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St. Louis Illustrators Are Making a Scene — and Finding Camaraderie | Arts Stories & Interviews | St. Louis

Published

2 years ago

August 23, 2023

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click to enlarge COURTESY IMAGES St. Louis-based illustrator John Hendrix works in his studio.

They work alone, and the things they make are strikingly diverse. One has that classic storybook look, with wild faces and tiny fine lines making up detailed backgrounds. Another twines quirky text so intensely with images it’s not clear which came first. Still another is bright and simple and effective at transmitting information effortlessly.

They are produced daily, monthly, yearly (or multi-yearly). They begin by commission or their own invention or even a class assignment. They’re sold or put online for free or roughed out and never really finished.

They are all so different — yet at their center, there’s something the same. After all, they’re all drawings made by illustrators working in St. Louis.

And St. Louis — it’s a good place to be an illustrator. There’s a solid community here and a surprising nexus of talent for such a small city that is not particularly known outside its borders for its well of drawing capability. You could say it’s a secret, but it’s one that’s unlikely to stay hidden for much longer.

Perhaps not any longer than the publication of this article. Illustrators have built a community here, and they’re happy not only to pare away the mystery of what it’s like to draw for a living, but also to explain why and how they do it here — and make a compelling case that others just may want to join them.

The making of an illustrator

Most of these artists find illustration young, before they even know it could be a job.

“I’ve been an illustrator my whole life, I just didn’t know that’s what it was called,” says John Hendrix, a freelance illustrator. A St. Louis native, he really came into the profession in New York, where he worked as an art director with the New York Times before returning home to teach at Washington University and eventually start up its Illustration & Visual Culture MFA, of which he’s now chair.

It was the same for Dmitri Jackson, who traces his illustration roots back to a Crayola Easter Bunny coloring contest he entered at age six.

“I ended up winning first place, and it was pretty cool,” he says. “That was the earliest moment where I thought, ‘I think I can do this. I could make a living doing art or doing drawing.'”

Jackson began drawing comics (find his long-running Blackwax Boulevard online or pick up a print collection where books are sold), eventually going to college at Wash U, which broadened his interests into motion graphics and beyond.
click to enlarge COURTESY STEENZ Steenz got their start working in a comic store and now draws the daily strip Heart of the City.

School was also Christina “Steenz” Stewart’s entry into drawing for a living — or, rather, dropping out of art school was how they found the profession.

“I liked drawing,” Steenz says. “I knew I liked illustration; I thought maybe I should go into children’s books, illustration. But I didn’t really know what the avenue for that was either. So after realizing that my college was not giving me any valuable answers as to how to take my skills and put it into a career, I dropped out because I was like, ‘What am I paying you for?'”

They started working at a local comic store and got involved in the community, eventually meeting their creative partner Ivy Noelle Weir. After Oni Press published the duo’s first book, Archival Quality, things took off. “It made it a lot easier getting other gigs,” Steenz says. Eventually everything fed into being tapped to take over as the artist of the daily syndicated comic Heart of the City. click to enlarge COURTESY IMAGE Candice Evers became an illustrator after a quarter-life crisis.

But knowing your path from an early age isn’t the only way to do things. Look at Candice Evers, a freelance illustrator who has done work with NPR-affiliate WNYC Studios, the LA Times and more. She was working in nonprofit fundraising until, amid a “quarter-life crisis,” she relocated to St. Louis to be closer to her significant other’s family.

After the move, she attended an online summer program through the Illustration Academy, where she heard lauded St. Louis illustrator Ed Kinsella speak. Then she made her way into Wash U’s new grad program.

“It’s not going to hurt me to give it a shot,” she remembers thinking. “Like, I’m not so old yet. So what if I just try a little bit?”

click to enlarge COURTESY IMAGE A sample of Candice Evers’ work.

The hustle — and the side hustles

Evers mostly does editorial work on commission, which is how it works when a publication hires an illustrator to create a piece to match a specific project (the RFT does this a lot). But it’s not like getting an assignment and coming back with a fully finished piece by deadline. Instead, the artist will create sketches, maybe pitch them and refine them, and then ultimately produce a piece.

Recently, Evers worked with the WNYC podcast More Perfect to illustrate an episode about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ collegiate obsession with Malcolm X.

