On this episode of Workbook Radio, podcaster/photographer Daniel Bedell talks shop with award-winning illustrator and painter Gregory Manchess.
I look at your work, it’s super impressive to me. But it makes me think, why isn’t this guy only a fine artist? What drew him to being an illustrator? Was it a practical business move? Was it people he admired were in this [field]? I can just see this, and I hope this doesn’t come across [poorly], I can see some people say illustrators are second class citizens to true fine artists.
Oh yeah, yeah. Absolutely. All the time. We suck. We suck because we’re commercial. We suck because we go for the money. And it just doesn’t work that way. Again, [it is perceived] we really don’t understand the world, the market of art and as an artist I think we do. I’ll run around, like, “Wow did that happen for you? Yeah, that happened for me. Oh, I’ll do that again.” You know, it started slow like anything else. We study people that seem like they have talent early. You have to dig back and back, farther and farther into their lives to find the links. It’s like finding the source of the Nile or Mississippi. It spreads out, it’s fingers. You can’t point to one thing. It compiles.
But I had years of loving television and comics and film and illustration that I saw everyday. And all that said to me was, these people can draw like crazy. These people can paint like crazy. So, when I got to art school and was told that painting and drawing were dead, I was not in a spot to hear that. I was like, “Wait a minute, I’m paying you money so I can learn how to draw a face and hand!” And they said, “Oh no no no. We threw all that out years ago.” And I thought, “Well, I’m not ready to let it go.” And illustration was the place that had people drawing and painting not just realistically, there’s loads and wonderful styles, some completely wild styles and illustration has it all over fine art. And I saw that from a young man’s heart.
I adored it. I just fell in love with it and I thought, “Well, I’m gonna do this for a while and maybe I’ll go paint later on.” And a guy I knew, David Grove, who was a fabulous illustrator (his career was huge in the ’70s and ’80s) became a friend of mine, and we were talking when I was a young student. I said to him, “I figured I’d do illustration and then go paint.” And he said, “Yeah, you and 14 million other guys think the same thing.” (Laughing) And I thought, “Wow, this illustration thing is hard! And if it’s hard… it’s gotta be right.” And so I went after that.
The fine art stuff is hard in a different kind of light than illustration. But one isn’t better than the other. One isn’t wrong and one is right. That’s not the point. It’s a lot about the passion and what you’re going after. Money still gets to the same spot between both of them. Illustration, you deal with the money upfront, and then you go and do the best job you can. And then fine art, you do the best job you can, and then you got to figure out how to sell it, because you got to sell it. Otherwise you don’t survive.
And that’s where a lot of the mythology starts about the starving artist and all that stuff. I haven’t starved at any time since I left that stupid art school because I went into illustration, and I’ve learned to not only feed myself physically but feed my mind with much more stuff. I never was interested in doing art. I don’t want to talk about art. I want to talk about people. I want to talk about stories, narration…narrative, rather. I want to talk about the human condition. I love when you go to the museums and you see paintings about people in situations: adventures and tragedies and all that stuff. That’s interesting. Don’t tell me that when I go into a gallery I have to be told how to think about blue.
What do you think it’s been that’s helped make you successful? Has it been moves that you’ve made or things about you that have contributed to that?
Yeah, there’s probably a combination of the two. Moves that I’ve made is part of it because I would say to myself, alright where do I go? Do I sit in Kentucky? Do I sit in Iowa and paint and become the unknown painter? Or do I get to New York and Chicago and Los Angeles and drag my portfolio around? So, moves like that were things that I challenged myself with. And I challenged pretty high. I was walking into agencies and magazines and film production companies with my portfolio looking for work. And back then it was brutal. It was hard because people tend to tell you what they like and don’t like about your work and I had to listen. The only thing I could do was listen.
So the next part of that is the perseverance part, which I think comes out of childhood a lot, somehow…multiple factors. My parents encouraged me to do the things I loved, which were drawing and painting, especially my mom. But she wasn’t the kind of person who just loved everything I did. She didn’t stick it on the refrigerator and fawn over it. She would point to [it] and say, “Well, you know the back of this horse…the proportion isn’t quite right.” (Laughing) After a while I thought, “Jeez, Mom! Give me a break here! I’m four, Mom! I’m four!”
(Laughing)
It was hard, I thought. Okay, wow. If I can impress her, then I’ve done something. And so, you know, I was constantly trying to impress my mom and my dad, and especially my brother, who would come home from the Air Force Academy, and he’d be drawing Peanuts cartoons. He loved those. And I would try to copy that. I would try to copy him copying Peanuts. And he would show me tricks and shapes and things like that. So if I could impress him then I figured, okay hey maybe I’ll be doing well. After a while as I got older, I realized oh it’s pretty much…you need to impress yourself. And that’s tricky. Because it takes innovation. It takes changing where you’ve been on the last drawing and moving into the next one and the next one. So that perseverance was built from childhood. And especially when you walk into art school and they go,”No, we’re not teaching drawing and painting anymore.” And you get a little pissed off. So I was out to prove that I could, in a world that didn’t want to see illustration. In a world that didn’t care about illustration. In a world that really didn’t care about painting or realism, I was determined to say, “No, this is not dead!” You know? We’ve only been oil painting for hundreds of years, not thousands.
A lot of people think of someone who’s painting or drawing as a very solitary thing. They don’t think about, “Oh this person’s having to deal with the business side of things or have someone giving a lot of input.” I’m just curious if there was a big change between how that side of things looked from when you started to when you were maybe 10-15 years in?
Mmm. I never really had a problem with the idea of going for help in the form of an illustration rep. I figured […] illustration is kind of a lonely life because you’re there by yourself working a lot. You need to be able to get into the world and explore, but a lot of times you’re going to be on the board or at the easel. So basically, I thought if there’s someone in the world hustling for my work, then I can do the work and allow them to bring it in. Once I was in mid-career and working away, the only part that was not good about the agent situation was at that point, my work was bringing in much more attention to the agent, and he was overwhelming me with work. And what I hated was turning him down. If somebody said, “Oh we’d like to have Manchess do this.” I mean, to a guy who’d been in the business for 15 years or more, that’s like chiming bells! That’s sparkly stuff. We want you to do this. Oh, that sounds wonderful!
How do you decide what to say no to? It sounded like you had to learn that, maybe.
Yeah, absolutely right. On what to say no to, a couple things on that. My boss at Hellman design was Gary Kelly. I was there before Gary Kelly became the Gary Kelly we know as the guy that’s won more medals than anybody else at Society of Illustrators and his work is brilliant. He sent me a little badge one time. It said: No bad jobs. Don’t take on every job that comes down the pike. You have to pick and choose the ones that you think are going to take you to the next stage. And I listened to him on that because I watched him do that. And I realized that when work would come in I had decisions to make about how to take it.
So I had to visualize the final piece, and if it was something that I thought I could build off of then it was pretty much an instant yes. Other jobs you had to judge on whether or not they were going to pay you well. So sometimes I would take on jobs that paid really well but were just not the best. You got to do that. That’s life. That’s life of surviving. That’s the thing we don’t talk about in society either. That artists have to survive in order to be the geniuses we think they are so, you know, they gotta eat like everybody else.
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