Thursday, April 25, 2013

The Great Slowing Down


The Great Slowing Down

So in the 70s and 80s I became much too fast at knocking off illustrations. I didn’t start that way … at first I used to laboriously crosshatch and/or stipple practically all of my art. In the beginning I seemed to have unlimited time to produce artwork so I never thought very much about trying to speed up. Then one day I was handing in a job at the Star Weekly when the art director informed me that they would need to break the story into two parts and they needed an illustration for the second part almost immediately. Yikes! So I went back to my home studio (I had a full time job at McClelland & Stewart in those days) and started working a lot faster and with fewer interruptions and managed to get it done … but I didn’t like it as much as the first one and started working out how to avoid getting trapped like this in the future. I first figured out how to simplify at my day job. I did catalogue covers and my first book jackets in this streamlined style. My points of inspiration were Milton Glaser, John Alcorn and other artists connected with New York’s Push Pin Studios (who I’d first heard about when at art college). So over the years I developed this style … sometimes with a bit of stippling for old time’s sake … though I did take to sometimes using Letratone© which I considered a bit like cheating). Full colour pieces could slow one down if the artwork needed to be pre-separated … think amberlith, Xacto knives, mylar, Scotch tape, registration marks, and multiple layers (without really knowing what it was going to look like until a colour proof was made by the printer).
         I got so proficient that at some point in the 1980s I was illustrating a textbook and zapping off an average of four illustrations an hour. I read somewhere that an illustrator I knew was planning to no longer illustrate for educational publishers because they didn’t pay enough money. But I was earning something like $200 an hour so long as I could keep up the rate I was then at. Seemed like more than enough money. While working on this project I became aware that I was working so quickly that I was starting to lose track of what I had done before. I even saw some pieces and had little or no memory of having done them. This was not good! So I determined to slow myself down.
         Probably just as well as this was the late 80s when my design work started to dry up because of my refusal to become computerized. I gave it much thought and then I evolved my El Whacko© style … base drawings with outlines on both sides of the base art plus stippling and cross hatching … I’d ditched all my Letraset and Letratone at the curbside so there wasn’t any danger of cheating.
         First real chance I had to use this new slower technique was for a book called It Takes Two Judges to Try a Cow. I methodically planned out the drawing and then traced it onto a board. Then I did an initial drawing in fountain pen and then applying outlines with a fairly fine (O or OO) Rapidograph technical pen.
         Colour was a problem as I could no longer obtain a Kohinoor fountain pen which worked with waterproof ink. Should have stockpiled a few in the 1970s before they stopped manufacturing them. Finally in desperation I started using a straight pen with India ink for the base drawing so I could add colour without black bleeding into the colours. This after some experimenting with doing the colouring first and then adding the ink which I felt took away some of my control.
         During this slow period I joined Japan’s Sloth Club (via Kyoto Journal magazine) plus got a subscription to Plain. I had set a Luddite course that would last until the waning months of 1999. 



Saturday, April 20, 2013

So-called Self-Promo Schemes

There have been more than just these two (some I even pulled through to fruition) but these'll do for starters....


Abortive Promo Schemes

«21»

Surely the grandaddy of them all! Mix and matching three of my favourite films, The Seven Samurai, The Magnificent Seven, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, in various combinations seemed like a wonderful, attention-getting way to celebrate 21 years in the design and illustration game. My true favourite was the Kurosawa piece (though I admire pretty much everything I have ever seen by this director). Included are a few of the more dynamic studies (some of which were sent as multiple job feelers to Nelvana, the animation studio, who never acknowledged their receipt). All that ever surfaced in final form was my contribution to a Valentine’s group promotion of Three in a Box … a samurai holding a dwarf aloft while a cowboy watches from behind a rock (the dwarf was trying to bribe the samurai with a heart-shaped box of Valentine’s chocolates) … the samurai’s kimono also featured a heart motif. I was never aware of any reactions to this piece and it certainly didn’t net me much in the way of new work. Which is what such promotional schemes are all about. Aren’t they? This is a later version of the Valentine's 21 artwork....

The Fun Hustler’s Olympic Septathlon

A «21» spin off. A myriad of events involving the number seven. For starters there were the Seven Dwarf Toss, Seven Samurai Gauntlet Run (Ouch!), and Magnificent Seven Shootin’ Range. Then came the Seven Seas Regatta, the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World Scavenger Hunt, the Seventh Seal Cross-Country Run (led by Death, of course), the Seven Brides for Seven Brothers Wife Swapping Spree, etc. Plus some demonstration events such as the Seven Grain Bread Bakeathon, the Group of Seven Sketch Event, the Seven Deadly Sin Along, and a «Seven» Film Festival (things like Seven Beauties, The Seven Year Itch, etc.) Nothing final has ever come of this but that doesn’t mean it won’t in time.