“You’re getting this information, like bits and pieces of this podcast episode in process,” she says. “It’s interesting to see, ‘OK, what am I thinking is standing out, what are they thinking is standing out?’ So you’re generating as many thumbnails, as many scratches as you can for possible ways that you could solve this puzzle of trying to create an image to go along with the story that they’re trying to tell.”

But that’s just one way to do things, Hendrix says. And the lines between various modes of illustration have blurred.

“It used to be that the disciplines between, let’s say, classic illustration and comics were very different,” he says. “Thirty, forty years ago, but even fifteen years ago, they were very separate. But now they’re very connected, mostly because illustrators are really not your classic ‘waiting for the phone to ring’ Mad Men era. There are people that are writing their own work, and in one way or another, using drawings and writing to engage with the world.”
click to enlarge COURTESY IMAGE Dan Zettwoch got his start doing technical illustrations, and that carries into the style of his work today.

That could look like an old school in-house type of illustrator, so prolific in the heyday of the advertising boom but even now still in existence, as with Dan Zettwoch’s first gig out of school as an illustrator at a technical magazine. Some create book jackets or children’s books, like the icon who is arguably St. Louis’ most famous illustrator, Mary Engelbreit. There are visual journalists, who write and draw stories. And professions like game design are increasingly falling under the illustration umbrella.

Then there are the people who have related jobs. Hendrix is a freelancer and he teaches, as do many, including Steenz, who is an instructor at Webster University, or Brandon Daniels, who says he teaches as an adjunct at “just about every school in the region.” Jackson also serves as an educational technologist at Wash U, providing technical support, which he says is the perfect balance between creative and not creative.

Very rarely, it seems, does anyone these days focus on only one aspect of illustration, regardless of who they are or what they primarily produce.

“I like to have a bunch of different stuff going all at once,” Zettwoch says. “I think that’s been sort of my personal secret, to never feel like I’m chained to the drawing table or chained to a computer.”
click to enlarge COURTESY IMAGE A Dan Zettwoch illustration.

There’s also a darker side to that multiplicity: It’s a necessity. Jackson recalls reaching out to publications nationally at the start of his career. “I had to hustle hard from the jump,” he says, noting that he’s eyeing the encroachment of AI in illustration’s territory warily.

Steenz sees things a bit differently. There are plenty of opportunities to be found, they say, because so much is done online. But that’s not enough.

“What sucks is that there’s not a lot of money for the arts,” they say. “You can have all the faculty positions available, but they’ll remain unfilled if the salary doesn’t increase. Many artists are doing multiple creative pursuits. Not just because it’s nice to diversify, but because we need multiple streams of income to make ends meet. But I can’t say that’s strictly a St. Louis problem.”
click to enlarge COURTESY IMAGE Steenz’ comic Heart of the City is syndicated in newspapers across the U.S.

Building a community

Drawing is a solo act, even when there’s a collaborative aspect, as with Evers’ podcast illustrations. That can be great — Zettwoch says he can look back at past projects and picture exactly what he was listening to or what was happening in his life at the time, like when he was putting together a book on the internal combustion engine just as his toddler son was getting super into cars.

“He’s not always excited about what I’m working on. I’m a pretty boring dad,” he says. “But that was a fun one.”

But there’s a downside as well. “It can be an incredibly isolated role,” Evers says.

As a result, illustrators are finding ways to come together and make community in St. Louis.

Take Steenz, who makes their Heart of the City strips Monday through Wednesday and “sometimes Thursday, if I’m feeling lazy.” They create two strips a day and then work on the Sunday one, which is longer and more involved.

That schedule leaves a lot of time to pursue other things. They’ll read pitches, or do some work as an editor, help other comic creators develop their projects or teach a workshop. They’ve found a multitude of ways to give back and provide the support younger artists need.

“Those kinds of one-on-one reviews and mentorships are the stuff that I feel the most passionate about,” Steenz says. “I felt so lost and abandoned after I left college.”

Steenz set out to let others know that the expected path from college to job wasn’t how it worked for everyone: “I don’t want people to think that they have to live their life a certain way when they have so many other options out there for them.”

