Seeing & Writing 3

Peter Arkle

This interview was conducted by the authors, Donald McQuade and Christine McQuade, and Marc McQuade, an architecture student, on May 23, 2005.

D.M.:	It's such a pleasure to have your work in the book. It speaks so powerfully to the elegant simplicity and the power of what one notices. I think it's going to have a very powerful effect on a lot of students.
P.A.:	And it's pretty basic; it's not like the process is mysterious. It's basically: Here are some drawings and a bit of labeling.
D.M.:	But I think a lot of kids—and this was certainly the case for me when I was young—whether it was literature or art, they were all so removed from anything I could have access to because I came from a working—class family in Brooklyn. The notion that I was going to read literature was unheard of to me. There were these sacred texts that were there and were treated that way by the religious who taught me.
P.A.:	And you can learn that they are just words, and that you can make some words, too. That's a hard thing for people to learn. I had a similar experience, there wasn't really anyone in my family who was doing those things or encouraging me. I used to do quite well in the English Department at my high school in Scotland, but I didn't really deserve to. I wasn't really a good reader, and I wasn't really very good at writing at all. I don't know what it was. I think I was well behaved, and that was enough of a ticket at the kind of school I went to. I really learned to read while doing my illustration work. You have to read things to be able to illustrate them. Although you're making a drawing, and I really probably wouldn't be good at writing a critical essay, the kind of analyzing that you have to do to make an illustration of something, you have to be very quick and really grasp the core meaning of something. And you just keep doing that again and again and again. I can remember that being much harder in the beginning. I think that's what taught me to be a better reader.
D.M.:	How did you get started doing illustration?
P.A.:	When I went to art school, I started off doing a foundation course where we did everything. All I knew was I liked drawing and painting and making things. At one point, I was even considering getting into film. But I really didn't know what any of these things were, nor did I know anyone who worked in those fields at all. Toward the end of the foundation course, I was introduced to illustration, and something clicked. It was what I wanted to do, and it just made sense to me. I knew I could paint, but I didn't want to become a fine artist; it just didn't seem right. At that stage, all I knew was that [illustration] was the degree course that I wanted to do. Once I started, I realized more and more that it was what I wanted to do.
C.M.:	Can you describe the training that goes into becoming an illustrator?
P.A.:	When I was going through training, we did a lot of book illustration. The woman who was the head of my course was very keen that we should all be good readers, and that was important to her. That wouldn't be important in every illustration course. Some illustration courses are all about technique. We didn't do much on technique. It was very clear that you could be bad at drawing and still be an illustrator. You wouldn't necessarily have to draw; you could make collages, or you could take photographs. You were making artwork that was inspired by something else, illustrating something else. Sometimes we would do drawings to illustrate music sometimes. And you could always give them some kind of commercial application. You could say that that would be the design for a CD cover or that's a book jacket or that's an illustration for a magazine. The magazine illustration was kind of a standard one. Magazine articles are kind of short. You can photocopy one and hand it out to ten students and give them a couple of days to come up with their ideas.
D.M.:	What were the criteria used in school to judge the pieces you worked on?
P.A.:	I always thought that was interesting, because we used to have "crits" and tutorials, where you'd be judged by your peers in a way. You'd all sit down and it would just become very clear which things people thought were the best ones. Which was always kind of a little mean, I thought. There were definitely people who I thought were making pretty good things sometimes, who wouldn't necessarily be in fashion or in favor at that time, so they would kind of suffer. I've only done a couple of days teaching since I left art school, but when I've gone back, it's kind of awful seeing that. The pecking order is instantly obvious—who's the person who's popular or trendy, who's doing the thing that everyone loves. And it's sometimes not necessarily that good. It becomes a confidence thing. This person, because people are telling them they are that good, is more confident. In a way they are better than everyone else, because they're just arrogant, in a nice way maybe. I think that's the key to success in way. You have to learn to be a little arrogant, and then control it. At least you have to learn to have the guts to just do something. I still do that. Every illustration job I do, I start off by firing little sketches at someone until they tell me it's really good. When I hear those words, that's what I need to then do something that's even better. There are times when it's more difficult, and all I get is an "OK," and I'm just glad when they've gone away. But the really good thing fires a little switch in my head that says "Ah, they like this," so now I can really have some good fun with this.
