IGI features
The Life of Brian: an interview with Brian Cronin
May, 30, 2002
Milton Glaser looms large in the life of many of us. If you’re an illustrator then you can’t really escape the influence of the man. I suppose some people could say that seeing his work turned them on to illustration. But how many of those, a few short years after first seeing that work, subsequently worshipped at the feet of the Great Man, in his own lair, working alongside him? Well Brian Cronin can, the lucky devil. By Chris Sharrock (This article appears courtesy of AOI Magazine)
By his own account, Cronin’s own lair is as sparse and as carefully considered as his illustration, and that’s not because he needs all the space for the awards he keeps winning for his work (although it would make a damn fine excuse). He’s a man of few words and few lines, but what he does with those lines (and what goes on in that golden head of his) can bring tears of admiration and jealousy simultaneously to many illustrators. Apparently blessed with an imagination that comes from some other part of the forest to the rest of us, Brian throws fresh ideas into the rather care-worn province of Conceptual Illustration, reviving and extending the language of editorial illustration.
From a scrappy, post-college, impoverished start in his native Dublin in the early 1980s, (working on In Dublin magazine, a sort of O’ Time Out) he has risen to being one of America’s most celebrated illustrators, with a property portfolio almost as interesting as his illustrative one. All this with a pencil and a brain. How does he do it?
Well, he wouldn’t tell me. So we had to talk about something else. I tossed around a few possible opening gambits, but eventually I conceded the most interesting thing was still his work. With a regular client list that spans the United States and Europe, and with Gold and Silver Medals from The Art Director’s Club of New York, The Society of Illustrators and the New York based Society of Publication Designers, what made him choose the perilously inclined path of illustration?
“I studied graphic design at college,” he told me, “I was very interested in typography but my big love was drawing. I am not very technical, so although design was interesting it was too precise for me. Instead I concentrated on solving design problems through my drawings. I was unaware of illustration and at that time the college was very segregated. I had thought initially about taking the fine art course but I felt it was too unorganised and I needed some structure. Drawing and painting became more and more my focus, so when my tutor introduced me to the work of Milton Glaser, I knew I wanted to be an illustrator.”
I queried his view that design was too precise for him. Surely his own illustrations are precise? “They end up being precise,” he said, “but, unlike design, there are few set rules to work with in illustration while working towards the final solution. I approach each drawing as fresh as I can, focusing more on the problem and less on me.”
Brian claims to have learned little at art college. He was too busy having fun and meeting his future wife, Siáin. Was it all just a blast, or did he actually secretly acquire some knowledge? Brian admits he got one big gift from his time as a student. “I learned how to think. I didn’t start illustrating until I left college and I really learnt how to use drawing to express an idea through trial and error. I think there was a lot of time in college to just mess around. There were no star tutors, or even guest lecturers, so we were just left to answer problems on our own, in our own way, with no real guidance. (It’s all very different now, the college is very structured.) In retrospect, I think this approach was the best way for me because in high school- where everything was structured- you had to think and react like a bunch of sheep. Art college was very liberating for me. I hated school. I was- for the first time- really able to think for myself and really find my own way of thinking- one that did not have a formula.” I wonder if the new “very structured” college is still producing people of Brian’s calibre…
With the money from a scholarship he had won at college, Brian went to New York for the summer. Like many an Irishman, America had always figured large in Brian’s consciousness. “I grew up surrounded by American culture- the comics, the music, the television… I stayed up all night watching Apollo 11 landing on the moon.” He also had a welter of relatives in the United States. But the clinching moment was when his older sister Jean came back from a visit to America with a gift of a pair of cowboy boots for him. “I knew America was where I wanted to be.” Like many an Irishman (and Englishman, Scotsman, et. al), when he finally got there, he fell in love with the place. The following year (once again clutching the winnings from the very same scholarship) he went back, this time to work as an intern at Milton Glaser Inc. “Milton was very encouraging to me, and when I returned to Dublin we kept in touch. He suggested I come to the States and take my book around.” So in the summer of 1986, that’s exactly what Brian did.
Subsequently his illustrations, with their fine lines and rich ideas, have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, GQ, Esquire, Rolling Stone and many, many more publications. His work often has the linear qualities and spatial arrangements of a Japanese print, and there are strong design qualities to his compositions. There’s also an often sparse but always carefully orchestrated use of colour. I initially had him pegged as a printmaking graduate (he often uses small ‘accidental’ splurges of colour down the edges of his illustrations, reminiscent of the screen-printing process). Learning of his graphics background made me certain he must have, somewhere near him, a textile designer who was a significant influence. This Sherlockian (Sharrockian?) deduction spooked him. “My wife was a textile student at Dublin, and she is a great influence on me and my work” he told me, with surprise. It’s elementary, my dear Bri…
How has he arrived at doing the kind of work he does? “I’m not really sure…” he said, “I guess you just start and then something happens along the way that makes you go one way or the other. It is about who you are and how you see the world. I think my work reflects me and vice versa. I like to keep things very simple- where I live, how I dress. I don’t like a lot of stuff, I like to keep things uncluttered. I have just spent this last year living in Italy and the houses there have lots of furniture, which is totally over the top for me, yet I can feel something changing in me where pattern and decoration may play a bigger role in my work- and indeed my home.” A sensitive soul.
