On Creative Traveling Companions
“Ten years ago,” I typed in late 2020, launching a sentence. Given all that has transpired, that seems more than a decade distant, doesn’t it?
Ten years ago! Back then Donald Trump was a reality show gasbag of minimal consequence, and global pandemics only showed up in sci-fi thrillers and history texts. But now, in March 2021, with DJT decamped to Palm Beach County and the U.S. government substantially back in business under Democratic leadership, and with vaccinations on the rise, the Trump presidency seems suddenly, mercifully distant. Time is so strange. Especially recently.
Last year, then: “Ten years ago, in 2010, I wrote a post which began as follows:
Recently I posed the following question to a group of senior students: What is your tribe?”
At the time, I was not requesting blood affiliations. Nor was I asking after the name of a sect or a cult. I was getting at questions of belonging, of cultural alignments and affections. Matters of choice, with (relatively) low stakes.
Philip Guston, The Studio, 1969. Guston is a major figure for many cartoonists and illustrators, myself included. As was widely reported last year, a major Guston retrospective planned for 2021 was shelved, with recriminations aplenty.
A decade back I was working exclusively with undergraduates. Since then, we have launched a graduate program, the MFA-IVC (or Illustration and Visual Culture) and now the same question must be retooled for a new audience with more mileage. For those undergraduates back then, I put it this way:
“…In about six months, you will no longer be surrounded by people who are exactly your age, who hail mostly from the same social class, who are interested in all the same things you are. There will no longer be a group of professional experts who are paid to be interested in you. You will be on your own, and you will have to construct meaning from your own resources until you find or construct another community.
How will you sustain yourself? I asked. Where will you find nourishment? “
Francis Criss, Untitled (Cityscape), 1938. A precisionist who has received more attention in recent years. Captures a grand-but-crappy urban experience. Criss also illustrated, but less persuasively. (Unlike say N.C. Wyeth, whose paintings were mostly dusty, backward-looking things in contrast to his much more vital illustrations.)
In such moments I have routinely offered the chestnut, If you aspire to be a producer of culture, you must also be a passionate participant in it. To begin, culture is a big word. We plug into it selectively, in accordance with our own predilections. In the age of the interwebs, you can find digital encampments of many varieties. Some are productive places, others enthusiasm sinks.
Amid the scorchingly rapid half-lives of Twitter hot takes, 21st century tulip manias, and festivals of umbrage, I’m not really so sure anymore about passionate engagement. Sometimes a cool head serves one well. Keeping your own company and working quietly seems as good a stance as any, and better than some at least. (SEE: Guston, Philip reproduced above.)
Title Screen, Winky Dink and You, a television show aired on CBS from 1953 to 1957. The first interactive electronic experience, the show required children to draw with crayons on a plastic sheet placed over the screen to help Winky Dink conduct his adventures. Hosted by Jack Barry.
Back to the matter at hand: “At the heart of my question—how will you find nourishment?—lives something deeper. I am really asking: To whom will you turn?”
As it happens, many of the people I turn to are dead. Meaning: Museums and libraries are sources of nourishment, too. And you can belong to a tradition, an approach, a certain variety of impatience, and be sustained by it. The fields we work in—illustration, for one, and cartooning, another—lack sophisticated histories, partially due to ubiquity and temporality: The stuff is everywhere, yet always being burned off and tossed out. In such circumstances: How do we assemble a useable past for ourselves?
Kayren Draper, Illustration from The Sunshine School, Ginn and Company, 1928. Detail under magnification.
I say: curiosity, cultural spelunking, attentiveness. We build a history of our own, or at least the makings of one, with the evidence of our affinities—confirmed by our responses to what we see contemporaneously—combined with our excavations and researches. That stray ad or modest illustration from a century ago that sets something off in your brain.
Stuart Davis, Pochade. 1956-58 I go back to the Stuart Davis well every so often, and I am never disappointed. Someday I want to write an essay and maybe edit a collection on his influence. A major figure for a wide variety of folks.
Circling back, to employ an irritating verbal tic of the moment, my initial challenge remains.
“What is your tribe?”
