ROGER HUYSSEN

by Jennifer L. Bohanan

You don't have to scratch too hard to uncover the capitalist beneath the surface of commercial illustrator Roger Huyssen. He's an artist who loves the business of illustration art and a businessman who's thrilled to earn his living by indulging his passion–painting. Roger Huyssen has built himself a highly successful career straddling two worlds that most people find mutually exclusive, and from all indications, he's delighted with both.

Working from a studio he shares with his old friend and sometimes partner Gerard Huerta, Huyssen relocated from the hubbub of his earlier years in New York City about sixteen years ago. His office, located in the quaint yet upscale village of Southport, Connecticut, almost two hours north of Manhattan, is a refurbished, historic freight station that sits just next to a working set of railroad tracks. There, Huyssen practices his craft in quiet surroundings, aside from the periodic noise of an Amtrak train whizzing past his studio windows.

Despite his somewhat tranquil environment, Roger Huyssen is a hardworking illustrator who is realistic about the true nature of his business, an understanding that has helped him remain successful through nearly three decades. "Art in the commercial world is all style," he says. "What's fresh and new and different is elevated and becomes the fashion, but it can date the same way. It's a visual medium that just eats itself up. Once something is heavily exposed, it'll move on its course and something else will move into its place."

Huyssen believes that commercial artists who find the most success are those who have known how to redefine themselves and their work continuously along the way. "The guys that I looked up to, that were really great in this business, had to reinvent themselves stylistically all of the time," he says. "You need to do a little bit of that all the way along in order to evolve into something that's fresh and new. And that's very difficult to do."

Although he's achieved national prominence as a commercial illustrator, Huyssen is quick to assert that he does not credit any of his success to having an inherent "talent." "There's no such thing as talent. It's hard work," he says. "If I thought it was talent, I would have quit a long time ago. There were always guys next to me that could draw better than I could. If they naturally had some kind of thing that I didn't, how could I ever overcome that?" Huyssen reasons that an investment of time and effort will result in a better artist. "Because I don't think you're born with it. You're born with a propensity to spend the time. The more time you spend, the better you get. It's not hard work–it's fun work, but it is time. If you're bored half way through, you're not going to spend the time."

Unlike many commercial illustrators, Roger Huyssen is no repressed fine artist–he's proud of the work he does and satisfied with the combination of exposure and money that his career has earned him. "The fine art world looks down their noses at commercial art," he says. "But I wanted something that could be validated. I never wanted to spend all my life doing something, and then have some subjective guy come in and look at it and say 'it's wonderful' or 'it stinks.' I wanted more control, and I wanted to be able to assign a value to all of the hours I would spend. Art is totally subjective, but in the commercial world of illustration or art direction, it's business. So that's a perfect marriage, because you can equate value to what you actually do. "

Perhaps Huyssen's overall pragmatism toward his work comes from the fact that he didn't start out with a goal to become an artist. In his undergraduate years at the University of California at Santa Barbara, he majored in economics and minored in art. "When I was in college, I didn't realize you could make a living doing art. It was only afterwards. I met a guy, Ray Gray, while I was in the army. He was doing record work. I looked at what he was doing and said to myself, 'Hey I want to do this!' because Ray was actually earning a living."

It was after he graduated from Santa Barbara in 1968, and after he served in the army in Vietnam, that Huyssen enrolled in Art Center College of Design, where many of today's distinguished artists have studied. It was at Art Center that he was exposed to such disciplines as design, lettering, advertising–the commercial world of art. He found that he truly loved painting and at that point, he decided to become a professional illustrator. It was also at Art Center that he met Gerard Huerta, forming a friendship that has endured ever since. Specializing in graphic typography, Huerta's work complemented Huyssen's and the two have teamed up for many projects through the years.

