John Page / painter, printmaker and professor

site link

Just today, I have designed and posted a new website about the life and work of Iowa-based printmaker, painter and teacher John H. Page (1923-2018). I hope it will be of interest to those who know and admire his work—as well as to those who have never heard of him.

a new practical guide to art in relation to seeing

coming soon

There’s a new book in the works—it isn't out yet, but it's coming. Issued by the University of Chicago Press, it will soon be available in hardbound, paperback, and E-book formats. The title peaks my interest: STUDIO SEEING: A practical guide to drawing, painting, and perception. It is due out in September. The author is Michael Torlen, a painter, printmaker and writer who retired from teaching in 2012, and now resides in Maine. A graduate of Ohio State University and Cranbrook Academy, he taught courses in visual arts for many years at the University of Georgia at Athens, and at Purchase College in New York.

How do I know him? I don’t, or at least we've never met in person. But we are well-acquainted “online,” as they say, because about ten years ago, by chance we discovered that we have a common interest in, not just art and vision, but in the writings and teaching practices of an artist / teacher (in the 1940s and thereafter) named Hoyt Sherman. At OSU, Sherman was the teacher of Pop Artist Roy Lichtenstein. But he was also the teacher of one of my most influential teachers, a man named David Delafield. Torlen’s link to Sherman is far more direct: he earned an MFA at OSU and actually worked closely with Sherman.

My additional interest in Sherman is through his connection to artist and optical physiologist Adelbert Ames II, who invented the Ames Demonstrations, about whom I have written, and more recently made a three-part documentary video on.

At OSU, Sherman reconstructed many of the Ames Demonstrations. But the achievement for which he was famous (or, as his detractors would probably say, “infamous”) was his attempt to teach drawing in the dark. He devised a method of teaching drawing in a pitch dark studio (called a “flash lab”) in which his students drew from abstract images that he projected on a screen, using a tachistoscope, for a fraction of a second. His students included members of the OSU football team, who (it was claimed) improved their passing accuracy by wearing a hooded contraption called a “flash helmet.”

Judging from its table of contents (as well as the title), the key concern in Torlen’s book is perception in relation to art, from the view of a long-experienced teacher. You can learn much more about him as well as updates on his book at <https://www.michaeltorlenauthor.com/>.

social media acronyms as practiced by victorians

Above A three-panel caricature, The Pair of Skaters (1873), by one of history's finest comic illustrators (often featured in Simplicissimus), the Norwegian artist Olaf Gulbransson. His command of movement and gestural line has never been equaled.

•••

A.A. Milne, Autobiography. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1939, pp. 131-132—

One way and another we [the author and his brother Kenneth John Milne] got a good deal of happiness out of it [preparatory school], if not always in the way expected of us. We sat together now, never to be separated, in the Mathematical Sixth, which meant that we occupied one corner of a room in which some lowly mathmatical set was being taught. Since we could not talk wthout disturbing the master-in-charge we wrote letters to each other: long letters detailing our plans for the next holidays. Interest was added to these letters by our custom of omitting every other word, leaving blanks which the addressee had to fill in. Our minds were sufficiently in tune for this to be possible without being easy; one could get the general sense without being certain of the exact word. As in my old French set, we then changed papers and marked each other's mistakes. Sometimes our communications were in initial letters only. During “second school,” for instance, it was certain that one of us would ask the other “SWGUSIB?” This clearly meant “Shall we go up-Sutts in break?” a question which expected the answer “Yes” and got it. Ken would feel in his pockets and decide that, since we already owed Father 15/6, we might as well owe him sixteen shillings. We did.

tobacco road / the story of a boy who smoked

EVOLUTION OF A BOY WHO SMOKED, in The Journal (Huntsville AL), February 28, 1907, p. 2. Reprinted from the Chicago Daily News. Artist unidentified—

Do you know any little boy that [sic] smokes cigarettes? If you do, just show him this picture. It is the sad story of Dick Sillypate. He saw another boy smoking a cigarette, and thought it looked so manly that he would try it himself. The picture shows what happened to him at the end of five months.

a remote radio drawing course taught in 1932

There is a legend, true or not, that Hungarian-born Bauhaus designer and photographer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy once created an artwork over the phone. Henceforth, as Rainer K. Wick said in Teaching at the Bauhaus (Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2000), it might be the conclusion of some that “art in the industrial age could consist of an anonymous machine process of high precision and exist independently of the personal intervention of the artist’s hand; thus the act of artistic creation should be seen in the intellectual aspect and not in the manual one.”

