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When the Baltimore Sun's "Arts and Society" section needed an illustrator for an article entitled, "The Amazing Afterlife of Johnny Eck," David Julian got the call. "Your work is just weird enough that you might like this assignment," said the assigning art director, who had just reviewed Julian's portfolio, "but I want you to read up on him." "I don't have to," Julian replied, "I've read about him since I was 13." Now that's amazing, considering that the late Johnny Eck, a 1930's circus side-show performer who was in Tod Browning's classic film, Freaks, is hardly a household name.

The assignment was to create a full-page tabloid with a circus poster environment, only it wasn't supposed to look like a circus poster. For the piece, Julian used many digital images of artifacts to illustrate his subject, an fraternal twin who was born without the lower half of his body, and who used his arms as legs. "It was exciting because all I had was old black and white materials and a couple of

client-provided digital snapshot images to work with, and I wanted to put together this stage-like environment," says Julian. What isn't so amazing: Julian's illustration caught the attention of the Society for News Designers (SND), which gave him its Award for Excellence. Another piece "The Legacy of Lynchburg", which illustrated the pre-Nazi practice of "Eugenics", involuntary sterilization of "undesirables", also won him a SND Silver Award in two categories.

According to Boston-bred Julian, he was born to very pragmatic parents who suppressed his early artistic leaning in favor of his scientific interests. Because Julian's early scholastic life was dominated by science and mainstream art, he says he secretly illustrated his more risque and acute ideas. When his parents happened upon those designs, he was shuffled off for a psychological evaluation by "a classic German doctor." Turned out the doctor was a collector of bizarre conceptual and surrealistic art, and praised Julian's expressive talent to his parents.

After earning a B.F.A. from Pratt in 1979, Julian did freelance design in New York City, eventually becoming an art director at Warner Brothers Music. Seeing as Julian always retained his passion for science and nature, "I spent all of my spare time traveling to the equatorial tropics studying natural history building a photographic stock collection, and I produced educational materials about deforestation for an international non-profit conservation organization," he says. Nikon and Time Inc. gave Julian funding, equipment and prominent gallery space for his personally-motivated efforts. In 1991 Julian went freelance again, working on many pharmaceutical campaigns, Broadway theatrical ads and numerous other client projects.

These days Julian's conceptual, psychological and eclectic style has earned him work on a myriad of assignments from a client list that includes Microsoft, ABC TV, Cisco Systems, Prentice Hall Books, Ziff-Davis, Discovery Networks, Saatchi & Saactchi, IBM Corporate, Viacom, and Time Warner. As for Julian's influences, he credits artists like Andy Goldsworthy, Jiri Kolar and Jerry Uelsmann for affecting his thinking and vocabulary, and "the evolution of technology itself." Then there's Julian's amazing life: "Though I am not a natural history artist,"he says, "my observations of nature have been my most powerful influences." Altpick spoke to Julian in his waterside Seattle studio where he lives with his wife, Cheryl, and a three-legged cat named Psycho.

How has your work evolved?
I have worked to refine three related styles aimed towards specific markets that reflect a common thinking, pallette and look. I have also refined my use of symbolism and object in an un-cliched way.

How has working as an art director helped you?
For one thing it gave me a very professional attitude towards what art directors need. Good art directors are one reason I do what I do; otherwise I would just be experimenting and without structure. I am a very social person and enjoy the process of collaboration as an illustrator as much as I did when I was art directing.

Take us through the creation of some of your work. What was the idea behind "Fertility"?
It was a self-assignment aimed at attracting the pharmaceutical market from a different standpoint. I wanted to do something that was more allegorical. Since fertility and infertility are such huge issues with women today, I wanted to do something that was kind of beautiful but talked about a sensitive subject. I shot the Venus statue for a classical sense. The egg in the bird nest and the egg in the hand are about women controlling their own fertility. That's why the months of the year are ghosted in background on the bottom - the rose as a life sign and the bud going into a full flower.

I noticed you use hands quite a bit in your work, is that a thematic choice?
I think a lot of people use hands. I like to introduce hands just because it is the human way of taking and giving. It's not unique to my work but I do try to incorporate hands as much as I can. Hands are useful, they hold things, and they demonstrate things. They symbolize the human element. I'm always studing people's hands, always drawing them. Plus I can shoot my own hand when I need to work quickly.