Not A Businessman But A Business, Man: An Interview with Sterling Hundley
Sterling Hundley is an accomplished illustrator, a well respected professor at VCU, and one of the main people behind the professional illustrator factory, The Art Department. AdHouse Books has recently released a retrospective monograph of his work, entitled Blue Collar, White Collar. So I got straight to the point:
When did you become a businessman?
[laughs] It’s a hard business, man. I think that's the future of artists--being your own brand. You take the online tools of social media and connecting with people, and it becomes a numbers game. I can get my own exposure. All I have to do is make a distinct product. [I can] say I wanna write a graphic novel, and get someone interested. Then I can release the “making of,” and that's another product. You don't have to cold call anymore--people are asking for information. You've got the book to produce; maybe print on demand, so you don't have the overhead of publishing costs. And you sell directly to people that are interested. It's all there. It's really pretty exciting.
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How's the business side with you? I know you do the teaching part, and finding the talent, but how do you train the modern illustrator and designer to run their own business? Do you guys have classes for that?
Oh yeah. All this stuff I'm saying has come from personal experience. I've actually retired from illustration. I'm a painter now, and I'm pursuing galleries. In a lot of ways, I've started from scratch, but not completely. The biggest frustration I had with illustration was that I wasn't the master of that content. I couldn't license [my illustrations]. I couldn't do much with them, because they were so specific to that product. I want to be the author from the start. I have about fourteen different stories, graphic novels and things I wanna write. I'm trying to just pursue different things and move laterally, instead of trying to figure everything out completely. If you can be exceptional at one thing, then you're well beyond the people that are successful out there. Very few people are exceptional. You can build on that one thing, and be exceptional, then become exceptional at another thing and keep building on that. Then you're going to be a star. That's how I'm teaching the Senior Studio at VCU. It’s not just getting a portfolio together and sending out postcards--you have to have that connectivity. You basically put yourself in the center of the hub with all the things that you are doing.
I kind of reorganized everything [recently]. My website is essentially a gateway. I point [people] towards the hub. All these things have multiple revenue streams, if you think about it. You've got t-shirts, tennis shoes, and cases for iPhones. Anything that you can print on can be potential for creative output. You've got the physical artifacts themselves--the paintings, the drawings. Those can be monetized. The educational aspect can be monetized. Limited edition prints and books. That can all be monetized, and you don't have to charge as much because [production] is not as expensive these days.
[At The Art Department,] we've got a group of people that are highly visible. The more visibility we can get, the more we are drawing in people. The more the art critics, collectors, and buyers might come down to the school: “We're checking this person out, but look at this, this is cool too.” The more that happens, the better. Ultimately, I find ways for other people to make livings. If they are making a living, they are much less likely to leave. They have the community they want, the financial means to stay here--[Richmond] has a cost of living that is well below other cities that have this much stuff going on. There's a lot of stuff to offer people.
I think you made a great point there. The more people you can keep in town, the stronger the Richmond brand is. Once the city brand gets to a certain tipping point, people will start feeling like Richmond is where you’ve gotta be. We are making strides in that sense; we're probably a few years off. Things will cascade, and we'll be in that conversation with Austin, Seattle, where people will help you, and you can be around jobs to make a living. Its a low cost of living area right now, and everything is growing.
We're a Tier 3 city right now. When people talk about cities, when we’re on the radar, it’s way down on the radar. But when you start to look into specific things, we are in the discussion. We have emerging artists here; the problem is we always lose them. They always go somewhere else--they have to follow money.
So tell me about this book you have out. Is it a compilation of older work, or newer stuff?
The title is Blue Collar, White Collar. It’s this notion of blue collar work ethic, white collar aesthetic. Illustration is the blue collar worker of the art world, who has to work for a living. You don't work, you don't eat. It’s tough, but its cool too. It’s definitely treated me well, and in turn I've treated it well. I do it for the practice, but I have ambitions of seeing what's next. I've gotten to the point [with] illustration [where] I've done what I wanted to do with it, and I'm ready for more control. I keep talking about having ideas and things I want to enact. I certainly talk with other people about things they should do, and how they can apply their intellectual property and pursue their ambitions. I've never been one to teach out of theory, I want to teach out of practice. I'm going for it, I'm kind of all in. I've more or less retired from illustration. I've been making paths to pare down and walk away from it.
