BY JO DAVIES
A shorter version of this interview appears in Varoom 06 2008. Some of the questions and text have been adapted from the original interview
During Brad Holland’s long and distinguished career, his intelligent and challenging imagery has contributed to a redefinition of illustration as a cultural force. In 1999 his paintings were the subject of a retrospective at the Le Musée des beaux-arts, Clermont-Ferrand. He is a member of the AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale) and the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame.
Within the past decade he has become increasingly, and controversially, noted for his campaigning to protect and promote the legal rights of illustrators. I met him in his loft studio in Manhattan to discuss his work, to get his view on the current challenges facing illustrators, and to take the pulse of American illustration.
Jo Davies: Do you consider yourself an illustrator?
Brad Holland: Well, I don’t call myself one. Of course, I don’t call myself anything. I think of what we do as popular art. I can see the difference between good art and bad art, but I don’t think you can make that distinction about a picture by what you call it.
I don’t have anything against the word Illustration. It just doesn’t seem to fit me. It pigeonholes your work as something you do to illustrate, and I work from a kind of pre-literary logic. It’s like you put me in one room and put a writer in another and give us both the same assignment. The writer writes an article and I draw a picture. When we’re done, you marry the two and hope the marriage works out. A lot of times I get called by magazines to do pictures for articles that haven’t been written yet. So if I’m doing a picture and the article hasn’t been written, what am I illustrating?
Do you ever find that there’s a conflict when the two come together, the sum of two parts being unequal?
Well, yes. But that’s why it’s like a marriage. Some work, some don’t. But people don’t stop getting married just because some marriages flop.
When people commission you, what do they say?
Different things. One of my favorite clients is the Odeon Theatre in Vienna. The Theatre director emails me a 50 word brief describing the theme of a play. Then I send him a dozen or so sketches. He’s not expecting me to illustrate his production as such, but to give him my interpretation of the theme.
Is the art direction usually in that vein then?
No, of course not. When I started in the late 60s, magazines generally dictated ideas – usually pretty literal ones - to illustrators, who they assigned on the basis of style. Since I was pretty wilful about what I wanted to draw, I didn’t fit into the program very well.
In those days, writers, editors, readers – most people really - still expected illustrations to illustrate, and I was trying to do pictures that, if I were a reader, I’d be interested in looking at, even if there was no article to go with them. Most people never saw the point of that approach; and most of them who did see the point thought it was a bad point, I think it seemed arbitrary to them to just match pictures - so I had a kind of rocky time of it my first few years.
My break came when I dropped off my portfolio at Playboy in Chicago one day and came back the next day to pick it up.
Art Paul, the art director, had asked to see me. He was very complimentary and said he’d like to hire me on a freelance basis to do work every month. And to start immediately – well, to try me out, really - he assigned me a double page spread for a PG Wodehouse article. I was thrilled - until I got a call the next day from Bob Post, Art’s assistant. Bob said I’d have to work from an idea the art department had come up with; he said that’s the way they worked with all illustrators.
Well, from the beginning, I had always insisted on coming up with my own ideas –I didn’t see how you could define yourself by rendering something somebody else had dreamed up. So I told Bob I’d have to turn the job down.
Now at the time, Playboy was a very high profile magazine and here I was, just a couple years out of high school, blowing my big break – at least that’s the way I saw it. But I didn’t want to look like I had been bluffing, so I decided not to back down.
The next day I got a call from Art himself. He said he was very disappointed that I had rejected the job and he asked me if I thought I could come up with a ‘better idea’ than the one they had given me. I thought for a second. Here was this powerful art director, graciously giving a punk kid an opening to change his mind and act like a grown-up, so I was very tempted. I really wanted to do the work.
But then I thought: who’s going to decide which idea’s better? Them, of course; the art department - which meant the odds were they’d probably still pick their own idea. So I decided I’d go for broke. I said, ‘Art, I don’t know if I can do something better than you guys, but I know I can do something more personal.’ There was silence for a second. Then Art said, ‘I like that answer. Why don’t you do something more personal?’
