Artists Should Not Be Old Dogs Unwilling to Learn New Tricks

Many people express great surprise when they learn that someone my age (I’m 81) has taken to digital photography and cutting-edge digital art so rapidly and enthusiastically. After all, you might expect a guy who got his first camera at age 11 by earning Brownie Points for selling magazines to be a die-hard film camera holdout.  By the same token, how does this guy, without any academic art background, become a successful digital artist at such an advanced age?

It’s simple. I’ve always been anxious to learn, always willing to accept new ways of doing things. That doesn’t mean I ignore the past or discard lessons it has provided. Take printing, for example, which I regard as an art form in itself. 

  

When I got my first newspaper job on a small weekly in October 1947, most small-circulation papers were printed on flatbed presses. Body text was set on Linotype machines, display type (for headlines & ads) was set by hand. Each page was composed separately, with type and engraved plates (photos, other illustrations) assembled in a form called a “chase.” I loved the whole process: clatter of Linotypes, thump-thump of presses, smell of the ink. 

(Some of the old shops still had fonts of large wood display type. These were a joy to the eye, sensuous to the touch, each alphanumeric character carefully hand-crafted, then polished to a satiny finish by years of use. I knew an editor once who scavenged some wood type and created a great coffee table, placing the type in no particular order under a glass top. Made a very artful piece.)  

 

As I progressed through my career, printing technology evolved rapidly. My second newspaper job was on a large urban weekly with a big job shop and a battery of rotary presses. Then came the “cold type” era in which we pasted up pages using “repro” copy  pulled from galleys of machine-set type galleys and half-tone or line art. Setting type electronically followed – and then we entered the computer printing revolution. 

There were large, expensive systems designed for very large publications. And as PC and Mac microcomputers improved, primitive individual publishing became a possibility. I was in at the beginning, attempting to do “desktop publishing” before Paul Brainerd, creator of PageMaker, coined the term about 1984. By now, I had well over three decades of experience writing, editing, designing pages and even doing paste-up for everything from small newsletters to national magazines. The lure of being able to create and produce a printed document or publication by myself was a temptation I could not resist. 

I was at Hughes Aircraft Co. during this period, having been hired in 1977 as a supervisor of special projects in the Art Department. By 1983, I was turning out multicolumn newsletters on CP/M and early DOS PCs, albeit not always with the greatest of ease. (In some future Blog I will regale you with the story of how I did my very first 2-column page.)