D.M.:	It's interesting, when I teach writing, I always talk about confidence. I often say to the students that the only confidence that's reliable is the confidence that emerges out of practice. That you have to practice sometimes to the point when you become fluent in it. And that you then really have some sense, you can then genuinely recognize and appreciate what the nature of your own success is. What you've just said makes it a little more external. When somebody expresses a sense of satisfaction, that they like this, or this is really good, then you know you're moving in the right direction.
P.A.:	And it's not just the praise, I need to know that they've "got it."
C.M.:	You might have your own moment when you say "This is good," but that might be different from someone else's.
P.A.:	And the more I do that, the better I am at figuring out what people want. When I first began, I used to find that much harder. There were jobs I'd do where I'd do the illustration maybe ten times before I'd find what it was they were actually looking for. A lot of that is [because] there are editors who just don't know what they want either, and they will mess you around.

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D.M.:	One of my favorite drawings of yours is the funnel going in to the brain and the faucet coming out the other side. It's so clear. Anybody can understand how the mind works and how the mind processes stuff and what comes out. The sensibilities at work in that drawing are fantastic.
P.A.:	I'm going to do a tidied up version of that, because it was a very, very rough drawing. The one thing I might change is the words going in at the top of the funnel. They should all be pictures or little fragments of images. At the moment, words are going in and words are coming out.
D.M.:	Oh, that's right!
P.A.:	But I love that constant play between. Reading is so instant to all of us. You don't necessarily see it as words going it; you see it as the images it's describing. The mind jumps between the two things. Everybody writes, and writing is such a familiar thing. I think it actually makes it worse. When I'm writing something, I can be lucky, and it's all in my head, or I'm on a quiet subway ride and I can get to just write it all down. I don't even think of it as being a piece of writing; it's just some notes I'm trying to get down as quickly as I can, which is kind of the best of my writing. But if it's something that I have to do, an actual assignment or something, then I still have to usually start by thinking that I'm writing a letter to my mother or something. I imagine that it's not a big deal; it's just some e-mail that I'm writing to a friend. I write all the time.
D.M.:	So you have to get started.
P.A.:	With drawing there are technical things [to help me get started]. When I sit down to do an illustration, usually an art director has told me what shape it's going to be, or the size, so literally there are times when I'll very carefully draw a square. [Laughing] I get out my set squares and with a pencil draw this very neat box. And then usually I don't draw anything in the box; I end up making little notes around the edge of it. Eventually, I get an idea and throw away that piece of paper altogether. But it's a little technical thing I can do, so I can see the space I'm going to fill. And then that will help me do the next bit. Then there are a million distractions. There's picture research. Of course, Google exists nowadays, so I do all of these endless Google image searches. The first thing I'm always doing, which is always a mistake, is I start looking for the finished illustration that I can just copy, because I'm just lazy, it's Monday morning, I'm tired or whatever. You type in the title of exactly what you want, "an angry man having a problem at the supermarket" or whatever, and you try and find that, and it's not that. But in trying to find that, usually I find something else. . . . I used to do [this] at the library before the Internet existed. That would be the same thing. I would wander around the library and just get distracted, because things were never where they were meant to be, and you'd just find these things. The problem is that it's hard on a deadline. It's that weird thing where you're trying to allow an accident to happen, but you're trying to make it happen in a very short time. It's pretty stressful actually.
M.M.:	I have a similar working process. It's very easy to think of that time spent as distracted or wasted, but it's one of the most important times.
P.A.:	And it's really stressful to keep that period alive. The one thing I've learned to do now is to wait before I send an image to someone. E-mail makes it so instant to send an image. I used to always make the mistake of sending something too soon, and then I'd regret it because I'd be stuck with that first thought. So now if I've got some time I'll get down an image that does the job, so that I at least have something. That then allows me to not be scared about the deadline. Now I can go away and hopefully find something that's funnier or better.
D.M.:	So the trickiest part for you is getting started. There's a lot of research about writing, and what happens when people are literally writing, and most of the research seems to me completely wrong. The metaphor that's often used is that the writer gets "derailed." I always think that the hardest thing is getting out of the station.
P.A.:	It varies every time I do it, I think. There are certain things that you do which are familiar and in the past they've worked, so I will return to those research methods or those ways of getting going. Sometimes I feel like it's just luck, especially when it comes to ideas. There are days when I have no ideas whatsoever. On those days, I'm really glad that there's someone who might just say "Draw this dog." Or that day I might be doing a portrait, where it's just purely about making something that looks like something in front of me. The way it works best is sometimes an art director will call me up and while they're talking to me and telling me what it is they want, I have an idea, and I can just hang up and draw it. And sometimes it can feel like that. And then it's weird being paid. Still other times, the drawing that has a good idea behind it doesn't have to be a good drawing. You could draw a stick figure, and people would be like "Ah, that's great!" A lot of the drawings I did for Bumble and Bumble involved little straight lines; anyone could have drawn them. Basically there are these little lines which are meant to be hairs. So there's no skill in the drawing at all. I won't get away with that again.
