Question from a Masters Student

Jesse R., a teacher in Virginia and a Masters student in Illustration asked me the following question:

"When working in a field like commercialized illustration, where the subject is more or less dictated to you, do you find that it impacts the level of, or form of, self-expression that you put into a piece?"

There are three assumptions built into the question that I'd like to examine. In my experience illustration doesn't have to be commercial unless you're doing an illustration that's promoting a specific product or service. Even in that case, advertising illustration these days tends to be more creative, indirect, and expressive, and doesn't generally feature the product directly as it did in the 1950s.

You might ask in what other sense can a piece of art be commercial? Well, it can be commercial if it is created purely with the intent to sell it, or if it's just done for the money.

I never accepted the conception of fine art vs. commercial art, which strikes me as a false dichotomy, because it presumes gallery art is somehow more free from commercial considerations or more personally expressive. It's not; it's usually more commercial in that other sense.

A young artist is completely free when they bring their first batch of paintings to a gallery, but once some pieces start selling and other pieces remain unsold, there's tremendous pressure to repeat a success and to focus more and more of one's mind on such commercial considerations. It's possible to rise above such thoughts, but not easy.

That's why I love illustration. I never even thought about whether my covers helped to sell a book or a magazine. It would have been impossible to disaggregate the data, and we didn't get analytics anyway. So in my experience, illustration is far less commercial, more free, and more expressive than gallery art.

The third assumption is that subjects are dictated to the illustrator. Don't kid yourself: many gallery dealers dictate subjects to artists. Nothing is trickier to manage than a portrait commission or a client commission for a piece "like that other thing you did." I never experienced the problem of dictatorial illustration clients. 

Maybe I was just lucky because I was painting paperback covers, National Geographic illustrations, and paleo art which were the last remnants of the Golden Age of American Illustration. The art directors were enlightened enough to trust me to come up with ideas. They would ask me to come up with three or more sketches of my conceptions based on my reading of the material. Obviously there were design constraints, but those constraints added to, rather than subtracted from, the experience of self expression. Every creative professional knows that creativity thrives within boundaries.