So I did, and when my picture - pictures, really; it was a sequence of three – when the pictures were published, Wodehouse, who was about 90 or so, wrote a funny letter to Playboy. He said that when he first saw my illustrations for his Domestic Servant piece, he felt as if he’d been slapped in the face with a wet fish. But upon reflection, he said, he had come to think that he actually preferred ‘this modern Impressionist stuff’ to the kind of literal illustrations he had been used to all his life. It was a great letter.
After that, Art let me run on a pretty long leash. And since I was doing work for them every issue, other people saw what I was doing and began calling me to do the same kind of thing.
So had you developed your style at that point?
Well I never really thought about style very much. No, that’s not true - I did think about it. Because when I started, you were supposed to have a style. So yes, I did think about it, but not, I suppose, the way other people did.
I was drawn to different styles, so I tried different things: Ronald Searle’s scratchy style appealed to me, but so did Diego Rivera’s murals and Hokusai’s woodcuts. Yet whenever I tried to do stuff like them, it ended up looking like I had done it and not them. My first thought was I must not be doing it right. My second thought was, well maybe that’s what style is all about: learning to live with the fact that your pictures are going to look like you’ve done them.
So how much of that was a conscious development?
Oh, I suppose a little thought went into it, but I more-or-less sleepwalked into it.
It turned out that my style is to do things directly and not to strive for effect. I’ve always been impressed by people who can paint a thing one color so that when they paint over it, it’ll show through. When that happens in one of my pictures, it’s usually because I’ve covered something up.
When I was 19, 20 and working in Chicago, I developed a very virtuoso style. It was all black and white, very textured. I was using acrylic paint, but getting an effect like you’d get with woodcuts or lithos. That was the portfolio I took to Playboy and brought to New York. It was a very original look and it got me a lot of work right away.
I got off the train in New York at 11 o’clock one morning, stowed my suitcase in a locker, went directly to a phone booth and made an appointment to drop off the portfolio. Four hours later, I had a double page assignment from Avant Garde. I hadn’t even found a hotel to stay in that night.
So it worked; the style had gotten some very high profile attention very quickly. But over the next year, as I became more sure of my imagery, I realized that I wanted to disappear into the pictures. And for that I needed a style that was invisible.
As your style developed, how did art directors respond?
It’s hard to generalize, but at the time, people seemed to think of style as a permanent condition, like having one leg. If you got known for doing pen and ink drawings, that was your style. If you did acrylic paintings, that was your style. For a while, there were a bunch of illustrators who emulsified their acrylics with dishwashing detergent – it caused the paint to bubble up on the canvas. So that was their style.
And once you had a style, you weren’t supposed to change it either. It was supposed to be like career suicide or something. You were diluting your “brand.”
Well, the first pictures people identified me with were these very stylized things for Playboy. So when I started doing ink drawings, art directors would call and ask: ‘Are there two Brad Hollands and which one are you?’ Then I started doing paintings, so they’d call to ask if there were three of us. By the time I started doing pastels and writing articles, I think most art directors had concluded that there was only one of me, but that I was afflicted with multiple personalities. It took a while for most of them to get used to me. I used to tell them that syle is a living thing and it’s no more permanent than your face.
What in your background caused you to think about it that way?
I always thought like a writer, I suppose, like Mark Twain or Graham Greene, somebody like that. The way Greene would write screenplays and movie reviews, or travel books and novels and short stories. I thought why can’t artists do the same thing? I also liked the idea of being a composer. Like Duke Ellington or George Gershwin. I mean which style was Gershwin’s style: Porgy and Bess? Rhapsody in Blue? Stairway to Paradise? I tended to think of art like that. I wanted to concentrate on form - just getting the noses in the right place and the fingers on the right side of the hand. I figured I’d let my style - whatever that turned out to be - sneak up on me.
It’s said that you are the creator of conceptual illustration. Was it a conscious decision to overturn popular illustration at that time?
