by Ron Rae
First Beginnings
I was born in 1937 in Saginaw, a town in Mid-Michigan famous as a lumbering center in the mid to late 19th century. A couple of sections of Saginaw have clusters of Victorian Era mansions built by the Lumber Barons. My first home was in one of these Victorian palaces, a mansion turned into an apartment house. My grandparents lived in another elaborately detailed Victorian home close by. I think growing up in this overtly decorative environment influenced my life-long interest in historical art movements and design styles. I started drawing as a youngster as most of us did and often illustrated my school projects to get better grades than the written content deserved. Many of my teachers fell for this ploy. I knew early on that I was destined (or doomed) to be some kind of an artist.
Hitched and Married at Twenty-One
When I married in 1958. My wife Kathy and I soon became avid antique collectors and she became, and still is, an antiques dealer. She handled a wide variety of antiques, but our own favorites were of the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and later on, Mid-Century Modernism as it is now called. We recently found some of my 1970s silk screen prints showing up in the Modernism antique shows. I’m now officially an "antique artist" - I guess.
Just a Smidgen of Education
I attended Wayne State University in Detroit for one year (1957). My formal art education also consisted of one year (1958) at The Art School of the Society of Arts and Crafts in Detroit. Today it's known as Center for Creative Studies. In the 1970s I taught graphic design there myself. Incidentally I have no degrees (except 98.6). My first job in 1959 was as an apprentice in a desirable commercial art studio in Detroit called Gilchrist-Osler Studios. My first boss was Jerry Campbell, Detroit’s premier lettering artist and designer. My early training was for a position called “Layout Man” the old designation for a graphic designer.
My first job “on the board” (that’s drawing board) was at a small but pretty hot art group called LeBeau Studios. At this studio I first met and worked with my friend of 48 years, Edward Fella, now a world famous designer/graphic artist, teacher and lecturer. Ed and I discovered and explored a lot of art influences both historical and contemporary while working together in the same room. It was with this group (1960-1962) that I was officially called a graphic designer, and it was here that I was caught up in what I call "The Great Graphic Art Explosion of the 1960s". My first admired New York contemporary group was the original Pushpin Studios... Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, Paul Davis and John Alcorn. Imagine how amazing it was, when a few years out of Saginaw I was actually (if only occasionally) competing with Pushpin Studios for specific projects. In their "Historical Eclecticism" approach the Pushpin guys were referencing the historical styles and eras of art that I was so interested in, Victorian woodcuts, The Arts and Crafts Movement, Art Nouveau, Art Deco and the great early illustrators, both American and European... Howard Pyle, Maxfield Parrish, The Beggerstaff Brothers, Ludwig Hohlwein, Arthur Rackham and Aubrey Beardsley. Other important inspirations were Polish posters of the 1950s-60s, hippie music posters of the 1960s-70s, The Royal College of Art in London, Modern Fine arts... Picasso, Matisse, Max Ernst collages, Surrealism and Rene Magritte, Joseph Cornell, Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. My brain was swimming in all these influences and inspirations.
My new designation as I started to do mostly illustration changed to decorative illustrator. I was by then receiving constant requests from agency art directors to do work in my decorative illustration approaches. The main pitfall throughout my illustration career was to be the request "I love the way you style your illustrations, but could you give me a little more realism?" Of course the answer was an emphatic - NO! As Clint Eastwood says in one of his westerns right after drawing on and shooting a bad guy... "A man's got to know his limitations!"
My next move was to McNamara Brothers Studios (in 1963), my first big studio job with about 40 other artists. I went there to work with my favorite local graphic artist of the time, Jimmy Dunne, a little Northern Irish fellow direct from Belfast with a delightful accent. Jim became my most important mentor/teacher. At the same time, Jim was mentoring another of Detroit’s best designer/illustrators, Nelson Greer. One of the promotion pieces that Jim and I did for McNamara’s was a large illustrated silk screened folder/booklet on heavily textured color paper. The subject was old railroad trains. It was my concept and design with Jim and I each doing half of the art work. It was my first work to be accepted in The New York Art Director’s annual and in CA Magazine (in color, no less).