...and now you can pick the jobs that you want, right?
I'm trying not to. I'm trying not to do any of it.
Afraid that it will suck you back in?
Yeah. It’s an all or nothing kind of thing. I'm at a place in my life where I cannot completely walk away from it today, but I'm hoping [I can] tomorrow, you know? The book encapsulates that career. It’s got some of the first steps of my painting career that I've tinkered with, that I don't think will be my ultimate direction for my personal work. It’s been my first steps of getting to a local gallery and producing work. Ghostprint Gallery has been great. They treat me like gold, and I want to support them. This next show in November is going to be the real statement of what I've figured out. I've gone to where I want in my illustration career, I've pursued these baby steps with my painting career, I've played with these lines between abstraction and representational art. And now these things are converging. I'm more excited to paint now than I have been in eight or ten years, because it’s mine. It’s my work and I don't have any excuses or anyone to blame anymore. It’s all me, and I love that.
So how did the book happen? Did a publisher approach you about this? Did you send some work in and they were interested?
I approached Chris Pitzer, who owns AdHouse Books and operates everything himself. I've been a big fan of what he's been putting out for years, and I've seen the effect his books have had. I love the quality of stuff that he does, and was looking for that type of platform and audience. I was at a place in my career that it warranted a monograph. Well, I hope so.
Are there stories in there?
Yeah, there are stories, notes, sketchbook pages. It’s broken down into three sections. One is illustration, and my hopefully unique way of approaching problem solving. I love taking accepted notions of what illustration is or storytelling is, and [questioning] why it has to be that way. The second section is confusion--certain types of stories [where] you are dealing with violence and aggression or situations that people find confusing. How can I bring the notion to the images that actually enhance the storytelling and tell more of the story? That's where that train of thought came from, and playing with perspective and overlapping. A lot of that came [from] experimentation with abstraction. I'm searching for the line between abstract and representational that lives in people. I introduced little notes of representation in there, and let people solve the abstraction. So I brought that thinking back into my illustration work, and was able to let paintings and illustrations reveal themselves in layers. When you first read it, you can't make it out.
It's a deconstruction of everything you had been programmed to do as an illustrator. That's what I thought of when looking at your paintings. You had taken it so far and were thinking, “How can I unlearn?” To not so much be given an assignment and figure out how to do it--now you could just do whatever you want. It seems like a real challenge. There's not much room for interpretation in modern illustration.
There was a shift, too, in the business model of illustration. Art directors lost the power. All of a sudden, editors in all the New York publications were taking the authority away from the art directors. I think a lot of it had to do with [the fact that] a lot of the art directors were young, and the editors seemed to have been there forever. So you get someone who is a very linear thinker, who is very good at what they do with words, but they don't connect that with images. An editor tells an illustrator, “You need to paint what's in the story,” and that just dismisses about 95% of what interests me about illustration in the first place. I want to show what's in my head. Its very insightful what you observed about my paintings in the first show--I was searching. And I'm not saying that I was at an end, by any means. I wasn't terribly concerned with people walking away with, “Wow, this is beautiful,” or, “This is well done.” I wanted people to walk out and say, “That's interesting.” Because if something is interesting, it means people are thinking.
What was the name of that first show?
It was Emergent, a reference to scientific structures in which the whole is greater than the parts. The process was compiling completely. I wanted to paint a certain event involving horses that all died in the playing field. I wanted to paint it in a way that someone might actually put it on their wall and it reveals itself in days, weeks, years. “Oh, is that a horse head? Are those horses in pain or conflict?” Before you realize it, it's telling a story to you, and every time you look at it, you discover something new. I would say illustration is a statement. The paintings I want to make are questions, [with] room for dialogue between the viewer and the surface.
Having gone to illustration school, I felt illustration was very restrictive. It’s something that I couldn't handle in the long term.