Oh no, it was just a decision to do the kind of work I wanted to do.
Which was?
Well, remember I never studied art or went to college, so I was never really integrated by stages into the existing art scene. I came from high school in a little town in Ohio straight to the art scene in Chicago with no period of adjustment. So suddenly – being in a business where people could make a whole career out of just painting stripes on a canvas - or where they called drawings ‘works on paper’ - the world of fine art just struck me as being very bizarre.
On the one hand, there was illustration, which was supposed to be insignificant by definition, no matter how much authority it might convey; and on the other hand, there was fine art, which was supposed to be important - again by definition. Now if you came to this way of thinking by stages – through art school and so on, I suppose it ‘s inevitable that you’d think that way. But if you came at it without a filter, as I did, those distinctions didn’t seem to make any more sense than the length of your sideburns or the width of your lapels. It was just an intellectual fashion statement, and I thought why let your life be determined by fashion?
So for you, it wasn’t like a punk revolution, like the radicals in the 70’s in the UK?
On no, not at all. In fact, I always thought of punk as a fashion statement, a look, an attitude. Punks were very self-conscious; you don’t just wake up one day with green hair and a ring through your nose. That’s a major fashion decision. Also by the time punk became punk, it was a movement. What I was doing was a pretty solitary thing, just doing assignments on a case-by-case basis and sparring with art directors about not making changes. In a way I suppose, what I was doing was maybe the opposite of punk.
In what way?
Well, radicals always want to make revolutions, but revolutions aren’t always made by radicals. Sometimes change comes from people who just want to keep in step with tradition, but discover that tradition has gotten out of step with the times. So they skip a beat to get things back on track. Frankly, as far as revolutions went, I thought that fine art had crawled out on a limb and had nowhere to go but to saw itself off.
After Cubism and Abstract Expressionism, there was this presumption that you could never go back to drawing things that looked like things. Everybody had to be a revolutionary or else you were a square. But revolutions are only revolutions if you don’t have them very often. If you do, you don’t have a revolution; you have a lot of unstable people on your hands.
So by the time I arrived in Chicago, the art world was full of unstable people. A lot of them were burning up to be the new Picasso or the new Kandinsjy or the new Andy Warhol. And by the seventies, for God’s sake, you couldn’t walk through Soho in New York without getting run over by a topless cello player or guys covering themselves with vasoline or eating holes in sheetrock or else, if you stood still, Christo might come along to wrap you up. Now I thought that if all these people were having a good time, that was their business. It’s just that that kind of thing didn’t hold any interest for me, so I went my own way.
For me, art was no different than it had ever been when I was a kid back in Ohio. The US has about 300 million people in it. In a country this size, it just makes sense to make pictures that are a part of everyday life. So magazines, books - things like that - just seemed to be a logical place for me to go.
If you regard Playboy as your first real break, where did you go from there?
Playboy was a monthly assignment, and since it was probably the highest paying magazine in the world at that time – and since I lived somewhat like a college student - I didn’t need much more money than I was making from them. That gave me a lot of time to start doing drawings for some of the hippie papers that were coming along: like Rat, Screw, the East Village Other, the New York Ace. They only paid about ten bucks a picture, but without anyone looking over my shoulder, I was able to do drawings the major magazines might never have printed. For some reason, this stuff started to attract attention and one day, the art director of the New York Times called and asked if I’d be interested in doing drawings like that for them.
That was the New York Times Op-ed page?
Yeah, they were just starting it then. The idea was they’d solicit editorials from people who weren’t on staff and get opinions that didn’t necessarily reflect the newspaper’s point of view.
And you were one of the first contributors?
Yeah. They wanted some kind of art to go with these articles, but they didn’t want the kind of political cartoons that other newspapers were running – you know, like Uncle Sams, and John Q. Publics and politicians with their names written on their suits. I think actually the Times was just too stuck-up to want to run drawings like that – but whatever the reason, it was good news for me. I persuaded the editor not to try illustrating articles, but to consider my idea of marrying pictures to them. I said you’d get better pictures out me by leaving me alone than by making me channel a lot of writers I’d never met. I’d been peddling this idea everywhere, but outside of Art Paul and the acidheads who were pasting up the hippie papers wearing sunglasses, I wasn’t getting much traction with it. But I lucked out at the Times.
