FireFly

Table of Contents

Introduction
by Christopher Newton

Theatre Posters
Theatre Advertising

Ballet Posters
Music Posters

Book Covers

Magazines
Identity
Ephemera

Working In Scratchboard

Acknowledgements
Index

Introduction

In 1881, the theatrical poster came of age. Of course there had been posters before this date, but often they were simply complex typographical extravaganzas. They were called letterpress posters and they combined crude woodcuts with various typefaces. The cheap ones were in black ink, the more expensive in red. In the second half of the 19th century, photomechanical printing techniques were perfected and the world of the ubiquitous full-colour image was upon us.

But why do I choose 1881? It's a useful date because in 1881 The Magazine of Art published an article called "The Street as Art Galleries." The well-known British artist, Hubert von Herkomer -- a fellow of the Royal Academy -- had designed a poster. The article discussed the implications quite sympathetically of this step into the gutter of commerce. In the same year, an article in Punch (April 30, 1881) derided the idea of established artists like Leighton or Burne Jones ever condescending to provide poster images.

This tension was never really resolved until the late 20th century. There was always a slight stigma attached to the artist who went into "commercial art," as it was known in my childhood. And yet, artists needed to make a living and commercial work was a relatively sympathetic environment in which to labour. Indeed, several members of the Group of Seven worked for advertising agencies without compromising their principles. Many other artists made excursions into the advertising world: Toulouse-Lautrec designed posters for various notorious bars; Millais sold one painting -- Bubbles -- to the Sunlight Soap Company. No artist wanted to live and die in poverty in a tiny garret in order to create great art. It's a pretty conceit for a novel, but no template for a life.

And what are theatre posters? What are they supposed to do? Today they are nowhere near as important as they were a hundred years ago, when images on the street -- on hoardings, on omnibuses and trams, outside the numerous theatres -- could seduce passersby into spending money on entertainment. Nowadays images seducing us into visiting a theatre show can appear in a dozen different media. A hundred years ago they were chiefly limited to the street. Still the aim is the same today as yesterday, no matter what the means of distribution. It is to create a striking image that will be noticed by as many people as possible and encourage them to see the show. And, of course, this still happens.

It's a curious thing that there are still images from a hundred years ago -- and more -- which easily resonate with us today. Frederick Walker's woodcut advertising the dramatization at the Olympic Theatre of Wilkie Collins' novel The Woman in White is still powerful enough to be used today. Some of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas spawned famous posters and the cabarets and dance palaces of Montmartre stimulated Lautrec and Jules Chéret to create works which are perhaps more famous today than they were at the end of the 19th century. Then they served a strictly commercial purpose; now they are considered works of art.

Book illustration is something else. Illustration is not about finding a startling image which will attract attention. Illustrations for a story are explorations. As we read a novel or short story we follow the action in the same way that we inhabit a dream. We cannot change the action in a novel, although we can stop and think about what is happening. I do this a lot, particularly when something unpleasant is about to happen to a sympathetic character. I want to delay the inevitable until I can deal with it. Action is clear. The setting, though, is not. The backgrounds of the story exist in a kind of fog. There are, naturally, detailed descriptions when the author needs to be extremely specific. However, the reader usually will construct in his or her own head the landscape, the street, or the room in which the action takes place from what is known or has been experienced. This is why so many films made from novels prove unsatisfying. The images on the screen seldom approach our own inventions.

Illustrations, too, can disappoint and disconcert us when we turn a page and find a picture instead of text. Two things need to happen to prevent a disruption of the narrative. We need to be prepared for the style of the illustration and we need the illustration to expand our understanding. Preparation can be as simple as a frontispiece. "Ah," we say, "this is how the illustrator conceives of the book." And we can accept or reject this concept. If, and this does happen, we don't like the initial image, then it is possible to ignore what comes after it, leaving us to live in our own invented landscapes with no help from the illustrator. If we accept the style, then the illustrations will provide detail in the more vague dream-like world that we create in our heads.

It is this provision of detail that interests me as a theatre director, because this is what I do when I direct a play. This detail should connect with what the reader or the audience member already knows, and it has to be theoretically possible, however strange the circumstances. This is where an illustration can illuminate a particular moment and thus enrich the story. The landscape outside the bus window, a landscape only glancingly touched upon by the writer, can come to life and enlarge our understanding of an internal narrative or a state of mind. A room can take on a different relevance because the size is revealed. A gesture can gain in significance when we see how a character observing the gesture reacts. A great illustrator intensifies our experience by demonstrating layer upon layer of detail, even if the details are themselves only suggestions.