M.M.:	Along the same lines, it sounds like a lot of what you're doing in the beginning is using drawing to think through the process, as opposed to thinking of an idea and illustrating it through drawing.
P.A.:	I wonder if writers do that. You could just start writing everything down in your head. . . .
D.M.:	There are two cognitive styles. One is to think and then write it down, and the other is you write and rewrite and rewrite. There are some people who don't write anything until they've thought the whole thing through, and writing is just physical. They just transpose what's in their brain onto a piece of paper. The idiom is, "Put your thoughts in writing." There are other people who "free-write" in a version of what you were saying, the letter to your mother. You start doing it easily, and then you discover the shape as you write it.
P.A.:	Some of that I know is just therapeutic. It's just soothing. Especially with stuff that has a deadline, you're just panicking. You just do this stuff because it calms you down. One thing I love about my work is that I can panic, and I have my two desks downstairs, one with a computer and the other one. At one I'm just thinking and playing around with ideas, on the other I'm playing on Google. At the start of some jobs, I'll be running about between the two desks, in this panic, kind of sometimes feeling sick. It's horrible. It's a time versus money thing sometimes. I will have spent two days on this job instead of one. Usually what happens is that if I can just sit down for a minute and just draw something, then I just calm down, and then I think more clearly.
D.M.:	Are there circumstances in which someone calls you to do X and you immediately say "That's not for me"?
P.A.:	I haven't really done that. The problem is I can't imagine what that would be. There must be something. It would get really specific. It would just be something I hate. Like if someone said I need you to do cartoons where they've got really little bodies but really big heads, that kind of caricature. That is just something I will not do. It's very specific like that.

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C.M.:	Could you describe the process you went through to arrive at the cover image for Seeing & Writing 3?
P.A.:	The starting point was an image of 14th Street that I'd originally done for my newspaper, my own little publication called Peter Arkle News. I started it when I was at art school and have been doing it for about eleven years now. It's basically just everyday ramblings. I always describe it as stories of everyday life. Funny things I might see on the subway, little thoughts I have, little drawings I do. The original idea came from a Richard Scarry word book. There's a lot of town scenes, views in a supermarket or of a breakfast table. Everything is labeled with words. Visual dictionaries do the same thing. It was a very basic process. I thought I'd like to do a New York image that has lots of labels, and [I] gave it a try. And then I sat down to label everything. As soon as you start labeling things, you can't help but realize that you are choosing which things to label. The first pass through with labels, it was very basic. I tried to pick up on things that were particular to 14th Street as well. So it went a little bit more personal that just a man, woman, tree, ground. And then as I went on with that, I started realizing that I could start to label things that you couldn't really see but you knew were there. Or I could label things with my attitude toward something. So it's not just "pair of trousers" but "horrible pair of trousers." Then Katie Andresen at 2x4 saw that image and that was her first thought for the cover. The first time she phoned me we talked about that image. And then it was just a process of deciding what we would label. So then we decided we'd do something with students on campus. I spent a half a day over in Washington Square Park [near New York University in New York City] photographing students and writing down things I heard them saying. I took lots of photographs, but the scenery ended up being not any kind of background, like one of those white-space infinity studios in a way. It had to be anywhere in America or anywhere in the world. So we didn't have anything that made it look like Washington Square Park. And then it was just a matter of deciding which students I would include and arranging them.
D.M.:	I love the imperial pigeon. It's so wonderful, because I know that every time students look at it, they will see something that they hadn't noticed before.
P.A.:	And every time I look at it, I can think of something else that I should have probably added. I can also imagine zooming into it. I could redraw a detail of it, and then another million labels appear (we could go on and on until there's only one label, which is the meaning of life).
C.M.:	Was it different for you to think about representing college students as a population?
P.A.:	Different in that there were definitely things I noticed that made it very clear that that's where I was, that it wasn't just any bunch of people. The age thing, for one. There was one thing, we kind of played it down, but there were all these girls with boring, long, straight hair. There were some things I couldn't put in that illustration, because it is a book jacket. I was surprised [for example] by the amount of Louis Vuitton luggage. It kind of horrified me a little.