Steenz is now part of a group, which includes Daniels, leading the charge to bring back the St. Louis Small Press Expo (which ceased with the pandemic) as the St. Louis Independent Comics Expo, or SLICE, this year on October 14 at the Sheldon. Despite the name, it involves far more than just comics — really, any print-based artwork, indie publications and more. And, unlike previous iterations, SLICE is now planning events throughout the year, including regular Drink & Draw meetups and workshops such as a graphic novel book club at Betty’s Books on Wednesday, August 23.

The group is far from the only community connecting St. Louis creators. Ink and Drink Comics holds a weekly session for illustrators to meet up, grab a drink and make comics. It regularly publishes the results of those meetups in themed anthologies with drink-inspired names, such as 2021’s Liquid Courage II, which is about superheros.

The Cherokee Print Bazaar is another such point of intersection.

“Whenever you go to one of those [annual events], seeing everybody, checking in with each other, maybe that’s the only time you see someone over the course of six months or a year, but it’s good to see what people are up to, and I think that definitely informs what other people are doing,” Evers says.

There’s also a natural nexus forming around Wash U since the creation of its MFA program. “St. Louis has kind of become a bit of an illustration destination,” Hendrix says. “It’s neat to see it really take off in our town.”

The programs at Webster, Maryville University, Lindenwood and elsewhere add to that, with some graduates leaving but others staying in town.
click to enlarge COURTESY IMAGE Dmitri Jackson’s web comic Blackwax Boulevard is also collected in book form.

Jackson says it isn’t only about the programs here. There’s something about the city itself, which is just the right size. “It creates a real strong sense of home and family in a strange way,” he says.

“That’s one of the great parts about St. Louis: It’s big enough of a town to have real culture, things like that, but also small enough to where you feel like you have access to everybody, or could meet everyone who’s doing the kind of work you’re interested in,” Zettwoch agrees. (He also observes that elements of the city have crept into his work subjects — local history and birds, for example — and even the style of lettering he sees around the city.)

Funding from places like the Kranzberg Arts Foundation and the Regional Arts Commission helps. “There are lots of art administrators and art foundations and nonprofits that are supporting us,” Daniels says. “RAC gives out millions of dollars a year to support the local communities, and they don’t seem to discriminate against illustrators or comic artists.”

Then there’s the thing that makes St. Louis great for all artists: It’s cheap. And that draws creative people in, or just keeps them here.

“There’s a lot to love about it,” Hendrix says. “You can have an affordable home, and people just stay.”
click to enlarge COURTESY IMAGE A sample of Dmitri Jackson’s work.

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Five Fun Facts About Busch Stadium You Didn’t Know

Published

11 months ago

July 30, 2024

Natural Bridge

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When baseball fans roll into St. Louis, Busch Stadium often tops their must-see list. But this iconic ballpark has more hidden gems beyond baseball — and even beyond its souvenir shops and good hotdogs. Here’s a lineup of interesting facts that’ll make you the MVP in Busch Stadium trivia.

From Ballpark to Brewing Brand Deal

A 1900 postcard showing the Oyster House of Tony Faust, founder of the brewing firm | Courtesy Anheuser-Busch.

Busch Stadium has a past that’s more refreshing than a cold beer. Before becoming the shrine of Cardinals baseball, it was a multipurpose park called Sportsman”s Park in 1953. Anheuser-Busch, the brewing giant that owned the Cardinals for a time, purchased the stadium and called it Busch Stadium.

Talk about brewing a partnership with a home run!

Museum for Baseball Maniacs

One can explore unique stadium models, step into the broadcast booth to relive Cardinals’ historic moments and hold authentic bats from team legends in this Museum | Courtesy Cardinals Nation

The St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Fame and Museum is an 8,000-square-foot tribute to baseball’s rich history. Opening on the Cardinals’ 2014 Opening Day, this shrine charts the team’s stories from its 1882 beginnings when it was still called the American Association Browns. Here, you can revel in the team’s 11 World Series Championships and 19 pennants. And if you’re feeling adventurous, watch the game from the museum’s roof—the Hoffmann Brothers Rooftop—complete with a full-service bar and an all-you-can-eat menu. It’s like VIP seating, but with more hot dogs.

Even the Fans Break World Records

Busch Stadium is more than a ballpark; it’s a record-breaking arena.

