At this point in my life, I was building a new identity for myself: an artistic person, a creative person. That’s how our Dean of Education, Tom Hudson, described us as future artists and designers: creative people.
I was still pretty young in 1986, about 20, and there was still an old image of myself I had to fight, an old habit of seeing myself as a small person from a small, obscure world. In that world, art, design, and creativity were not understood and not incorporated into mainstream life. As a kid, I’d only seen glimpses of drawing, painting, illustration, and performance around me at home, or out in the city. Radio, TV, and the movies had probably been the most influential media for me, growing up.
From my personal experience, the tools and methods of art-making seemed old and obscure, passed down through centuries somehow, and kind of disconnected from everyday living. My only personal understanding of them had been connected to the aromas, textures, and patterns of art-making in grade-school. I could smell wax crayons, and feel their resistance and slipperiness on a piece of newsprint in a cheap drugstore colouring book. I grew up hearing about oil paintings, but never using oil paints except in one paint-by-numbers kit when I was about nine. Printmaking was only understood through what kind of shapes you could stamp out using a potato.
Paper, Pencil, and Print
Newsprint was the most plentiful kind of paper around me in childhood; a kid’s most availble medium. Every Sunday colour newspaper had a comic section, and comic books and colouring books always seemed to be somewhere close by. I experienced a lot of printing by noticing how some sundays the colours in the funnies didn’t register with the lines; the effect of reading and enjoying was ruined because of a printing error that kept distracting you from the story.
A major influence of mine was Dr. Seuss, whose children’s books seemed everywhere around me. Silly alliteration, crazy energetic line work, bold colours, and surreal characters and situations all stirred my imagination. He created the most wonderful worlds for kids to escape to.
Inking and linework in comics always fascinated me as a kid: In the early seventies, newspapers like the Victoria Times-Colonist would still have black and white illustrations in some of their ads or articles. Print quality still wasn’t good enough for photography to rule representation, so a few illustrators would be drawing images of smiling babies, or some family sedan that was on sale that week.
I found myself attracted to the artists who really used expressive lines. Hank Ketcham comes to mind right away. His inking in his “Dennis the Menace” single panel cartoons was beautiful and lyrical, with elegant, jazzy swoops and whorls to show things like wrinkles in a pant leg, or bagginess in a sagging pair of dungarees, or the unruly hair of a shaggy dog. The quality of good ink linework has an almost musical quality to it, leading your eyes on twisty little journeys in, out, and around subjects using variations of width, lightness, firmness, and power. Hank Ketcham was a master of that.
In my teens, I discovered Len Norris, the amazing editorial cartoonist for the Vancouver Sun. We had a softcover book that was a collection of a year of his daily cartoons. He was a real master graphical storyteller; someone who was so good that Walt Kelly, a former Disney artist and the creator of “Pogo”, praised him as one of the greats of the industry.
I remember the emotional tone of “Peanuts” by Charles Schulz. Even as an eight year-old, Charlie Brown made me sad and frustrated, because he was always kind of losing at life. I guess he didn’t make me happy, because I recognized in his sad tone the same depression and worry that adults in my life faced. Maybe as a little kid, recognizing fear and worry in grown-ups was too scary to face.
All the kids in Peanuts talked like grown-up armchair therapists or philosophers. Back then, I much preferred Snoopy and especially his little bird buddy, Woodstock, who seemed the most natural and innocent creature I’d every seen in a comic strip.
I could both read and feel the comics and their characters. It was all part of a kind of unspoken visual language.
The Power of Graphical Storytelling
In 1973 or 1974 when I was about nine, my grandfather gave me a few magazines that had been found in the rooms in the Hotel Yates, which he managed. He told me that the maids had found them in some of the rooms while cleaning, and so he took them and gave them to me, which I thought was a really cool gift! It wasn’t even my birthday or anything. (I didn’t really understand that my grandfather was artistically minded, but before long, I’d discover his oil painting easel, palette, and brushes, and his Walter Foster painting books down in the basement of his house.)
