Lessons

Lesson Info

show & tell

You and I know that we are born creative. We have this energy brimming inside of us and we know that everybody else does too. And when we let that out, our excitement breeds excitement in others. And that's what we know, we know in our heart of hearts that we're capable of and your job just ain't gonna fucking let you do it. So you're born creative, you gotta ride that horse and let go of the reins. When I moved to New York, I was a kid. I was 19 years old, but I knew something about posters. I knew about the history of like Olympic posters, the posters from the Olympics. I knew about, you know, it was, I knew about the Vietnam War. I knew the very cool advertising posters at the time that like Levi's were making, for example, or um used to hang out in this ski shop when I was a kid and there was like very cool advertising posters there for skis and K two and stuff. And I wanted to make posters, right? I went to New York to go to art school, didn't do particularly well. Got out of art ...

school started like literally like three days later, working, working in publishing and making book jackets, right? And woke up maybe five years later, six years later. And then I thought, oh, I came here to make posters and I'm not making any posters. What the hell is that? And, but I realized also that there were no jobs to make posters. There's no commercial entity making posters unless you work for a theater company, right? Um So a situation came along in 1992 about um Columbus Day, right? It was one of the New York was like big on Columbus Day. There was a big huge uh parade and parties and all that. And I, I remember distinctly because I had read a few books. I remember like what I'd learned about native Americans from grade school and I was looking around going, why don't I know any, where, where are they now though? I don't really have any Native American friends. Um And I wanted to kind of as a journalist almost to tell the other part of the story, you know, to tell about like ask where they've gone to create some contra to the, to all the the parties in the hoopla. Um And I with my own money created uh the my first poster which is uh celebrate Columbus. Uh um this one which is just a simple two color. I spent my rent money um printing, not only printing but getting it put up professionally um which was a really bad business plan, but I didn't know anything at the time, I wasn't, I didn't have that level of professionalism at the time where I could find a sponsor or a client or, and you know, what client is going to subsidize you to have your contrary and opinion. Um I use typography. That was wrong. I used the typography. That's basically this is the typography that Hallmark uses for their logo. So I was like, oh, that's funny. Um And I basically wanna say, wanted to say, celebrate, celebrate Columbus uh kill an Indian, you know, um This started a really flourishing a really great period for me when, when I was just in my, in from my early thirties till I was like 3031 where I basically created just a ton of work, some with clients and some without some, you know, self subsidized because I didn't because I didn't have a client for this and I paid my rent to use my rent money to, to, to, to fund this one day. There came a knock at the door which I knew was coming and it was uh some guy who basically said you are served. So it was eviction notice because I couldn't pay my rent, right? Um And I hid those papers, I threw them away or I hid them or whatever I paid my rent, everything was fine. It's always fine, but I hid those papers and I wish I hadn't because I would have, I would, I would publish them now and say, you know what, this is the price to do what you love. This is the price of greatness. These are the risks that we have to take. Yes. Could I have done it another way? Yes. Could I have um um found a commercial entity to help me possibly. Um But I will never run away from that, that risk, that challenge. I will never let it stop me from, from singing my song. Racism came quickly after this was 93. The next year big silk screen poster. I love this one. The original drawing is about this big and it's just a pencil drawing and I just smudged it um precomputer. So I had to take it to a special place where they scanned it in and they said, you know, what we can do, we can make it real really big and we can, you know, so they, they kept uh a bit of the, they kept the, the, this smudge part in it, which was really awesome. Um The C is another just a sec, a second drawing. So it's just literally two little drawings stuck together. Uh This one had AAA social cultural story of what was happening in New York at the time between a uh um a community that was um at the edge of the Hasidic Jew community and the Black community and the, and the tension that was, that was coming from that. Um And everybody was saying racism, racism, racism, racism, and I didn't want that word to lose its potency. I didn't want to turn to like love, right? Love. You know that, that meaningless thing. I wanted to show, I wanted to show racism as that ugly, eat your Children kind of thing. So and some things I do because it's funny, I created this with a couple of pals who run a company called G FDA and we created this poster called it called Go F Yourself. Um And it's kind of like a um what is the, what's that game called where you fill in the blanks? Um Well, there's hangman but there's no uh there's uh um the books where you fill in all the words, right? Um Fuck ad Libs. Mad Libs, mad Libs. So this is this, this was kind of like mad Libs, right? Um And the funny thing is, it says this is a test, meaning the first thing that we come up with is go fuck yourself. But there's so many other words that can fill this in, right? That can, that you can finish this off. And if you're creative, why do you, why do you even pay attention to the fact that there's three places? Why don't you say, you know, go fabulous yourself or, or change this into a B or ignore it all together and put a big banner across here and says, you know, so um um I love that about this piece and some other of my things where I give you just enough information for you to divulge something about yourself, right? This is for a Japanese client that sold condoms. So the two different reasons to, to, to, to, to wear a condom, one is to not spread disease and the other was to not get pregnant, right? And I just had a like a, an image from a newspaper of a condom and I cut it out and reproduced it on here. And these were tracing these literally trace. I had a friend at the time who had just come by my studio as a photographer. And he showed me some photographs he had taken and one was literally some flies that were on the window sill of his studio and he took a photograph of them, you know, of them, them having sex. And this one, I basically took some clip art bunnies and kind of manipulated. 