Moholy’s experiment comes to mind whenever I see this vintage magazine article on so-called “Radio Comics” [shown above], as published in an issue of Popular Mechanics in 1932. The instructor is a radio broadcaster, who makes a drawing on a grid-based page, consisting of 144 numbered squares. His pupils, who are listening remotely to the broadcast, have been given an indentical page of numbered squares—but without a drawing.

“As the instructor draws a figure, he calls out the squares touched by his pencil or crayon. Pupils sitting at the radio with duplicate charts trace lines from one number of another as they are announced in efforts to ‘copy’ the work of the instructor.”

Actually, the only thing innovative about this (at the time) was the use of the radio. The practice of “squaring off” a drawing (called mise au careau) in order to copy, enlarge or reduce the image onto a second squared-off surface, was practiced as early as the Ancient Egyptians. Here is an example of that by the artist Sassoferrato.

Later artists (among them Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Dürer, and Vincent Van Gogh) not only relied on that same approach, but also used “drawing frames” (of which Dürer's and Van Gogh's are shown below) by which they looked at the model through a network of suspended threads, arranged to match a pattern of squares on their drawing paper. Leonardo highly recommended this—

“If you wish to learn correct and good positions for your figures [he wrote], make a frame that is divided into squares by threads and put it between your eyes and the nude you are drawing, and you will trace the same squares lightly onto your paper on which you intend to draw your nude.”

After the invention of photography, artists began to square off photographs of their models, as a gridwork guide for drawing. Still other artists (among them Blanche Ames Ames and Adelbert Ames II) make efficient use of large-scale grid-based frames which the model stood behind as the photograph was made. Below is a photograph of that in her Borderland studio. 

Samuel Chamberlain's elaborate failed volvelle

Above Drawing by American artist Samuel Chamberlain. Born in 1895 in Cresco IA, he can’t have stayed there for long. He is buried in Marblehead MA, where he died in 1975. He grew up in Washington State, studied architecture at MIT, and served in both World Wars. He went on the become a widely-admired architectural illustrator and printmaker. His exquisite pencil renderings were often published in art-related periodicals, including the architectural journal Pencil Points. In the passage below, he seems to be describing his proposal (never published) for a wheel-like “information chart” (commonly called a volvelle), not unlike those included in Jessica Helfand’s book, Reinventing the Wheel (NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003) [see cover below].

•••

Samuel Chamberlain, Etched in Sunlight: Fifty years in the graphiuc arts. Boston: Boston Public Library, 1968, pp. 94 and 98—

Along with so much printmaking, I spent most of my spare time [c1938] on a totally different project—a wine chart. My interest in the red and white wines of France has always been intense and relentless, and I was determined to combine the graphic arts with gastronomy in one package that would appeal to all gastronomes and oenophiles. A richly decorative chart, brightened with maps, vignettes and pen-and ink sketches, was the result. Everything was hand-lettered. Openings of various sizes were cut in the chart, and these revealed information on various wines, lettered on a disk. Turn the disk to the right place and all the pertinent data on red Bordeaux, red Burgundy, or Cotes-du-Rhone wines would be progressively revealed. There was a descriptive essay on each wine, mention of good culinary companions, proper serving temperature, good recent years, and the significant names of each type of wine. On the other side of the disk was assembled the same information on the great French white wines, those of Burgundy, Bordeaux, Champagne, Vouvray and Anjou, and Alsace. On the two faces of the chart were drawings of typical bottles and wine glasses, and suggestions of what harmonious wine to serve with food, from oysters, soups, fish, shellfish, chicken, red meats, game and cheese, down to desserts and pastry. There were pointers on the technique of serving wine and on secondary vintages, and a list of gastronomic enemies of wine, from anchovies to Tabasco sauce.