Would Alice Through the Looking-Glass be quite so extraordinary without Tenniel's illustrations? I doubt it. The Jabberwock would not possess its most specific characteristics in its readers' memories without that terrifying image, which, once seen, can never be expunged from the mind.

I have always treasured my first encounter with certain illustrations -- Tenniel's of course, then Arthur Ransome's sparse and amateurish illustrations of his own children's books, Kipling's drawings for his Just So Stories and Sidney Paget's illustrations in The Strand magazine for Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. I've just looked at The Speckled Band and the last picture of Dr. Grimesby Roylott and I experienced the same kind of shock I had when I was 8 years old, as I devoured the stories late at night, reading with the help of a flashlight under the bed clothes. Holmes has never really changed from these first images. Had Sidney Paget any idea that his portrait of Holmes would outlast all the others?

I spread some of Scott Mckowen's posters on the carpet. The majority are for the Roundabout Theatre Company in New York. But there are also posters for The Grand Theatre in London, Ontario, for the Denver Center Theatre Company, for The Acting Company and many others. I wonder if there are themes here?

I know that I would recognize any of these posters as the work of Scott McKowen, in part by recognizing his mastery of the specific technique he uses. His scratchboard technique allows him to work with great delicacy without sacrificing a vigorous intensity in the larger statement. This versatility is not really possible in engraving or woodcuts. In Scott's posters, the black and white constructs are linked with a highly subtle use of often quite bold colour; the result is a series of readily identifiable personal statements. But, aside from the accomplished and elegant technique, it took me some time before I could define what it is that makes me so certain an image is a Scott McKowen work. There is an elusive, yet readily apparent, tone to his work. Ultimately I think it is a sense of whimsy.

There is a sense, not of the fantastical, though that is certainly often there, but more often of an intricate complexity. There is, too, a lightness of heart which is not afraid to acknowledge the proximity of darkness. There is a kind of awareness that asks the viewer to go with the artist on a journey that obviously has a structure, but which may take the viewer into strange and remarkable places. There is a sense that something else may well be happening. For a poster artist, especially one whose abiding interest has always been the theatre, this is a particularly attractive trait. In theatre, a gesture or a particular sound can sometimes be so arresting that we suddenly see a scene or a character from an entirely new perspective.

This whimsical view of the world allows both menace and humour to co-exist. I am thinking of the poster for the Roundabout Company's production of Heartbreak House where a great mansion floats in a strangely dark sea, the chimneys of the house belch smoke, and the house begins to take on the appearance of a bizarre, doomed liner. Others have explored these land and seascapes -- Terry Gilliam easily springs to mind -- but Scott seems able to suggest danger and to reassure us at the same time. Again, this is an enormous advantage in the theatre where we know that, unlike ordinary life, the play will have a shape, that it will be finite, and that, whatever the trials and dangers of the unknown world, the visit will come to an end. Unlike real life, a resolution will be found.

I like, too, Scott's outrageous sense of delight. He can show us Neil Simon removing a piece of roof from the Plaza Hotel and thus suggesting that his play -- Hotel Suite -- has some of the attributes of a children's romp, that the shenanigans in the hotel are as lighthearted and as unimportant as an afternoon spent playing in a nursery. The same mad verve is elaborately explored in the poster for The Man Who Came to Dinner. Scott has taken a minor incident involving penguins in a play full of surprises and turned it into a metaphor for the play as a whole.

This combination of fantasy and reality is probably seen at its most refined in the series of images that Scott created for the 1990 season at the Shaw Festival. For several years, The Shaw had stressed the beauty of its gardens. The idea was if you found fault with a production you could be soothed by and find solace in the gardens. In this series, Scott began with the idea of a topiary garden -- there really are such places -- and he developed the concept in such a way that he could create images for plays as disparate as Shaw's Misalliance (a propeller takes off the tail feathers of a topiary peacock), and Cole Porter's Nymph Errant (underwear is scattered around a box parterre dominated by a stone statue of Cupid). This sense of delight came to dominate Scott's work at The Shaw, thus reflecting the happy eclecticism of the company.

Scott McKowen takes great pleasure in the human figure. And it is perhaps ironic that one of his most powerful posters (Tartuffe at the Roundabout) suggests the human figure without actually showing it. All we have is an empty 17th-century corset. The top of the corset is undone and the laces entwine to form the title of the play. The implications are myriad. Is it Tartuffe himself who has undone the corset? And who was in it to begin with? It could be anyone -- maid or mistress. The image is seductive, enticing and mystifying like the underlying themes of the play. And the result, hopefully, is that the observer is seduced into buying a ticket. The mystery can then be resolved.

