Portraits of Excellence OriginsPart 2: It's not a phase, Mom.

The saga continues with some of the formative pop culture moments that shaped my brain and influenced my creative interests. Complete with some retro video clips that still live in my brain rent-free, and early drawings from my personal archives.

Don’t Touch That Dial!

As a Gen X latchkey kid (despite having a stay-at-home mother), I generously nursed from the cathode ray nipple. After-school cartoons, Saturday morning cartoons, Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman reruns, and PBS educational shows were all the staple food groups in my TV diet.

However, if I was stuck at home and exiled from the TV room, I usually retreated to my bedroom, sprawled out on the floor with a couple of sharpie markers and a haphazard stack of recycled dot-matrix paper. I often drew things I’d watched, turning movies like The Wizard of Oz or Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein into homemade, accordion-style, picture books.

*We interrupt this program for a quick glimpse at the ol’ bewb-tube: Some Detroit Public TV gems*

Missing from the Picture

Because I was such a cartoon buff, I lived to see an illustrated likeness or a caricature rather than a regular photo, but I couldn’t help but notice that the artists *I* liked, weren’t in those magazines very much. If they were shown at all, the illustration wasn’t flattering. Why weren’t my heroes getting the same visual treatment?

It bugged me. A lot.

It got me thinking: if no one else was going to do it, I guess I would create my own versions.

Determined, I got my trusty sharpies together and got to work.

Outside the Lines

In between doodling cartoons on my classmates’ denim overalls, I turned every book report, oral presentation, and history project into an art project whenever I could get away with it.

Then, halfway through my junior year of high school, my world turned upside down when my parents divorced and my mother sold our family home, and I found myself at a brand new school. Fortunately, my good grades landed me in a vocational program for design and printing where I spent half the school day surrounded by real materials, tools of the trade, and endless creative possibilities.

I learned just how all those album covers and concert t-shirts were made. It was a sandbox for testing out the intersection of music and design in the context of a possible career in what was then referred to as “commercial art.”

For one project, I screen-printed my very own custom Boyz II Men concert t-shirt, since I knew going to the show was absolutely out of the question. (Decades later, I designed their official merch!) 

After a new Elvis stamp went pre-internet viral, I turned my favorite jazz legends into a series of postage stamps. I would design playing cards, magazine covers, or anything that let me merge music with design with my own tastes in mind.

Looking back, I seemed to connect more with what I was hearing from these Black artists than what was being shown around me. I’ve heard it said that some people dance to the lyrics, while others dance to the beat. For whatever reason, I was a groove child. I wanted to capture my musical heroes and share them in the same way that had fascinated me, through cartoons and illustration.