In one memorable event, Nathan’s Famous set a Guinness World Record for the most selfies taken simultaneously—4,296, to be exact. Just imagine trying to squeeze all those selfies into a single frame!

Not to be outdone, Edward Jones and the Alzheimer’s Association formed the largest human image of a brain on the field in 2018. With 1,202 people, the image was like a giant, multi-colored brain freeze.

1,202 people gathered in centerfield at Busch Stadium to form a multi-coloured brain image | Screenshot from Guinness World Records.

The MLB Park in Your Backyard

Are you an avid Cardinals fan, thinking about living near the stadium? The cost of living in the area might be in your favor.

A 2017 study by Estately.com shows that media prices for homes around Busch Stadium is the fourth least expensive among around 26 major MLB stadiums. When San Francisco Giants fans have to pay up $1,197,000 that year for the same convenience of catching a game at a walking distance, Cardinal fans can snag real estate at only $184,900. If that’s not a walk-off win of a deal, we’re not sure what is.

Big Cleats to Fill as Busch Stadium Eyes Expansion

Those wanting to invest in property near Busch Stadium better get it while it’s still affordable. Rumor has it Busch Stadium could soon expand. That rumor has been going around for three decades since talks to raise public money allegedly started. We’ll believe it when we see it.

According to Cardinals owner Bill DeWitt III, plans are likely to mirror recent projects for the Milwaukee Brewers and Baltimore Orioles, with price tags hovering around $500 to $600 million. But the real investment is still up for debates pending a concrete cost-benefit analysis on the stadium’s surrounding area.

So the next time you kick back with a cold beer and catch a game at Busch Stadium, be in awe of the fact there’s more to the place than what meets the batter’s eye. Pitch these interesting facts at trivia night or to your Hinge date who’s new in town. Who knows – you might just win a home run beer.

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Nashville Police Officer Arrested for Appearing in Adult Video

Published

1 year ago

June 14, 2024

Natural Bridge

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A Nashville police officer, Sean Herman, 33, has been arrested and charged with two counts of felony official misconduct after allegedly appearing in an adult video on OnlyFans while on duty. Herman was fired one day after detectives became aware of the video last month.

The video, titled “Can’t believe he didn’t arrest me,” shows Herman, participating in a mock traffic stop while in uniform, groping a woman’s breasts, and grabbing his genitals through his pants. The officer’s face is not visible, but his cruiser, patrol car, and Metro Nashville Police Department patch on his shoulder are clearly visible.

The Metro Nashville Police Department launched an investigation immediately upon discovering the video. The internal investigation determined Herman to be the officer appearing in the video. He was fired on May 9 and arrested on June 14, with a bond set at $3,000.

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Jane Smiley’s New Novel, Lucky, Draws on Her Charmed St. Louis Childhood

Published

1 year ago

May 22, 2024

Natural Bridge

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Like any good St. Louisan, Jane Smiley has an opinion on the high school question.

“If you ask somebody in St. Louis, ‘Where did you go to high school’ — because each school is so unique, you do get a sense of what their life was like and where they live,” says the John Burroughs graduate. “Where are you from? What do you like? And, you know, the answer is always interesting.”

That’s pretty much what Jodie Rattler, the main character of Smiley’s latest novel, Lucky, thinks.

“School, in St. Louis, is a big question, especially high school,” Rattler muses toward the start of the story. “… My theory about this is not that the person who asks wants to judge you for your socioeconomic position, rather that he or she wants to imagine your neighborhood, since there are so many, and they are all different.”

This parallel thought pattern is even less of a coincidence than the author/subject relationship implies. Lucky, which Alfred A. Knopf published last month, is nominally the story of Jodie, a folk musician gone fairly big who hails from our fair town. But the book is more than just its plot: It’s an ode to St. Louis and an exploration of the life Jane Smiley might have lived — if only a few things were different.

The trail to Lucky started in 2019, when Smiley returned here for her 50th high school reunion and agreed to a local interview. The radio host asked why she’d never set a novel in St. Louis.

“I thought, ‘Boy, why haven’t I done that?'” Smiley remembers. “And so then I thought, ‘Well, maybe I should think about it.’ And I decided since I love music, and St. Louis is a great music town, that I would maybe do an alternative biography of myself if I had been a musician, and of course I would say where she went to [high] school. So that’s what got me started. And the more I got into it, the more I enjoyed it.” click to enlarge DEREK SHAPTON Jane Smiley rocketed to literary stardom after winning the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for A Thousand Acres. She now has more than 25 books to her name.

