Paving the Road to Revival
David Willardson

(Click on any image for a larger view)
Reprinted with permission from Airbrush Action (February 2000)

David Willardson, who became a sort of Johnny Appleseed of modern airbrushing, somehow found himself at the core of the airbrush's rebirth in the 1970s. It may be that he was just in the right place at the right time, because it seems, without trying, he helped pave the road for the emergence of the airbrush from closets and drawers to become the hottest technique in commercial art for over 20 years.

When Willardson was in art school, the commercial art world treated the airbrush with the same kind of respect dogs show a fire hydrant. Actually, even less. Dogs, at least, have a use for fire hydrants.

During the late ‘60s, the techniques Robert Petty and Alberto Vargas mastered to such perfection just a generation earlier were disdained by teachers and art directors, who had a major influence on commercial art. If teachers weren’t teaching or encouraging airbrush work, and art directors didn't want to buy it, then the airbrush gathered dust.

"It was completely unacceptable in commercial art," Willardson says.

By then, the airbrush's high point was more than a decade past. The exquisite pin-ups painted by Petty and Vargas, so popular through World War II and a few years after, were no longer in vogue.

In the 1950s and later, about the only airbrushed commercial art with any exposure was produced by Otis Shepherd for Wrigley Gum. And, though it kept a mere flicker of the flame burning, the brighter glare of other art techniques attracted all the attention. Still, Willardson "could see its application in projects I was working on."

Though he was intrigued by the airbrush's potential for blending colors and softening edges, the Thayer & Chandler Model B—a gift from his father—stayed in its box while Willardson attended the prestigious Art Center in Pasadena. He wasn't even a closet airbrush user in those days, he says.

"It was a private thing," he says. "Not what one talked about."

It's not that there was no airbrushing around for Willardson to see. Much later, reflecting on some influences that had seeped into his subconscious, he recalled the auto pinstriping artists who jazzed up hoods and fenders.

"What probably came back the loudest visually were those gradated flames from cars in the ‘50s and ‘60s," he says.

Those cars were on the road, and in magazines and covered model box tops, in plain view for every teen-age boy growing up in those years.

Willardson, now 57, grew up in Southern California, and he still lives and works in Glendale. Except for a 15-month sojourn to Idaho (where he says it seemed like winter the entire time he was there), he's been a Southern California lad.

Since he was a boy, art has been his driving goal. "From the time I was five years old, there wasn't anything else I wanted to do," he says. "It consumed my time, often to the detriment of my studies. I drew, painted, sculpted. Anything."

From the tenth grade, his goal was to get into the Art Center and pursue a career in commercial art. He made it there in 1962.

His enrollment at the nationally recognized school, the other students he met, and the timing all became cobblestones in the road leading to the airbrush's revival. "I met an amazing number of very talented students," Willardson says. "The students you're with have just as much influence as the instructors."

Before, between, and after classes, Willardson hung out and talked with students like Dave Wilcox, David McMarken, Peter Lloyd and Nick Gaeteano. They traded ideas, theories, and support to cope with the angst of art.

"Without that experience at the Art Center, I'd be doing something completely different today," Willardson says.

The ideas bred in that hothouse of talent were fed by the times, the turbulent upheaval of the 1960s, where everything "establishment" was questioned and challenged. "There was a new attitude developing," Willardson says. "We were encouraged to experiment with new techniques to set us apart."

Still, even at a school where the young and talented sought different and cutting-edge techniques, the airbrush wasn't considered.

In 1965, within a year of graduating, Willardson teamed up with Charles White III, an artist who would become another icon of the airbrush revival. According to Willardson, White was a later convert to the tool. "I mentioned the airbrush to him and the reaction was negative. He teased me about it," Willardson says.

At the time, White was swamped with work for major clients like Continental Airlines, Lockheed, and the National Football League. "It took the efforts of two people working day and night to pull those projects off," Willardson says.

Two years later, Willardson broke out on his own, though he and White stayed in touch until they reunited ten years later. "We shared a lot of ideas and concepts," Willardson says.

