Fine Art In Illustration
My art career began at a very young age, when I discovered I had an ability to draw and paint and I loved doing it. My mother, who had been an art student at McGill University, recognized this ability and encouraged me. When I was ten, she had a converstion with me about the profession of being an artist. That idea excited and stuck with me from then on.
Earlier my family began its nomadic movements around the world, first emigrating from Canada to Ohio, then moving off to Lima Peru, where my dad set up a tire company for BF Goodrich. After that experience it was back to Ohio, then Indiana, then to London, where I started High School. My art education really took off there, because I had the freedom to go anywhere in the city and look at the great paintings in the museums as well as modern art in galleries. It was also the time of tremendous flowering of pop culture as the great British bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were becoming popular. The world seemed to be exploding with new ideas and I was lucky enough to be in a front row seat! I remember seeing the first major Pop Art exhibition in Europe and was blown away by the huge billboard-like paintings of James Rosenquist, the work of Jasper Johns, Any Warhol and the rest of the Pop artists. The art in that show was fun, exciting and irreverent and stood in striking contrast with the art I was was absorbing in the Tate and the British Museums. Yet all kinds of art fascinated me, with anything being possible! The images from so-called ' High Art ' and the imagery from advertising and comic books fused into a whirl of interesting possibilities.
After a few years of the London experience, we moved again, this time to Sao Paulo, Brazil. I finished High School there and was confronted with another culture, the mixed fusion of African, Indian, Portuguese and European influences that make up Brazil. It had its effect on me, as did all the places I lived growing up, from the wild Pacific coast and high mountains of Peru to the ordered neighborhoods of Akron Ohio.
I went off to college at Pratt Institue in Brooklyn NY, at a time of huge upheaval in the country. The Vietnam War was going on, along with mass protests, all set against a background of the Psychedelic era. I found myself once again in a confusing but interesting fusion of cultures.
At the time Abstract art ruled and anyone producing realistic art was ridiculed as pathetically quaint. Nevertheless, That was where I found myself going, drawing and painting what I saw around me. I was given a camera about that time and realized the potential and importance of photography in its influence on how we see. The camera quickly became a painting tool for me.
I started using photographs to paint from, using the camer's ability to catch fleeting moments, that plein air painting couldn't compete with. I also noticed I was catching things in my photographs, like cars passing by, which I had been ignoring while painting on site. These real, but ignored things in life began to find their way into my art.
Around this time I met an experienced illustrator who lived in my Brooklyn Neighborhood, Charles Gehm. When he saw my work, he suggested I could make a living in illustration. The idea that realism had an appreciative audience was really interesting to me. I had never thought of being an illustrator. He showed me the ropes of the book cover business and even allowed me to watch him doing a shoot at a photography studio in downtown Manhattan.
I did a few samples and started carrying my portfolio around to the publishers. It was quite a different experience from bringing my work into galleries. At galleries, I was rather rudely rejected, but the publishing art directors were encouraging, even if they didn't see something they could use. They would tell me what they were looking for in very matter of fact terms. I did more samples and soon I was working on real jobs.
From the beginning, I wanted to bring all the art influences I had experienced into my illustrations. It was pleasing to me that publishers noticed that I was doing something different, bringing the "High Art" world into the pop culture of Romance books. Though I started at the bottom, with unknown authors and bottom-shelf genres, I tried to make each book cover a work of art, if possible.I was fusing the style of Caravaggio with the design style of Rosenquist to sell books. I tried to bring Botticelli and Vermeer to my romances, using the modern camera and 15th century oil painting techniques. It was a lot of fun!
I have started many trends in book covers, to watch them become imitated, then overdone and then fall into yesterday's style. I always try to keep ahead of the trends, if possible to be setting them, as opposed to being forced to follow them. That's the way pop culture works. You lead or you are forced to follow.
Of course it's increasingly difficult to figure out where culture is going these days, with attention spans shortening to microseconds and knowledge of art history being forgotten like old Facebook postings. I cling to a belief that there are such things as classics that remain in style. I read somewhere that what intrigues and satisfies music listeners is something familiar, but with a twist. Something different added to what we already know. In that same way I bring along a lifetime of looking at and creating art into the momentary world of present-day culture. Something old and something new. I am a product of that fusion!
