First there was the amusing sketch - which if you examine it in detail it is apparent that one leg has gone missing! Sometimes an artist forgets the most basic things.
But in the final color version everything came out exactly as planned.
At last, the long winding tale exhausts itself... leaving the theatre empty and the lights gone dim. To those valiant readers who wintered over and endured the endless gales of verbiage, I offer my gratitude.
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Life on West 78th Street was sketched neatly along the lines of Stuart Little or some old Jack Lemmon movie. I remember watching all the people bustling off to work in the mornings... through the dappled morning sunlight of the trees. You could smell the perfume of the secretaries and hear the click of their high heels on the pavement. There was the Dublin Harp bar on 81st street in the evenings... quiet, tasteful... full of opera buffs.
And never a dull minute in New York City. New York always steals the show.
Like the night at 3 am to be awoken by jackhammering in the street directly outside the window. JACKHAMMERING at 3 am??? And then, when dawn finally broke, the guy in a hardhat poked up in his hole in the middle of the street... sipping his morning coffee and looking as much like a groundhog as a person!
Or the time in the middle of one of those monster snowstorms, when the city was buried under a mountain of impossible snow. Only in New York would you see the traffic cop struggling on foot from car to car, digging holes down into each mound of snow to find the windshield to put on a ticket for an ‘opposite side of the street parking’ violation!
The three strangest sights I ever saw in Manhattan:
1) Early one morning, I came climbing up the stairs from a subway to encounter a surreal street full of dusty elephants silently shuffling along down 34th street on their way to the circus. Never seen anything like that before or since!
2) One bright spring day around 57th street and Lexington I came across a city street gushing deep with crystal clear water. Instead of the usual asphalt there was a sparkling, foot deep fountain of clear water filling the entire street. It looked exactly like an alpine river from the Rockies had issued forth... unreal. The sunlight reflecting through the water was entrancing.
3) One day in Central Park I saw the only smoking jogger I’ve ever encountered. An elegant old queen with an ash tray in one hand was shuffling along in a purple velour jumpsuit. All the while with the most wicked sort of grin... he probably enjoyed being the only smoking jogger on planet earth. Only in New York.
Of course New York City had it's dark side...
I mean Manhattan is an exciting, but it’s tough to live there. New York was a world behind glass. You could look at treasures behind glass, but you can't touch them. The lure of the West Coast was calling. I suppose I needed a trip out of Manhattan by then anyhow, call it a vacation or whatever - but just staying there seemed too hard.
I guess I'm really a Westerner at heart. I have to have snow capped mountains in view.
We’d spend hours in the Museum of Natural History sitting in front of this one particular diorama with elk in the Flat Top Mountains in White River National Forest in Colorado. It almost hurt sometimes to sit there and just wish I could hear the river rustling and smell the sage and the campfire smoke. So we packed up and headed west. On the way we stopped for a much needed two week camping trip in the Rockies.
It was exactly what we needed to unwind and relax in the sun. Echo Park in Dinosaur National Monument... Rocky Mountain National Park... and we even made a point of searching out the exact spot of that museum diorama in the Flat Top Mountains in White River National Forest. We came close to the exact spot... but I think the artist must have fudged a few details, since we couldn’t get it to line up exactly.
We returned to New York the following September... but this time to Dobbs Ferry, in Westchester. It was quiet and leafy and much more live-able than Manhattan. That's where I put down roots as an illustrator, living in a wonderful old house built in 1840 overlooking the Hudson, with the most wonderful and eccentric landlord... a sculptor and art history professor and his wife, a photographer. But that's another story. It was the land of Sleepy Hollow, winding roads through the trees, historic estates of the robber barons, the Hudson River line to Grand Central.
But after four years in Dobbs Ferry, the West kept calling. I was homesick for snow capped peaks, rain forests, desert canyons, sagebrush, the cool green Pacific... for wild places without hardly any people. I dreamed of Seattle, the proletariat paradise... or so it seemed... sailboats, coffee shops, mossy sidewalks and ferns. I subscribed to a neighborhood Seattle paper, which is the worst possible thing to do when you're homesick.
Anyhow, by now I had an agent... and FedEx made it possible to live anywhere. So my New York days were over.
All in all I got to be all misty eyed and choked up when I think about New York City and how it makes the All American dream come true for ragged immigrants who arrive on her shores with no more than a dream. All those cliches about ‘If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere’ and ‘Welcome your homeless, your destitute and all that’- I loved every minute of it. I arrived destitute with my own little dream and some talent... and it all came true for me. Thanks Manhattan!
I'd been a New Yorker for 5 years... it was everything I'd hoped it would be. But things move on. Amazingly I haven’t been back once ever since, even though I left decades ago. I never seem to go back to places. Life got in the way. And, after 10 years I began to realize that they NEVER send illustrators on business trips. Never, Ever, Never. Did I mention they never send illustrators on business trips?
