people are doing. On the other hand, if people don’t relate to it, it means that I’m not going to get work and then what am I going to do with myself? I'm always worried when I hand something in.

"While I'm doing something, I never know if it's really good. When I first get an idea, I'm sort of suspicious of it, and it takes a while for me to realize it's a terrific idea. At first I'll just think, 'Let's see if this works.' And hopefully the rendering justifies the idea. After working on a drawing for five minutes, I always think that I can't draw and I'll never draw again. But then I work into it and it works out okay. But there's a struggle in the very beginning, when nothing's happening and then either you go away from it for a while and then go back to it or you just keep working on it and it works itself out.

"I love working, and I like to draw. But what I like best is to see the work in print. Don't you?

"Even my mother, who is 97, worries if she doesn’t see anything of mine in The New York Times. She’s worried that I’m running out of business."

Art In (In)action

2008-02-08T10:54:32+00:00

Guy Billout Profile

2008-02-07T11:01:23+00:00

To Guy Billout, age 66, who left Paris as a young man in the '60s, New York was the City of Light, a beacon of creativity and energy. The feeling was mutual, and his first piece in New York Magazine appeared well before he learned English.

"When you're in your early 20's, you are restless, and I was very restless and dissatisfied with being a graphic designer.

"After my four years of art school in Ecole des Arts Appliqués de Beaune in Burgundy, I went to Paris to get a job. In the US it’s different, you can go to New York, you can go to Chicago, you can go to Los Angeles. In France it had to be Paris.

"My very first job was in the animation department of the state owned television station, and after leaving that job to do my military service in Algeria for 18 months, I was an intern in the biggest advertising agency in France.

"I always had this thing about America, specifically Manhattan. There was something about New York, as a place, that interested me. And in the ‘60s, in advertising, the reference was the American experience. The English language is incredible – especially the American language – it’s incredible for advertising. You can say in a few words things that in French would take forever. And there was also very good photography, very good illustration, very good composition, so we were all in awe of America in that field. So it was sort of a normal inclination for restless young men, and one day I decided to leave and to go to America, just like that. That’s the kind of thing you do when you are a young person.

"So I began to make plans to go to America. A friend who was working with me in that advertising agency, was a very good friend, because he told me, 'You're not so good as a designer. Why don’t you do illustration?' He was aware of the little doodles I was doing during the day at work, because we sat across from each other and would pass notes back and forth. It was amazing, that he had such an insight that I could be an illustrator, because I didn’t have any. I had no experience in making an illustration portfolio and he gave me the idea that, why don’t you write and illustrate the story you know best. And I did that: I did a series of 14 drawings about my life, and that was my portfolio. And then I left to come to New York, and I was so scared, that instead of taking a plane, I took a ship, because it gave me a week as a buffer zone.

"When I got here, the important thing was to meet Milton Glaser, because he was already someone I had heard of, in Paris. I was extremely intimidated and didn’t speak any English, and a friend of mine was going to his classes, and she said, 'Why don’t you come to his class, and bring your portfolio.' And that’s the way it happened. I went to the class, and meeting him was like meeting the Pope. I couldn’t understand one word of what they were talking about, but he looked at my portfolio and he said, 'Why don’t you come to see me at New York Magazine,' where he was the art director. So I went to the magazine and he showed my protfolio to Clay Felker, who was the editor, and they decided to run it. Five pages, which was really amazing. There was nothing better.

"And I loved New York. It confirmed what I dreamed about, the verticality of the city; I can’t tell you how I love the sky scrapers and the canyons. I love it in the Wall Street area because the streets are laid out like an old European city, but you have skyscrapers and there’s never any sun. As an artist, New York inspires me in a way that Paris does not. God knows, I love Paris, but in New York the light is incredible: such very big contrasts in light with the sun and shadows. It’s just incredible. I mean, you don’t come to the city because it’s dreadful; you come to New York because there’s all these promises and the landscape, the cityscape ... there is nothing like it in Europe.

"So I began to get a lot of work. Art directors back then, if they liked an artist, they would commission you and the editor would trust the art director. That’s something that somehow has disappeared. I was very busy from then on, though I've had some slumps.

"You talk to other artists and you realize that we don’t talk too much about the fear, but if you talk enough, you realize that we are all nervous about not getting the work. I have bet everything on this profession and what's scary is that I'm nobody besides being an artist. That can be very distressful, because if everything goes bad, what can you do? Even now, when I send in work, I'm insecure. It’s amazing how unsure we are. I have a fantasy that I would like to be a bus driver, because that’s predictable and there would be no surprises. Of course, I would get crazy after a while, but that’s the fantasy.

"The other side of it is what I call the Divine Surprise, when you do something and say, 'My God, where is that coming from?' That happened years ago when I started to get into photography. For New York Magazine I was doing something about Central Park. And they didn’t like the way I was doing the trees and architecture, because at that time I was doing them rather simplistic. I was drawing like Folon. So I began taking photographs of buildings and trees in Central Park and in the country and that's how I started to draw from photography.

"It got to the point where I was literally taking a picture, making a print, and tracing. That’s how I did the series for The Atlantic, that incredible assignment that lasted 24 years: a full page in a great magazine. Do what you want, six times a year. Nothing like that, believe me. Nothing like it.

"Another thing I shared with Folon was the relationship of a very tiny character to these huge lonely landscapes and that’s something that still permeates my work. I never really made a thorough self-analysis about it, except that I know that I’m sort of a loner and the only place I really feel comfortable is in the studio.

