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A few months ago I was contacted by The Saturday Evening Post to create an illustration to accompany a J.D. Salinger story set to run in their July/August 2010 issue. Seeing that e-mail in my inbox was a real thrill, let me tell you, and I couldn’t wait to get started! And I confess, though I consider myself a well read person I had never read any of J.D. Salinger’s works before the beginning of this assignment (I know! Bad, Ashley!).
The chosen short story, “A Boy in France,” was written during Salinger’s time in army service during World War II, and was originally published by The Post in 1945. From its tone and realism the story made it clear that Salinger was writing about experiences and feelings of a war that he knew intimately, not from the distance of American soil. I wanted to capture this feeling in the final illustration, and to really hi-light the difference between the nostalgic glow of home and the dark reality of life in a WWII foxhole.
Working with the art director at The Post was wonderful, and when I presented her with my three sketches she chose one that we were both excited about. From there it was a straight shot to the finish, and then many weeks of excited waiting for it to be published before I could share the final. And then a couple of weeks ago, this arrived in the mail:
With lovely cover done by Paul Rogers
Hey! There it is!
So there you go – my first job with The Saturday Evening Post! I’m really pleased with the final painting, and thoroughly enjoyed working with everyone over at The Post. You can still find this issue on newsstands through August.
This is the very first time I’ve participated in Illustration Friday! I’ve been regularly visiting the site for a while now, but this is the first chance that I’ve had to jump in on the fun. Perhaps it’s because I’m warming up for an upcoming web design job, but yesterday my fingers were just itching to draw, rather than type. Ergo, drawing:
Satellite
Things have been terribly quiet here on my blog lately, but that’s not to say that work has been quiet as well. In fact I’ve been quite busy, and it’s been wonderful! The past few months have been spent working on a few illustrations for children’s magazines, which I will be able to share with you closer to their publication dates in June and October.
Grandma Sylvia, 2010
One project that I recently finished and am able to share is the above painting that I created for my Grandmother. She lived with my family from when I was two to when I was fifteen, and she had a big hand in my childhood and my upbringing. She is the mother of my father and yesterday, together with my uncle’s family, we celebrated her 92nd birthday. It was a wonderful day where we all cooked dinner together, and shared stories of Sylvia’s life and family over good food and good drinks – and boy does she have some stories! This is a lady who lived in Afghanistan for five years when my dad was in college. She traveled all over the world, from India to Iran to Guatemala, collecting goods for an imports store that she ran, all while raising three kids – two of which were rambunctious boys who were very into mischief making (speaking of great stories, my Dad and Uncle have them… but those are for a different post). She was a “Badger Beauty” as a college student in Green Bay Wisconsin, and when asked what her secret to reaching 92 years is, she responded “milk,” like a true Wisconsin girl. At 92 she is incredibly sweet, and has a serenity to her that is hard to find in others her age – to me, my Grandma is the epitome of graceful aging, and the picture of a life well lived.
A few months ago she requested a painting of herself gazing at the moon and a star from her bed, and the completed piece was my gift to her for her birthday yesterday – in the interim time, I got to spend the weeks painting this thinking of my Grandmother’s life, and remembering the memories we have shared. In that way, although I don’t think she knows it, her request for a painting was a gift to me.
The New Year brought some good news with it! I woke up on January 1st to find that my painting Jo has been accepted by the Society of Illustrators of Los Angeles into this year’s juried show! I’m so grateful that my work has been selected for the Illustration West show, and it’s an honor to be included once again. Thank you, SILA judges, for the great start to 2010!
Happy New Year!
I have just returned from ringing in the beginning of our new decade with family and friends, and I thought this might be the appropriate time to post one of the last pieces of 2009. Fittingly, the subject of this illustration is a party scene.
This illustration was commissioned by Saint Mary’s College of California, and art directed by Bob Ciano, who was a pleasure to work with once again. A couple of months ago Bob contacted me to create a theatre poster for a Word For Word production of three short stories by Virginia Woolf at Saint Mary’s. Each story takes place at a party, and they were presented together on the stage as selected moments from the famous fictional party of Mrs. Dalloway.
Being that I am a literary-minded person with a great interest in theatre, this project was exciting to me on multiple levels. It was my first chance to read any of Virginia Woolf’s work, and I was entranced by her use of language, particularly by her repeated references to water. Each of the three stories center around a different woman’s experience at the party, and each of the women is at some point caught in a struggle, swept away in a social situation that rises out of their control, and left struggling – almost drowning – in a sea of necessary propriety and social expectations.
The entire story created a wonderful opportunity to play with watery colors and an aqueous environment, and I really enjoyed exploring all of the possible concepts in the sketch process. Sometime in the future I may come back and edit this post to share some of the thumbnails. The final piece was well received, and ran as a theatre poster advertising the show’s run during the end of November.