I no longer use the word tribe in this context; it’s disrespectful. Editorialists got used to using the adjective tribal to signal unhealthy, inflexible politics, a regrettable usage. More fundamentally, the invocation of “tribe” amounts to an appropriation of the picturesque native, a la Mia, the Land of Lakes “Butter Maiden,” phased out last year, along with hundreds of different images of kids “playing Indian” in school primers from the 1920s into the 1950s. Etc., etc. Tribe somehow manages to be exotic, fetishizing, and dismissive all at once.
What’s more, in many cases the identification isn’t so localized. Sure, if you draw superhero comics you can claim Jack Kirby and others who fit comfortably in that bucket. But for many, the range of people stretches across categories. It may be less a club than a sensibility. For that reason recently I have used the term constellation of influence.
I do think a sense of belonging matters, especially for young people. Terms like illustrator, cartoonist, animator are important.
H. A. Rey, detail shot from Find the Constellations, 1954.
But a constellation of influence is more personal and intuitive, and more critical, than a job title. It’s sort of like picking a sandlot team: these are my peeps! We don’t necessarily play the same position, but we play the same way, or share certain values—how things are put together, how the drawing works, the approach to a medium, even the “rules” of the world or the cultural sensibility: witty, urgent, lovely, languid, brutal, dense, balletic, coarse, astringent, funny.
Constellation of influence may be a little too detached or formal for some; too analytical. Maybe more like traveling companions—people you admire and would like to spend time around, without devolving into fanboys and girls. (These prospective companions don’t really get a vote; you are choosing them, not vice versa.)
You might also think of these people as beloved but distant friends, whose letters buoy you when things look bleak.
Whichever image works.
D.B. Dowd, Paris Rooftops, from Spartan Holiday No. 3 French Lesson, Spartan Holiday Books, 2019.
A few thoughts on how belonging or membership can be experienced. But maybe first, how they might not be. For example, Pinterest [which I use here as a semi-passé stand-in for the various digital closets where we stash passing interests]. I have come to regard Pinterest as a scourge, in part because it dominates Google image searches in a particularly unhelpful way, gumming up results with less-than-useful material.
But separately, for the purpose of discovering aesthetic and cultural affinities, Pinterest has a cheapening effect. Yes, it works as a collecting tool. In the digital age, we see many, many image on a daily basis. Some catch our eye. Of those, a certain number might be flagged as favorites and uploaded to the various platforms where we put, even hoard, such things: Instagram, Figma, etc.
But what does it cost us to do so? Zero. Having a mountain of jpegs sitting on some server in East Ether does not enable them to act on you over time. Lived osmosis comes from steady exposure. I encourage students to print out images that seem important to them; in a further edit, since space is always scarce, I urge them to pin up the most relevant stuff where they work. (Why or how they are relevant need not be explained up front; that recognition can emerge over time.)
D.B. Dowd, K is for Knowledge spread from A is for Autocrat: A Trumpian Alphabet, Illustrated. Spartan Holiday Books, 2020. Graphic design by Scott Gericke.
Harry Beckhoff, Illustration for Lonely Heart, by Damon Runyon, Collier’s, January 16, 1937. I adore Beckhoff’s work during this period—two color gigs, mid 30s into early 40s.
Why pin things up? The speed of digital experience and social media have produced a kinda cool standard of achievement. That’s fine for consumers of various stimuli. But kinda cool is a weak standard. (Digital tools are a contributor to this. The screen glows. Colored light is always awesome. But the light is not the form. Unfinished things can feel finished when they are not.) The best work reveals itself over time, and bears sustained looking. You can’t get that from the scan that produces a quick judgment. The scan measures attractiveness, which is not nothing (!) but nowhere near everything.
Sifo wooden puzzle, circa 1950. I collect these things.
For me personally, there is an experiential aspect to influence. I frequent antique malls on the prowl for research materials in the form of printed ephemera. I write about visual culture, so there is reason to trawl in such places. But I also go for the purpose of being surprised in my studio practice. I find something that sticks: a palette, some lettering, a figurine or tin toy. Some day perhaps I will write an essay on a handful of those items that stuck, provocations which seeded something down the line.