The Life Jane Smiley Didn’t Live

Jane Smiley has always felt really lucky.

First, there was her background: She grew up with a “very easygoing and fun family.” Growing up in Webster Groves, she enjoyed wandering through the adjacent neighborhoods and exploring how spaces that were so close together could have such different vibes.

Then there was her career, which kicked into gear when she was 42 with the publication of A Thousand Acres, a retelling of King Lear set on a farm in Iowa. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 1991 and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1992. It became a movie and, two years ago, an opera. Since then, she’s been steadily publishing and now has more than 25 books to her name.

“I was lucky in the way that my career got started,” Smiley says. “It was lucky in a way that it continued. I was lucky to win the Pulitzer. And I really enjoyed that. I said, ‘OK, I want to write about someone who’s lucky, but I don’t want it to be me. Because I want to contemplate the idea of luck, and see how maybe it works for somebody else.'”

click to enlarge

Both the book, and Jodie’s good luck, start at Cahokia Downs in 1955. Jodie’s Uncle Drew, a father stand-in, takes her to the racetrack and has her select the numbers on a bet that turns his last $6 into $5,986. She gets $86 of the winnings in a roll of $2 bills.

Smiley, a horse lover throughout her life, used to love looking at the horses at the racetrack before she understood how “corrupt it is at work.” (She also reminisces about pony rides at the corner of Brentwood and Manchester across from St. Mary Magdalen Church and riding her horse at Otis Brown Stables.)

Unlike Smiley, Jodie is not a horse person. And at first, Jodie feels somewhat disconnected from her luck — it’s something other people tell her that she possesses. She’s lucky to live where she does. She’s lucky that her mom doesn’t make her clear her plate, that her uncle has a big house, that she gets into John Burroughs. Later, she begins to carry those bills around as a talisman.

“[I] made a vow never to spend that roll of two-dollar bills — that was where the luck lived,” Jodie thinks after a narrow miss with a tornado.

It’s John Burroughs that changes Jodie’s life, just as it did Smiley’s. But instead of falling in love with books in high school and becoming a writer, Jodie falls into music. She eventually gets into songwriting, penning tunes as a sophomore at Penn State that launch her career.

One of Jodie’s songs should instantly resonate for St. Louis readers.

“The third one was about an accident I heard had happened in St. Louis,” Jodie recalls in the book, “a car going off the bridge over the River des Peres, which may have once been a river but was now a sewer. My challenge was to make sense of the story while sticking in a bunch of odd St. Louis street names — Skinker, of course, DeBaliviere, Bompart, Chouteau, Vandeventer. The chorus was about Big Bend. The song made me cry, but I never sang it to anyone but myself.”

Throughout the book are Jodie’s lyrics, alongside the events that inspire them. Writing them was a new experience for Smiley, who found herself picking up a banjo gifted by an ex and strumming the few songs she’d managed to learn, as well as revisiting the popular music of the novel’s time — the Beatles (George is Smiley’s favorite), Janis Joplin and the Traveling Wilburys, along with Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, and Peter, Paul and Mary — basically “all the folk singers.”

“I really love music, and I do wish I’d managed to practice, which I was always a failure at,” Smiley says. “… I liked that they made up their own lyrics, and they made their own music, and I was impressed by that.”

Both Smiley and Jodie grew up in households replete with record players and music. It’s one of their great commonalities.

A great difference between the two? That would be sex. At one point, Jodie compares her body count, which she calls the “Jodie Club,” with a lover — 25 (rounded up, Jodie notes) to his 150.

“That was a lot of fun,” says Smiley. “She learns a lot from having those affairs, and she enjoys it. She’s careful. And I like the fact that she never gets married, and she doesn’t really have any regrets about that.” (Smiley has been married four times.) “In some sense, her musical career has made her want to explore those kinds of issues of love and connection and sex and the way guys are.”

You can tell Smiley had a good time writing this. After Jodie loses her virginity, she thinks, “The erection had turned into a rather cute thing that flopped to one side.”

