Few artists had ever considered illustrating corporate annual reports containing financial results for shareholders. There seemed to be little potential for creativity there:
But in the hands of imaginative artists, corporate reports turned out to offer surprising opportunities. Great illustrators such as Daniel Schwartz transformed annual reports, inserting poetry between consolidated balance sheets.
For example, the Board of Directors of United Foods bragged to its consumers and stockholders that it had hired "noted painter and sculptor" Daniel Schwartz to decorate the United Foods report especially for them:
Schwartz's landscape for the cover for the Amfac Corporate report...
...was as loose and free as a Degas monoprint (except for the tiny Amfac truck Schwartz added in the corner):
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| Degas |
Schwartz brought the aesthetic of a fine artist and gallery painter to a corporate report:
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| detail from Schwartz's Amfac cover |
Ever since the 1960s each generation of illustrators seems to have fresh reasons to fear obsolescence. New technologies, economic downturns and evolving taste all cut into historical markets. Yet, the resourcefulness of talented artists has repeatedly been a source of inspiration. Often the paths they chart seem obvious in hindsight.
Craig Mullins, who came along after Schwartz, dabbled with Photoshop during his lunch hour and became one of the first to see the great potential of digital painting for video games, creating a gold rush for illustrators.
Nathan Fowkes, who I think is one of the most talented and genuine illustrators working today, gave an excellent lecture on how artists might continue to "stay relevant" by finding new ways to add value in the face of alarming new technological changes, such as artificial intelligence. That talk is available on You tube.
5 comments:
This is interesting. I thought Schwartz left illustration for fine art because he was one of the few who could make it.
JSL
Really nice stuff here, thanks.
As I greedily download these, just noticed that the bean plant (?) doesn't enlarge when clicked.
I think there was some scope to get commissions for these type of things until relatively recently, certainly occasionally saw some incongruously attended-to illustrations on dull publications of similar ilk til around the late 90s.
Bill
anonymous no. 1: It's true, Schwartz always walked the line between fine art and illustration. He had successful gallery shows and his work is in the collection of museums. For years he also taught drawing and painting to a devoted group of artists. I suppoae he took opportunitiies where he could find them.
Anonymous / Bill-- I confess to be baffled about the best way to post images so they enlarge. Posting good, high resolution images from originals whenever possible is the second most important function of this blog (the first is provoking feuds between the cattle ranchers and the farmers of illustration in the comment section.) I always try to upload material at 400 to 600 dpi, and sometimes it enlarges when clicked but other times it doesn't. I've tried jpgs, TIFFs and pngs but there seems to be no rhyme or reason to what will expand and what won't.
If anyone has any advice out there, I'd be happy to hear it.
The resolution is good enough as it is - glad to have the images ! thanks David.
(But they seem to lack whatever it is stokes a range war)
Bill
I like the potatoes. Nice loose-but-sensitive drawing, and the watercoloring gets the color and form without stiffening up. I can see it framed and hung on the kitchen wall of a staged house in an Architectural Digest "country living" special edition.
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