Work History
This week I’ve been contacting people in the ad world, showing my stuff around, re-establishing old connections. One goal of mine for 2009 is to do some kind of big ad campaign: TV spots or webisodes, outdoor, print ads. You name it. Do something that I can sink my teeth into and create a mini world around. I’m looking for a brand that’s compatible with my style. As I’m doing this, I’m seeing more clearly that I’ve been blocked in this area for years.
It’s funny. I have no trouble ferreting out the most personal details of my life, illustrating them in a way that feels truthful and artistically honest and then sharing it in a story with as many people as possible. But the thought of doing work for a big brand has frozen me up until now.
I envy illustrators who have no trouble seamlessly drawing their weird characters, doing personal paintings, then designing sneakers, clothes, TV spots, ads for car companies with no discernible hiccup. Typically they seem to be younger than me. I’m 34. So maybe it’s generational. But I don’t know.
What is it about commercial work that I’ve been so afraid of? Pretty much all of the culture I ingested as a kid and teenager could be considered commercial / mass to some extent. I loved TV shows, illustrated books, video games, mainstream movies. Even as a teenager when I thought I was being so rebellious, I was mostly discovering bands through their music videos on late night MTV shows or on “alternative” radio stations, or in slightly left of center mainstream films (Tim Burton, Cohen Brothers).
In college I went pretty far out on a limb and discovered fringe lo-fi indie bands, record labels like Shimmy Disc, SST, or cassette-only homemade labels like Shrimper. I listened to some noisy jazz, watched experimental films by people like Stan Brakhage. Thumbed my nose at “popular” culture. But meanwhile I was smitten with hip hop. And I pretty much always had a Top 40 driving jam that I secretly bumped in the car, whether it was The Spin Doctors or Sheryl Crow or some other fluff.
After college, it was “literary” or “underground” or “fine art” comics. Whatever the hell you want to call what I do. I’ve spent the past 10 years learning what this movement is all about, what its rules are. How these kinds of comics are made. Learning how to make a comic strip is like boot camp for graphic artists because it teaches you skills that you can apply to almost any creative field: drawing, writing, character design, page layout, information graphics, even web design and filmmaking. It all begins with a pencil and a blank piece of paper.
While ingesting all of this on my own time, I was working by day in design studios or in ad agencies and hating it. I was so smug. “If only they knew what a genius they have working right under their noses here!” This was my attitude. I gave them about 10% of my talent, and sadly it’s often all that was required for the assignments. But under my radar, by osmosis, I was soaking in the rules of design, branding, communication. There were dozens of times that I was floored by the work that was being done in other departments: art directors using stop motion puppet animation, or cartoon motifs, or 8-bit video graphics or more lavish full-blown film and photo shoots. But it felt so impossibly out of my league. I was toiling away designing junk mail in a cubicle. These men and women were flying to South America, casting actresses, staying in hotels, expensing big meals. I mentally twisted my inferiority complex around and came out superior again. “They’re selling out. They don’t know REAL creativity. They’re hacks.” Whatever got me through the day.
When I got my book deal, I fled that world fast and thought I was leaving it behind for good. Finally I had free time to just create without restrictions! A studio in a cool building with other artists (it’s FREEZING here right now, by the way). Music projects, animation. My work. My world. No one telling me what to do. To be fair, it has been a total blast.
But two years later, I’m feeling a genuine hunger to re-connect with the ad world. I still want to keep doing all this personal work, but something feels like it’s missing. Like I’m ignoring my civic duty or something by being so disengaged from the business world. Maybe it needs my talents. Maybe I need its rules, which are based on numbers and sales and demographic data. What’s wrong with knowing what sells and why? What people need and want in their livest? Plugging into how people are relating to, experiencing and even loving the products around them? Can anyone really claim to be living a product-free life? Would you really want to? Even Thoreau’s experiment in the woods was first built on dozens of years of education and familiarity with city life, not to mention the soap that kept him bacteria-free, the pen he was using to write, and the entire newspaper, and later, publishing industries which printed his work. The life of the disconnected artist is a myth. By the way, I’m kind of borrowing all of that from a talk I heard while working at Ogilvy. I had my ears open even if my heart was mostly shut.
All that to say: my sleeves are officially rolled up. I’m ready to be of service. Let’s do something awesome.