My favorite illustrator was N.C. Wyeth, and I would read books because they were, there was Treasure Island or whatever it was because the pictures in it was so engrossing and whatever the peculiarity of that gene that pops up with people that they want to make pictures. You know, the interesting thing is all kids want to make some kind of mark on a page. Is it some almost anthropologically built in mechanism? Whether it’s the cave paintings and decorating jugs or whatever it was. And it, it keeps flowering in various forms. I also was a kind of, a dreamer if that’s not contaminated by politics. In other words, I got lost in fantasy and imaginative things.

At that point also something else happened, The World’s Fair in 1939 in New York, it had three huge buildings that are called pavilions of three centuries of European art, the late 15th or 16th through the early 19th century. It was occasionally filled with people, except me. I couldn’t get enough of it. And it was a dramatic change from that, that book size image, which is in itself very enthralling, but not the same as the huge replications of the real world. And I kept saying, “Oh my God, how’s that possible? Could I ever do that?” And that was a, I guess, a transformative moment when I began to look at other sources of inspiration and I mean I was only 9 or 10 years old, but there was a bug in me. And people said. “Did you always want to be an artist?” And I said, “I never thought of it as a choice.” It was like who I was, my personality became infused with the idea of making pictures.

When I was 13, I went to the Art Students League, which was a big privilege. You started out drawing from plaster casts, great old Greek sculpture. And then you were allowed to go into the life class, which of course at 13, I knew meant you were going to see naked women, not Nudes, but transformed in the street language, but I knew that was an art thing. So it was okay. It was again, the moment where that’s, that was part of my progression. The school I went to, my parents were very forethoughtful, they hated the thought that I might really be an artist, but since I didn’t play the piano, they thought, well, he might as well take art lessons. In this funny cognitive disconnect because if we keep training him to be an artist, he might really turn out to be that way. And for depression era parents, that was like worse than the measles.

I think I was also a little concerned myself. I wasn’t very secure as a kid. A lot of my buddies from Music and Art High School, and I, I’m still friendly with one of the remaining members of that class, Harvey Dinnerstein. We’ve been friends for 75 years. A couple of lifetimes. And they all went off to art school and I felt that competitive thing, maybe I’m missing something but then I decided as a compensation, I would do drawing classes that the Art Students League, that would be something. And then I would also chart off to Philadelphia, they were at the Temple (University) Tyler Art School and it was kind of imbibing from whatever instruction they would get and I saw, I kept sharing that kind of community of, of friends who are as dedicated in many ways as I was. And that led to also kind of an interesting evolution. One of the people, a guy named Leroy Davis, who was a wannabe artist, but he decided he was not really very good. He would become an art dealer. And so he set up a gallery on graduation and all the people he knew at Tyler became artists in the gallery. We formed the kind of kernel of security against what was then the burgeoning amazing world of non-object painting.

And here’s the interesting thing. All of us in some way were intimidated by two things, by the scale of modernist painting, huge suckers, I mean Jackson Pollock is, wall size. Robert Motherwell. I mean, if you look at all of that, they decided right away that making a design and small scale, that’s quite. But you make it big. It induces a sense of, “Oh, how did he do it so big?” Number one, number two, “Oh that’s really stunning” or that’s really the impact becomes heightened, but we were kind of ideologically bound in a way with the idea that we had a central notion about what realism, ought to be.

And so as a result, this rather interesting exhibition got lost, nobody was paying attention to it. It was at the National Arts Club downtown. And what was before their rehabilitation was sort of musty circumstances. You know, it felt like we’re going into an 1890s old house or something. And a lot of us felt, thwarted, frustrated by that. The gallery we were in soon after that disbanded, a lot of artists went in different places. I went to a gallery in Philadelphia and then out to Washington. And so I came back, I had a gallery in New York. I decided for me the problem much more was what was realist art going to be about and what was my place in it? Where was I, where did I fit or didn’t fit? I dropped into illustration by accident, as well as necessity, first of all, something I saw, “oh, I can make a few bucks that way.” Had some savings when I got out of the army, I thought I began to do art jobs that way.