“Oh, it was fun,” Smiley confirms. “Sometimes I would say, ‘OK, what can I have Jodie do next? What’s something completely different than what I did when I was her age?’ And then I’d have to think about that and try and come up with something that was actually interesting. I knew that she couldn’t do all the things that I had done, and she had to be kind of a different person than I was. And so I made her a little more independent, and a little more determined.”

click to enlarge VIA THE SCHOOL YEARBOOK Jane Smiley’s high school yearbook photo. In Lucky, Jodie recalls of a classmate, “The gawky girl had stuck her head into a basketball basket, taken hold of the rim, and her caption was, ‘They always have the tall girls guard the basket.'”

Lucky follows Jodie from childhood to into her late 60s. At several points in the novel, she crosses paths with a Burroughs classmate, identified only as the “gawky girl.” Jodie takes note of her former classmate, but she’s not recognized.

Toward the end, Jodie walks into Left Bank Books and sees the gawky girl’s name on the cover of a novel.

“Out of curiosity, I read a few things about the gawky girl. Apparently she really had been to Greenland, and the Pulitzer novel was based on King Lear, which I thought was weird, but I did remember that when we read King Lear in senior English, I hadn’t liked it,” Jodie thinks. “… I remembered walking past her in the front hall of the school, maybe a ways down from the front door. She was standing there smiling, her glasses sliding down her nose, and one of the guys in our class, one of the outgoing ones, not one of the math nerds that abounded, stopped and looked at her, and said, ‘You know, I would date you if you weren’t so tall.'”

Sound familiar? Does it help to know Smiley is 6’2″?

The doppelgangers meet face to face after their 50th Burroughs’ reunion at the Fox and Hounds bar at the Cheshire. To go into what happens next — it’s too much of a spoiler.

“In every book, there’s always a surprise,” Smiley says. click to enlarge ZACHARY LINHARES Smiley enjoys St. Louis place names, and DeBaliviere is one of many in the novel.

Jodie Rattler’s St. Louis

Lucky is a smorgasbord of familiar names and places for St. Louis readers, and picking them out will be a big part of the joy of the book for locals.

“I love many things about St. Louis — not exactly the humidity, but lots of other things,” Smiley says. “One of the things I love is how weird the street names are. So I had to put her in that house on Skinker, and I had to refer to a few other places that are kind of weird. I couldn’t fit them all in.

“But I love the way that those street names and St. Louis are a real mix, and some of them are true French street names. Some of them are true English street names. Like Grav-wah or Grav-whoy” — here she deploys first the French and then the St. Louis version of “Gravois” — “whatever you want to call it, and Clark. It’s just really interesting to look around there and sense all of the different cultures that lived there and went through there.”

Jodie grows up in a house on Skinker near Big Bend. It’s “a pale golden color, with the tile roof and the little balcony,” Smiley writes. Jodie walks through Forest Park and eats at Schneithorst’s. Her mother works at the Muny; she shops at Famous Barr. Her grandfather prefers the “golf course near our house on Skinker,” which must be the Forest Park course. Jodie goes to Cardinals games, the Saint Louis Zoo and Grant’s Farm. She visits and thinks about St. Louis’ parks such as Tilles and Babler. Even the county jail in Clayton gets a mention.

Of course, Chuck Berry shows up several times, first mentioned for getting “in trouble for doing something that I wouldn’t understand.” Later, as Jodie drives by his home, she drops some shade on the county along the way: “Aunt Louise knew where Phyllis Schlafly’s house was, so I drove past there — another reason not to choose Ladue,” she writes.

Jodie and the man who invented rock & roll later meet face-to-face briefly at a festival near San Jose, California. “My favorite parts were getting to walk up to Chuck Berry and say, ‘I’m from St. Louis, too. Skinker!’ and having him reply, ‘Cards, baby!’ and know that no one nearby knew what in the world we were talking about,” Jodie recalls.

Lucky feels like a bit of a members-only club, and here the club is St. Louis. There is barely a page that is without some kind of reference — to the point where one might wonder if non-locals can even keep up. (Though they should rest assured: It’s a good read.)

“I write more or less to do what I want to do, and so I wrote about the things that interested me,” Smiley says. And more than 50 years after she graduated high school and left Webster Groves for Iowa and (briefly) Iceland and California, where she lives today, St. Louis, clearly, qualifies.

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