As for the actual making of his images, Brian had made it clear to me at the outset that he wasn’t interested in discussing this aspect of his work. He was more than willing to discuss his ideas and his process for generating them, but we were to be allowed no peeps into his pencil box. What I did deduce- or squeeze out of him- is that at the appropriate moment, an Apple Macintosh is pulled out of its hiding place and at least some of his process is carried out on it with the assistance of Photoshop. Brian is very clear about what is important for him in his work. “For me, in order to make a good illustration all the elements- idea, composition and colour- must be in harmony.” In his own work (and those of the artists and illustrators he admires- Eric Fraser, Peter Brookes, Glen Baxter, Seymour Chwast, Brad Holland, Magritte, to name a few) the idea behind the drawing is “the special part”. And for Brian that idea often comes through drawing. When supplied with a text, Brian looks up words in a dictionary and thesaurus (an old graphic design habit) and starts drawing. When his brief consists of no more than a short synopsis of a piece, Brian just draws. “Drawing really is the key for me. Sometimes drawing something that has nothing to do with the subject can spark off a string of thoughts that leads to an idea.” He uses his sketchbooks, he says, “like a mathematician. When I have arrived at the solution, there are just piles of bits of paper that have no use- they were just bits of an equation.” Once he has his idea, he refines and chips away at it till he is sure it is strong enough. “When it [the rough] has been approved I concentrate on composition and colour. Choosing a colour palette can take some time, trying to set the right mood. I work out my colour selection on my lap top and, much like working on the process of getting an idea, I go through many different combinations before I feel that all the elements are working together.” This is a thoroughly grounded approach: the perspiration after the inspiration. I asked if he was a methodical, calm worker. “You should ask my wife!” he said, “when talking about me, she quotes Jackie Gleason [the American comedian] describing another character in his sitcom The Honeymooners: ‘the applicant is a bum’… I think it is nearly impossible to be creative if you are calm. I am focused when I work, but never calm.”
This focus is turned on and off as the commission begins and ends. Does this mean he’s only consciously a creative person when he’s responding to a brief? Not at all. While denying he’s an illustrator ‘24/7’ he admits that when he’s not working on a commission he absorbs information constantly. He reads a lot of factual books, which he recognises goes against his identity as an illustrator who uses his imagination. When he’s not working he’s “just looking and being… hopefully something comes in and comes out when I start working… I spend a lot of time just messing about thinking….just being. I think this is where my real inspiration comes from. I think, in the long run, less is more.” But he qualifies this maxim with an aside that he’s interested to see what impact life in Italy will have on his work. “I don’t feel it is evident yet, but I really feel something inside is starting to happen.”
So, for Brian, the future is up for grabs. What of the future for the rest of us? How does he see the World of Illustration changing? “Every year since I started has been busier than the last. I still enjoy it very much and would like to continue for some time to come. I tend not to look at a lot of illustration anymore, but I think for a while that there was a lot of illustration being used that was trying to say too much and as a result said nothing. You know, the kind of drawing that has a handshake and a globe and lots of arrows… and now there is a lot of work which looks as if it was traced from a photo from some teenager’s photo album. I know there are a lot of really great and talented illustrators out there, but unfortunately it’s like the music you hear on the radio. Most of what you hear is crap and you really have to dig deep to find some interesting work.” Ouch.
Having said all of that, Brian thinks the best work, for the most part, is coming from the States. “When I was starting out, the really great work was coming out of England. I think the recession in the early ‘nineties knocked it out of the water. I think there will be some interesting things coming from the UK now that things have improved.” He is right to suggest we cannot rest on our laurels (they’ve dried up and gone a little spiky) but the fresh recession that’s looming in this decade may halt our regeneration. This, coupled with the increasing adoption of our teaching techniques by American Art Schools, (see the article on Marshall Arisman’s course in the excellent APU publication Line) could see our long held dominance finally washed away on a sea of domestic indifference and neglect (there’s cheerful for you). Less is only more when you’re Brian Cronin. Or am I being too pessimistic?
Well, as he modestly backs into the limelight, I have only one thing to say to Brian. No, it isn’t ‘I hope you break your hands’. I congratulate him on the admirable body of work he’s produced so far (in a comparatively short space of time) and I wish him a long and successful career. And I hope the same will be true for those of us on this side of the Atlantic.
