Greg Clarke

Greg Clarke's career route has been a circuitous one. He received his BA in fine art from UCLA in 1983 but claims not to have acquired any skills there. The department was steeped in the conceptual art in vogue at the time and traditional drawing and painting skills were considered a quaint and outmoded form of expression. He did do some editorial cartoons for the school newspaper, much to the dismay of his purist instructors. but wasn't really aware of the possibilities of illustration and design until his senior year when he started going to the art library and looking at old issues of the New Yorker and Graphis. The humorous covers by artists like Blechman, Sempè, Steinberg and Andre Francois were a revelation to Greg, amazed that one could be humorous and poetic at the same time.
After college and disillusioned with the fine art world, and with no illustration portfolio to speak of, Greg took a job as an office assistant at an ad agency specializing in movie poster design, and after months of pitching his own unsolicited poster ideas to the creatives, they kindly made him an art director. At this point he became very interested in typography and graphic design, and subsequently worked for several more years at various graphic design firms before experiencing burnout and general creative malaise. Bar-drawing buddy and fellow UCLA graduate Gary Baseman, who had moved to New York and launched a meteoric illustration career, urged Greg to put an illustration portfolio together and go to the city to show work. He did so and has been working steadily ever since.

Greg created the L'homme Wiggly as a limited edition silkscreen poster to sell at a gallery exhibition in Los Angeles and the image quickly became a sort of personal logo. As with so many of his peers, regular appearances in American Illustration (more often than not in the unpublished category) really helped to get his career going, particularly in the editorial field. A self-promotion mailer of over-sized post cards led directly to larger scale commissions such the portrait of Beck for a Rolling Stone record review.

Greg generally tries to approach most jobs with the notion that a strong concept trumps considerations of style and medium. Without a good idea, an illustration is just window dressing. He therefore strives to instill a certain degree of wit into everything he does. The portrait of Beck was a loosely interpreted image based on reference photos provided by Rolling Stone. Beck had an angelic face with the innocence of a puppy dog. As often happens in the world of illustration, this piece led to a number of subsequent commissions from other art directors asking him to do other celebrities as animals (Rosie O'Donnell as a cat, Eminem as the Ugly Duckling).

The Nutcracker on ice skates was originally created for the cover of the Holiday Fiction issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer's Sunday magazine. Greg had been doing a string of chaotic illustrations with very busy compositions and needed to do something very simple, quiet and elegant. Chrissy Dunleavey, the art director, gave him a lot of latitude and trusted him to do something with delicate washes even though there was nothing like it in his portfolio. He played around with a number of holiday character icons engaged in the solitary act of reading and for some reason found the Nutcracker the most amusing. In one sketch he was reclining in an easy chair by the fireplace, but it was felt that placing him outdoors in stark relief against a monochromatic winter setting worked better as a cover. Several years later, Galison Press in New York bought the rights to turn it into a holiday greeting card.

A recently completed series of black & white illustrations for My Fine Feathered Friend, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, was an opportunity to endow animals with human attributes without relying on human props. As told by William Grimes, restaurant critic for the New York Times, it's the true story of a chicken that shows up out of nowhere one day in his backyard in Queens. The chicken proceeds to make a place for itself among the society of resident cats. The chicken and the assortment of cats all have personalities as distinctive as those of any humans.

Hot off the drawing board are illustrations for a children's book of poetry about human body parts. Written by Allan Wolf, The Hungry Spleen and Other Poems About Our Parts, published by Candlewick Press, presented the challenge of bringing human anatomy and bodily functions to life in an instructive and entertaining way. Greg gets a lot of children's book manuscripts sent his way, but more often than not, the text does not seem a good fit for his work. When he initially read this manuscript however, he responded immediately to the whimsy of the poetry, which seemed a good complement for his own sense of visual humor.

More recently, Greg has found an outlet for his narrative talents on the back pages of magazines like Kiplinger's, Mother Jones, and Los Angeles where the illustrator is given a whole page to create something independent of someone else's text. He has also been a regular contributor to BLAB! an irreverent anthology of comics published annually by Fantagraphics.

Living in Los Angeles, together with his wife and two children, Greg joined The Artworks in 1996 after taking a trip to London. On a whim, he thought he'd investigate the possibility of getting representation in Europe. Michael Hodgson, a graphic designer and British expatriate living in Los Angeles, gave him Allan Manham's number before leaving, and he turned up with his portfolio. Excited at Greg's work, but aware of the group policy of worldwide representation, Allan suggested that Greg talk to Sally Heflin in New York and that if all parties agreed, The Artworks would love to represent him. The rest is history.