In a neat abstraction, Scott has reduced the human figure to a Barbie doll (The Mineola Twins) again suggesting that something more is actually occurring than we can fathom just from the single image. He is more forthright in a lovely poster for Mrs. Warren's Profession, where the central image, a silhouette of a standing, naked woman, is both sexy and somehow confined and static. Although it is the first image that we notice, it exists as a background for a page from an account ledger. And we realize that the naked woman has become a commodity.

On the other hand, the boys throwing paper airplanes (All My Sons) and the dark figure plunging into the ocean (Gem of the Ocean) are anything but static. These boys are bursting with energy. The interesting thing here is that we want to be with them. We want to participate in the thrill of their movement, their rush towards us, and we can only do that if we purchase a ticket.

These people in the posters, who sometimes look an awful lot like actors that Scott and I have known over the years, lead me to his book illustrations. The same whimsical half-smile seems to suffuse these extensions of the writers' worlds and what intrigues me is that Scott has dared to challenge the best of the older illustrators. He has no fear. Territory firmly staked out by Tenniel or E.H. Shepard is undermined, and I realize what it is that so truly impresses me. Somehow we are able to connect the past with the present. Scott affirms that the reader is alive now.

These book illustrations are definitely from the 20th or 21st centuries. Certainly the drawing technique is old-fashioned. The scratchboard skill exploited with great dexterity is timeless, but the images inspired by the texts are brought forward to the present day. I'm not sure how Scott has done this because, often, the characters are very much of their own time. (I am thinking particularly of the animals in The Wind in the Willows.) And yet, I know these creatures. They are very much like people I shop with on Saturdays or pass as they get out of a bus outside the Royal George Theatre. Is it simply that, when an artist fully inhabits his or her own world, this identification helps us appreciate other times and other worlds? We understand Alice's fall down the rabbit hole quite differently after seeing pictures of men floating in space.

It is, perhaps, what any fine artist does. He or she opens doors and makes connections that others only half recognize. A moment of contradiction or the representation of a surprising truth can create laughter, and laughter -- as Bernard Shaw knew so well -- opens us to other ideas.

But it is not only laughter that is generated by juxtapositions. It can also be understanding and recognition. I keep turning to the illustration of Mowgli and the young wolves in The Jungle Book, which shows a real baby surrounded by real wolf cubs. Two of the cubs join the howling baby, another cub is distracted. The distracted cub makes me believe that the whole idea is reasonable, that a child could be raised by wolves. These reasonable details -- Mole's fingernails are another example -- fuse illustration and narrative. I participate more fully because I recognize.

I can't remember exactly when I first saw Scott's work. But when I did, and it must have been over twenty years ago, my first reaction was to compare him with the American painter and book illustrator Rockwell Kent. Scott's works have, I think a comparable broad vigour. It was only later that I began to appreciate the delicacy and wit of Scott's images and the generous discrimination of his whole approach to graphic design.

I was always delighted to see his tall, lanky figure from my office window at the Shaw Festival. In the fall, he would arrive at the stage door almost always burdened by a small suitcase of books and sketches to work on the annual brochure.

The brochure was always an adventure. Scott and David Cooper, the theatre photographer, would develop a basic idea into a set of variations. And these variations would always fly off in all directions. In a brochure emphasizing the countryside around Niagara-on-the-Lake, red apples in our orchards are turned into red books to be harvested by the actors while another actor chases butterflies from the sidecar of an old motorbike. In the most beautiful of all the brochures, an old set -- for Coward's Easy Virtue -- was painted a pale gray, and every play was somehow enticingly suggested by an incident re-created in this evocative room.

In the spring, Scott would arrive with more books and a file of ideas for the programmes. These would be meticulously researched. He must have spent days in the Bridgeman Art Library or the Hulton Archives going through drawer after drawer, envelope after envelope, of forgotten photographs. The great Mander and Mitchenson Theatre Collection would disgorge strange memories. Scott actually found a photograph of Forbes Robertson's set for Caesar and Cleopatra being burned on the beach in San Francisco in 1914.

With his wife, Christina Poddubiuk, he seems to live in a glorious whirl of images drawn from everywhere under the sun. This generous eclecticism rules everything he does. For the observer -- and even more so for a collaborator like myself -- being with Scott is like entering a fairy story. On holiday, he sketches. An adventure travels from eye to brain to hand to paper. Nothing mechanical gets in the way, and I wonder if this is not the key to the vitality of his imagination. Scott is here in our world now, but his connection with the world is respectfully old-fashioned in the way it is experienced and gathered. It is only modern in the distribution. Perhaps this is the whimsical balance that makes his work unique.

