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[ August 4th, 2003 ]
Autumn Whitehurst grew up in the deep dank south...New Orleans to be
specific. Though she never imagined that she'd actually be living in New
York one day, she fantasized as a young girl about a career in fashion. At
art school in Baltimore Maryland, however, she reconsidered, as painting
had become her first love.
And do it she did. Now, Whitehurst's signature style softly rendered photographic illustrations has given her the oppurtunity to work with Ogilvy and Mathers, Crush Design, Ecko, Out, YM, Utne, the Baltimore CityPaper, British publications Computer Arts and Digital Home amongst others. She spoke to altpick.com from her home-studio in Brooklyn. What did you do after you graduated art school? I stayed in Baltimore for a while, because I wasn't sure what I was going to do with myself. I knew I wanted to move to New York but it never seemed likely, and then the oppurtunity arose when a friend offered me a job to do some freelance scenic work and I pounced! I was so excited to finally be here, in this fantastic city that's like a big organism. I had a good time doing scenic work, and it taught me a lot about NY, but eventually I became very sensitive to the materials that I was working with and sometimes the conditions that we worked under were somewhat brutal and exhausting. That's when I considered graphic design and so I took a job at a service bureau to better understand what happens when a digital file goes to print. I eventually realized that graphics were less interesting to me than illustration.
I think in analogies. Anybody who spends any amount of time with me will hear me voice outloud an analogy to help me better understand what's going on and it always falls out of my mouth like a rock. And I have always had a very strong response to illustrations, especially recently, there are so many fantastic illustrators out there, making the world a more pleasing place to live. The diversity in ways that you could express something is stimulating. It can be anything from the ephemeral quality of urban living to the more timeless and poetic. Living in the city there's so much visual bombardment that I just had to do something with what was swelling in my head and illustration seemed like the way to go. What was your first big job? It was with Ecko Red. They supplied me with a photo of a model to illustrate. She looked like she was glowing with perspiration and the gleam on her skin reminded me of the way everybody in New Orleans shines for a good part of the year. So I decided to pick up on that and render it into the illustration. Before that illustration my work had little to no rendering in it. I like lines much more than for what they're worth, but the Ecko illustration came to define my style as it's what most art directors had the strongest response to. When I initially began illustrating I never imagined that this was the style I'd develop but here it is. I mean, I watch a lot of cartoons and thought that more than anything that my work would be much more stylized. Had I been left to my own devices I think that the work would be different, not any more enjoyable to do, but more darkly humorous and much more lean. I've learned that as an illustrator I make up one half, and the art director makes up the other. Every piece is a collaboration. If you had to travel back in time as an illustrator and land yourself a job, what would it be? And why?
One of the side affects of working digitally is that I don't move anything very much other than my fingers so as a result of never moving, rarely speaking, I've become very "local". I walk outside of my apartment everyday and get hungry for some kind of adventure to move me. Why did you choose to work digitally as opposed to working with traditional media?At one point while I was living in Baltimore I was interning for a company that made tutorial CD-Roms for American students overseas. I would do the illustration in gouche, which doesn't lend itself to blending, and then fix it up in Photoshop. That was when I learned to use the Adobe programs. More recently when I began illustrating again I skipped the gouche and started drawing directly on the computer because it's much faster and I found that I could get those clean hard lines using Illustrator. Working digitally is much more forgiving as well. You can fine tune your color choices, stretch things and really mess around before landing on a final decision.
Painting is very personal and I have to reach inside to get the stuff out to make it work. When I'm working on an illustration I often tap into that to hopefully achieve something that evokes feeling. Sometimes it's close to home and other times I just want to make my client happy so I have to pretend that, for example, I go clubbing and like it or that I'm concerned about casinos for example. In any case it obliges me to enrich myself with stimuli daily so that I can bring something to the table for every job that I get. I love it. And yeah I miss painting. A computer is very convenient; you can work so quickly. But a digital file is never, ever finished. You can open it up 20 years later, and you can find something that wants changing and then change it. It never tells you when its complete. With paint, it gets to the point where the paint looks muddy. It tells you that you're choking it with your indecisiveness and it looses its luminescence. One of these days I'll go back to it but I won't make a switch in careers. Illustration has taught me about my approach to painting. Painting will be more about the process, not the product. Before it was a means to an end, and now, I want to think about the process alone, like a drunk and failed alchemist, who never gets the gold but makes a million other better things instead. - Contributed by Kelly McEvers >> See more work from Autumn Whitehurst >> See other member spotlights on the member spotlight index >> Find out more on how to become an altpick.com member |