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Wisdom in age-old ways


An article from 2010 about my wife's parallel career (we met when she was studying at OCA).

Wisdom in age-old ways
Simply, don’t work for a client you don’t like
By Kelvin Browne, National Post

There are talented interior designers that fly below the media radar – Toronto’s Candace Shaw is one. Clients of these intentionally low-profile designers like it this way. Many with the means to live nicely don’t want their names – or homes – in print, on TV, or otherwise devoured by voyeurs who need something new to envy or deride.
            As fascinating for me as Candace’s obviousness to personal PR (in a time when everyone is desperate for celebrity) is her attitude about clients. It harkens back to Bob Dirstein’s approach, whom she worked for in the 1970s. The mantra is: It’s about the client, not the designer. I haven’t heard many designers express this other than those of Bob’s generation. On the contrary, many designers today, often those who appear regularly in print, eagerly want to impose their look. Decor becomes the commodity clients buy rather than the unique outcome of a joint effort.
            “It’s a personal business,” says Candace on the topic of residential design. “You’re invested in the lives of your clients. I only work for people I have a rapport with. Otherwise, it never turns out well.” She has another caveat: She hopes clients have “congenial spaces.” How awkward to have a client you love who owns a house you hate, and you have to help him or her furnish it.
            As she phrases it, a designer has a “client” and a “space” and both have to talk to you. I agree that, regardless of trend and budget, good designers are able to converse with their clients and rooms, and this dialogue is what creates memorable spaces, not to mention spaces in which clients feel at home. She also knows that certain spatial relationships work. For instance, the distance between chairs if you’re going to have a good conversation in a living room. If you ignore these realities for a look you arbitrarily want, the room will never be inviting. She also has immense amounts of technical knowledge about what good upholstery is and how curtains should be made. I wonder how many young designers know or care about these details?
            Candace’s family were painters and artists, and she was raised in a creative environment, attuned to the spaces around her. She says, “from an early age, spaces were living things for me.”  She recalls making drawings of rooms, and that, in retrospect, which must have appeared as “an odd thing for a young girl to be doing.” She attended OCA, and her first job after school was in the space-planning department of a large company. Not exactly creative work.
            Then she got a job with Dirstein. “I couldn’t figure out why he paid me, I loved what I was doing so much. I finally was where I always wanted to be.” Since then, she has never doubted her career choice. “There were lots of antiques, beautiful houses to work with, and I particularly enjoyed meeting the clients.” From that moment, it was clear to Candace how important it was to work well with a client, if a project was to be successful. When she opened her own business, she says, “nothing much changed other than I didn’t go into a shop every day. I like being my own boss.”
            I ask what’s different about her approach to rooms today, compared with the 1970s. Her response startled me because it wasn’t about technology, brave new lifestyles or trends in colour or design. “Nothing’s different,” she says. “The most important change is when 20th-century interiors stopped being historic creations.” And modern design? “The juxtaposition of styles and unexpected materials remains the essence of a contemporary approach.” The rest? “Doesn’t really matter that much.” How shocking, but I agree.
            As for her own preferences, she is a fan of mixing 18th-century English and French antiques (“the high water mark of furniture”) with contemporary, comfortable upholstered furniture as per the English country house style. For an elegant room, nothing beats French antiques paired with sofas and armchairs covered with simple but sensuous materials, all on a great carpet, although I’d throw in a modern into the mix, too.
            Candace has never wavered. She knew what was good then, and she knows it now, which reminds me that classic never goes out of style, and classy designers never do, either.

Sunday, April 7, 2013

Grandfather Newmarch


From time to time I may include the writing of others here … this is an essay my father wrote after he had retired and was taking a Creative Writing course. Parts of something like this may find their way into a projected memoir I am compiling….