Christopher Newton
Artistic Director Emeritus, Shaw Festival

 

McKowen's mastery of line and texture, gift for arresting juxtapositions and perspectives, and fluency in drawing the human figure make for complex and breathtaking images that are at once old-fashioned and cutting edge. And he writes as crisply as he draws. McKowen shares his techniques for adding color to his incised drawings and tallies up what is lost and gained when scratchboard meets digital technologies. Most intriguing are his explanations of what elements in the plays (from Twelfth Night to Pinter's The Caretaker) and books (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to Neil Gaiman's eight-part graphic novel 1602) inspired his brilliantly composed and beautifully executed illustrations. In McKowen's work, art meets literature, and both thrive.
- Donna Seaman  Booklist  2009 12 12

In these days of computerized drawings, it's a treat to see a book like A Fine Line, featuring over 200 scratchboard illustrations by Scott McKowen, best known locally for his posters for the Shaw and Stratford festivals... This collection of McKowen's work, theatre posters as well as book illustrations for classic text and Neil Gaiman's graphic novel 1602, is hugely attractive and often surprising: Macbeth covering his face with his open palms, casts an illusive crown's shadow on the wall behind him; Carroll's Alice falls from the heights of a Victorian museum surrounded by dodos, playing cards, teapots and a white rabbit; a series of inventive topiary images designed for the 1990 Shaw Festival. Each illustration includes the artist's thoughts on his process and decisions, while the book's introduction is by the always articulate director Christopher Newton.
- Jon Kaplan  NOW Magazine, Vol. 29, No. 16, Toronto  2009 12 16

Scott McKowen's art of scratchboard drawing has come a long way since he illustrated an address book for the Stratford Shakespeare Festival back in 1987. Compared with his more recent work, those earlier illustrations resembling woodcut prints differ considerably from the exquisite pieces the Stratford graphic artist has been producing for music and theatre festivals and book covers. The beautifully illustrated book Mr. McKowen has just pulled together demonstrates the scope of his artwork over some 20 years and is a show-and-tell about a relatively rare creative form.
- Donal O'Connor  Stratford Beacon Herald  2009 09 01

Most people don't think of posters and book covers as art. This new collection of work by Scott McKowen, an American-born illustrator who lives in Stratford, Ontario, just might change people's minds. McKowen's work demands a second look, if for nothing other than the startling detail and creative whimsy he can create using scratchboard, a once-popular but difficult art technique that, like so many other types of art, has lost ground to the computer-generated image... It's not only the technique McKowen uses, but it is the one he is most famous for, and its what gives his work its signature look and feel... The results are as unique as the method.
- Peter Scowen  The Globe and Mail  2009 09 26

The book [has] amazing breadth... Page after page of dramatic posters with vivid descriptions of thought process and research that went into creating them. The collection is a throwback to subtler times, when posters didn't scream but whispered to you, often in black and white images or gently colored scenes.
- Bill Castanier  Lansing City Pulse  2009 09 23

A Fine Line demonstrates there is a fine line between applied art and fine art when the former transcends its utilitarian role--whether promoting, marketing and advertising or visually supporting the written word--by providing esthetic pleasure and satisfaction.
- Robert Reid  Waterloo Region Record  2009 10 10

This collection showcases the career of McKowen, a scratchboard artist who designs theater posters and illustrates for books and magazines. Discussing his creative process and the influences behind some of his most successful images in straightforward language, McKowen explains how he tailors his theater posters to each director's individual vision; some of the most dazzling are designs for Macbeth, Chekhov’s Three Sisters, and Shaw’s Candida. In 2003, Sterling commissioned McKowen for a series of classic book reissues, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Alice in Wonderland. Those images, also included, manage to capture the depth and scope of epic stories in a single, precise, stunning image; in his introduction, director Christopher Newton aptly describes McKowen’s style as a lightness of heart which is not afraid to acknowledge the proximity of darkness.
-   Publishers Weekly  2009 09

McKowen points out that [scratchboard is] a dying medium, which is disappointing to learn after having been seduced by his mastery of the technique. Though clearly dishertened by its uncertain future, McKowen's passion is unmistakable and contagious.
- Andrea Carson  Quill and Quire  2009 11

A Fine Line demonstrates [that] there is a fine line between applied art and fine art when the former transcends its utilitarian role--whether promoting, marketing and advertising or visually supporting the written word--by providing esthetic pleasure and satisfaction.
- Robert Reid  The Guelph Mercury  2009 10 10