I think in painting, the thing that interests me [is that] you have time with the viewer, you aren't just spoon feeding the viewer. Everything is like--here is enough information to figure it out, so figure it out. What I get frustrated with in painting is [when] there are no dots, no connections to be made, but people present it in a way like there is, and you waste your time. This is trying to appear intellectual here, like something is going on, but it’s just bullshit. It gets frustrating. What’s exciting to me within painting is what I can do in a body of work. Not just a singular statement, a theme. That's exciting. I'm compelled, I'm engaged and I'm interested. I want to write a lot more. I've got to get smart with my business model to do that. Teaching is offering me a nice transition right now, but I want to be at the point again where I was for ten years, when I was just making art.
Oh, absolutely. A lot people teach to get re-energized, and rethink themselves. Its good to be around young impressionable minds that have no rules yet. They just bring new ideas, and they are excited about everything, and they are scared of everything. I want to always have that connection to being naive and raw. As you get older it gets harder to stay fresh and not take yourself so seriously.
The cynicism starts to sneak in, and that's a bitter pill for me to swallow, but you become more aware. You have more knowledge, and there is an inherent weight to knowledge. You start to see things, and that's all good, but its also restrictive in a lot of ways. You start to second guess. When I was young, I didn't think twice. I just did what I felt I needed to do. I think getting older, you have more responsibilities. I've got a daughter, a wife, a mortgage, a car payment.
I feel time is short. I don't know when I'm going to be gone. Do you ever think of legacy? What would you want your daughter to think of you when she gets older?
Well, I want to have things left behind, to have people come to her and say, “Wow, your father was a good man. He helped a lot of people. He was inspiring.” But I don't want that to be my only legacy. I don't want it to be that I just taught people. I want it to be the things that I made, the things I did. The real motivator for me has always been fear. I don't want to regret the things I didn't do. I want to regret things that I did. I can live with those consequences. I have morals, I have things that guide me, but I don't want to look back and say, “God, I wish I had...” My first thoughts of the day are getting rid of the darker things, and trying to go out and have a positive impact. I think I've had an impact, but you never know. I mean, fashion is a weird thing. I've never physically worried about fashion with my paintings. I just try never to be on the coattails of anybody. To quote Jackie Chan, “I never want to be the next Bruce Lee. I want to be Jackie Chan.” Life has a funny way knocking off hard edges. When you are young, you've got a chip on your shoulder with something to prove. You met me when I was teaching a little bit, when I had kind of been through some things. I was confident, arrogant, however people wanted to define me.
I caught you towards the middle of your career. You had established yourself. You started getting into the Society of Illustrators shows, started getting some good assignments. Very driven, little bit of a hard ass. A little bit of a hermit too, you know?
[laughs] I think that comes with teaching at a young age, too. I was offered a one year apprenticeship at VCU, and I had never done anything. I hadn't figured out the distinction between information and knowledge. I had a lot of information, but I was just regurgitating what I had been taught. You go out there and find out a lot of things were different from what you were taught. That often comes from people who had been told something themselves. I wanted to learn from people who had figured it out on their own.
Do you feel like you are passing that on to your students now? Like, “I've been put through the grinder, here's some nuggets of how you can be a professional” versus just learning the technical aspects of learning to draw well?
I think that's the very distinction. Unfortunately its my knowledge now, its not theirs. But at least it’s not information being masqueraded as knowledge. I can't tell you how many times in school I was told to do certain things that were just handed down. They may have been truth at one point, but truth changes. I can tell you something today, and the world is changing; if I tell you that same thing in five years, that's no longer the truth. It’s antiquated. That's the danger of knowing the truth: you get comfortable, and you stop working.
I'm being considered for tenure right now, and I've quit my illustration career. Its not the smartest thing, but I have to make a change. I don't have a choice. I'm ready, I'm moving on, I just need to do it. I'm going to have more information [about] what’s current, because I'm out there doing it now, versus teaching what I was doing five years ago. I had to completely readdress my senior studio class, because things have changed so much in the past two years. So I'm building my website again. I'm building my identity, my brand, my body of work. Fortunately, I've done it before. I know what to expect to a certain degree. But my business is starting over, and it’s scary. Every moment of contentment in my life has come on the heels of fear. [I was] terrified of moving to New York, so I moved to New York. Terrified of heights, so I found a radio tower and climbed it. You go do it and you have this feeling that you've achieved something.
And you grow quickly in those moments.
Well, that's the only place I think you can really grow.