#Cute But Sad Luke Cheuh #Inspiration 1.0 Vince Frost
You really get the feeling that Luke wants to be the best at whatever he is doing at In this regular feature we ask renowned creatives what they think inspiration is. It’s a spur of the moment answer, a stream of consciousness and hopefully an insight for the rest of us. This issue we asked the man himself, Mr Vince Frost. Vince Frost is what you might call a fast tracker to success. In 1989 he joined Pentagram in London, and just three years later he was their youngest ever associate at 27 years. In another two years he’d started his own studio,
Inspiration is a real problem. Vague nowhere mind set, a mind breathe.
Frost Design (www.frostdesign.com. au) which he still runs with offices in Australia, the United Kingdom
Hustle and stress,
and the United Arab Emirates.
a constant requirement to deliver. To surprise, to think beyond the expected. Problems unresolved accumulate into festering stress pits. Sometimes being free of any thought creates windows, visual windows, my inspiration comes from the opportunity. Eyes open breathing in pictures, potential ideas, reference. Books, magazines, people doing quality things. Tight parameters, blank paper. Something out of nothing, no budget.... I get excited about making ideas reality. Inspiration is normally desperation. The momentum of years of digging, a mind archive Nothing beats the feeling of the ‘click’
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The body smile when you’ve found what you were looking for.
It’s a story of success that he puts down to an inability to look at any job as being a bad job, insisting every piece of work you do should be your best, whether it’s for a multinational or for the hair-dresser on the corner. It’s a theory that there’s a perfect answer for every brief, you just have to find it.
the time. He comes across in
painting for a while and put
interviews as a person who
design on the back burner.
is constantly trying to better himself, upgrade his skills and
Touted these days as one of
move up to the next level. He
the hottest properties on
clearly likes to concentrate
the LA art circuit you might
on the task at hand freely
say it was a good decision.
admitting that he stopped drawing and painting at one
Looking at his work your
point so he could focus on
first reaction is based on the
becoming a Graphic Designer.
cuteness of his Manga styled characters in their many forms
It was only when he moved
of bear, monkey and rabbit.
to Los Angeles and couldn’t
These instantly adorable
find work he started painting
characters are juxtaposed
again as a way to keep himself
against the ironic and slightly
busy while looking. In March
disturbing situations they
2003 he decided to show
find themselves in. A bear
some of his paintings and
finding himself on fire is
was surprised by how well
slightly bemused at the fact
they were received, coming
that the tap of the shower
very close to a sell out show.
has come off, leaving him to
As you can imagine this
burn. Or the cute rabbit that
encouraged him to keep
turns his back on his adoring audience to take a much needed cigarette break. It’s as if these icons of 20th century innocence are thoroughly disappointed at how the world views them and have resorted to often extreme acts to provethey have more depth than the average toy.
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While some of the pictures
creature allowing us to look
The themes stem from
are clearly quite horrific, Luke
on from a comfortably safe
Luke’s unhappy childhood
creates a buffer zone between
distance. An idea that appeals
of growing up as American
the viewer and the tortured
to many in our voyeuristic
Chinese in a minority
creature allowing us to look
society and is demonstrated
intolerant community. Seen
on from a comfortably safe
most prominently by the
as a commodity by the
distance. An idea that appeals
way his art consistently sells.
other kids you can see direct
to many in our voyeuristic
A bunny chopping his ears
parallels to the loneliness his
society and is demonstrated
off in muted silence is the
creations show. Not fitting
most prominently by the
perfect conversation opener
into a world that demands
way his art consistently sells.
for guests to your house…
stereotypes the animals can
A bunny chopping his ears
unless of course they have
take their frustrations out in
off in muted silence is the
small children with them (in
ways that Luke was never able
perfect conversation opener
which case you’ll probably be
to. Luckily he has chosen to
for guests to your house…
seen as the devil incarnate for
turn those frustrations into
unless of course they have
purchasing such an upsetting
inspiration for his art and
small children with them (in
piece of art let alone actually
although the pictures insist
which case you’ll probably be
putting it on your wall).
you feel empathy for these
seen as the devil incarnate for
melancholy forms they also
purchasing such an upsetting
provide humour based on
piece of art let alone actually
the irony that horrible things
putting it on your wall).
happen, no matter how
While some of the pictures
cute or harmless you are.