M.M.:	Are there any other things that you censored from the cover?
P.A.:	Those were the main things. Though there were a few things that came from a cynical point of view, which I knew weren't going to make it, or that might have offended people. They would have ended up in my newsletter. That's why I have that; it's somewhere I can rant a little bit more.
D.M.:	You talked about working from your photographs. How did you use them?
P.A.:	Because of perspective, you have to decide which things are going to appear at the front, and those are the things you have to draw first, because they don't have anything in front of them. I assemble it all on a computer now; it's all individual drawings which all get stuck together. You can do the same thing using a light box and tracing, which is how I used to do it. It's actually nicer, because then you end up with an original with everything in it. Now I end up with all of these scraps of paper, some of which only have a hand on them, or something I redrew, scanned in, and dropped in. So I can change my mind a little bit.
D.M.:	So you draw something, and then you scan it, and then you start organizing it.
P.A.:	Yes, and it's exactly like paste-up, but it's just within a computer. Just a few years ago I used to do all of this on paper. I would use a scalpel and cut things out and stick layers of paper on top of each other. I would use tons of liquid paper. I've had drawings where the whole thing is like a lumpy relief because there's so much liquid paper. Especially once I start adding in writing, and I've corrected my spelling mistakes, it becomes a mad, bumpy thing. The early originals for my newspaper were all like that; the paper would crack if you bent it. Photoshop now allows me to do all of that seamlessly, but it's basically the same process, which is why I can handle using it in the first place. It's basically just cut and paste, but it's all on screen, and you don't inhale any noxious fumes.
D.M.:	One of the pleasures of teaching is to walk between classes and to listen to the snippets of conversation and then imagine what the contexts for those assertions were.
P.A.:	Yes, and I love how much I vary, and how open I am to noticing stuff. There are definitely days when I can leave the house and there are so many amazingly funny and interesting things that I see walking down the street. I can write it all down and fill four pages of a journal, full of this silly little adventure. And then other days there's just nothing. And I don't believe it's because nothing is happening. I think I'm just not paying attention that day, or the switches are not open. That reminds me of something I kept thinking about as I read your book: Aldous Huxley's novel Island. He imagines an island utopia, a perfect utopian world. They have these mina birds, which are trained and released all over the island. And all they say is "Pay attention." They fly around everywhere and say "Pay attention." It's about personal safety, but it's also about creativity. If you're awake and paying attention, you're bound to find something interesting.
D.M.:	So when you're walking down the street and you see something interesting, what do you do? Do you stop and enter it into your journal?
P.A.:	I know I have to. Very often, I'll see something funny happening, but I'll just keep going. And then a couple of blocks later, I know I've got to write it down or else it's gone, and I know I won't remember later.
M.M.:	Is that note-taking in writing or drawing, or is it a mixture?
P.A.:	Usually it's just writing, because it's usually all I have time for. I've gotten lazy because I have a digital camera now. If I have my whole bag with me, I'll have my camera, notebook, and everything. But my pockets get full, so sometimes I just have my camera. I will sometimes just take a photograph�if not of exactly the thing that was happening�of something that will remind me of something that happened. But I know that if I don't write it down then and there, I'll forget. Even if I think a photo sums up the whole thing, I still know that I should make a note in a notebook. I assembled the newspaper by looking at the notebook and seeing what's funny and interesting.
C.M.:	What's the difference between that snapshot and the handwritten note?
P.A.:	It depends what the thing is. Sometimes the snapshot does everything because it's purely about the way something looked. I know you can describe anything, but some things will ONLY make a good drawing. It would be wrong to say that one thing is better than the other. It's interesting, because there are times when I just draw something at the time as well. Partly because of my purest art training, I feel like the thing I just drew then and there is really the proper drawing, and the thing I draw from a photograph later on is kind of a cheat. There are definitely times that I can take a photograph and there are things in the photo I didn't even notice were there. Sometimes they're distractions and other times they reinforce a point I was trying to make. Even in that photograph of [the] New York University students, I found, when I was looking back through the fifty or so photos I took, I'd noticed a logo that I hadn't noticed before. Especially when you are photographing people and trying to make it look like you're not. It's like fishing in a way. Eventually you learn how to point the camera. For a while, I had lots of shots of peoples' knees. I do a column for Print magazine, with has the sinister title "The Stalker." They send me to design-related events, like parties and openings and conferences. I wander around there and write down things that I overhear. At conferences I tend to rely on what people are talking about on the stage. But the parties are quite funny, because in the end I just have to cheat and put words with people who didn't necessarily say them. 'Cause the drawings are not so accurate that anyone would ever know it was them. I'm not going to get sued, at least I hope not. But there are times when someone is saying something and the way they look is really important to that. I'll either have to do a little drawing or run away and try to sneak a photograph, and it's hard doing both things sometimes. I'm trying to listen and write and do drawings and photos.