I've always envied people who get to go out in the world and travel as part of their work. I just stay at home and the work comes to me and I make my own little worlds. Of course since the internet arrived, it's all kind of one big electronic village.
I've heard people tell me that my editors and art directors will be glad to see me - but somehow I can only remember how when I was in NYC everyone was always too busy to see me or even remember who I was. So I've never gone back. I send postcards instead.
Anyhow, that was my tiny tale of triumph & tribulation... I'm sure everyone's got one that's just about the same, so thanks for reading mine!
Our trivial tale draws nearly to it's conclusion... as our footloose artiste finds his footing on the slippery slopes of publishing.
The real turning point and the place where I felt I was born as an illustrator was on a bone chilling February day. It was one of those days when the mere word ‘cold’ is the palest distant echo of the reality of the bone jarring, nose freezing, wind whipping merciless sub-zero torturous COLD there could ever be. I had an appointment to show my portfolio at Holt, Reinhart & Winston on Madison Avenue, I think.
Inside it was warm... and wonderful... and seemed like magic. I was led back to the office of Miriam Chaikin, who seemed more like a fairy godmother than an art director to me. She appreciativley looked through my portfolio... carefully turning the pages and then paused and said. “Well, all we’d have for you now would be a little book. It only pays $800”.
More divine words have never into the porches of mine ears been poured. That offer, which I accepted on the spot, immediately tripled my bank account and made it possible to stay in Manhattan and try to become a freelance illustrator. Plan B was history. That job alone saved my career and changed my life... and I’ll be eternally grateful to Miriam Chaikin for her wonderfulness. She turned the course of my life then and there.
As it turned out, the book I did with Miriam Chaikin was fun. ‘School & Me’... featuring my totally cringeworthy artwork. I threw myself into doing it all. Color separations, designing the cover... things I’d never done before, but quickly learned. I did it all working in my tiny little studio room, delighted to be a real working artist. I remember the oddity of being woken up by a phone call from my ‘editor’ many a morning.
And as the Winter turned to Spring, my schedule of assignments snowballed. I had an A4 sized drawing sample printed up and mailed it out and dropped off samples at dozens of publishers. It was so exciting! It was living first and later on maybe I could think about anything to worry about... life is exciting when it’s lived out ahead of itself in the most wonderful way.
So I started working... freelancing. My tiny room became my studio. I made a lightbox out of a cardboard box with the bottom cut out and a lamp. I drew on translucent heavy vellum for the sketches and traced onto watercolor paper and painted. It all worked out great.
On a nice day I’d walk down to midtown though Central Park from West 78th Street... to drop off a sketch or finished art. I started doing lots of jobs for magazines... and little spots for educational publishing. And to my amazement, I started to get rich... it felt like I was rich at least. By June I had almost $5,000 in the bank! I’d never had more than $800 before... and that was after scrimping and saving for months. My dream was coming true... it was New York City... it was Springtime... it was wonderful.
And so my fledgling career began. I was now working for half a dozen clients. Travel & Leisure magazine, Scholastic, Games Magazine, Macmillan, ABC Publishing, Harcourt Brace.
I even got to work for 17 Magazine... which seemed like the swankiest, most glamorous place I’d ever been before. I relished each trip to the art studio in back, where I’d discuss the sketch with the art director. My only disappointment was there wasn’t a single coed in a cardigan to be spied anywhere on the premises. But it was still thrilling to do an illustration and then see my work 2 months later in the magazines on the newsstands. It was all just too heady and exciting.
It almost seemed like as soon as I’d return home from dropping off an assignment, there’d be a new job waiting... for some fabulous fee like $375 for just one spot drawing! I used to have to push a broom for two weeks to make that much. This was the career for me!
I guess it was sort of a ‘La Boehm’ existence... only I felt rich. Did I mention there was no kitchen and only a shared bathroom down the hall? Amazing what one can adapt to... piling up dishes on the edge of a bathroom sink to wash them somehow under the bathroom faucet. The best technique was to use a frying pan cover as a tray, turned upside down, so it could balance on the flat top of it’s handle. Then all the plates and cups and glasses and pans and silverware all sort of balanced on top of that.
Manhattan had it’s charms. The Museums... the Met, the Whitney, the MOMA, the Frick, the Morgan Library and the Museum of Natural History. We’d go to the Museum of Natural History on cold winter nights just to have a place to walk around... stretching our legs through all the fabulous wings of dioramas. There was Central Park and the Lake. We’d sit on one particular rock that was like a peninsula stretching far into the water and just admire the beautiful view of Nature and the City. Those Olmstead Brothers did a bang up job of crafting Central Park. It’s hard to imagine New York without Central Park. I remember our mailman, who looked like a character right out of Stuart Little used to always sniff up his nose and say ‘Mmmm.... smell that wonderful fresh air coming from Central Park. It’s the trees that makes the air so fresh’. He was right.