are clearly quite horrific, Luke creates a buffer zone between the viewer and the tortured
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#Infinite Activity James Jean Talented, likeable and busy are the three words that occur to me when summing up 33-yearold James Jean. His art skills are without doubt although he admits he still feels he has a lot to learn. It’s this humble approach that has made him so many friends and supporters in the illustration industry, causing him to be often described as the artists’ artist. Moving to New Jersey from Taiwan when he was just three, James had always been hooked on art even though his family was anything but artistically minded. “My Dad would bring home computer paper, all dot matrix graphics and I’d turn it over and do these huge pictures of robots, Voltron and all the good stuff.” The little interest that his parents gave his pictures didn’t stop him and he drew at every chance he got. When he was about 12 he managed to see a neighbor’s copy of a Wolverine comic and it was complete seduction of the innocent, “They had the Yakuza in it, they were on drugs, there’s women in there, all this violence, it was great,” he remembers, “That really sucked me in and I started collecting comics for a while.” The interest in comics and art waned when he started high school and he became interested in another obsession: the trumpet. “It was a strange detour I admit, but I was intent on becoming a Jazz legend.”
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It was only in the last year of senior high he started to think about art again and enrolled in one of the only art courses available, advertising illustration, where he drew a multitude of cereal boxes. “I basically knew I wouldn’t make it as a professional musician and I thought ‘hey I’ve always drawn, why don’t I just give it a shot’ and I did.” Enrolling in the school of visual arts (SVA) in New York he joined the cartooning program but quickly switched after a year to illustration. “It was an absolute revelation for me when I got to SVA,” he says, “I looked at New York City and fell in love with all the painting and art.” He spent a lot of his spare time attending museums, galleries and meeting passionate artists and slowly the energy to be a musician slipped away and was replaced with a fiercer ambition to become a great painter. At 20 and still in college he began working for an entertainment company doing drawings in Flash. The money was great but unfortunately only lasted for a year when the dot com bubble burst. Finding more illustration work proved to be a lot harder, “I decided my work was suited for book covers and approached all the big publishing companies.” They all rejected him. “I did eventually do one book cover for Simon & Schuster but it turned out terrible and was one of the worst experiences ever.”
Determined not to be beaten he kept at it and was thrown a lifeline after visiting entertainment giant, DC Comics, the home of Superman and Batman. They gave him the chance to do a few covers for a new series they were starting in their mature audiences division, Vertigo. The title was called ‘Fables’ and revolved around the idea of fairy tale characters descending on present day New York. The series went so well that they kept him on and his professional career was born. “One cover pays pretty well so I could do one cover a month and bum around for the rest of the time.” A dream job by anyone’s standards and one that allowed him time to build up his portfolio and launch his website, something that started gaining a lot of attention. “That eventually got me a lot more illustration work unfortunately to the detriment of my own personal work… a bit of a trade off.”
Throughout the last few years clients such as MTV, Spin, Atlantic Records, The New York Times, Scholastic and Playboy, have started to roll in helping him reach even more fans. Recently he was inducted into the Gold Medal Society of Illustrators LA and in 2004 was awarded ‘Best Cover Artist’ in the comic world’s Oscars: the Eisner Awards.
Vertigo appreciated the fact that James wasn’t from the comic book world, bringing a fresh perspective into a market place where the art can sometimes seem a little synonymous. “They’ve got this interesting mentality that they’re publishing fiction, not comics,” he points out. Soon after starting the Fables covers he was offered his first superhero title to cover, “It did okay and that introduced me to a whole new audience of comic fans. There are a lot of art directors out there who’re comic fans. I’ve had some people hire me while being fans at the same time, which is kind of cool.”
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We were lucky enough to catch him in between jobs while he was suffering from the flu to ask him a few questions. So how does a normal day work for you? I wake up at nine or ten. Answer e-mails. I get a lot of fan mail, especially a lot from the comic art world. I tell you, the longer I work in the industry the more frightened I get of how zealous the fans are. I mean it’s good because they buy a lot of the art. They really love the work and really follow everything I do. They care, just in a very intense way. 90% of web searches under your name end up being a comic fan’s blog. Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s an interesting mix, a lot of emails from art students too and some professional e-mails. So that takes up a little bit of time. Then I start work for... well I pretty much roll out of bed into work, maybe spend a bit of time with the wife when she gets too lonely. Normally work all day until maybe one or two a.m. everyday, seven days a week.
