posted: July 1, 2009

These were four portraits that I did for a book published by VH1.  They go at the four corners of a large map that describes all of the different genres of music.  The portraits are meant to look somewhat like the small heads on old maps that show the different wind directions, weather currents, etc.   I worked in a tighter and more graphic manner to get the feel of some of those old maps but keep it contemporary.  I worked with Emily Oberman at Number 17 on the project.

With all the stars that have been passing away lately I'm starting to feel we should start giving props to people while they're still alive!  Lets hear it for Madonna.  Still around after all these years.  She's got the hits from the 80s and 90s but for some reason I like this one that didn't get much play from 2005.  Maybe because it samples ABBA.  Bold move with the tacky outfit, socks, and high heels.  Yeah, I just admitted to liking Madonna and ABBA.  Whatever.

I still have a fondness for KISS.  One of the first American rock bands I had ever seen back in the early 80s, I assumed all rock bands in this country painted themselves like demons and cats and performed with loud pyrotechnics blasting behind them.  I had no idea what they were singing about at the time, but this was my favorite song:

And this would be me circa 1982 on 'drums'.  The old guy behind me is my grandfather visiting from Cuba and likely wondering what the hell had happened to his grandchildren.  The 'drums' were made out of cardboard boxes, painted with latex house paint by yours truly.  The symbals were hubcaps tied to a broomstick.  Rock. On.

posted: June 30, 2009

I came across this info about an upcoming show at The New Museum in NYC.  Looks great, thought I'd pass it on.  Museum website here.  208 page book of Douglas' work available at Amazon here.
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Emory Douglas: Black Panther

An Exhibition Curated by Sam Durant for the New Museum, 7/22/09 - 10/18/09

Some of Emory Douglas’s images are nearly forty years old, but they are still as powerful as when Douglas first created them. They are dangerous pictures, and they were meant to change the world.
Emory Douglas was the Revolutionary Artist of the Black Panther Party and subsequently became its Minister of Culture, part of the national leadership. He created the overall design of the Black Panther, the Party’s weekly newspaper, and oversaw its layout and production until the Black Panthers disbanded in 1979–80. Throughout the ’60s and ’70s, Douglas made countless artworks, illustrations, and cartoons, which were reproduced in the paper and distributed as prints, posters, cards, and even sculptures. All of them utilized a straightforward graphic style and a vocabulary of images that would become synonymous with the Party and the issues it fought for.
“Emory Douglas: Black Panther” includes a wide variety of Douglas’s work done while a member of the Black Panther Party. Curated by the Los Angeles artist Sam Durant, whose work often deals with political and cultural subjects in American history, the show includes approximately 165 posters, newspapers, and prints dating from 1967–76. Durant met Emory Douglas in 2002 and began working on a book of Douglas’s work, which resulted in a monograph published in 2007. Two years later Durant curated “Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, which serves as a model for the exhibition at the New Museum.

All images © 2009 Emory Douglas / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

posted: June 29, 2009

This portrait of Bernie Madoff was for this weekend's Wall Street Journal.  He's to be sentenced on Monday for ripping off $65 billion from investors.  He faces a 150 year sentence, Bernie's lawyer suggested 12 years.

posted: June 23, 2009

I thought I’d write a little about how I started out in illustration.  There are a lot of students graduating right now and thought some of this might be of help.  While in college at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn I majored in painting, but I took a number of electives in illustration, most of them with my favorite illustration teacher at the time, David Passalacqua.  In Dave’s class I had been working on a variety of projects and trying out different mediums, but as I was about to graduate, Dave thought I should put something more cohesive together, a portfolio to show around to newspapers, magazines, or book publishers.  This was back around 1993-94.

At the time, I was doing a lot of printmaking—etching, silkscreen, woodcuts and monoprints.  For the portfolio, I decided to illustrate the story of Rapunzel by the Brothers Grimm.  I did the entire story as monoprints, black, oil-based ink on buff drawing paper.  I had no money for professional promotional material, and websites or internet portfolios were not common at the time.  Instead, I designed an 8.5 x 11 book, went to the school copy center, and printed 50 black and white books myself.  I also made photocopied postcards of some of the images on cardstock.   I had no clue about how to contact art directors, so I went to the school library and started looking at the mastheads of magazines I liked and writing names and addresses down.  I sent 50 books out to the art directors on the list that I had cobbled together and set up a few appointments to show my portfolio.  I stuck the originals in a black portfolio and headed out. 

I got a few jobs out of my first outing.   Patrick JB Flynn at The Progressive noticed the book I sent him and gave me a full page to work on.  Florian Bachleda at The Village Voice and Jerelle Kraus at The NY Times Op-Ed page also gave me a couple of assignments. I also met with Steve Heller at the NY Times and he recommended that I add some color to my work.  

I got a big kick out of seeing my work in print and realizing how many people were looking at it.   I went into graduate school for painting at Hunter College, but kept on showing my illustration work over the next few years.  I worked on more illustration portfolio work and over time began to add color.  About a year later I dropped off my new book at The New Yorker and started to get regular work from them, along with some other magazines and newspapers.

Below are the images that were part of my first portfolio, and the story of Rapunzel.

Rapunzel

There were once a man and a woman who had long, in vain, wished for a child.
At length it appeared that God was about to grant their desire.

     These people had a little window at the back of their house from which a splendid garden could be seen, which was full of the most beautiful flowers and herbs.
It was, however, surrounded by a high wall, and no one dared to go into it because it belonged to an enchantress, who had great power and was dreaded by all the world.