Once he was independent, Willardson was free to use whatever technique or tool he fancied. "The day I left his studio was the day I started using the airbrush," he says.

There was probably some good fortune at work when Willardson launched his solo career hinged on the airbrush. Maybe the challenging attitude of the decade and the cycle of artistic taste combined to pry away some of the old prejudice against the airbrush. Or, maybe the quest for something "different" reached the right level.

An art director for West Magazine, a weekly publication of The Los Angeles Times, was so captured by the airbrushed promo work Willardson sent that he loaded the artist up with jobs. Every week assignments came in, and every week two million readers saw what the airbrush could do.

That, Willardson says, was really the start of its comeback—massive, regular exposure. "It was the premiering of airbrush work." And, it was not just the magazine's Los Angeles readers who saw it. Advertising agencies began to take notice. So did art directors in New York.

With its rebirth in centered Los Angeles, airbrushing became known as a West Coast technique, Willardson says.

Its expansion to the East Coast received a boost when White (who, according to Willardson, asked him about the airbrush as its popularity skyrocketed), moved to New York and brought the technique with him.

At that point, the popularity of airbrushing started to permeate the business like a good idea, or an epidemic—someone has it, gives it to others and they too bring it to new places.

Willardson's workload mushroomed, and he brought in assistants who hadn't been exposed to what the airbrush could do. It wasn’t too long before artists like Joe Heiner, Michael Schawb and Roger Huyssen (like Willardson, a 1999 Airbrush Action Vargas Award winner) became airbrush artists.

"It was starting to become so popular a technique on the West Coast, you were crazy not to pick it up," Willardson says.

Everyone wanted airbrush illustrations, and the appetite grew as more people were exposed to the work. It seemed like the market would become saturated, but at about the same time, another industry jumped on the airbrush's capacity to produce realistic images.

Record companies began demanding airbrushed illustrations for album covers. Some of the decade’s most memorable commercial artwork appeared on the sleeves of albums. Willardson did hundreds of them. "It was great timing," he says. "We were starting this new technique, and this new media appears. There was a good ten years of exposing this technique to millions of people."

The album covers expanded the audience for airbrush work beyond those who saw advertising and magazine illustration. Teenagers from Maine to Mississippi were exposed to what the airbrush could do, even if they did not realize how those striking images were produced.

By the middle of the 1970s, the airbrush was out of the drawers and closets and back at work with a vengeance.

Then, when a woman started a small greeting card company, another outlet emerged. "A look she loved and embraced was the airbrush," Willardson says. The first illustration he sent to Paper Moon for a card outsold those done in other techniques, and she asked Willardson for a few more. Soon, she was asking for a couple hundred, a demand that even Willardson and his assistants couldn't meet.

The card company with its vivid illustrations further expanded the audience. And it wasn’t just cards—it was everything a greeting card company could sell, from calendars to wrapping paper. Now, mothers of the teen-agers who adored the album covers sent birthday wishes adorned by airbrush to sisters and friends.

"Our imagery, all of a sudden, was all over the world," Willardson says. In 1977, Willardson reunited with White, who asked him to work on a series of astrology illustrations. Returning to California from his chilly stay in Idaho, Willardson shared space with White.

They formed Willardson and White, probably the best known studio for airbrushing in the country and, at the time, maybe the world. "We were inundated with more work than we could handle," Willardson says.

So they hired more former students from the Art Center and trained the assistants in their technique. More airbrushing disciples were created.

Though some in the art world called the airbrush a fad from the start of its rebirth, there seemed no end to its popularity and the demand. Much of it focused on the Willardson and White studio.

"It became more accepted and utilized. It was growing in leaps and bounds," Willardson says. "We said we felt like we put Thayer & Chandler and Paasche back in business."

During that period, Willardson says, a young female artist from Japan visited their studio, showing tremendous interest in their work. She left with a stack of their posters and other examples of the style they had made popularized. "The next thing we know, this young lady created a look like ours in Japan, and she became very hot," Willardson says.

The rebirth of the airbrush, in which Willardson had played a important part, crossed the Pacific to spawn an entire new art industry in another hemisphere.