I am absolutely appalled at the magnitude of this undertaking, and feel now that my days would have been spent far more usefully…Once the chart was finished, I showed it to several publishers, all of whom turned it down because it presented too many production problems. It has been in my portfolio all these years, a reminder of a magnificent and earnest way to waste one's time.

new works by california artist jared rogness

Copyright © Jared Rogness

For decades, I have been in awe of the drawings of Jared Rogness, a California-based artist, who grew up in Iowa. Here (above and below) are two of his latest drawings. using only a blue-ink ballpoint pen. Such amazing facility, and such a gift to be able to so persuasively depict figures in motion from such complex points of view.

Bravo! 

Here is an online essay in which he talks about his work and provides more examples. In addition, we’ve blogged about him in the past, since I had the pleasure of working with him in the late 1990s and early 200os, when he was a university student in Iowa. 

Copyright © Jared Rogness

recalling the pleasures of teaching with ede

Above Craig Ede, Self-Portrait (© 2021).

 •••

Some many years ago, too long to clearly remember (it was more than three decades ago), I was teaching a course in basic design (not graphic design), the arrangement of visual components, regardless of media. I came up with a brilliant idea: Why not invite an especially capable graduate student to team-teach that course with me? My approach to team-teaching required the combined presence and participation of both teachers in the same classroom at all times. 

But who to ask? It occurred to me that it should be someone who intended to teach in the future at the university level. And of course it should also be someone who had exceptional abilities as an artist / designer, as well as the skills that all teachers should have. To complicate matters, the experiment was non-funded. The student teacher would neither be paid nor would he / she receive course credit. But the experience could be listed on the person’s vita (when applying for teaching positions), with a letter of recommendation, and slide examples of the work that the students produced in the course. 

So who did I choose? Without hesitation, I approached a graduate painting student named Craig Ede, whose recent self-portrait drawing is posted above. At the time, of course, he was three decades or more younger, and did not yet show the scars of the torment of living through both a pandemic and the threatened decay of civilized life. Craig, who has so vividly “captured” himself, is an old friend, a painter, and former professor who lives in Wisconsin. I haven’t seen him for years, but this is such a persuasive reminder, it is almost as if he were present. Or, as he himself explains, it is what he will look like about seven months from now, in December 2021. More than ever, I can clearly see why I invited him to team teach in my classroom. It was a memorable experience, for students as well as the teachers.

famous for an hour—his only sports achievement

Paul Pfurtscheller, c1910

Above Detail (restored and adapted) of anatomical wall chart by Austrian zoologist Paul Pfurtscheller (1855-1927), c1910.

•••

Roger G. Barker (Iowa-born social scientist) in Gardner Lindzey, ed., A History of Psychology in Autobiography. Volume VIII. Stanford University Press, 1989—

On the first day of the boy’s [himself] attendance at the junior high school in Palo Alto there is a free-throw basketball contest. Boy reluctantly joins the line of contestants; he has never thrown a basketball. He comes to the throw line; he hefts the ball and is surprised by its great weight. He throws—a good one. Another good one. Still another basket. On and on, he can’t understand it. He is a machine,…13, 14,…24 hits out of 25. The boy is famous for an hour, his only sports-connected achievement.

Kenneth Gogel | Recalling a wonderful teacher

Above Kenneth Gogel, The Nervous System. Collage (1973). Permanent Collection of Art, University of Northern Iowa. Among his most memorable artworks is Gogel's portrayal of “the [very] nervous system” of US President Richard Nixon at the height of the Watergate scandal. Gift of Roy R. and Mary Snyder Behrens.

•••

In the late 1960s, when I was an undergraduate art student at the University of Northern Iowa, one of my favorite teachers was an art education professor named Kenneth Gogel. He had been a student of Victor Lowenfeld at Pennsylvania State University. He was particularly interested in children’s drawings, and what those might reveal about (in Lowenfeld’s words) their “creative and mental growth.”

Part of the reason I liked him so much was his eccentricity. He had "a mind of his own,” so his comments were often surprising. His artwork was equally unpredictable. He wasn’t committed to staying within a consistent approach to art-making, whether medium, style, or subject matter. In one of his experiments, he used photo booth self-portraits and xerox (innovative at the time). In another, he rigged up a kind of terrarium, the sides of which were covered with a card-like material punched with random circular holes; inside the terrarium were ladybugs, which changed the pattern of the holes (on-or-off, like digital punch cards) as they climbed up and down the interior walls.