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Wow, that’s like 17 hours which seems excessive. It’s the only way you can make a decent living in art. Saving up for the rainy days you know. I think right now a lot of people are really blowing up and doing a lot of great work, but then what’s going to happen five years down the line when you’re out of style? Style is a key word, for example I did an album cover for ‘The Donnas’ and it’s a little different to what I usually do. It was heavily art directed, and since I’ve done that, everyone’s asking for the ‘Donnas Style’. That’s going to get played out. So it’s important you spend time trying out new styles? With each assignment I do whatever comes naturally. One of the problems I had coming out of school was my lack of direction in terms of style. I had no idea how to approach each assignment; it was only through a few years of experience that I’ve come upon a sort of a style. With the Fables covers, they’re more diverse in terms of approach and there’s a fan base, or a following, that appreciates that. So it’s sort of become my style, or my lack of it. There is a quote from one my art teachers at the SVA, he said “the best technique is no technique…”
What’s the process of illustrating a cover? I normally get a script. I love to get the script. It’s a much better experience then when they tell me what to draw. A lot of the earlier covers were really fun because they’d got the scripts 100% completed and I had time to read through them, do a bunch of sketches and pick out the dramatic moments. Or sometimes you can find little bits and pieces that maybe aren’t so important to the story, but inspire interesting imagery. Recently the writers have been falling behind and I just get a vague description and I really hate that. As an illustrator you’re meant to be working from a text, deconstructing it and putting it together in a beautiful image, rather than just being a pair of hands doing a clichéd idea. Unfortunately that happens pretty often. You’ve done a lot of trade paperback covers as well, collected works, is that a different experience, as opposed to a single comic cover? Yeah that’s definitely a big challenge in terms of hierarchy because I have to look at the story over all. Find what the main idea of the whole story-arc is, pick out the salient details and work it within that huge swirling composition. I guess that’s become my signature in a way, how I put
together that whole picture and tie in all the different story elements. Especially those Fables trade paperback covers, they’re quite daunting and grand at full scale. My natural inclination is to simplify things but then my inclination to please usually leads me to something grandiose. There’s that word again: hierarchy. It’s weird, every artist I’ve talked to lately is going on about hierarchies being the key. It must be a buzzword! I picked it up from my drawing teacher, Jim McMullan. It’s just a really good word when you’re thinking about composition and organising your ideas. I don’t know how everyone else is applying it but I look at the trendy artwork nowadays, all the Vector and all that stuff, and I guess that has a kind of hierarchy in a way. You have the big shape and then it sort of goes down into the more incidental detail. For me it works more in terms of telling a story, especially on a lot of the covers. A lot of people like it when I put in little clues and moments of incidence that give a secondary or a third reading to the cover, after they first read the story. Everything’s there for a reason. That’s what one of my professors at school stressed; you have to be responsible for your imagery. You can’t just throw it all in there, it doesn’t all have to have meaning but it should have a purpose. You
know, like Mark Ryden, he’s almost apologising for his paintings by explicitly explaining all the symbolism. I think it worked better without it, made them more mysterious and everything. How long does a piece take you on average?
Before you started doing comics you were really into your sketchbooks weren’t you? Oh yeah, I’ve done loads of them. I just don’t get as much time anymore and I don’t get around as much as I used to. I used to be ‘that guy with the sketchbook’ and I’d have one with me all the time.