And the first big entree in illustration was I was having a show with this Davis gallery and I made a brochure with a drawing on the facade. So that was like odd for the time. And the art director at Sports Illustrated, he hired me to do these instructional drawings. So that was, that was the beginning. And it lasted only about a year and a half because they changed Art Director, Richard Gangel, and he was out and I was out and I didn’t work again for Sports Illustrated until, oh, about 15 years later. And it grew from there. I did stuff, I think it was Esquire first picked up on the idea of my painting ability. And so they hired me to do takeoffs on classic paintings, but with contemporary figures, because I had both drawing skills and painting skills, it became a perfect kind of option and a lot of work, for example, emotional work was done with drawing, institutional promotion of black and white and even a lot of advertising, newspapers.

And so that’s where I began to filter into other arenas and it wound up working for Time Magazine doing covers because of portrait skills. There was a great deal of freedom. Art director, Steve Heller, for example, who was wrote a, review of one of my painting shows, wonderful review, who understood the relationship between painterly and illustration intuitively he thought, and it also changed from the 1950s kind of illustrative modality, with the very smoothed out kind of two dimensional boy meets girl thing. Suddenly there was a lot of muscle. The idea of suddenly interposing the artist with the illustrator. I think whether it was conscious or subliminally understood or however, I think that became characteristic.

Harvey Dinnerstein also worked for a while as an illustrator. They sent him to cover The Poor Man’s March in Washington. And he did what was almost quasi revolutionary posters from the 1870s, you know, I mean, it was in the year, certainly in the sixties, which was a traumatic time for so many of us coming out of McCarthyism in the fifties. And I don’t think it’s irrelevant to talk about the political atmosphere, because if you’re alive in the world, what’s happening in your country is as important as what your role is in it. Why are you here? What are you doing here? Who’s it for? It’s just for yourself. Maybe that’s enough. There’s a lot of people who want art to, stay away from politics. But if you are integrated in the world, integrated in the sense that you’re an alive person in live events, it colors your feeling, or at least it impacts it in a certain way, both on that conscious level that I mentioned before, and also has the taps into the things that you don’t always know about.

When we decided to go to Montgomery, Alabama, we had grown up with that kind of skill-based art. And suddenly we were thrust into a dynamic that was totally different. Montgomery Bus Boycott turned out to be a seminal event for the Civil Rights movement, brought Martin Luther King into it, it brought a lot of black activists who are active in civil rights drives in Jim Crow South in 1950s. This is before Brown and The Board of Education. And we walked into what could have been a very scary situation.

Didn’t know anything. We didn’t know, except as Harvey mentioned, we left Baltimore and the train suddenly turned all white. The Mason Dixon Line. Blacks couldn’t be in the same train with whites, subtle thing. You know, you might not notice and you look up and suddenly, Hey, there are no more black people from New York. The drawings turned out to be very important. They ended up in museum collections and it was an exhibition a year ago in the summer where the museum, I guess, for want of having other exhibitions, threw them up on the wall again, because they still were relevant in a way they’re drawings of, African-American centered sympathetic that are not caricature, that are not enhanced. That was one part of what was a significant change in both how we thought about our art and how it developed, what it looked like. And the other part of it is that it thrusts this into an interesting kind of psychological moment at suddenly we were relevant as artists. In the face of the overwhelming modernist kind of envelope, we had a place. And clearly as illustrators, you had a functional role. Somebody in the real world came to you and said, “We need you,” Even though it might seem trivial. You know, people make magazines. How important is that?