Of the artworks he was making then, one I especially admire is a large mixed media work titled A Bride and Her Father Visit the World’s Largest Turtle, dated c1968 (below). It is now in the UNI Permanent Collection of Art. Gift of Roy R. and Mary Snyder Behrens. The original source for the turtle is the vintage print at the bottom of this post.

Kenneth Gogel (c1968), mixed media

Ken and I remained in contact now and then after I graduated, by exchanging cryptic notes. His were usually whimsical observations he made during lengthy faculty meetings or peculiar things he’d run across while nosing around in the library. One time, he sent me the patent diagram for a mechanical drawing device by Jean Tinguely. He was forever looking around at thrift shops and used bookstores, then sending me things that he thought I could use. He sent me my very first vintage World War I photograph of a dazzle-camouflaged ship, the USS Leviathan.

He even wrote to me when I was (miserably) in the US Marine Corps. When I answered candidly, he saved the letter (he saved nearly everything, repurposing the slightest scraps), then simply mailed it back to me fifteen years later.

Years later, when I was teaching temporarily at an awful art school in the South, I was surprised to hear his voice when I answered the phone one day at home. When I asked where he was calling from (I had heard that he was touring the country alone in a recreational vehicle), he replied, “Oh, I’m just a couple of blocks from your house. If you’re going to be there, I’d like to stop by briefly, just to say hello.” Moments later, he arrived, and, in spite of my insistence that he stay for a few days, we talked briefly and off he went. That time, I think he gave me a copy of Karl Gerstner’s A Compendium for Literates.

As an undergraduate, my major was Art Education, so that later, I would teach grades 7-12 for most of a school year, until the draft board broke my contract and sent me off to be a Marine. But in the last year before graduating with a BA degree, I was a student teacher for the first nine weeks of one semester. During the remaining half of that semester, Ken Gogel was my advisor for a full-time research project in which I proposed to read about the role of perception in visual art. I met with Ken only a few times, with the agreement that at the end of the term I would turn in a substantial paper about what I had discovered.

The paper I turned in was titled Perception in the Visual Arts. It anticipated many of the subjects that I would research and write about for the next fifty years. Although I was only an undergraduate, on a whim I submitted it to Art Education: The Journal of the National Art Education Association, the foremost journal in the field. It was published there in March 1969, just weeks in advance of being ejected from the classroom (not having a bone spur) and sent off to an unjust war. I am the same age as the man who now pretends to be the US President.

Public domain

Milton Glaser on All Life as Transcendence

Above This image, created by Thomas Kent, was published in the Strand Magazine in 1909. It was one of a number of graphic peculiarities. A pencil-drawn portrait, it was accomplished with a single continuous line that originated at the tip of the nose.

•••

American graphic designer Milton Glaser, interviewed in Joan Evelyn Ames, Mastery: Interviews with 30 Remarkable People (Portland OR: Rudra Press, 1997), pp. 84-85—

I remember Rudi [a friend and teacher] saying once that all life is about transcendence. If you’re ugly you have to transcend your ugliness, if you’re beautiful you have to transcend your beauty, if you’re poor you have to transcend your poverty, if you’re rich you have to transcend your wealth… There is nothing worse than being born extraordinarily beautiful, nothing more potentially damaging to the self. You could say the same for being born inordinately rich. You suddenly realize how wise the idea is that you get nothing at birth except things to transcend. That’s all you get.

David Suter Poster | Kaycee Miller 2016

David Suter Poster | Kaycee Miller 2016

Above Poster designed by Kaycee Miller, graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa, commemorating the work of American artist David Suter, whose editorial-page illustrations were widely acclaimed during the Watergate Era. •

A two-day campus visit by the artist took place on October 24-25, 2016,at the University of Northern Iowa. Sponsored by the UNI Department of Art, the event was part of the Meryl Norton Hearst Lecture Series.

Suter's editorial illustrations have been described as "puzzles and mindbogglers, tricks of the subconscious, and foolers of the eye." Some people call them visual puns or metaphors, but the artist prefers "to think of them as equations…It's a little like algebra. I try to combine two images through a process of finding similarities and canceling out dissimilar aspects."