It used to take me about a week, but now it takes me about half that time, maybe even a quarter of the time. With PhotoShop, it would take me forever to do my selections and figure out the colour schemes. We didn’t learn PhotoShop at school, I took that up on my own and I’ve just gotten better over the years. I’m sure I’m doing some things the long way but it hasn’t really hurt me in terms of time. I’m more of a pixel pusher with PhotoShop. I cut and paste and move stuff around rather than use it as a brush. I try and do that in the real world and then bring it into PhotoShop. Apart from PhotoShop what mediums do you use? I use mostly graphite on paper but I also use a lot of oil paints, charcoal, acrylic, basically everything, gauche. In my sketchbooks there’s a ton of paintings with acrylic, which I drew on with ballpoint pen. I also use hand painted textures that I scan in to add to the pictures,
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You’ve got some beautiful portrait work in them, catching people in their natural state. Did you ask people if you could sketch them? No, no, I’m too shy! I used to do it on the sly. You’ve released a book containing all your notebook sketches called Process/ Recess. How does that feel having them all together? It was amazing to get it in the mail, to see it all condensed into that brick. It’s hit some stores on the West Coast but we’re having a hell of time getting it over from the publishers, it’s just getting held up in customs. It’s big and it’s heavy so they must think… well I don’t know what they think. They just keep holding them, which is annoying. We did get some cases for a recent lecture and signings, and for my show. I guess we had about 150 books for the weekend and they all sold out, so that’s exciting. What did you lecture on? It was sort of a bio, Photoshop demo. I talked about my influences and all that junk. I think I went on for too long and people got bored! Actually, it turned out my wife was the only one who
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was yawning and everyone else seemed to be genuinely interested. I went through all my PhotoShop files and went through all the layers and gave everyone a lot of tips and tricks. Did you enjoy it? I guess I did, in the beginning I was a little nervous. It was my first public appearance as a lecturer, which can be a little frightening. I’m usually a reticent guy, kind of shy. My wife will tell you, I normally bottle it up. It was fun when I gave a lecture. I brought a whole bunch of slides of my influences and it all just came pouring out. I went on for maybe three hours. I’ve no idea where it came from, it was good, people asked me artist’s names and they were taking notes. It’s all good for the culture at large. The Internet’s good but it’s also bad, it’s a short cut. If you’re trying to educate yourself sometimes it’s really better to look through
the dictionary rather than looking up a word on-line. Along the way you’ll bump into other things that you wouldn’t have otherwise. You see all the young people nowadays... I talk like I’m so old… but you know, these kids are like 17 and 18 and doing amazing professional quality work but it’s still kind of a derivative. It’s all about style and six months later you can’t stand seeing any more deer antlers or paint drips! I don’t know, we’re all guilty of it. On your websites you seem very open about showing your roughs and the way you work. Is that a conscious thought to demystify what you and other artists do? I don’t know. I found, especially in the beginning, a lot of people were really interested in how I made the pictures and how I made my sketchbooks. I thought the drawings themselves were interesting to look at, how they would evolve into the finished
piece. I see the finished piece as being inferior to the original sketch. It’s in the sketches where everything begins, and that holds a lot more energy and verve than just a bare boned structure of something filled in with PhotoShop. I love the drawings, I’m not sure other people do. Do you work from home or at a separate studio space? I work from home. I do have a separate studio space but we’re still in the process of setting it up. I‘d like a big easel in there and everything. Right now I’m stuck in front of the computer all the time so I don’t really utilise it at the moment. So you don’t think it’s important to have a separate workspace? I talk to some people like Kent Williams, he really feels he needs a separate workspace. You know Magritte would get up and put on a suit before starting work. I work in my underwear! For me the physical space isn’t as important to me as the intellectual space. I’m able to get into that work mode pretty easily. I don’t have TV or Playstation or any of those nasty distractions. Work is so fun and everything I do is in service of the work. Art is work and work is life, you know.
So what’s next? I guess you’re looking forward to taking some time off? Oh yeah! Yeah, I think we’ll get some money from the book and since I’ve been working so much I’ve a little bit of freedom now. Hopefully I’ll get to do some more of my personal work and get that going again, especially the sketchbooks. We live pretty close to the beach now so I want to get out more, I need to buy a bike and see the town a little bit, do some more drawing, thinking. Do you feel like you’re famous? No, no, I mean, it’s a strange one. Someone started a fan club online a few years ago. It’s a little weird, it brings up a whole bunch of interesting questions, you know, like ownership, how much control you have over your own life. People have expectations and you almost become public property. Ideally what I’d like is that my work had more personality than I did, so it could speak for itself and I just disappeared into the background. Some people like to play at the rock star thing. You know, like Paul Pope, we’ve become good friends recently. He’s most known for doing his own book called THB. You should look him up; he’s a great designer and artist. He’s named one of the 10 hottest guys by some New York magazine. He’s a real rock star. He enjoys it, he can handle it.
On the other hand you have someone like Art Spiegelman after doing Maus… well you know, his book was hailed as a cultural icon. He’s had essays written about him, about the psychological and structural aspects of the book, I mean he won the Pullitzer Prize for it. It’s a great book, everyone should read it but… he got a block for such a long time, 12 years, he couldn’t do anything. Hopefully we’ll see more stuff from him. So yeah, I don’t know, fame, it’s a funny one. See more of James’ amazing work at www.jamesjean.com or see some of the original sketches at www.processrecess.com, definitely worth seeing, just to understand how it all comes together.
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