The editor of the Op-ed page was Harrison Salisbury, who had made his name as a Pulitzer Prize winning author, Moscow correspondent during the Stalin era and head of the Washington bureau during the Kennedy years. He was a top notch guy. He also respected himself too and that’s always important. People who respect themselves usually respect others – and you’re always more likely to sell a new idea to a leader than a follower, because leaders are willing to lead.
Anyway, Harrison bought into my approach and gave me two articles to try me out. I did some drawings; he liked them, and presto, I suddenly had a big international forum for the kind of work I wanted to do. A great editor like that can make a great difference. Unfortunately, the Golden Age didn’t last very long. Harrison was about to turn 65 and the Times had to put him out to pasture. So suddenly, just as he was getting the page going, he was replaced by this dreadful woman who had no interest in the job at all.
If she wasn’t interested in it, why did she take it?
I’ve always wondered myself. Ambition, I suppose. She had formerly been the Times ‘society columnist.’ See, the Times didn’t have a ‘gossip columnist’ – she was their society columnist; big difference. The way I saw it was - the Times wanted to be politically cool –- so by making her editor of the Op-page, she was suddenly the first woman editor of a major newspaper. And since the Times was the country’s most major newspaper, she was suddenly being touted as ‘the most powerful woman in journalism.’ I suppose that’s the reason she wanted the job - but other than that, I couldn’t see what she was doing there.
Her great ambition in life was to suck up to the rich so she could condescend to them in her articles. She didn’t show much interest in actual news, but she was dreadfully interested in who Babe Paley had been dining with or whether you pronounced Stas Radziwell’s nickname as “Stas” or “Stash.” It was quite an experience to try talking with her about ordinary stuff.
Did it ever settle into a good working relationship?
No, but for a while it wasn’t too bad. David Schneiderman, who had been Harrison’s assistant, actually oversaw all the art. She was happy to let him do it because it meant she didn’t have to deal with us. She’d usually let David alone to art edit the page - at least until she found something on it she didn’t like; like some drawing that somebody in her social circle had called ‘lugubrious’ or something like that. Then she’d haul David in and look at him like he’d been using the wrong fork.
David would usually give her some erudite explanation about how the picture illustrated this or that - he had picked up that technique. She’d usually look at him as if to say ‘I’m wise to you guys;’ but the truth is, I think she knew if she got rid of all the artists she didn’t like, she’d have to deal with a lot of blank spaces on the page. So she just settled for living with us and it turned into a pretty uneasy stalemate.
And were you comfortable with that?
No, I had a lot of other options by then, so I gradually stopped working for the Times. I left them with a little folder full of hundreds of sketches. The art director could go through the book and if he found a sketch he wanted to use, I’d do a finished drawing of it. Of course all this was years ago. The Times has been through several editors and art directors since then. They still have the folder of sketches. I update it periodically and I still work with them, although nowhere near as often.
Which brings us back to the present. When you’re not working to commission these days, do you still make pictures for yourself?
Oh sure, all the time. I have a painting that’s going to be in the Society of Illustrators show this year that was published last year but which was done 10 or 11 years ago. It just took a while for the right article to come along. I’ve also got boxes full of sketches that I can mine for ideas whenever a job comes in.
So do you make a distinction between commercial and personal work?
No, the trick is to find what’s personal in whatever you do.
You’ve talked quite a bit about the past. What’s your experience of the art editors and directors that you work with now?
It’s a very uneven time. On the one hand, there are some very confident art directors like David Harris at Vanity Fair, who are ideal to work with. And on the other hand, a lot of art directors can get steamrolled by their editors – especially the ones who owe them their jobs. You know, a new editor often comes in and wants an art director who hasn’t staked out his own turf. So he hires a new guy. That makes it harder for the art director to assert himself. For the editor, I think it’s counter-productive. Editors who always second-guess art directors often get second best work.