Grandfather Newmarch
By John Graham Shaw

You must refer to the register in the old Parish Church of Thornton Curtis, in the county of Humberside, England, for an unbroken succession of Newmarch generations, dating back to 1536 AD in the same village. However, with the passing of my maternal grandfather, Frederick Neville Newmarch, followed by the death of his only sister, my great aunt Ada Mary Newmarch, and predeceased by his only son, Daniel, the family name has ceased in that district.
            For many years this rural community regarded Fred and Ada as characters, among its many other eccentric personages, where he was the village postman and she, a late-married ex-school teacher, owned the only general store on the high street.
            When on duty he wore the official uniform provided by the General Post Office, and, while not frail, he was painfully thin, and the high-necked, navy blue jacket enveloped him too generously, and the red-striped trousers were too baggy at the knees and seat. However both of these garments looked tailor made when he donned his shiny black leather belt, and crowned with his special cap, with its patent leather peaks front and back , and his silver badge of authority, he mounted his once pillar box red bike and made his daily rounds, delivering the mail, in all weathers, throughout the hamlet from the carriers affixed to the handlebars and over the rear wheel.
            It was when he was off duty that this minor government official blossomed into an authentic north-countryman, and the real Fred Newmarch emerged, as a wiry, strong, healthy individual, with irregular, tobacco-stained teeth and a walrus moustache; short, sparse, grey hair, bright blue, humourous eyes behind small much-repaired spectacles; all with a broad Lincolnshire-accented manner of speech.
            The better items of his civilian attire had once belonged to the local squire, and had been given to my grandmother Newmarch by his widow after her husband’s demise. The lord of the manor had been of robust girth, and the jacket, waistcoat and trousers provided their new wearer with more than ample room to wield a scythe, plunge a garden fork, or swing an axe, without restriction or restraint.
            The materials of these cast offs were of the finest weavings of selected pure wools, in the subtle earth tones so favoured by the gentry of England. It was a further tribute to their high quality and durability that they served their quite unimpressed recipient so well through so many more years of hard wear, and total neglect, before he, in turn, discarded them as being tattered beyond the limits of respectability.
            This once new clothing soon took a more comfortable, lived-in aspect, and the earth tones became downright shabby, even when set off by an inexpensive watch chain hanging between the pockets of the once canary yellow waistcoat. The weather beaten, thin face was topped by a battered, shapeless tweed hat, and his feet were encased in enormous, muddy, hob-nailed boots. This picture of elderly rural manhood was always replete with a gnarled, cherry-wood pipe, with a smouldering wad of foul smelling navy shag tobacco.
            In either of his guises he addressed everyone, young or old, male or female, with “Halooo theeer, Bill” and he, in his turn, was affectionately known everywhere in the district as Old Bill.
            At all times he deliberately cultivated the broadest of rural Lincolnshire accents, and enjoyed the farce of being tape recorded by earnest students of dying north country dialects. They were most anxious to capture his archaic speech patterns before the BBC succeeded in inflicting a standard English pronunciation across the land, to almost perfectly emulate its continuous output of radio and television broadcasts.
            During the summer months grandfather Newmarch joined great aunt Ada’s husband, Fred Lacey, and on their bicycles, with ther elderly but able-bodied men, took their hand scythes, sharpening stones, oil cans, homemade bread, sandwiching thick slabs of fat pork bacon, wedges of cheddar cheese, homegrown tomatoes, an apple from their jointly owned tree, accompanied by a dark green bottle filled with refreshing, cold, sweet tea, to augment their meager incomes by cutting and tidying the long grass and edges at the sides of the paved roads throughout the Parish. They each received a miniscule stipend from the local municipality for this strenuous chore; but successfully negotiated an unofficial bonus from a local farmer in exchange for the grass cuttings to supplement his store of cattle fodder for the winter season.
            These roadside maintenance duties were regularly extended by the same team of scythe wielders into the churchyard, where grave visitors admired the high quality of their graveyard maintenance performance.
            Clad in their Sunday best suits of serviceable dark serge, wearing squeaky, black, medium duty boots, and sporting freshly laundered, but tieless shorts, many of these same men, including Old Bill and great-uncle Fred, made up a team of accomplished bell ringers. Each Sunday morning the village of Thornton Curtis was filled with the exquisite sound of differing peals and complex changing sequences from the large number of bells in the tower, all tolled manually by long, tasseled ropes from an upper gallery platform by this modest body of experts.