D.M.:	It sounds like when you're in that scene, you are reaching for the whole scene, rather than zooming into a particular detail.
P.A.:	I'm panicking really. I'm thinking: I'm here, and this event is only going on for two hours, and I've got to write a comic strip about it. I used to do a weekly comic strip, and every week I had to find something funny that happened. Anyone who does that does the same thing. There are just certain different angles you can have. You can always fill the space. The best thing is when something really funny happens and you catch it and it's just a totally unique, funny moment. And then there are other moments when it only becomes funny when you add a thought of your own. And then I would have to do one or two, the one where I had a funny dream. Or then there were the ones that are: "I had a funny thought." Kind of like, I wish this had happened, you know? Or I would write about something I wish I had done but didn't do. I swear I've seen every cartoonist do this; there's the one where they haven't got an idea, and they do a comic strip about not having an idea. You're allowed only one every few years.
D.M.:	Every poet has a poem about poetry.
P.A.:	The people I'm most jealous of are hip-hop singers. All their songs are all about being hip-hop singers. They've managed to make whole careers out of talking about who they are and what they do and how cool they are, and they might mention their car and stuff. It's unfair. Where's the creativity in that? When there's a hip-hop song and it's not just about them, it's great. It is a good medium; you can tell good stories.
C.M.:	We often ask students to consider an artist's style. Is there a way to describe your style that you are comfortable with?
P.A.:	Variety is important to me. I like if someone sees my Web site and sees the range of work I do. Sometimes I work as a cartoonist, as a comic artist, as an illustrator; sometimes [I work] even more like a fine artist. I would never really use any one of those labels, though I call myself an illustrator most of the time, because all of it fits into that category in some way or another.
D.M.:	But you wouldn't object to those terms being used?
P.A.:	No, in an average week I have things called cartoons, things called drawings, and I have people who get all nervous and don't know what to call it. And I say, "It doesn't matter; I'm not that precious."
D.M.:	Is there a time of the day that you work?
P.A.:	I'm a morning person.
D.M.:	How do you get started?
P.A.:	My daily routine is that I always have coffee first, and then I check my e-mail and delete hundreds of spam, 'cause of all the cookies I've picked up being on Google far too often. And then ideally, a good day would start with me sitting down at my non�computer desk, 'cause then I know I�m really just trying to see what's in my head, and I'm not relying on finding something that's half done and it means I'm awake. My panic mantra is "Just do something." I have so many things that are on the go. I can just panic, just making a list. But nothing happens when it's meant to anyway. The list doesn't really work anymore. The "Just do something" works well. I always try and do the thing that I know I can finish first. That helps, too. You get that satisfaction of finishing something.
C.M.:	Do you have any advice or suggestions for students working with Seeing & Writing?
P.A.:	My favorite advice is "Just do something." Especially when I first began just recording funny things that I came across, there was no real skill involved. But the only thing that made them of any interest was the fact that I'd bothered to write them down. And people would go "Ah, this is so neat." And everyone would identify with it, because it was all stuff they'd seen as well, but they just hadn't bothered writing it down. . . . My dad died when I was six, but he left all these journals. When I was old enough, I remember being really excited to read these things, and later when I was doing my own writing and keeping my own journal I was interested to compare what he had to say and wondered if we had similar styles. [Unfortunately] they're just so dry. They're lists of the weather and what's going well in the garden and what wasn't. But it's still interesting, because he did bother. It says something about him. Half of the panic is partly a choice thing. I remember that a lot when I was at college. There's this feeling that you could do anything you want, and you're meant to think that, because everyone's constantly making it clear to you that you're in this lucky position where it's not commercial, and you can do whatever you want. But that actually makes it worse, because you feel like "I can do anything, so therefore I'm going to do nothing." Which is why the only time I would do good work is when I was on the train and all I had was my little notebook and a scrap of paper or something. My early notebooks are full of proposals for crazy things I would make, but of course what's interesting are crazy proposals, not the things; I rarely made the things.

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