What motivates you?
I’ve never really thought about it. Whatever I’m doing, I’ve been doing it since I was five. When I was a kid, I used to listen to the radio and draw. And when you discover what you want to do that early in life, you tend to tune out a lot of the things that normally socialize people – like paying attention in school or going to college. You develop within a kind of parallel universe where if you’re willing to be an adult for five or six hours each day, you get to be a five-year-old the rest of the time. So whatever motivated me when I was a kid is the same thing that acts on me now. I’ve always had more will than sense.
As well as being active as an artist you have founded the Illustrators’ Partnership. That seems like a big part of your professional life?
Yeah, and I wish it weren’t. I really punched the tar baby when I got into that. I thought I’d write one article and then get back to my life. I never expected it to snowball into what it has.
The AOI were following the Orphaned works debate last year. What’s the situation with that now? Can you explain about Orphan Works?
Yes, easily. Under current US copyright law everything you create is protected by copyright. Under this proposed bill, nothing would be. Nothing! Every picture you do, every painting, every sketch, every doodle, every note, email – even every family snapshot, home video, whatever - everything will become an ‘orphan work’ unless you’ve registered it with a private, commercial registry. Users would then be free to infringe the work
Is that legal?
If they write it into law it will be. Of course, it’ll violate international copyright law, but that doesn’t seem to bother the people at the Copyright Office or the Congressmen who are trying to ram it through Congress. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s got tremendous support.
What kind of commercial registries are you supposed to register these works with?
That’s what we’d like to know. All the bill’s sponsors will say is that they believe if they pass the law, it’ll ‘incentivize’ (their word) the private sector. And you can bet it will too! There are always opportunists ready and willing to make money off of artists.
How do illustrators working on the ground, ordinary people scribbling away or making masterpieces with their Wacom tablets come to grips with all this? How do they understand what’s going on?
Well, in theory, the bill is supposed to be nothing more than an amendment that’ll let libraries and museums use a lot of old work. But in reality, it’s been written so broadly that it’ll legalize the infringement of anybody’s work from the moment they create it. Or to put it another way: under normal copyright law, someone has to make a deal with you before they can use your work. As a result, you know they’ve used your work, and so do they. It’s a two party transaction. But under this bill, someone could use your work and you may never know about it. That’d be a single-party transaction and there’s another word for that: theft.
What will the effect of this bill be globally?
It could act as an international copyright virus. For this reason: under the Berne Convention – which is the international copyright law – you aren’t required to mark your work with a copyright symbol or register it in order to have it protected. But if a work isn’t marked, there won’t be any way for an infringer in the US to source it; it could be work from any country. All the law would require the infringer to do is satisfy himself that he’s made what the bill calls ‘a reasonably-diligent search’ to find the artist. And when he’s satisfied that he’s done that, the infringer could use your work for any purpose, even a global advertising campaign.
This would shift the burden of diligence from the infringer, where it is now, to you. You’d be responsible for monitoring the infringement of any work you’ve ever done. And since your work could be infringed anytime, anywhere in the world, that imposes an impossible burden. It’ll open the door to cultural theft on an unprecedented scale.
What do you think will happen next?
Well, last time, we stopped the bill in the House Judiciary Committee. Thousands of artists jammed their fax machines. I testified against it in both the House and Senate – on behalf of 42 groups, including international groups like the AOI. The bill’s sponsors had fast-tracked it for passage by September of ’06, but instead they had to take it back to the shop for repairs. Now we expect them to resurrect it, in one form or another, this spring.
There was mention of an artwork tagging system – has that been dismissed?
Well, we proposed it as an alternative to passing such a blunderbuss law. A medical illustrator named Cynthia Turner – who was the first person to notice that this bill was in the works - she and I researched a system where artists could be assigned ‘persistent identity tags.’ A publisher could then embed your tag into your work when it went to press and after that, every time your picture was used somewhere, it would phone home.