Shakespeare in the Park... Concerts on the great lawn. Lots of walks past the lake to the Met. We went to the Met and the Museum of Natural History so many times that we strung together Christmas tree garlands out of all the museum buttons. Life on West 78th Street was wonderful... especially viewed through the lens of nostalgia. But would it last? Could it last?
Just one final wrap-up episode left, faithful readers! Hang in there...
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The children's book illustration class with Maurice Sendak was held in a corner window studio on the 11th floor, high over 5th Avenue. I remember I was so nervous on the first day... waiting for the famous Mr. Sendak to appear. I’d have never guessed he’d turn out to be a disarmingly unpretentious regular guy from Brooklyn.
I told him I was nervous having him as a teacher because he was so famous. 'I'm just an old man with a beard... get over it', he said. He was totally unassuming... but he had this air of anxiety... must have been the genius gnawing at him or something. A cold draft of anxiety that always seemed to be there. But he was totally brilliant, entertaining, delightful.
Maurice would wait until the class was all quietly hard at work and then ramble on with priceless philosophical insights. I thought it highly amusing one day to hear him declare the obvious, “Of course a degree in illustration is completely superflous... it’s only one's talent and portfolio that really counts”. Another time he said “It doesn’t matter how many brilliant talented people you hang out with, it won’t make you any more talented”.
One day M.S. brought in the dummy pencils to 'Outside Over There'... they were incredible.. detailed down to each leaf. ‘It's like an opera’ I commented. M.S. thought that was an interesting, because someone else had also told him that. At the time I didn’t know his interest in opera was so keen... but I imagine that had something to do with it. I lent him a plastic bag to wrap the dummy up in, since it was pouring down rain... my brush with fame.
M.S. seemed to really care about his students welfare, unlike most of the other distant teachers there. He would make appointments with editors for his students to visit... invite them out to lunch (I actually turned down an invitation once because I had a stupid midterm the next class... something I'll always regret)
I used to come back to visit the class though even after I dropped out of school. M.S. was thrilled when I dropped out and started working. One day Richard Egielski was there too. He hadn't won the Caldecott yet. I don't think I met another illustrator for 10 years after leaving school. Amazingly I'd never even heard of the SCBWi. But the experience of those weeks was magical. It was like something you read about in books... like how Picasso and Renoir and Rousseu would all meet and have parties in Paris in 1906. I could scarcely believe it was me there... among the greats of the world of children’s books.
Also in the M.S. class were Steve Salerno and Vivienne Flesher. Steven Salerno has gone on to write & illustrate fabulous children's books... he was even chosen to do the art to a reissued Margaret Wise Brown book. The last time I saw Vivienne Flesher was one night on the sidewalk outside Balducci's... she hadn't landed a single illustration assignment yet and seemed a bit discouraged. Within 5 years I'd be seeing her incredible, unnervingly beautiful pastel draftsmanship on the cover of Time magazine.
I loved Walter and Niiad Einsel's class too. They were so calm and focused and seemed to impart wisdom almost by osmosis. Good design... basic aesthetics... the history of illustration. They really were a great team of artists. I wished I could have stayed on longer.
But after the Holiday break, my career as a ‘freelancer’ began in earnest. Underscore ‘earnest’ what with all of $275 in the bank account... make that extreme earnestness.
The decision to drop out of school was fairly obvious. I was terrified of running up a huge student loan debt. I wasn't really feeling like I was learning as much in school as I was from New York City. I was desperate to start making the rounds of publishers and actually start working. I hardly had to think twice about my choice. Also, my Mimi (a.k.a. Ann) had moved out to join me in my little 'La Boehm' room on West 78th street. We'd met in Seattle, and I guess true love can't be denied. She flew out at Christmas and together it turned out to be the start of a great adventure... since I'm still married to her. Looking back, no doubt it was the most exciting time of my life.
But on to work. What with $275 in the bank I really needed some work. This was it... Do or Die.
I still remember the first time I ever made a cold call to a publisher, trying to get a portfolio review. I was at a pay phone in the basement of the Museum of Natural History... and I was calling Workman publishers (who I still haven’t ever worked for to this day). My voice was trembling as I got through to the art director and lied and said, “I’m a freelance illustrator and I wonder if I could drop by and show my portfolio”. I guess it’s the lying part I remember so well. And the response was a total ‘No, we have no interest in seeing you at all..’ A total cold shoulder. But I had pockets full of dimes and just kept on calling.
I must have made the rounds to no more than 5 or 6 places before I landed my first job... doing an educational spot drawing for Macmillian I think. It was just $75 or something... but it was money for making art... not pushing a broom. It was the first time I'd ever been paid for artwork. It was so invigorating to just be out and about in midtown Manhattan, meeting real art directors in real publishing houses. The energy of the streets, I think they refer to it. It was fun and easy and what I'd come to New York to do.
What did I have to lose? Not much... there was always Plan B. Taking the bus back to Seattle... but I didn't want Plan B.
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