To give you an idea of how tedious the precomputer graphic art business could be I’ve included this description of hand separated art. The illustrations I did for the next ten years were very often hand separated flat color. The art had a line drawing on the illustration board with separate cell overlays for each color and screen of a color. Sticky red colored material had to be cut for each color shape with an X-Acto knife and the excess peeled away. Then each cell had to be registered to the line art. Many of my jobs were three or four colors, with many traps and two to four cells for each color. If you don’t recognize this as the description of a nightmare, add in that the art was usually due the next morning. Imagine how happy I was when four color process color became the norm for color art.
In 1964 I moved with Jimmy Dunne to start a small design studio called, Design Center where we were joined by another of Detroit’s best designers, Al Evans. Design Center was a subsidiary of New Center Studios, Detroit’s biggest ever Art Studio. It had about 75 artists by the late 1960s.
My new job was in Detroit’s finest 1930s skyscraper, The Fisher Building, an overtly over-decorated Art Deco wonder. I worked at Skidmore for 22 years in total 1965-1985 and later 2002-2004. In the 1960s Skidmore became Detroit’s finest art studio with about 30 artists. My national success as an illustrator came during my time at Skidmore. During this period I worked with Ed Fella and Al Evans again, and also with a number of others in the ranks of Detroit’s finest artists of the era... illustrators Bill Klemm, Frank Wagner, Chuck Gillies, Rudy Laslo, Steve Magsig, Bob Andrews, auto painters John Ball, Leo Skidmore, Jerry Monley and designers John Dudek, Wallace Mead, Bill Kastan. I just missed working with Bruno Hohmann, another of Skidmore's finest graphic designers. The studio's best ever rep, John Sahration, went to New York and Chicago regularly to bring us the coveted non-automotive projects. I always managed to make a pretty good living doing very little automobile work. I was working on a commission (percentage per job) for most of my time at Skidmore. The work I did always came in specically for me to do. It was like I had my own little "art store" within the big studio. For most of my working years I was fortunate enough to be able to have a work philosophy of... “If it ain’t no fun for me, I ain’t doing it!”
At the height of my illustrative success in the late 1960s I had offers for representation from New York art reps. The downside for me was that I would have to move to New York. In later years with overnight delivery companies, moving to New York was not so important for artists. A few of my illustration clients from1963 to1985 (without moving to New York), were Alcoa, Bendix, 3M Corp, Brown Paper Co, Dayglo Corp, CBS/Fox Video, Orion Video, GM, Ford, Chrysler, Upjohn, Eli Lilly, Dow Chemical, Detroit Free Press, Booth Newspapers, Playboy Magazine, Good Housekeeping Magazine, Cosmopolitan Magazine, McCalls Magazine, Friends Magazine, American Youth Magazine and on and on. By 1982 I had started doing a lot more graphic design, but I still did a fair amount of illustration, especially as part of my own design work. At this time I was doing work for the burgeoning movie/video industry, especially promotion campaigns to market classic movie videos. To illustrate these movie collections, including those of Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn and Shirley Temple I used three of my favorite independent Detroit illustrators, Gary Ciccarelli, Bill Hosner and Ken Granning. The last part of this movie video business was done at Pepellashi and Rae/Pelkan Pictures (1986-1993), my only period of art studio ownership. Pelkan Pictures, an offshoot of Pepellashi and Rae was a studio built around a main-frame graphics computer called the Quantel graphic paintbox, which allowed us to do a lot of "real time computer magic" in 1990, just before the Mac Computers and Adobe Photoshop gave us the desktop computer revolution that changed everything in our business. Soon large, expensive mainframe computers were no longer necessary to do major graphics imaging. The Mac and Adobe did it all and more.
A New Lesson in Old Dogs and Pixel Tricks
When I was 55 years old, I had to learn the Mac computer and Adobe programs or fold up my tent. It was one of the hardest things ever for an old brain, but I stuck to it. Luckily I really wanted to be able to do all the cool things I was seeing in print. I had been doing elaborate collage, montage illustrations for years combining my art with photos and old prints, etcetera. I had even done transparent effects by overlapping Xerox images on tracing papers. I was really ready for Photoshop... and Illustrator was ready-made for my graphic icon styles. Being able to set my own type and do the comps without those awful type rubdowns was just too good to be true. One more really good thing about computer art... as a drawing board artist I had regularly had black india ink bottles land in my lap, but I have never spilled any pixels. Being able to make changes to things without redoing the whole hand rendered comp was a revolution in itself. If only we had unlimited “Command Zs” for everything in our lives.