But frankly I don’t think the people pushing this bill are interested. For example, Google has given some legal scholars at Stanford University two million bucks to file lawsuits undermining copyright protections and Google has said that if this bill passes, they expect to use millions of orphaned works.
Are these issues not debated on the curriculum in the US? Do you have any involvement with any universities or art schools?
Most people teaching in art schools don’t know anything about this stuff and frankly, most don’t seem to care. A lot of artists seem to think they’ll be better artists if they’re bad businessmen.
I just saw a film about the illustrator William Steig. He got paid $50 in the 1940s for an illustration. He said his whole family was able to live on that for some time. Have fees over here grown relatively since then?
No. When I started with Playboy, I could live by doing one picture for them every month. I don’t know any young artist who could do that now.
I thought that illustrators in the US were well-respected, minor celebrities almost, that illustrators can enjoy good status?
Oh, it’s still OK at the top, I suppose, but for people on the way up, the stairs have dropped out of the business. Twenty years ago, a kid coming out of art school could count on getting a couple of four or five hundred dollar spot illustrations a month maybe – enough to pay the bills, get experience, develop a style, build a portfolio, get a reputation. But stock houses have changed that. Look at magazines: see how many pictures are credited now just to ‘Getty’ or ‘Corbis.’ No artists’ names. And it’s hard to build a reputation if you don’t have a name.
And the prices: who’s going to pay a young artist $500 for a picture if they can get a knock-off from Getty for 49 bucks? And as for the quality, well, the dirty little secret of our craft has always been that artists have to work hard to give clients better work than clients often want. So stock houses saw an opportunity there: give clients bright colours at cheap prices and a lot of them will be happier than if you gave them something original or offbeat and charged them a lot more money.
But I don’t mean to be too negative. I’m just trying to describe the nature of the new competition. Things aren’t going to go back to the way they were. We have to size up the landscape and go on from here.
You’ve got your finger on the pulse of contemporary illustration. How do you feel about the way that illustration has evolved. Are there illustrators you admire? Do you have any heroes?
Well actually, I don’t think I do have my finger on the pulse of illustration. I’ve got my finger on my own pulse! I’ve always imagined the world I work in to be the way I think it should be; then I act as if I live in that world. I did that back in the sixties and by the seventies my real world had begun to resemble the one I had imagined. And, of course, where things didn’t fit, I adjusted. But that’s about the same way I approach the future now.
What about the way your own work has evolved. Do you explore different technical aspects of it, materials, scale, and so on?
Sure. For example, I originally did that painting Three Dogs [pointing to a big canvas on an easel nearby] as a small picture for a German magazine. Then I thought I could do it better, so I did it again, only bigger and of course, different.
Or sometimes circumstance leads you into new territory. Take trends. I try never to follow trends, Yet a couple times in my career my work has become a trend. And each time I felt the need to escape. First it happened with ink drawings; then suddenly there were a lot of ink drawings like mine. Then I switched to paintings. Then one day I woke up and felt like I was just one more guy who painted like Brad Holland. So I went out and got a box of Crayolas and started doing crayon drawings. Then I switched from crayons to pastels and suddenly I’d found an outlet for ideas that would never have worked as paintings. But do I see changes like that as an evolution? I don’t know. I don’t really think consciously about a direction for my work. I just sleepwalk through each picture and when the pictures all add up, it adds up to a direction.
What are the highs of your career?
Individual pictures. Images I don’t think anybody had ever thought of before.
Further reading
www.bradholland.net
www.illustratorspartnership.org
www.newyorkartworld.com/commentary/holland2.html
illoz.com/bradholland/
http://illustratorspartnership.org/downloads/Holland_ColumbiaLawJournal.pdf
http://www.illustratorspartnership.org/01_topics/article.php?searchterm=00185
http://www.unitedpgremote.com/society/soi_2008_02_21.html