If my experiences of the last few weeks (and year) are a representative sample, then I can offer this advice: if you ever get the chance to meet one of your idols, go for it. A little over a year ago I met the first in a growing string of people who have the coolest jobs ever. It started with Eric Rohmann, the 2003 Caldecott winner for his book, My Friend Rabbit, whom I met when he gave a talk on the UW campus. Then last week I met three cartoonists from the New Yorker: Roz Chast, Matt Diffee, and the cartoon editor, Robert Mankoff. They were here as part of the New Yorker College Tour, and I actually got to sit down with Matt Diffee to talk about my own drawings.

And most recently, this past Thursday, I got to spend some time with one of my all-time favorite artists, Tim Biskup. His work is a unique blend of pop and Art-with-a-capital-A. One of my friends and I decided that he is the natural continuation of Warhol’s legacy: Warhol took pop culture and made it Art; Tim Biskup takes Art and makes it pop culture.

I don’t remember when I first saw his work– it was either a link from K10K, or it was some of his work in Juxtapoz magazine– but I know that the first thing of his that I bought was the Space Totem. Since then, I have also bought a Stack Pack toy, his 100 Paintings book, and the complete set of Neo Kaiju, which includes two of his creations as well as two toys by his wife, Seonna Hong (and two each by Gary Baseman, Todd Schorr, and Kathy Staico-Schorr). And that is a testament to Biskup’s genius: he makes things that you want to buy. Well, I do anyway, and the fact that he has an entire (successful!) storefront filled with his work means that others want to buy his stuff, too.

Biskup was here to deliver a talk for a local organization of designers, Design Madison, and in that talk he discussed the ways that he has intentionally steered his offerings to be even more desirable. The vast majority of his work is created as limited-edition multiples: serigraph prints, posters, and toys, primarily. But to raise their “I must have that” quotient, he takes smaller sets of the multiples and bundles them in creative ways to make even more exclusive options (and therefore more expensive). For a collector, that kind of thing is just irresistable.

So aside from all the awe that I have for his work and his marketing savvy, I was most impressed by Tim the person. He deserves to have an ego the size of Godzilla, but if it is there, it doesn’t show. He was real, he was personable, he was generous and friendly, and he was just a really nice guy. One of the things he talked about during his talk was how he got started: I hung on every word, of course. He came into the art world by way of the animation industry, and while he was trying to break in, he was taking the advice of (someone I can’t remember), who said that we all have 100,000 bad drawings in us. Once you get past those, you’ll be in business.

So while I don’t want to be another Tim Biskup (though there are worse things!), I do want to be THE David Huyck, and if it is going to take 100,000 drawings to get there, I’m going to have to keep busy.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 21st, 2005 at 10:10 am and is filed under Art, Illustration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.