            In addition to these daily, weekly, and seasonal activities, “Old Bill” panted and dug up all the vegetables and fruit needed by his large family. At the end of a long, narrow, cultivated garden stood, next to the outhouse and chicken run, a well-kept pig sty with its well-fed occupant; bought as a piglet, and brought to an impressive size by a regular diet of swill and kitchen scraps. At the proper time, the fully grown pig was taken to the village butcher who, for a small fee, processed it humanely into hams, roasts, bacon, pies, and sausages in sufficient quantities to serve as meals for several months to come; during which time the next piglet was installed and nurtured towards a similar future fate; but always addressed by my grandfather with “Halo theeer, Bill”, with the utmost courtesy.
            His post office route, garden, chickens and pig-keeping chores, gossiping with his cronies, quaffing an occasional pint of ale, were interrupted at regular intervals by the need to fetch drinking water from the single pump, which served the whole village. The imposing edifice of weathered, unpainted wood, with its shiny, well-used timber handle worked surprisingly well, considering the total lack of any systematic, authorized maintenance of its mysterious working parts, and its constant year round use. The water, brought to the surface from an inexhaustible subterranean spring was copious, cold and crystal clear at all times. Conveying the water from this pump to the large clay urns in the cool, stone floored kitchen larders of each household, depended on a variety of means; ranging from two buckets suspended and balanced from a wooden shoulder yoke to a quite sophisticated vertical, open-topped, cylindrical vessel of galvanized iron, pivoted from the trunnions of a two-wheeled trolley of cast-iron, propelled manually by two handles and equipped with a floating, circular, wooden board to control wave action and to prevent spillage during its travel over rough terrain. Because of their cost these mobile water tanks were jointly owned and shared by several families, and my grandfather subscribed to one of these mutual arrangements.
            Water for laundry, ablutions and gardening were separately supplied from rain barrels, replenished by rainfall drained from the tiled roof slopes of the individual cottages.
            Although a man of amiable disposition, popular with all those on his postal route; especially with babies and school children, who all loved to be greeted by the uniformed postman with “Haloooo theeer, Bill”, he nevertheless had a short explosive temper. This manifested itself most often against his faithful old bike, whenever it gave trouble through a breakdown of its elderly moving parts, or when the oft-mended tires sprang yet another leak. At such times he has been known to kick the offending steed, throw it at the nearest wall, and at times of extreme provocation to lay it down and jump on it, while filling the air with loud blasphemous oaths peculiar to that part of Lincolnshire.
            As was usual with north country folk, the meals were always regular, ample and nourishing. The only unusual arrangement at the Newmarch table concerned the mid-day dinner, at which the dessert was served and eaten before the main course of meat and vegetables. As my grandfather explained to me: “…sithee, Bill lud, tha doesn’t neard soo mooch meart ufta thy pudd’n…” which one of the forementioned students of country dialects might have translated as: “…see here, after a great helping of inexpensive suet pudding and custard sauce, even an active ditch digger has a reduced appetite, satisfied by much less of the expensive meat course to follow…”
            The effective economics of this unusual meal sequence had been necessary to sustain his large family on a small weekly wage from the Post Office, and with other unusual practices became his lifelong pattern for the stringent management of his very limited resources. His supper, before retiring to bed, never varied from a large bowl of cubed, stale bread, soaked in hot milk, with sugar, accompanied by a huge mug of strong tea.
            Notwithstanding his normally frugal attitude to material needs, he had an ungovernable passion for old, non-functioning clocks. Each year he would visit the annual Brigg Fair in search of yet another one of these to add to his large collection, with nary a “tick” or a “tock” between them. His avowed intention was to repair each and every one, one of these days; but like all true procrastinators, together with his lack of patience, and absence of manual dexterity, that day never dawned; and the ever growing collection of dormant old clocks became an ongoing family joke, and a progressive strain on available, suitable storage space in his small cottage.
            His peaceful passing, the result of old age, came after keeping intact his lifelong avoidance of the medical profession and its related institutions. Attesting to his popularity a great number of people attended his funeral, where only a few hundred feet separated his cottage, with his surviving widow, from the well-tended churchyard, where he lays in a modest grave, with a small granite headstone, the last male of a long respected lineage.
            The Newmarch surname has been continued as a Christian name in the person of my eldest granddaughter, Florence Newmarch Shaw, of Toronto, Canada. She will likely travel to England one day, curious to pursue the Lincolnshire source and ancestry associated with her middle name; and to explore the village of her great-great-grandfather, “Old Bill”.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

TCE Mk I

This space is reserved for a description of some of the behind the scenes stuff that transpired back in 1985 when I was embroiled with the design of the original Canadian Encyclopedia … quite possibly the last major project in Canadian publishing that was still produced manually. Much more to come.