11 was down and um feeding and this guy was, this guy was kind of standing up and looking around and I just kind of nudged them a little closer together. But again, there are pencil drawings about that big and I love this, you know, not filling it in correctly. I don't wanna show that, you know, that I, I don't wanna, I don't want that veneer of perfection. I wanna show that a human being made this I think that's important because it says you can do this too. I'm not special at one time. I had a whole series of um stickers like the stickers I gave you that say you work as a gift. I had a whole sticker, a whole series of stickers that were in um fluorescent colors and um Cooper black. I like this, this font Cooper Black because designers don't like it, right? Designers are like, oh you, you're using cer black. I'm like, yeah, just get over it. Um And usually I like when I show this, I like it to be, I like it to hang this way because I'm paying attention to the painting and not the typography. Um And this was created for a uh a conference called the 9999 U in uh in New York. There's a big 55 color silk screen black in four colors. I just thought it was lovely. I just thought people would like this. So I made it, I think we made of them and got rid of them. All. This typography is made out of tape, right? And it was done at a time when New York was um getting rid of Times Square and getting rid of everything authentic and au everything um original in Times Square and covering it up with basically the shit you get in the airport at the mall right there. Were two of these, there was Disney go home and there's another one that says, just say no, but the same, the same Mickey Mouse, except the other one had a, I think an orange tongue instead of a green tongue up here in the corner. I I it's funny. It says um goodbye, New York. Hello, goofy. Meaning goodbye to everything authentic in the organ. Hello to this fake here. Um um By this, by that, I was asked for, asked by the University of Chicago, the uh the DePaul University um um to make a uh a poster for a gallery show of, of contra images of art, art work from um work by John Lennon and Alexander Calder and all these famous artists um against um it was like women's rights and war and all these big issues over historically, right? And they asked me to make the, the, the poster for the, for the, for the show. Um And uh they didn't have a lot of budget and I said, well, that's, that's fine. How many do you need? How many can you use? Can you don't need 1000 right? They said, no, we could use like 50. I said, OK, I'll make 100. Then you can use the 50 put those up and then the rest of them you can keep or give to people. So we just did it on, literally on just bought red paper, did a white under under print and then I went, um, went down the street in New York to Chinatown and I, um, bought, um, it was a live chicken. You know, they just like in, in Chinatown, they just have cages of live chickens and you just go that one. You know, you're like, you're like, you're like Nero, you're like that one. Kill that one for me. Um, and I literally brought this plucked recently dyed chicken home in a war, you know, warm in a, in a bag, took it out on my fire escape and spread it out and took a photograph and then made all this other stuff as uh the, the, the, the banner and the imagery. It says e pluribus unum like uh like on the American flag. Uh I worked for a number of years for the uh NAACP um uh doing images on the death penalty. Uh This one says the death penalty mocks justice. Um The reason I chose to do work for this, this client was that um the, the statistics on the death penalty if you really pay attention to them are pretty freaking amazing in that. Um If a white guy kills a white guy, he goes to jail. If a white guy kills a black guy, he goes to jail. If a black guy kills a black guy, he goes to jail. If a black guy kills a white guy, he gets the death penalty, right? It's just kind of across the board, you can see those numbers. So it was kind of interesting. So I chose to work for this client. Um And again, this was just a, a simple, very small little drawing of, you know, the death sticking its tongue out. And um early as a designer, this was 1995. So early as a designer in my early thirties, I, I um there was a lot of skulls in my work and what's interesting is now there's a lot of hearts in my work. You know, it's nice to not, you know, it's nice to change. It's nice to just grow and to develop and, and let your not be beholden to one thing. And um um quite frankly just grow as an artist. So these two pieces are um um subway posters for the School of Visual Arts. Um It's an amazing opportunity uh to work with this client, which my client for these two is the guy who started the school. His name was Silas Rhodes, a real, a real genius, a real Maverick. Um And for example, this poster, he was 82 when he assigned me this. He said, yeah, yeah, I need a, I need a subway poster for the Spring this, you know, the Spring Sester, you know, you make something. Yeah. You know, and um um so I went home and I came up, it was at a time where I was kind of removing myself from this minimalist style and trying to grow and to figure out if I can do um maximalist or do you know, very busy stuff. Um So I come up with this was just a glom of everything I loved about New York. And um I used this clip art family because it was funny. Um But I also knew that the fascinating thing about this was I knew that Silas Rhodes didn't understand what he was looking at here because he was 82. How could I, you know, how could I get him to understand this? But the amazing thing about him and here it is about working with clients. He trusted that I did, right? So he taught me a lot about working with clients and how and who not to work for, right? So this was the, we call the uh the beach family. This guy's got like this Tupac tattoo that says uh um visual arts and it's just a, a bunny and all the kind of crazy things that I like about New York and graffiti. I didn't do the graffiti because I'm, you know, I'm not a graffiti guy. So I hired a pal of mine and he did the drawing for