David: You’re right that I have a diverse background. I never dreamed that I was going to be an illustrator when I was studying fine art. I was aimed at being a gallery artist. But I also, I think it’s interesting to know that I grew up a young man studying art during the 60s and the 70s when movement, the movements in art like pop and abstract expressionism before that and minimalism which is very big in the 70s all of this was sort of against the kinds of things that I wanted to learn, I wanted to learn, I admired people like Rembrandt, I admired the political cartoons of Daumier from the 1860s in Paris. I admired anybody who could express things through simple gesture and expression in the figure.
Sarah: There it is.
David: I wanted very much to learn to draw the figure as well as I could and to give it life and perhaps who knows that may have come from my early, early life growing up in the household of a radiologist. When my dad brought his work home he had the basement covered with x-rays projected on a screen. And so I grew up looking at bones inside people’s bodies. And it seemed, it just got into my consciousness but it seemed when I got to college it seemed like a natural thing for me to draw the skeleton, to learn what the names of those bones were and how they worked.
And so that to me was a very exciting subject which most of the other kids thought was very abstract and a bore and didn’t pay much attention to. So I was always sort of tending toward illustration and I was certainly always tending towards storytelling in my art which was also completely thrown out the window in the 70s with minimalist art. So even in art, which was, I felt where I belonged, I was marginalized. I’ve always been sort of a fringe person, as Sarah I think would say.
Sarah: It’s true.
David: You have been too in some ways.
Sarah: Out on the periphery. That’s the way we see well. That’s the only way to see clearly.
David: Yeah. And as I like to tell school kids it’s a pretty good place to be, out on the edge. Think of it as a big cookie; everybody wants to be in the center eating the filling and jumping around in the middle together and Sarah and I are out here on the periphery. Maybe an even better analogy is being in our own little satellite circling the Earth and observing.
You see you get the whole picture from out there, on the edge, you know you get a better, more objective view of things from the outside.