A whole new area opened for me by 1994-1998. I joined the Detroit area’s best interior and environmental design group, Peterhans Rea Design as they merged with James P. Ryan Architects. The two groups had merged to add an interior and environmental design group to their capabilities. We did total projects... buildings, interiors, and major high-end shopping complexes, restaurants/bars, music venues and zoo projects. Some of the work was for projects in London, England, Brazil in South America and Sydney Australia as well as all over the United States. My part of this was an amazing number of logos (mostly illustrative), art murals and dimensional decorative graphics and signage. Environmental design has been described as "just like regular graphic design... only thicker!" This period allowed me to design with some of the most creative and skillful artists I had ever worked with, David Peterhans, Ron Rea (pronounced just like my name, talk about confusion), Greg Tysowski (architect), Eileen Devine and Jim Ryan founder of JPRA Architects. This was one of my favorite periods of my career.
My last real job was 1999-2005 with friends I had worked with at Pelikan Pictures and Skidmore, Chuck White and Dean Armstrong. Chuck is a great art rep and Dean is the best computer artist I’ve seen yet. They had just started a new computer graphics studio called Armstrong-White. I did all their initial corporate identity work and helped with the design of their new studio space based on my interior design awareness from the stint with the Peterhans Rea group. A basic rule was... "develop a theme". Armstrong-White started out doing high-end computer photo retouching for all the major auto companies. The theme for the new studio was an attempt to make a studio space and image that was fun and entertaining for a business that mostly did pretty mundane photo retouching work. Since we were very high tech with our equipment and advanced retouching techniques we decided to do a visual spoof of "high tech". All our print promotion and our studio spaces featured old science fiction images and objects. The studio was full of rocket ships and robots. Many were vintage toys or reproductions.
By 2006 Armstrong-White had evolved into one of the nation‘s top CGI companies, doing 3-D cars for automotive ads, catalogs and TV commercials. I have now seen the art business in Detroit evolve from 1960, when the highest paid people were all artists who painted cars and 1965 when car photographers made the big money. Now, of course very few photographs of cars are used. CGI Rules! I wonder what or who will dominate next.
Since 65 years of age, I’ve been semi-retired, and working as a freelancer out of a small office, kindly provided for me at Armstrong-White. Most of my graphics work now consists of logo/identities. Take a look at ronraegraphics.com, my website that was done for me by my friend Bill Morgan, an excellent designer and art director, who was one of my best students when I taught at the CCS School in the 1970s.
The Creation - detail
The Creation (24' x 80")
50 years of my "Other Art"
I have always experimented with fine arts in my extra time. In the 1960s and 1970s I did some easel painting, assemblages, woodcuts and silk screen prints. I showed at a few galleries over the years. My wife and I collected old stained glass, including some antique stained glass lamps (now all replaced with my own lamps). Collecting led to my design and creation of many stained glass commissions, and to showing my contemporary glass works at the renowned Habatat Galleries International Glass Show from1979-1984. My last major glass commission was finished in December of 2009. It is the largest and most important work of my life as an artist. The project is a seven panel (24’ wide by 80” high) contemporary style glass mural... the Genesis account of "The Creation". It is in Cross of Christ Lutheran Church, a beautiful modern building in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (where my wife and I worship). I have also done stained glass for several other churches and a synagogue, all in a more illustrative style. I regularly do graphic work for various Christian Churches and causes at no charge. It is part of that "Who I Am and How I Got That Way" thing.
My days in the big studios, working with the best in the Detroit art field on so many great projects, will always be memorable for me. The bad deadlines, bad hours, lost evenings, the many all-nighters, the many weekends, the crushing stress, these I am grateful to have left behind. I am also grateful to have maintained a modicum of my sanity (a point upon which some would disagree). Describing 50 years of working in art... maybe 100,000 hours in total time, resulting in virtually truckloads of illustrations and sketches, printed samples, and glass projects, I should be feeling pretty tired now at 73 years old, but... who knows, there may yet be one more road (before the obvious one).