Concurrent with David Suter's campus visit, there were exhibits of his OpEd drawings and of a series of posters (including the one shown here) by UNI graphic design students that celebrated his drawings.

•••

Frank Swinnerton, Swinnerton: An Autobiography. Garden City NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1936, p. 28-29 [recalling the bullying he observed in a school that he attended in London]—

All [six boy] pupils were taught in the same room [and were largely unsupervised]…two horrid little devils declared a vendetta against the only other boy of roughly their own size, the spectacle of which moved me to such helpless rage that in thinking of it now I still feel embarrassed distaste. While the master was there these wretches did no more than stick lighted matches into the boy's tweed coat. When the master was away, as he often was, they had greater liberty, of which they took instant advantage. They wrenched their enemy's arms, speared, pinched, and kicked him until his shins must have been black and his flesh purple; and at last forced his head  murderously back over desks and parallel bars until he became blue in the face. It was appalling. I was too weak to lend an effective aid; the boy was too plucky to tell tales and was not strong enough to resist such implacable foes; and these foes grew every day more and more reckless, more and more outrageously brutal. At last, when he was being tortured one morning to the limit of endurance, I (a sort of Sister Anne at the window) caught sight of the master without, frantically summoned him by means of a wild rapping on the pane, and so brought the horror to an end.

• The drawing in the poster is the copyright of David Suter. All rights reserved.

David Suter Poster | Eldina Siljkovic 2016

David Suter Poster | Eldina Siljikovic 2016

Above Poster designed by Eldina Siljikovic, graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa, commemorating the work of American artist David Suter, whose editorial-page illustrations were widely acclaimed during the Watergate Era. •

A two-day campus visit by the artist took place on October 24-25, 2016,at the University of Northern Iowa. Sponsored by the UNI Department of Art, the event was part of the Meryl Norton Hearst Lecture Series.

Suter's editorial illustrations have been described as "puzzles and mindbogglers, tricks of the subconscious, and foolers of the eye." Some people call them visual puns or metaphors, but the artist prefers "to think of them as equations…It's a little like algebra. I try to combine two images through a process of finding similarities and canceling out dissimilar aspects."

Concurrent with David Suter's campus visit, there were exhibits of his OpEd drawings and of a series of posters (including the one shown here) by UNI graphic design students that celebrated his drawings.

•••

Frank Swinnerton, Swinnerton: An Autobiography. Garden City NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1936, p. 17 [remembering his father, an impoverished copperplate engraver in London]—

If, on Saturday, he was lucky enough to draw some larger money he would be induced to have two or three glasses of beer (which he could never stand), and would arrive home late in the evening a little stupid, with glassy eyes and a painfully courteous manner, carrying some bags of squashed tomatoes and other peace offerings, which he would put mutely upon the kitchen table. It is terrible to think that his marketing had always been bad, so that what he brought was largely useless and unvalued; but if he had silver in his pockets he always produced the whole of it, keeping nothing back, but setting it down with a truly distasteful gesture beside the tomatoes. On such occasions I fancy we were all rather brusque with him, my mother particularly so; and yet I do not recall that there were at any time outspoken quarrels between them. My mother frowned and marched about with her head in the air, dry-eyed, as if she were out of patience with anybody so fatuous; and he sat sighing, very quiet and polite, rather drowsy, at intervals saying humbly: "Can I help you, Ma?" and receiving the briefest courtesies in reply.

• The drawing in the poster is the copyright of David Suter. All rights reserved.

Artist David Suter | Suterisms

American artist David Suter, whose editorial-page illustrations were widely acclaimed during the Watergate Era, is coming to the University of Northern Iowa. The artist's two-day visit will begin with a presentation titled "Studies in Form" at 7 p.m., Monday, October 24, 2016 in the Kamerick Art Building Auditorium (Room 111). Sponsored by the UNI Department of Art, the event is part of the Meryl Norton Hearst Lecture Series and is free and open to the public.