One day the woman was standing by this window and looking down into the garden, when she saw a bed which was planted with the most beautiful rampion, and it looked so fresh and green that she longed for it.
She quite pined away, and began to look pale and miserable.

  Her husband was alarmed, and asked: 'What ails you, dear wife?'
     'Ah,' she replied, 'if I can't eat some of the rampion, which is in the garden behind our house, I shall die.'
     The man, who loved her, thought: 'Sooner than let your wife die,
bring her some of the rampion yourself, let it cost what it will.'
 

At twilight, he clambered down over the wall into the garden of the enchantress,
hastily clutched a handful of rampion, and took it to his wife.

She at once made herself a salad of it, and ate it greedily.

It tasted so good to her - so very good, that the next day she longed for it three times as much as before.
     If he was to have any rest, her husband knew he must once more descend into the garden.
Therefore, in the gloom of evening, he let himself down again; but when he had clambered down the wall he was terribly afraid, for he saw the enchantress standing before him.
     'How can you dare,' said she with angry look, 'descend into my garden and steal my rampion like a thief?
You shall suffer for it!'
     'Ah,' answered he, 'let mercy take the place of justice, I only made up my mind to do it out of necessity.
My wife saw your rampion from the window, and felt such a longing for it that she would have died if she had not got some to eat.'

The enchantress allowed her anger to be softened, and said to him: 'If the case be as you say, I will allow you to take away with you as much rampion as you will, only I make one condition, you must give me the child which your wife will bring into the world; it shall be well treated, and I will care for it like a mother.'
     The man in his terror consented to everything.
     When the woman was brought to bed, the enchantress appeared at once, gave the child the name of Rapunzel, and took it away with her.

Rapunzel grew into the most beautiful child under the sun. When she was twelve years old,
the enchantress shut her into a tower in the middle of a forest.
The tower had neither stairs nor door, but near the top was a little window.

When the enchantress wanted to go in, she placed herself beneath it and cried:
    
     'Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
     Let down your hair to me.'
    
Rapunzel had magnificent long hair, fine as spun gold, and when she heard the voice of the enchantress, she unfastened her braided tresses, wound them round one of the hooks of the window above, and then the hair fell twenty ells down, and the enchantress climbed up by it.
     After a year or two, it came to pass that the king's son rode through the forest and passed by the tower. Then he heard a song, which was so charming that he stood still and listened. It was Rapunzel, who in her solitude passed her time in letting her sweet voice resound.

The king's son wanted to climb up to her, and looked for the door of the tower, but none was to be found.
He rode home, but the singing had so deeply touched his heart,
that every day he went out into the forest and listened to it.
     Once when he was thus standing behind a tree, he saw that an enchantress came there,
and he heard how she cried:
    
     'Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
     Let down your hair to me.'
    
Then Rapunzel let down the braids of her hair, and the enchantress climbed up to her.
     'If that is the ladder by which one mounts, I too will try my fortune,' said he, and the next day when it began to grow dark, he went to the tower and cried:

'Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
     Let down your hair to me.'
    
Immediately the hair fell down and the king's son climbed up.
     At first Rapunzel was terribly frightened when a man, such as her eyes had never yet beheld, came to her; but the king's son began to talk to her quite like a friend, and told her that his heart had been so stirred that it had let him have no rest, and he had been forced to see her. Then Rapunzel lost her fear, and when he asked her if she would take him for her husband, and she saw that he was young and handsome, she thought: 'He will love me more than old Dame Gothel does'; and she said yes, and laid her hand in his.
     She said: 'I will willingly go away with you, but I do not know how to get down. Bring with you a skein of silk every time that you come, and I will weave a ladder with it, and when that is ready I will descend,
and you will take me on your horse.'
     They agreed that until that time he should come to her every evening, for the old woman came by day. The enchantress remarked nothing of this, until once Rapunzel said to her: 'Tell me, Dame Gothel, how it happens that you are so much heavier for me to draw up than the young king's son -
he is with me in a moment.'
     'Ah! you wicked child,' cried the enchantress. 'What do I hear you say! I thought I had separated you from all the world, and yet you have deceived me!'
     In her anger she clutched Rapunzel's beautiful tresses, wrapped them twice round her left hand, seized a pair of scissors with the right, and snip, snap, they were cut off, and the lovely braids lay on the ground. And she was so pitiless that she took poor Rapunzel into a desert where she had to live in great grief and misery.

On the same day that she cast out Rapunzel, however, the enchantress fastened the braids of hair, which she had cut off, to the hook of the window, and when the king's son came and cried:
    
     'Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
     Let down your hair to me.'
    
she let the hair down. The king's son ascended, but instead of finding his dearest Rapunzel, he found the enchantress, who gazed at him with wicked and venomous looks.
'Aha!' she cried mockingly, 'you would fetch your dearest, but the beautiful bird sits no longer singing in the nest; the cat has got it, and will scratch out your eyes as well. Rapunzel is lost to you;
you will never see her again.'
     The king's son was beside himself with pain, and in his despair he leapt down from the tower. He escaped with his life, but the thorns into which he fell pierced his eyes.

He wandered quite blind about the forest, ate nothing but roots and berries,
and did naught but lament and weep over the loss of his dearest wife.
Thus he roamed about in misery for some years, and at length came to the desert where Rapunzel,
with the twins to which she had given birth, a boy and a girl, lived in wretchedness.
He heard a voice, and it seemed so familiar to him that he went towards it, and when he approached,
Rapunzel knew him and fell on his neck and wept. Two of her tears wetted his eyes and they grew clear again, and he could see with them as before.

He led her to his kingdom where he was joyfully received, and they lived for a long time afterwards,
happy and contented.

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