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The Beatles Had A Few Good Tunes

This column is by my brilliant buddy, Randy Enos about his years teaching illustration.

Email Randy Enos Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl


Over the years, I have taught at many art schools including Parsons, Syracuse, Hartford, School of Visual Arts, Fashion Institute in New York, Rhode Island School of Design, Philadelphia School of the Arts and others. My longest sustained teaching was at Parsons in New York for 8 years.

The one common thread I noticed among students was that they didn’t know much of anything about our profession which they were supposedly interested in pursuing. They hadn’t looked at much illustration or cartooning and they didn’t know the names of the star practitioners of those fields. I always have found that to be peculiar. I’m sure that students of say, ballet, know the superstars of ballet; or students of music probably know the major musicians in the part of the field they are studying. I’m sure that students of painting or sculpture have their favorite painters or sculptors. But, not students of illustration. Once you get past Norman Rockwell, they don’t know any of the stars unless they have just had a visiting lecture from one of them. When you teach illustration or cartooning, you start at ground zero; there are no reference points, just a blank slate. I once opened a class at Syracuse with, “Good morning, I’m Milton Glaser.” I didn’t raise an eyebrow.

In my 8 years at Parsons, I generally taught two classes a week. It took Murray Tinkelman, the head of illustration at that time, five years to talk me into teaching. I kept saying,” I’ve only been in the business 10 years, how can I know enough to be able to be a teacher?” But, he wore me down and he had created a special course at that time called “Sequential Illustration” which I was to teach along with a “Conceptual Illustration” course. The conceptual course dealt with the “concepts” or ideas part of the process rather than drawing or perspective or design. At that point in time, illustration was a conceptual business rather than in previous times when it was a narrative, story telling process. We were in the era of illustrating abstract ideas for the business magazines like Business Week, Time, Fortune etc., rather than illustrating Indians attacking a wagon train for The Saturday Evening Post. We were illustrating articles on the falling stock market or the rise in childhood diseases or the latest fad in cooking.

The “Sequential Illustration” course was to be taught by three teachers, each teaching for a third of the semester. The course focused on illustration that was realized in multiple images such as in children’s books, animation, comic strips etc. I dealt with book illustration and multiple- picture magazine or newspaper illustrations in my third of the semester. Dick Giordano (Batman etc.) handled the comics part of the program and noted animator, Howard Beckerman handled the animation part. A little later on they created a third course that I was a part of which was just an animation course wherein Howard and I split the year in half. I did the first part dealing with designing and storyboarding and Howard did the last part and took the students through actually animating and filming animation sequences.

Clip from Randy’s illustration for Emergency Medicine magazine.

Sometimes I would bring into my classes, actual assignments that I had worked on myself so that students had the real thing to deal with concept-wise. One time, I received an assignment from Emergency Medicine magazine just before going to class so I gave them the same assignment with the same time frame I had to do it in. I told them that I would bring in my finished illustration a week later and they were to bring in theirs. One student said, “What if our illustration is better than yours will you take ours to the client instead of yours?” I, of course replied, “Your illustration isn’t going to be better than mine!” So… even though this particular illustration wasn’t paying very much, I spent all week doing an elaborate, detailed picture just to show the students what they should aim for. Another thing that I did was to bring in some of my art directors from time to time. I tried to give the students a real taste of the business.

Randy’s illustration for Emergency Medicine magazine.

This sounds like an exaggeration, but it actually happened. I told the students one day that most of the realist illustrators traced photographs. I made the mistake of mentioning Norman Rockwell in that group. One of my students was so horrified that his idol traced photographs that he went over to the window, climbed out on the ledge and threatened to jump. I calmed him down by explaining that Rockwell was a splendid draftsman who had worked from live models for years before resorting to working from photographs due to the pressures of deadlines. I told him that those pictures could never come out as well if he didn’t know how to draw like a master.

Many of my students went on to stellar careers in illustration such as Victor Juhasz (caricaturist, war correspondent, Rolling Stone illustrator etc.) and Peter de Seve (New Yorker covers, children’s books, character designer for Bug’s Life, Robots, 4 Ice Age films and many others).

I remember one assignment I gave my animation class and that was to design and storyboard an opening for a TV special. I wanted to pick a subject that would be fairly easy for them to research. I picked the Beatles. I figured they’d have no problem finding info, photos and ideas for a project like this. One boy in class said, “You know we don’t know very much about the Beatles, it’s kind of before our time!” Another kid said, “Oh, I know the Beatles, I heard of them; they had a few good tunes!” at which point, I screamed “A FEW GOOD TUNES? A FEW GOOD TUNES?”

A few weeks ago, my son told me that his friend, a guitar teacher, had a student who was shocked to find out that Paul McCartney was in a band BEFORE Wings.

When I would finish my class at Parsons, I often would go across the street and have dinner with a fellow teacher, Burne Hogarth of Tarzan fame. One time, I reminded him of an incident told to me by a friend who had been one of his students way back at the School of Visual Arts before it was called the School of Visual Arts and was called “The Cartoonists and Illustrators School”. One of his students asked him one day why Tarzan was always pointing his finger. Hogarth had this characteristic pose that he would often use of Tarzan with his right arm extended out and his finger pointing. Hogarth answered, “He’s pointing at my critics and saying, can you draw as well?”

I’ll end on this note … A FEW GOOD TUNES???