After working as a courtroom artist during the Watergate indictments, Suter went on to become a prominent OpEd and book review illustrator for the New York Times, Washington Post, Time magazine, Harper's, The Atlantic, The Progressive, and other major publications. His distinctive drawings at the time were comprised of puzzle-like political images that were in part inspired by the work of M.C. Escher. His selected drawings were later published as a book titled Suterisms (see cover above).

Suterisms have been described as "puzzles and mindbogglers, tricks of the subconscious, and foolers of the eye." Some people call them visual puns or metaphors, but the artist prefers "to think of them as equations…It's a little like algebra. I try to combine two images through a process of finding similarities and canceling out dissimilar aspects."

Although he still makes drawings, in recent years Suter has turned primarily to painting and sculpture, and currently exhibits his work in art galleries. While on the UNI campus on Tuesday, he will informally talk to students and faculty about his working process, the evolution of his career and related subjects.

Concurrent with David Suter's campus visit, there will be exhibits of his OpEd drawings and of a series of posters by UNI graphic design students that commemorate his work. These exhibits will be on view from October 17 through 29 in the Kamerick Art Building (ground floor south) during regular building hours.

David Suter Poster | Jordan Goldbeck 2016

Drawing © David Suter / Poster by Jordan Goldbeck 2016

Above Poster designed by Jordan Goldbeck (graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa), commemorating the work of American artist David Suter, whose editorial-page illustrations were widely acclaimed during the Watergate Era.

A two-day visit by the artist will begin with a presentation titled "Studies in Form" at 7 p.m., Monday, October 24, 2016 in the Kamerick Art Building Auditorium (Room 111). Sponsored by the UNI Department of Art, the event is part of the Meryl Norton Hearst Lecture Series and is free and open to the public.

Suter's editorial illustrations have been described as "puzzles and mindbogglers, tricks of the subconscious, and foolers of the eye." Some people call them visual puns or metaphors, but the artist prefers "to think of them as equations…It's a little like algebra. I try to combine two images through a process of finding similarities and canceling out dissimilar aspects."

Concurrent with David Suter's campus visit, there will be exhibits of his OpEd drawings and of a series of posters (including the one shown here) by UNI graphic design students that celebrate his drawings. These exhibits will be on view from October 17 through 29 in the Kamerick Art Building (ground floor south) during regular building hours.

David Suter Poster | Ellen Holt 2016

Drawing © David Suter / Poster by Ellen Holt 2016

Above Poster designed by Ellen Holt (graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa), commemorating the work of American artist David Suter, whose editorial-page illustrations were widely acclaimed during the Watergate Era.

A two-day visit by the artist will begin with a presentation titled "Studies in Form" at 7 p.m., Monday, October 24, 2016 in the Kamerick Art Building Auditorium (Room 111). Sponsored by the UNI Department of Art, the event is part of the Meryl Norton Hearst Lecture Series and is free and open to the public.

Suter's editorial illustrations have been described as "puzzles and mindbogglers, tricks of the subconscious, and foolers of the eye." Some people call them visual puns or metaphors, but the artist prefers "to think of them as equations…It's a little like algebra. I try to combine two images through a process of finding similarities and canceling out dissimilar aspects."

Concurrent with David Suter's campus visit, there will be exhibits of his OpEd drawings and of a series of posters (including the one shown here) by UNI graphic design students that celebrate his drawings. These exhibits will be on view from October 17 through 29 in the Kamerick Art Building (ground floor south) during regular building hours.

David Suter Poster | Chris Hall 2016

Drawing © David Suter / Poster by Chris Hall 2016

Above Poster designed by Chris Hall (graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa), commemorating the work of American artist David Suter, whose editorial-page illustrations were widely acclaimed during the Watergate Era.

A two-day visit by the artist will begin with a presentation titled "Studies in Form" at 7 p.m., Monday, October 24, 2016 in the Kamerick Art Building Auditorium (Room 111). Sponsored by the UNI Department of Art, the event is part of the Meryl Norton Hearst Lecture Series and is free and open to the public.

Suter's editorial illustrations have been described as "puzzles and mindbogglers, tricks of the subconscious, and foolers of the eye." Some people call them visual puns or metaphors, but the artist prefers "to think of them as equations…It's a little like algebra. I try to combine two images through a process of finding similarities and canceling out dissimilar aspects."

