GUEST COLUMNIST

Our guest columnist is illustrator Dan Hubig, who muses about a career of reinvention.

"Confessions on An Inside (the Newsroom) Man" or The Clock is Ticking:

"We shall never cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time." -T. S. Eliot

When my illustration career was launched 30 years ago it seemed as though my artistic life would be exclusively of my own making. I launched a political (Op-Ed) art service, it was syndicated internationally by Pacific News Service, but I had originated the syndicate idea and was responsible for creating all of its content.

The proverbial empty white page beckoned me to cover it with drawings. Challenging assignments seemed less like problems than possibilities. There was even the odd success snatched from the jaws of defeat, such as the time I gained notoriety when the apartheid government in South Africa banned one of my illustrations. The Rand Daily Mail was forced to print an official stamp where the artwork should have been, while keeping my signature.

After a few years I began to hear the devil whisper in my ear — "don't worry if you are stuck, just recycle an old idea with new technique". It was a prophetic thought.

Seven years later, when the syndication business dried up, I took one job as a staff newspaper illustrator at the San Francisco Chronicle and another as an adjunct professor of art at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

I saw the newspaper job strictly as a temporary situation that I would leave behind as soon as I "reinvented" myself. The teaching assignment seemed a means of advancing that mission. Teaching "reinvention" as a career tool for young artists, after all, was the core mandate of the illustration department at CCA in those days. The idea was that rather than pushing new talent toward an obsession with technique and style, to get them to see those as a backdrop to the mental gymnastics needed to envision alternative ways of seeing themselves and their art. The search then was not for the single universal truth in one's own work, but a fluid state of mind in which any style or technique could be utilized. I felt this was the path I was on.... I didn't know the half of it.

Working "Inside the Beast"

In the beginning, life as a staff illustrator seemed benign. Many assignments weren't even art directed. Artists were given decent tools to work with and the staff was congenial and collaborative. Many fine illustrators had recently passed through the art departments of the local papers, including Ron Chan, John Hersey, Adam McCauley, Marcos Sorensen, Gordon Studer and Zack Trenholm. This would be fun! I wasn't entirely wrong. The atmosphere was often quite fun and aspects of my craft were greatly enhanced through the constant workload and time constraints.

The main skill necessary for survival was speed--of conception as well as execution. Some assignment deadlines were measured in hours or even minutes. The story was read (if there was even a story to read), the paper flipped over and the sketching begun on the back (sometimes with the editor or writer looking on). The first idea that was close to the mark was the one to go with. You had to leave as much time as possible for the execution.

Other times the challenges had to do with working around constantly uncertain story lines; changing news; editors who thought only their ideas were good; politically correct issues ("Can you make this person a black woman with a smile … but not TOO black …") deciding when you had to be literal in your interpretation or more fluid; knowing when you could afford the time or that you even had the possibility of success in fighting for a concept.

And there was the tightrope walk of how do I attempt a new approach with such a short deadline? By making mistakes in public, that's how. It was a creative improvisational slalom run. The ability to think on my feet was paramount. The metaphorical challenge was to finish before the absolute "rock hard" deadline fell on my head. A late assignment could hold up a print run and cost many thousands of dollars.

It didn't take long to realize that the ultimate test was not to be overwhelmed by the demands and become a hack. The beast, that is the news business, has to be fed constantly. You recycle ideas in order to keep your volume up. But you have to constantly be on the lookout for becoming a cheap imitation of yourself. It's a hall of mirrors. My operative theory on judging myself became a sports metaphor: the batting average. Under these rules you cannot expect a hit with each at bat. You judge your worth based on success over a certain period of the time. But what's good enough? Hitting 500, 750, 350 ???

As a result of the Dot Com collapse in 1999 and closely followed by the 9/11 attacks of 2001, freelance survival became more tenuous, so my plans for a quick exit from the work-a-day newspaper world didn't materialize. I stayed on the job. In 2006, after 14 years, I left the Chronicle.

"Back to the Future"

Nowadays, just as in the beginning of my career, I want my artistic life to be of my own design. My clients are impressed with the speed with which I finish an assignment. But I still ask myself, "was that really the best concept I could imagine?" I still have the tendency to flip the article over and sketch on the back. I have the time to rethink, but I'm not always able to let go of the first "good" idea. Speed can actually work as a governor on my creative thinking; It can take time to find the right approach.

I also realize now that some of my skills have atrophied. Amongst the projects that I'm developing is a graphic memoir. And at first I found that I would easily panic, thinking "how do I do this?" To invent something out of thin air seems like a magic trick now. I'm so trained to work in response to outside stimuli that dredging up ideas from my personal experience is frightening. So frightening, in fact, that I agreed to do a stand-up solo performance, based on the memoir project, at a local nightclub, as a means of facing down that fear and getting to the experience. It worked and has been a productive springboard for exploring new ideas. It was a reinvention that I could never have imagined.

Yet, I still have to create "fake" deadlines to trick myself into working effectively. An old dog using a new old trick. This old dog could use a new trick— in some ways the empty page looks whiter than ever. But at least I know when I've found the direction I want to take a project. ...... I know for sure I will finish it on time.

Dan’s illustration work can be viewed at DanHubig.com.