I got a notice through my Facebook or from my website, from somebody from Kuwait who said, “Aqualung great!” Kuwait?! Okay, wonderful. I love it. And that’s another thing too inadvertently. It happened again very early in my illustration career, the guy who was the manager of the, the Jethro Tull, which is the group that produced Aqualung, apparently was aware of American illustration and somewhere somehow, went to the gallery or saw a board of my things. And this is 1969 and 1970, which was very early in my illustration career, when I wasn’t very good by the way. And he decided of all the people available, all very talented guys that he wanted me to come to do an album cover. And it, I wasn’t terribly interested in, cause it seemed like what I know about rock music, I didn’t like it very much. I was still hung up on Simon and Garfunkel, still am. And since then it’s become iconic, and I look back on it and I see all the defects, it was 1970, I was not nearly as skilled maybe skills, I went to art school by being an illustrator, really. Because just being in a situation where I had to be as good as other people around was a great driving force. So a lot of my drafting skills improved, my painting, composition, all those things became well.

The assignment was, I would have to draw all of the people involved in the storyline of how the Constitution came to be, all of the seven or 10 historic figures, whether it was Franklin, or Jefferson, or Hamilton or Madison or Tom, Jerry, I mean, Gerry, who is responsible for gerrymandering, and the great Gouverneur Morris, who is a stark figure, but it was an astonishing drunk. He was drunk all the time. Marvelous.

And that these were actors in a great American drama, but they couldn’t hire actors because they had only three minutes airtime. So you can’t have a set with actors and costumes and such, it’s too expensive. And it just doesn’t flow because it was mixed in with Moyers himself on camera. But if you had drawings, like courtroom drawing, as a backdrop for it, and then it would interpose himself on camera, back and forth, they decided that that’s the way it would work. And so there I was, with almost no backup image because who the hell has pictures of Tom Jefferson except the painting of him? So they gave me what would be a playing card pack of portraits of the central figures. So I said, listen, some more obvious ones like Jefferson, and Washington and so on, are not going to be a problem, but the others are obscure figures. So I’m going to take some license with them, even Madison, but all of that, I figured, okay, can overcome it. And I know, I knew, that I had enough skill and speed, that’s what was required because I got all two months-worth of programs in a batch. And I had to prepare them in advance, sometimes as few as two weeks before the program was going to air because they were writing it on the go.

Well I did something which I, which was imperative. I rented costumes. There were two different or even three different kinds of outerwear that had different lapels. They were winter outfits. Mostly were not from summer. In fact, they were in a heat wave in the summer of 1887, 1787. And they were wearing these heavy three layers of clothing and the place stank people sweating. So you imagine what came out of it, this Constitution’s a miracle. But in any case, it turned out to be something of a trial in a way. Yeah. It’s a kind of standout accomplishment. For the most part, I think, yeah. It wind up being a kind of historical artist without thinking about it, as you’ve mentioned, it, it’s kind of funny.

I had spent two decades illustrating somebody else’s story, at the same time I was making efforts at my own story. And I think every artist, whether they’re writers, they’re musicians or folk singers, or whatever, they are talking about their story. After a while you exhaust your inventiveness primarily, unless you’re doing a lot of portraits of personal portraits. And I say the best you can get a kind of interesting look, something that suggests a real life event that you happen to stumble on and try to make, and I think in all the commission portraits, I have, I have a different look, and I’ve tried to make that because I sit down and I do studies, right? And instead of working on problems with paint and so on, what’s the face going to be about, what does it begin to tell me.

The self-portraits are where I think most of the guts of things come about. Every artist who’s worked with, as an illustrator to some point, whether it was Remington or Sargent, and certainly Norman Rockwell, has had the aspiration to be an artist, not just somebody for hire, but somebody who exists as a kind of autonomous person who creates their own world. And if illustration artists are suddenly untagged from that dirty word, you get a different view of them.
So I cannot explain it more than that. The feeling that people often express I’ve heard from other artists that the feeling of a brush putting paint on a surface is, very satisfying. And there is something organic about that. This theory, again, maybe it reverts back to that very infantile notion that if you make a mark, it establishes yourself with your presence, you’re here. And paint has a historic importance to it. So why not?