My work has appeared and won awards in many shows and publications. Among these: The Art Director’s Club shows of New York, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Atlanta and Minneapolis. My illustrations have appeared in the Society of Illustrators Annual (New York) a number of times. Magazine shows include Print, How, Communication Arts, Idea Magazine (Tokyo) and the Graphis Annual (Switzerland). Local shows and awards include many Caddy Awards (Detroit Art Directors Club) and Detroit Scarab Club Show medals.
1955-56 attended Graceland College, Lamoni, Iowa, 1957 attended Wayne State University, 1958 attended The Society of Arts and Crafts School that became The Center for Creative Studies... Taught graphic design at the Center for Creative Studies, 1974-1976.
I am a stained glass artist of national reputation. I showed work for a number of years in the prestigious Habitat Galleries "International Glass Show". I’ve won many awards in the glass art field. I have produced a number of large commissions. My glass work was featured in several national glass art publications, 1976-2003.
How the big Detroit Art Studios worked (and then they didn’t)
The big Detroit art studios (in 1968 there were eight or so of them) all had six or so full time reps who called on the big advertising agencies every day for work. A typical large studio (Skidmore-Sahratian) had a production department with a manager and, six or so "keyliners", the people who pasted up the boards with type and position photostats for art elements and photographs. This work was done under the direction of graphic designers. The "keylines" or "mechanicals" went first to the ad agency art directors for approval, then to the printing companies along with all the retouched photos and finished art work. The production department also included stat camera operators who could also shoot reference photos for the illustrators and a team of apprentices who ran back and forth to the ad agencies and learned a studio art skill when not busy with apprentice duties. Artists on the board would consist of several realistic figure illustrators, a couple of decorative illustrators, one or two lettering artists, several photo retouchers, a couple of penciling artists who did pencil drawing underlays of automobiles and all sorts of mechanical items on illustration board for the mechanical painters to do final art on. The "pencilers" also drew all the obvious distortions that one sees on 1950s and early 1960s auto art, the stretching and widening and lowering that made the cars look so big (and the figures look so small). Figure artists always put in backgrounds and people. Painting the figures in the cars had a name, "stuffing the cars". The big studios always had a design department. The graphic designers at any of the major studios were excellent at styling the concepts of art directors or designing a project from scratch with their own concepts. They did thumbnail sketches first to plan the project. These could be shown to the art director for approval before tight comps were done. Full sized tissues were then done by the designer as guides for the comps. By the middle 1960s the presentation comps for car catalogs and ads became very comprehensive indeed, with real type setting that had to be specked and sent out to the type house in the evening to be delivered first thing in the morning for assembly by keyliners. Major changes were a big problem. Sometimes patches could be done on the comps, but often the comps had to be totally redone. A whole class of artists came to be, who specialized in “zippy” photo indications for catalogs, ads and TV storyboards. The stylish comps done by these real pros resulted in the saying... "This comp makes promises that the finish can never keep!"
Below are a few examples of preliminary ultra rough thumbnails, a tighter sketch or two and a few typical semi-comps.
By the 1990s when the Mac computers, loaded with the potent Adobe, Aldus and Quark Software came to town, the end of the big studios was in sight. The first entities to fade away were the giant typesetting factories. The advent of Pagemaker and Quark made keyline assemblies and photostat machines obsolete. The ad agencies were able to set up their own in-house studios to do all their production work. The use of photography and artistically reworked photos resulted in illustration being used much less. The big art studios were going out or drastically shrinking. All of the old studios I once worked for are gone, except Skidmore, which is now just a few design people with no illustrators. Detroit illustrators... the few that exist now, are all freelancers. The Detroit art world that I knew (and sometimes loved), is no more.
The Cupcake Station retail store was started a couple of years ago in the upscale town of Birmingham, Michigan. It has been a great success and has expanded now to an Ann Arbor store and a Van-Store that goes to big events in our area and sells cupcakes on location. I did the main logo first, then the Van-Store logo a year later.
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I'd like to thank Detroit great, Ron Rae for taking the time to put this together for us. It certainly was an honor to have him featured on Illustration Pages. I really hope you enjoyed this special series on graphic designer and illustrator, Ron Rae. Don't forget to read our other interviews too.