Willardson and White’s prominence in airbrush illustration attracted additional attention that also helped change the industry and painting techniques. Around 1980, a salesman from Washington State asked if they'd try a new airbrush. That invitation introduced them to a technique that had stubbornly evaded efforts with American airbrushes, Willardson says.

Until Willardson tried the Iwata, using acrylics in the more common American airbrushes was possible, but it often resulted in a lot of smashed airbrushes. Most airbrush artists had been limited to pale water-based paint. Acrylics, which are more nimble because they can be opaque or transparent, unleashed a major change.

Using acrylics was another one of those cobblestones. "It completely changed the technique for us," Willardson says.

They spread the word at a West Coast airbrush gathering and received a case of HP-Cs in thanks, he said.

The second union with White lasted five years, and the two parted company again. "There were things he wanted to do and I wanted to do that were at odds," Willardson says. "He went to West LA. I went to East LA."

By that point, the airbrush revival was reaching magazine readers, music-devouring teens, birthday well wishers and Japan. The industry then lunged into another huge, powerful audience that was too young to even care what an album was. Kids. The ones who can pester money from a parent's pocket better than anyone.

Disney was the first to attempt to create a new look for animation through airbrushing, Willardson says. Then, every studio in Hollywood, like MGM and Warner Brothers, had to follow. Widespread family exposure to the airbrushed character images provided another offshoot bonus.

"It created ancillary users," Willardson says. Child-intensive corporations like McDonald's and Burger King had to have those images to go with their promotions. "They all wanted that look," Willardson says. "A lot of airbrush artists started doing it. It's had a good ten year run and it's still going."

About the time the pint-sized audience began to see familiar airbrushed images, the love affair between art directors and the airbrush's staple strength, hyper-realism, was fading. Enough artists were finally providing enough sharp-edged airbrush realism to fill the audience’s demand.

"Hundreds—if not thousands—of illustrators around the world, trying to paint every pore and every hair, rendered themselves out of business," Willardson says.

The more gentle outlines of the cartoon characters, however, were an escape from what had become the airbrush trademark, according to Willardson.

The small army of airbrush artists that Willardson probably had a part in recruiting was testing the market’s ability to absorb their work.

"The competition watered down the ability to make the kind of living you'd like to," Willardson says. "I had to find a new canvas."

He kept his studio until the early part of this decade and has shifted his attention to the dual role of artist and manufacturer. Now, instead of album covers or greeting cards, Willardson's paintings go on large platters. But these 16-inch diameter plates are signed and numbered—not like the usual ones you see, Willardson says. "It's like a limited edition print, but on a different canvas."

Unfortunately, being a manufacturer is not the same as being a creative artist. Willardson says he spends most days attending the duties of a factory boss, leaving scant time for painting, though Willardson keeps at it. "I still get on the board every day," he says. "I paint five or six hours a day."

Except it's done at night after payroll, production, and promotion decisions have been made.

The surge-plateau-surge again popularity of the airbrush shows the cyclic nature of commercial art. So does the return of an older airbrush style in the pin-up, Willardson says.

In 1973, he did a poster for American Graffiti that helped launch another spin-off direction for airbrush work. Everyone from Levi's to soft drinks to tool companies wanted pin-up work. The demand lasted four or five years.

Now, maybe two decades later, it's coming back, Willardson says. "The last few years, I’ve started getting a few calls. Now, I'm constantly getting work on new pin-ups," he says. The return is especially interesting to Willardson, a student and well-versed in the airbrush's pedigree.

He says he remembers artwork from his father's generation of pin-ups, and those recollections are woven into the fabric of his childhood. "Later, I realized they were an influence," Willardson says. "I saw Petty calendars and later realized they were airbrush."

He pondered those and the Shepherd illustrations for Wrigley ads he stared at for hours riding a bus around LA. "I'd study those very simple airbrush forms. I was intrigued by the images," Willardson says.

The return of the classic pin-up (a wave of nostalgia?) has allowed Willardson to use what he learned from those images he studied in his pre-teen years. "Now there is this new body of work with the images I loved years ago," he says. "I'm getting to do them."