Around the same time, the airbrush was beginning to make a new impact on the commercial art industry. Although the tool had been around for decades, it was becoming more and more popular on the West Coast among young artists looking for new ways to express themselves. "Here was this tool that was so exciting, because it wasn't brush strokes–you could apply the paint to the canvas in a very fresh way... The airbrush to me was the most wonderful tool ever created for art," says Huyssen. "I still love it. And the reason I love it is that it gives me a huge amount of control. Lots of people hate it and cannot translate into it from illustration because it requires far too much craft–it's cutting and prep. I've always started that way, so it wasn't that big a jump for me."

Huyssen spent several years on the West Coast after grad school, his work focusing mainly on 12" x 12" album covers. He enjoyed the record work, because it gave him the freedom to experiment. "In the record industry, you were a jack of all trades," he says. "You could do one thing, then immediately turn and try something else. Then you would immediately pick up another style, and it didn't matter–you were being evaluated on 'How cool is this?!' rather than on its ability to sell.

"A record album wasn't a marketing tool; it was a freebie. People bought records because they heard the songs on the radio, not because of the image on the cover." The nature of album cover work also gave the young Huyssen an opportunity to fine tune what he believes to be one of the most important skills of a commercial artist; problem solving. "A really good illustrator is a good designer; he knows shapes, composition– that kind of thing. We're problem solvers. They're giving us a visual communication problem to solve, and we need it to communicate, articulate the product, sell the magazine or do whatever it does for the dollar, because that's what it's all about."

In the early '70s, he put together a portfolio and headed to New York for two years, to gain experience. He's never left the East Coast.

He started, as most commercial artists do, by picking up whatever kind of work he could get. He did editorial illustrations for Playboy, New York Magazine, Esquire and others. Although the work didn't pay as well as he would have liked, it gave him the kind of exposure that he needed to land his first of more than twenty Time magazine covers.

Huyssen found the Time cover work to be exhausting, invigorating, and ultimately, one of the most satisfying accounts of his career. "You'd get a call on a Tuesday and you would have to be able to produce a finished painting by Thursday night with approvals, changes–with everything," he describes. "The pressure was unbelievable. That week you couldn't do anything–you couldn't see your wife. You couldn't see your kids. You couldn't even answer the phone, really, until you got that thing done and delivered to them. And it had to be spectacular, the best you could possibly do, because you were competing, and the deal was that everyone would see it on Monday morning.

"The most satisfaction was to go in there and deliver that thing after four days. The editor wanted you to hang around because there might be changes. You'd leave there knowing that eight million people all over the world would see your artwork. I think it was the greatest high that I've ever had in the business."

Huyssen was also painting movie posters. He created posters for Saturday Night Fever, One from the Heart, Star Trek, and, perhaps his favorite, Bronco Billy, a 1980 Clint Eastwood movie that didn't receive the popular acclaim it probably deserved. Working with his buddy Huerta, who designed the poster's stylized typography, Huyssen created a painting that Clint Eastwood himself believed was a photograph when he saw it.

Over the years, however, the demand for artist-rendered movie posters has all but disappeared. "All movie work now is photography," says Huyssen. "It's much easier, because most of the stars' contracts have specific requirements, like one head must be a certain size relative to the others, or it's got to be the largest head directly underneath the title. Photography handles that much more easily–we used to go crazy painting likenesses of people."

Photography has also replaced much of the magazine work that Huyssen used to do. A camera and a computer can produce a quicker end result and facilitate last minute changes better than an artist can change a painting, but the illustrator maintains a positive outlook on the future of the industry and his place in it. "Commercial art exists because we will always be able to give them something they can't get from photography," says Huyssen. Using a recent Superbowl poster as an example, Huyssen explains one difference between photography and illustration, "You can't put Los Angeles and the stadium together with photography, but you can do it with art."

And of course, the computer is having a tremendous impact on the industry, allowing businesses to make last-minute changes, inexperienced designers to draw straight lines, and art directors to hire fewer professionals to do the work. "The business probably has changed more in these past five years than it did in the previous ten," says Huyssen.