Email Randy Enos   Visit Randy’s archive


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Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Andy Warhol Meets King Kong

Jacques and the Cowboy

The Gray Lady (The New York Times)

The BIG Eye

Historic Max’s

The Real Moby Dick

The Norman Conquests

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

How to Murder Your Wife

I Yam What I Yam

The Smallest Cartoon Characters in the World

Chicken Gutz

Brought to You in Living Black and White

The Hooker and the Rabbit

Art School Days in the Whorehouse

The Card Trick that Caused a Divorce

The Mysterious Mr. Quist

Monty Python Comes to Town

Riding the Rails

The Pyramid of Success

The Day I Chased the Bus

The Other Ol’ Blue Eyes

8th Grade and Harold von Schmidt

Rembrandt of the Skies

The Funniest Man I’ve Ever Known

Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part One”

Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part Two”

Famous Artists Visit the Famous Artists School

Randy Remembers Tomi Ungerer

Randy’s Overnight Parade

The Bullpen

Famous Artists Schools

Dik Browne: Hot Golfer

Randy and the National Lampoon

Randy’s Only Great Idea

A Brief Visit to Outer Space

Enos, Love and Westport

Randy Remembers the NCS

Categories
Blog Newsletter Syndicate

Andy Warhol Meets King Kong

My brilliant buddy, Randy Enos writes about Andy Warhol.

Email Randy Enos Visit Randy’s archive –Daryl


I saw Andy Warhol twice. Once when he was walking on 14th St. near his studio and I was just leaving my teaching at Parson’s School of Design. The other time was at a party at the Empire State Building.

In 1962, Bantam Books published something called “The Monocle Peep Show” which was a compilation of articles and cartoons and illustrations from Monocle magazine, a political satire publication of the time. Monocle featured work by David Levine, Lou Myers, Robert Grossman, Paul Davis, Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, Tomi Ungerer, Charles Slackman, Rick Schreiter, Marvin Kitman, Lou Meyers, Bob Blechman and many others, including me.

In the book, they re-printed a five page feature of mine called “The Giant”. It is so politically incorrect and raw that I cannot show it to you in this venue but I include here, the first page to show the crazy, messy “cardboard-cut” style I was using sometimes in those early days before I got into the full time linocutting.

At the same time Bantam published this anthology, they were putting together a book of King Kong. In 1964, to celebrate the launch of the book, they decided to have a party at the Empire State Building. For some reason they included all of us Monocle people in the invite. We were all going to see a screening of the original 1933 King Kong movie at the Empire State Building. And, to top it all off, we were also going to see a few minutes of Andy Warhol’s  movie “Empire” along with it. Warhol had evidently just finished this famous movie.

“Empire” is a silent, black and white, slow motion movie which consisted of a camera being trained on the building and never moving for 8 hours and 5 minutes. At the grand opening of the movie, audience members reputedly assaulted the filmmakers demanding their money back.

My wife and I had a lovely time at the party full of celebrities and artists and then the moment came to view the original King Kong. Folding chairs had been set up in a long room in one of the top floors of the building. Of course, we all noticed the white-haired Andy Warhol with a coterie of strange-looking girls from his gang standing in the back with his own projector prepared to show his film afterwards.
So, at the end of King Kong, after those famous last words were intoned, “It was beauty killed the beast,” we all had a little rest and a few drinks while Warhol and crew set up their projector.

Then … we watched about 8 minutes of his 8 hour movie. It was certainly good fun to watch both King Kong and Empire at the famous building that starred in both features. The camera stayed riveted on the building. Warhol, or rather his cinematographer Jonas Mekas, had shot it from the 41st floor of the Time-Life Building. I sensed that the audience at the Bantam party started getting restless through those silent monotonous eight long minutes of grayish inactivity. It was certainly a sudden contrast to the action we had just been witness to of Kong’s battle with the airplanes. THEN, miraculously, a pigeon flew across the screen. The audience erupted in applause.

Well, my very, very favorite moment of the entire evening was when, after a monotonous 5 minutes or so had passed in the Warhol movie, a gentleman seated up front said, loudly, “I liked it better with the monkey hangin’ offa it!”

Email Randy Enos   Visit Randy’s archive


Read many more of Randy’s cartooning memories:

Jacques and the Cowboy

The Gray Lady (The New York Times)

The BIG Eye

Historic Max’s

The Real Moby Dick

The Norman Conquests

Man’s Achievements in an Ever Expanding Universe

How to Murder Your Wife

I Yam What I Yam

The Smallest Cartoon Characters in the World

Chicken Gutz

Brought to You in Living Black and White

The Hooker and the Rabbit

Art School Days in the Whorehouse

The Card Trick that Caused a Divorce

The Mysterious Mr. Quist

Monty Python Comes to Town

Riding the Rails

The Pyramid of Success

The Day I Chased the Bus

The Other Ol’ Blue Eyes

8th Grade and Harold von Schmidt

Rembrandt of the Skies

The Funniest Man I’ve Ever Known

Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part One”

Read “I’m Your Bunny, Wanda –Part Two”

Famous Artists Visit the Famous Artists School

Randy Remembers Tomi Ungerer

Randy’s Overnight Parade

The Bullpen

Famous Artists Schools

Dik Browne: Hot Golfer

Randy and the National Lampoon

Randy’s Only Great Idea

A Brief Visit to Outer Space

Enos, Love and Westport

Randy Remembers the NCS