ADDICTION

You suspect that you’re a visual addict when you can’t say no, can’t avert your glance, can’t turn off the HUNGER. You know you are an addict when, despite the visual fatigue and perceptual overload, there is still always more to be seen, more to take in or reject. ALWAYS, more.

I first realized this when I was quite young. My parents, struggling to make ends meet with a family of four kids, would rather desperately take us to the Cincinnati Art Museum every Sunday.  The museum was free that day and there were sufficient other children to ensure that if our young attentions flagged – or more likely – our young bodies wandered, there would be some vigilant community mom to corral us back to safety and to not tip over a sculpture in a forbidden game of tag. 

 No tag for me, I had an addiction to cultivate. 

THE FIX IS ON

I still remember my first fix: Edward Timothy Hurley’s Midnight Mass. It hung under the discreet lighting in the museum – a still scene in steel blues and muted violets with gray snow falling down on the barely-perceptible Church of the Immaculata which still stands modestly on a fist of slate, high above the Ohio River. The church was built just before the Civil War for the German congregation in the city’s Mt. Adams neighborhood. Immaculata, as it is still known, is a pilgrimage church. Each Lenten season, an increasingly dwindling number of the Catholic faithful make a painful climb up the hundreds of steps from the boulevard below to the church – on their knees. My intensely Irish Catholic father was one of those faithful until arthritis and the admonitions of his doctor curtailed his zeal. 

 But it was in winter that Immaculata and Mt. Adams becomes magical. Solid and stolid brick houses tumble down the slopes from the church – narrow, snow-clotted ribbons of crowded streets that mirrored those in Catholic Bavaria, the home of so many of Cincinnati’s immigrants. In the soft light and soothing tones of winter, it becomes a monotonal Cubist  pastiche.

The almost photographic quality of the painting – and its romanticism – mesmerized me: it was the piece that I would rush to first on our endless subsequent visits to the museum.  And decades later, I would render it as a graphic to be used on an abstract holiday card for my friends who still live in Cincinnati. 

Bier Her, Bier Her, Oder Ich Fal Um. 

Cincinnati also provided my first font fix,  from Tony the Tiger’s Frosted Flakes and to Bordon’s milk cartons (my favorite breakfast reading) and eventually, to the ultimate Cincinnati product: BEER. 

 By the mid-1800’s, Cincinnati had 82 breweries and by 1890, it was dubbed the Beer Capital of the World. Even when I was a child (mind you, later than 1890), breweries hulked along either side of the Ohio River and the perpendicular Mill Creek with names that didn’t exactly trip off the tongue, unless you were one of those descendants of the original Cincinnati Germans. In the hot and humid summer, my parents would gather with friends in Biergartens with their kids. Bored with the oom-pah-pah music and beer-y adult conversation, I would pick the labels off of the empty beer bottles for my private stash. Long gone, these first mementoes of my graphic addiction can still be seen on the internet.

Some of the more popular breweries had immense neon lights on top of their brick warehouses and German Gothic fonts would blaze neon red or yellow in the night, reflected in the river or bouncing off the low-hanging winter skies of the Ohio River Valley. Their retinal impression remained with me and proved to be really handy when it came to studying illuminated manuscripts in my art history courses. By the time I had finished 30 hours of classes in manuscripts, I never wanted to see a Gothik font again in my life. Little did I know that the thrasher metal bands would revive the font’s popularity.

WHEN AUBREY MET PETER

My visual addiction deepened in high school. A classmate turned me on to the work of Aubrey Beardsley, a 19th British illustrator whose work focused on the grotesque, the decadent and the erotic, an irresistible combination for a closeted gay kid in the middle of the worst of teenage angst. The fact that Beardsley died at age 25 of tuberculosis was the finishing touch of romanticism. I pored over his illustrations in a secreted library book, sure that my Catholic father would promptly condemn it and take away my library card which was my door to artistic exploration.  Beardsley was, after all, a close friend of Oscar Wilde. And we ALL knew that he was “one of those.”

At the same time, Peter Max entered our home in the form of the now-iconic poster of Bob Dylan. My sisters were besotted with the poet-singer; my father, reared on Mozart and Puccini, would roll his eyes and leave the room whenever that “hillbilly would start his whining.” Criticism notwithstanding, I sought out every bit of Maxiana I could lay my hands on. He seemed to me an updated, although less skillful version of Beardsley. My fascination with Peter Max found its apogee when Yellow Submarine was released. I saw it three times, twice by sneaking in when the box office agent was flirting with her boyfriend in the ticket booth. 

For months I tried to reproduce both artists on my drawing pad, now lost to the passage of time. But the die was cast, the fix was in and I was well and truly an addict. An addict, I remain. 

HAVE CAMERA, WILL CLICK. AND CLICK. AND CLICK.

Travel feeds my addiction: my enabler is Leica. And Canon. And Ricoh GR. And iPhone. My compulsion says “see, and you shall shoot.”  Consequently, my photos clog the innards of three 2TB portable drives. I fool myself that I will go back and do a major purge someday, but the addict in me whispers, “not so fast, dude, there’s some design nuggets in there. You know there are.”  And so, I add more pixels to the pile with every trip. 

That’s not to say that I don’t use my photos in my graphic work. I am a huge fan of travel posters from the 1920’s through the 1970’s and my coffee table groans under the weight of poster art books. Over the years, I have created a series of posters based on my photographic forays. 

THE ADDICTION THAT KEEPS ON GIVING

So, where will it all end, this visual addiction? Without being too Aubrey Beardsley about it, my final fix will probably be to design a graphic for the urn that will hold my ashes. But until that hopefully far-off day, I will feed my need for a fix and keep my eyes open for the next hit.