While the sweeping changes affecting his industry could be discouraging to beginners, Roger Huyssen isn't necessarily painting a picture of doom and gloom. He has some wisdom and encouragement to offer young people trying to break into the business. "You need to go to school and learn as much as you can about art. You've got to feed that love and desire by constantly improving your work, getting it critiqued by people, and competing with other professionals. You can't just compete with other students.

"Young people have to think about how to get exposure and how to get work," he says. "You can be the greatest illustrator in the world, but if nobody has seen your work, you're not going to get hired." He cautions young artists to put together their portfolios with care, selecting only those illustrations that reflect the criteria of the particular job they're trying to get. "You can't just show them anything–you've got to show them the right illustrations to fit what they'll use. If you show examples in the wrong area, it might kill the job for you, because they won't think that you're that specialized guy." In the commercial illustration business, he explains, developing a style and a reputation can work for you in some ways and against you in others.

"Mark Fredrickson's been around now for awhile, but he's an example. When I saw him come on the scene, it was great because airbrush had done its thing. We were all waiting for the next thing, and he came up with a different version. Mark is a good illustrator who has worked scraping into a science. It's basically throwing paint on and then taking it away, scraping the highlights, the pores and textures, like hair and smoke. It's unbelievable," he says.

"There's Bill Mayer down in Atlanta who does great characters. You can't photograph that stuff–it's all out of his head. It's his own vision. If some kid can come along and do that, he's going to get used. And if he can show it, people will pick up on it, agents will look at it, and they'll show it. That's the part, I think, that young people should know. There will always be a spot for somebody to come along and do it in a fresh way."

Huyssen describes himself as a colorist who loves to interject as much color into his work as possible. "I remember the painting we used to do. The early ones were done with dye. With dye, you can't do it fast. You have to slowly blow one color and then another. You build it up and, in the end, you get something that looks like a jewel." The down side? "It took too long, it wasn't permanent or colorfast, and if you dropped a little water on it... that's why I switched to gouache."

Today, he paints primarily with what he calls "plastic" paints–acrylics–mostly using Com-Art colors, but once in awhile, he'll still use gouache. "I don't use it often, but sometimes I mix a little bit with plastic paint to bulk up the opacity. Gouache is one of the greatest poster paints of all time because its opacity reproduces so well.

"With gouache," Huyssen explains, "I can put down a red background and 'boom!' there it is. With Com-Art, I've got to keep laying it in and building it up, but it gives it more richness. Those are the trade-offs."

"Working on the smooth surface of clay board is good in some ways and bad in others. I like the quality of clay board with the Medea paints, because I can get really good rich color," he says. "But it takes a long time to lay down the color. It goes down too wet. It doesn't dry fast enough for the board. Gouache is much faster. Most of the Time magazine covers are done in gouache– not the heads, but all of the others."

He loves the Iwata airbrush for its precision, and he uses an HP-B and an HP-C, in addition to an Olympos Micron 200C.

In more recent years, Huyssen has found himself doing a range of projects for children, such as paintings for the animated film The Iron Giant and Dr. Suess characters for Universal Studio's Islands of Adventure. His penchant for using color makes this genre work well for him.

Living near Southport with his wife Donna and their two children, Brynn and Reid, his pace may be less frenetic than when he lived in New York, giving him more time to spend with his family, but his love for and dedication to his work is unflagging. "I do this because you are what you do. Whatever it is, you put your name it, and I'm telling you that is the greatest feeling in the history of the business. All the money I've made or lost, don't have, or will never make will ever give me that gratification.

"I've always been, and I'm not ashamed to call myself, an illustrator," he says. In an industry filled with frustrated fine artists, Roger Huyssen's exuberance is a refreshing inspiration for anyone involved in the business of commercial art.

TECH FILE

Airbrush: Iwata HP-B, HP-C; Olympos Micron, P-200C Air Source: CO2 Tank Paints: Medea Com Art Opaque; Winsor & Newton Gouache Surface Media: CS-10 Frisk; Strathmore 4-Ply Kid Finish Frisk: Frisk Film; Grafix; Acetate 003 & 005 Lighting: 3 100-Watt Bulbs and an open window