As I recall, the magazines that Poppy gave me were one Mad Magazine and a couple of monster comics, which I came to recognize years later as “Creepy” or “Eerie” from Warren Publishing. They were all black and white and, as magazines, weren’t bothered by the self-censorship of the Comics Code Authority, which had ruled little colour comic books ever since the Wertham scare back in the 1950s.
The content in Mad Magazine was funny, cynical, biting, and unrepentantly satirical – and a bit too far above my gentle 9 year old brain at the time. The monster mags were devoted to fantasy, scence fiction, or horror, and had lots of scary monsters or scantily-clad or topless buxom ladies rendered again with beautiful linework. I just stared at those pictures and ignored most of the words. That’s where I saw black and white line work on full display by cartoon masters like Jack Davis, Wally Wood, or Will Elder.
Like all reading, reading comics was a personal, private relationship between the artist and the reader. I remember holding those magazines in my hand that day and flipping through them with great curiosity. What a great gift! Within a day or two, they had disappeared. More than likely, my grandmother or another parent did not approve of their irreverent or salacious content. It remained, I thought, a little secret between me and my beloved Poppy.
All those magazines, colour superhero comics, and Sunday newspaper funnies – that was pretty much how I developed my love of reading and visual storytelling. I really think that I have my maternal grandfather to thank for my love of comics and graphic storytelling. He got me started.
When I became a teenager, I would buy “Creepy” or “Eerie” horror and fantasy magazines at the corner grocery every chance I could. By my mid-teens, I’d amassed a hundred such magazines before Warren Publishing went out of business in the early 80s. After that, it became all about Heavy Metal magazine for me. I just didn’t stop.
Photos, Film, and Video
In the seventies, video barely existed as a medium for the average consumer, and television was not known for its great image or sound quality. Film and movies dominated for large-scale, immersive experiences. That’s where all the high-quality imagery and amazing, orchestral music were to be heard in most towns.
For the average family then, photographs and film were the affordable medium for documenting life events. Everybody had one of those little plastic Kodak Instamatic film cameras with the flash cube on top, or later on, a Polaroid Instant camera with the image that would develop right before your eyes – so fascinating!
Understanding Media
So by the time I had turned 20, I’d started to learn about all those media from some actual experience. The lines, shades, tone, and modelling I’d seen in Poppy’s Walter Foster drawing books, well, I’d started trying that out for myself using graphite and charcoal in life drawing classes. I even tried to draw in india ink using a dip-pen and a brush. I preferred the fluidity of a brush, although I had yet to learn how to control it. I learned a bit of photography with a proper camera and slide film so that I could take photos of my work for a future portfolio, and I’d gotten glimpses into how motion picture films were shot from being a helper on a couple of student film projects.
All these experiences helped to widen my understanding of different media, their effectiveness for communications and storytelling, their power and impact for audiences, and which media I began to prefer.
As my second year of art school progressed, I became more visually literate, and with my readings and hands-on experience, I began to feel that paint, printing, and pigments weren’t that exciting to me. It all just seemed to be too static and ancient – paint and print just kind of “laid there” too much for my liking.
Video monitors, however, were like the new digital equivalent of Seraut’s Pointillism. I learned that I could take a magnifying glass and peer deeply at televisions and video monitors, to see the little red, green, and blue pixels that made up the display. Those images didn’t just lay there; they werecpainted on the tube at sixty times per second.
Once I experienced coloured light, understood additive colour theory, and had seen my first video monitors and video projectors, I realized that colour created through light was what really excited me. I literally felt waves of energy from it. From the laser light shows at the HR MacMillan Planetarium, to computer graphics and video special effects in rock videos and TV comercials, I think I became convinced that RGB was so much more modern and important than CMYK or red, yellow, and blue paints.
I knew that coloured light was coloured to our eye and brain because of its frequency and wavelength. I was a child of television, and Dad’s technical background in RF, radio, and television had steeped into me after all. It was finding a kind of harmonious blended expression in modern technology. For me, I couldn’t have learned about that technology anywhere else than in art school, where I felt free to explore it.