DB Dowd, View from Cherry Street, Plate 2 from Cry Mustardville: Reports from the Recent Calamity and Commentary Thereupon, Charles Bevan Press. 1995. Linoleum reduction cut printed in two colors. The first major project I produced in which the writing, illustration, design, and printing were all conceived as an integrated whole (although text and image appeared on separate pages, so not truly integrated—thoughtfully juxtaposed and sequenced, but distinct. It would take longer for me to see word and image as truly fluid.
My own path has been complex, especially as I have had to account for the roles of writing and drawing in my own work. Over time I’ve come to acknowledge the primary generative role of writing in many of my projects. When the writing leads, I am able to design images very fluidly to complement the textual argument. It wasn’t always so, and it took many years for me to figure that out. As I have come to terms with that, my constellation of influences has changed. (My approach to illustration when I haven’t written the text isn’t so different. I still read for meaning and go, but the integration of elements [drawing, lettering, photography] requires more negotiation.)
James Barrett & Sons, five textile printing blocks from a set of nine used to print a paisley pattern on silk. Dartford, England. 1880-1910. On display at the Winterthur Museum and Garden, New Castle County, Delaware.
Block printed textile, 19th century. Winterthur Museum and Garden.
I started as a printmaker many years ago. The intersection of drawing and printing has been of great interest to me as a theoretical question as well as a formal, visual one. I wrote about it at some length in my book Stick Figures (Spartan Holiday Books in association with Norman Rockwell Museum, 2018). Specifically, in Chapter 3: On Printed Pictures.
DB Dowd, Only to wanderers can come, hand lettering Spartan Holiday No. 2, 2014.
The role of lettering and typography has risen in my work quite substantially over time, too, especially as I have come to see drawing as fundamental to all of it.
Herbert Matter, advertising design for Knoll Associates. This is from the Herbert Matter Archive in the Modern Graphic History Library at Washington University, all of which pertains to his work for Knoll.
Graphic designers have come to matter much more to me. Drawing and design no longer seem like separate activities.
The vernacular drawing styles used on midcentury advertising characters and package designs have become objects of scrutiny.
Just encountered this today, 3/31/21. Illustrator uncredited, agency unknown, undersea troubles in TUMS ad, Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 27, 1953. I enjoy the transparent characters—how the contour lines of the figures are complemented and undercut by the negative shapes of light on dunes or whatever those suggestive forms are meant to convey. (We’re underwater is clear enough.) The octopus and the sword/sawfish are up to no good.
Only today, while looking through archival materials for something else, I came upon this drawing in a newspaper advertisement for TUMS, coincidentally still headquartered and manufactured in St. Louis.
Ben Shahn, Typewriter. 1956.
So what ties all this together? How do these sources (which include some of my own) make a meaningful set? It’s possible to push too hard for clarity, but I think here the answer is pretty clear.
First, many/most of these images bear traces of their mediums. How they were made has not been disguised, but rather foregrounded: the screen-tone dot pattern (to be distinguished from a halftone) in the Kay Draper; the painterliness of Guston; the tracking lines on the Winky Dink television screen; the slightly crude linoleum cuts in the Mustardville print; the block printing matrices and textile sample; the scratchy line in the Ben Shahn drawing above.
Second, these images call attention to how they are designed, or the way they are put together. The Beckhoff, the Criss, the Davis, the Sifo puzzle(!), the TUMS ad, my K is for Knowledge spread as well as my lettering for Only the Wanderer.
I have been thinking about this question for so many years that I have moved past thinking about individual people, and on to the tissue of visual culture in its many manifestations. That I am drawn to the vernacular and uncredited as much if not more that I am to celebrated folks is a product of long experience, in the best sense. I am in love with looking and with making, and these are things that nourish me. So I guess I have come to think less about who my traveling companions are, and more about our shared tastes across time.
Among the how, the what, and the why, I am drawn most to how: how people see, how they organize their ideas, how they draw and make letterforms, how they move and push and touch materials. I am fondest of interactions between intelligence and immediacy.