Concurrent with David Suter's campus visit, there will be exhibits of his OpEd drawings and of a series of posters (including the one shown here) by UNI graphic design students that celebrate his drawings. These exhibits will be on view from October 17 through 29 in the Kamerick Art Building (ground floor south) during regular building hours.

Artist David Suter | Hearst Lectures 2016-17

Image © David Suter / Poster by Allison Rolinger

Above Poster designed by Allison Rolinger, graphic design student at the University of Northern Iowa, advertising the first event in this year's Meryl Hearst Lecture Series.

Sponsored by the UNI Department of Art, this year's series (with the theme DOUBLED OVER: Wit and Irony in Art and Design) will begin with a public presentation by American artist David Suter, whose editorial-page illustrations were widely acclaimed during the Watergate Era. His presentation, titled "Studies in Form," will take place at 7 p.m., Monday, October 24, 2016 in the Kamerick Art Building Auditorium (Room 111).

The series is free and open to the public.

David Suter | OpEd Artist Coming Soon to UNI

Above American artist David Suter, whose editorial-page illustrations were widely acclaimed during the Watergate Era, is coming to the University of Northern Iowa. The artist's two-day visit will begin with a presentation titled "Studies in Form" at 7 p.m., Monday, October 24, 2016 in the Kamerick Art Building Auditorium (Room 111). Sponsored by the UNI Department of Art, the event is part of the Meryl Norton Hearst Lecture Series and is free and open to the public.

After working as a courtroom artist during the Watergate indictments, Suter went on to become a prominent OpEd and book review illustrator for the New York Times, Washington Post, Time magazine, Harper's, The Atlantic, The Progressive, and other major publications. His distinctive drawings at the time were comprised of puzzle-like political images that were in part inspired by the work of M.C. Escher. His selected drawings were later published as a book titled Suterisms.

Suterisms have been described as "puzzles and mindbogglers, tricks of the subconscious, and foolers of the eye." Some people call them visual puns or metaphors, but the artist prefers "to think of them as equations…It's a little like algebra. I try to combine two images through a process of finding similarities and canceling out dissimilar aspects."

Although he still makes drawings, in recent years Suter has turned primarily to painting and sculpture, and currently exhibits his work in art galleries. While on the UNI campus on Tuesday, he will informally talk to students and faculty about his working process, the evolution of his career and related subjects.

Concurrent with David Suter's campus visit, there will be exhibits of his OpEd drawings and of a series of posters by UNI graphic design students that commemorate his work. These exhibits will be on view from October 17 through 29 in the Kamerick Art Building (ground floor south) during regular building hours.

Who's Afraid of Leonard Woolf?

Pencil portrait of Renoir © Craig Ede (c1974)

Above Pencil drawing by former student Craig Ede (when he was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, we even team-taught foundations design one semester—I got paid, he didn't), based on a portrait photograph of the French painter Auguste Renoir.

•••

Leonard Woolf [British writer, husband of Virginia Woolf] in Sowing: An Autobiography of the Years 1880 to 1904. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960, pp. 137-138—

Thoby [Julian Thoby Stephen, Virginia Woolf's brother] was an intellectual…But he also, though rather scornful of games and athletics, loved the open air—watching birds, walking, following the beagles. In these occupations, particularly in walking, I often joined him. Walking with him was by no means a tame business, for it was almost a Stephen principle in walking to avoid all roads and ignore the rights of property owners and the law of trespass…In our walks up the river towards Trumpington, we had several times noticed a clump of magnificent hawthorn trees in which vast numbers of starlings came nightly to roost. I have never seen such enormous numbers of birds in so small a space; there must have been thousands upon thousands and the trees were in the evening literally black with them. We several times tried to put them all up into the air at the same time, for, if we succeeded, it would have been a marvelous sight to see the sky darkened and the setting sun obscured by the immense cloud of birds. But we failed because every time we approached the trees, the birds went up into the sky spasmodically in gusts, and not altogether. So we bought a rocket and late one evening fired it from a distance into the trees. The experiment succeeded and we had the pleasure of seeing the sun completely blotted out by starlings.

Thoby Stephen, PicSketch image from G.C. Beresford photograph