My background, my influences, always a narrative artist from the very start, always storytelling artist. Then in higher education, six years of higher education I was purged of the narrative in my art because that was very much out of style in the mid to late 60s and for six years I forgot my direction and had to find it again for which I thank my relationship with Audrey who said that’s nonsense, that narrative belongs in art.
It’s hard to remember now how monolithic art was in those days. There was one movement after another and each one was the final moment in art. This was it. This is where we’ve all been going for, you know, 500 years. So I found my way again and I thank Audrey’s attitude and direction on that. Early influences, believe it or not, will be as gauche as you can possibly imagine, Carl Barks, Uncle Scrooge comics, that’s what you could get where I was. No bookstores.
And then I saw Bambi so that was a mind altering experience if you’re living in a small town and you haven’t seen animation except Tom and Jerry at the local theater and also then came Mad Magazine, very, very important to me and there was even an artist named Wallace Wood that I loved and I like to think he was a relative. So then we went -
Although all of your art looks like it’s masters, old masters work with -
It depends on what you write, my dear.
I’m very flexible.
Yeah, I basically got down on my knees and begged him to do my book, the first book that we did together. I said please would you do this.
So once again, we’ve been given permission to disagree. I rode her coattails in this profession. If you speak with any editor frankly and perhaps we’re revealing inside secrets that you’ll need to edit out, but editors will tell you that they have 100 great artists waiting for one good manuscript. So how lucky was I?