me. Um And the la the last S VA poster that I did S VA subway poster that I did was um was this big sucker? It's called the uh the Real Cup poster because it's um from letters to a young poet. Um again, what was interesting about this and what's interesting about working in the subway is in the subway. You have timing, you know, people aren't just busy and walking by it or driving by it. They're standing on the platform. So they have, you, you can, you can draw them in and they can read. So I thought it would be interesting to me, for me to read, for, excuse me, to use what I was my favorite book at the time and invite people to that, you know. So it's, it's, it's, it's part of the 11th, 11th letter that Rilke wrote to the, the, the young soldier. But the famous bit of it is that live is about living the questions. So it starts here and it says live the questions and then it finishes in the little book. And here's the funny thing about working with Silas and working with the school and following the brief and all that is they would send me all this information and it would. And at the bottom of usually, if you look at S VA posters at the bottom is a big banner and it says it lists all the courses. I ignore that and they never once said, oh, you forgot, they just let it go. Right. It says School of SARS has got their logo on it. Um It's a lovely memorable piece. Um I love making, I love making posters and I, and I, and I would love to find clients. Um, but I've realized over the years that, that, you know, I'm a racehorse, like I'm, I'm, I'm capable of winning races for my clients, for myself. But my clients wanna put an apple cart, you know, when they want me to pull an apple cart and I can't do that, you know. So I've realized that I had this kind of massive epiphany. I just said, you know what, maybe I just remove the middle man because the client is just a middle man between me and an audience, right? So I start, that's when I started making just coming up with these phrases and expressions that I like doing like the ones from Feck perfection from my book. So this is from the book and it says the things that made you weird as a kid, make you great today. And this was the first iteration of it in a, in a big, in a big poster after, after it is ex existed in the book, was this two color poster. Um And then last year or the year, two years ago, I forget now, maybe, maybe two years ago, um I made a larger version. I was asked to go to, to um to speak at a uh um it's a, a group called Creative Mornings and they have these international summits and they happen to have an international summit summit in Austin. And they said, James, can you come and speak to our crowd. I said awesome. I'll come and speak to your crowd and I'll give him a gift. They said excellent. So I got my silk screen pal to get um inexpensive newsprint. And we took this weird kid thing and my talk was called, you know, The Weird Kid. Um, we reprinted it here and I had this stack of these posters and I said, guys take them, you can have one. So everybody got to take one. But the funny thing is they didn't have tubes and they didn't have, you know, they didn't have any way to take it home. So they had to cripple this up and put it in their suitcase. And then when they got home, they started showing photographs of it in their houses. They, you know, they've unfolded it and they're like, and I'm like, oh my God, that's fucking awesome. That's the new, that's the new thing. Oh my gosh. Thank you very much. So I went back and we printed new ones and then I started selling them and they sold extremely well. And the very, very first one I, that I'm, that is gonna get it, go out in the mail. I've got the box here, the UPS box, little small medium flat rate box and I've got it open and I take this poster and I'm about to go and put it in the box and I'm going, what the fuck are you doing? What the hell and then I said, no, this is the reason why I'm in the Museum of Modern Art and I Sprinkle it up and I put it in the box and people, and then what happens is people order, order a poster and, but they get a box and they're like, I ordered a poster. I got in a box and they, then they, what happens is they start, they go through this process where they start opening it up and they're going through all these different emotions. And then they realize, oh my God, that is so beautiful. Oh There isn't that awesome? I love that. Did you get any angry once the guy bought it for his wife? And she opens it up and she says it's wrinkled and he said it was a deal breaker. And I'm like, yeah, it's a deal breaker, dude. Get the hint. Yeah, you might wanna stay away from that one. um Yeah, I love this piece. Uh this, this, I will find new ways to new ways to, to tell this story. This is a great piece. I love it. How do you feel when somebody tells you how important that is to them? I am, I am reader. I am humbled all the time. I'm fucking humbled. It is crazy. I have people who write me and they're like, I have two autistic kids and I put it up and they read it and it's like I have all these great stories. Uh It's really crazy. Um But this is important. I mean, this is, this is, again, this was me able to, to craft an idea and where it came from was just me. I was writing my first book, I was writing the big coffee table uh who died and made you boss. And I was thinking about me as a kid working or, or playing. And I'm saying like, oh my God, that's what I do. Now, the things that I did then and it was very moving for me when I was thinking about this because I was thinking about like how, you know, my disciplinarian father and my parents who wanted us to be professional and all that, you know, how difficult it was to hold on to that. Um But I didn't know it would be, would be as meaningful to a lot of people because because in a particular lies, universal, right? My pain and my struggle is, is, is theirs, is yours. So your work is like recognizable because of your style. Like you will always, people always know it's yours. Thank you. Yeah, it's crazy. And it's something that like um we pooh, pooh that because it comes too easy. So you guys have to understand even, you know, I and everybody else, we, we don't realize what we have because these gifts they come too easy for us, right? We go oh Who would want that? My ability to, you know, my handwriting. But people, people like that. People want that and they, they want what you have again. There's an audience out there waiting for it. They just don't know yet. Okay. You guys rock. Thanks.