"The most difficult part of an assignment is when they say, 'Here is the story.' Right away, that gets me alarmed; I’m afraid I won’t find a good idea. So then I go through the process I hate, of looking for ideas. Despite that it’s been proven that I can do it, I hate that process. After all these years it’s still the same agony about looking for ideas. So the only thing that is satisfying is, 'Oh, finally I got the idea!' That’s another Divine Surprise, when you say, 'Oh My God, this is it!' And it doesn’t happen every time, I can tell you. But when it happens, you know you got it."

Tori Amos Portrait

2008-01-31T12:27:34+00:00

I've been sick with a terrible sore throat for a couple of weeks and busy with deadlines and teaching, so I haven't been hanging around Drawger the way I usually do. I've missed it.

When my throat was at its most sore I did this portrait of Tori Amos for a benefit calendar for the non profit RAINN organization. Her throat looked so cool and liquid, it made me feel a little better while I painted it.

It's nice to be back on the Drawger block; I think I'll go see what everybody's been up to.

Deconstructing Lunch: The Ketchup

2008-01-14T13:07:41+00:00

While you’re waiting for the ketchup to ooze out of the bottle, you might notice the label pasted on the front. It’s a label you’ve seen all your life, and you’ve never given its design a moment’s thought. But there's someone who’s given it a lot of thought, and that's Stan Church, “middle aged”, principal and executive creative director at Wallace Church, Inc., a strategic brand identity company which redesigned the Heinz line. His mission has been to be a member of the Big Boy’s Club and he’s got the awards to prove he made the cut.

"When I was a young boy, I was constantly drawing and I was able to put my Lionel trains together at a very young age, and I would build things out of scrap wood and make toys. So I was very constructive. When my mother realized what my skills were, she started suggesting that I go to school to be an engineer. She figured, if he can put his Lionel trains together when he’s three years old, he’s got to be an engineer.

"My father had an appointment for me to go to West Point after high school, and Governor Rockefeller was my sponsor. When I told my father that I wanted to go to design school, he nearly cried. I was the only son, and I think things were spinning in his mind and he was giving up on me.

"My dad was … he never actually made anything comfortable for me, although he had the means to do so, so I always had to work. I don’t know whether he was wise or whether he was just cheap. He was also a politician.

"After graduating from design school, I needed a job, and the first company that called me back was an ad agency, BBD&O. So I became an assistant art director, and I worked for an art director that would do little rough drawings, and then hand them to me, and I had to make them look wonderful. I was also very, very ambitious and motivated, so I would work day and night and weekends, helping them to pitch accounts. So I was always sort of in the scene with the big shots; there were some famous art directors there, and I was mingling with them.

"What happened was that they started moving me around, to be an assistant to other art directors that carried more clout. Usually those were guys that were more creative, so I ended up working with some really brilliant people. Then I became an art director after a couple of years, and all of a sudden I had a nicer office. And I got there quickly, so that was very exciting.

"You know what was really exciting for me? To go into the offices of art directors that had all these awards on their walls. And I thought, “These people must really know what they’re doing.” And they were famous, you know: people knew who they were.

"When I started my own company, I was nervous, because I didn’t have any money; I pretty much opened it up with credit cards, taking a lot of risk. And the motivation behind all this was that I wanted to win awards, so that I could have them on my walls, like those art directors back at BBD&O. It was all about recognition, and not money. When I was younger it was about winning all these awards to feel like I was a star or something.

"Our standards here are very high, and we’re published all the time in design books, and we’ve won hundreds and hundreds of awards over the years. It’s funny, I read articles about someone who’s won a few awards, and I think, 'That’s funny...we’re probably up to a thousand by now!' In our business, we’re recognized as being the most creative in this particular field, which is called brand design.

"Brand design is all about the package. A package is a product for a company, so when you’re doing something to the package, the president of the division or the company wants to know what you’re doing, so you might go to a meeting and deal with that level of corporate people. And I kinda liked that. What I had been doing earlier was just annual reports and ads, and I’d sit with someone that was only managing design, and I’d have to hand it to them. I didn’t feel like I was getting enough respect.

"For many, many years, I was the designer here and I had all these people as my assistants. So I would rough out what I wanted to do, and then I would tell someone to sort of clean it up and put it together, like the assistant art director that I was, back when I started.

"When a client isn’t comfortable with what we’re doing, I have to convince them that what we’re doing is right. We try to push them into being a little more open-minded. The way that I do that is, when we’re in a meeting, I look to see who’s the most senior person, and then try to address that person as being the one that’s more adventurous and visionary. So if he says something, I’ll repeat what he says and sort of build on that. Anything that he says that kind of is more visionary, I’ll say, 'You just said that we have to think about tomorrow!' And then what happens is, everyone else won’t challenge that.

"With something like ketchup, it’s such an established brand, it’s almost like Andy Warhol’s Campbell Soup can. It really shouldn’t be changed much. A lot of these old labels were done by the guy that was producing the boxes and bottles, and he had a couple of artists in the back room that did the design. Some of these old packages are pretty awkward and funny. For the Heinz ketchup label, it pretty much remained the same. What we did is, we went in and added some detail and fixed the type and just tweaked it a little."

Donald Fagen for The Wall St Journal

2008-01-09T11:14:05+00:00

This portrait of Donald Fagen, songwriter and front man for Steely Dan, accompanies the article in today's paper celebrating the 25th anniversary and re-issue of his album "The Nightfly". After getting the sketch approved, I did two color versions, one with a somewhat more realistically interpreted nose. I'm glad to say that they went with the more abstract interpretation (at least online; I haven't seen the printed version).