Karl Gude

Imagine a guy my age having a crush on a public figure. Not since Annette Funicello … Who?

I’d waited 32 years for this night, and I was feeling pretty impatient waiting for things to get moving. Finally, the huge concert hall grew dark. One thing captured the dim bits of light and gleamed white: a silver head of thick long hair sneaking out onto the large stage of the super cool Wharton Center at Michigan State University a few blocks from my office. Then, suddenly, bright lights and thundering applause. Without even a ‘hello’ Emmylou Harris, wearing super-pointy cowboy boots and a simple, dark beaded dress, sang a gorgeous-voiced first song from a list taped to her shiny guitar. Through my powerful binoculars I was intimately, and awkwardly, close to her.

I had fallen for Emmylou at an outdoor fair somewhere in California in the mid-70s and I hadn’t seen her perform live since. I was 21 (the age of my students today) and she was 29. Her hair had been pitch black in then, and I can clearly remember the hot wind tossing it around on that sunny day.

I was rock-concert thin and shirtless with a sketchpad in my back pocket (in case I got close enough to draw her) and long blonde hair that was a source of constant shame to my parents. My dad suggested he might cut it off with the lawnmower.

Today, I’d be arrested if I took my shirt off in public.

Things are different now, but they’re the same, too. For one thing, Emmylou’s older, but she’s as beautiful as ever (the older I get, the older ‘young’ gets) and she sounds exactly the same. Back then the Vietnam War, an insane war in my opinion, had just ended after 13 years, which meant that the emotional exhaustion of protesting it had also ended, along with the worry of being forced to serve. Now, I worry that my two teenage sons will have to fight in a new, insane war.

Back then everyone at that outdoor concert was young with a raw, raucous vitality. Now, at this indoor concert, I was knocked-out by the sea of wobbling gray heads in the orchestra seats below me. These fans, here and now, are what those fans, there and then, have become. What I have become.

I’m cool with that.

Back then, fresh out of school, I had a whole future to plan. Now, freshly back in school, I have a whole new future to plan, this time as a teacher, an art teacher. Back then, against my dad’s wishes, I wanted to be an artist. Now, I am one, and know that I have always been one. Why don’t grown-ups ever want their kids to be artists?

My two Emmylou sightings are bulging bookends to a full, fun and art-filled life lived in between. During that time I got fairly good at an obscure, artistic challenge called ‘information graphics,’ a craft that has been around since man could scratch shapes into dirt but that only became cool in the last 30 years, the lucky timeframe of my career, where interest in them moved from the most neglectful backgrounds of journalism to very near front-stage respectability.

Back then, information graphics were simpler but still there were very few of us making them well, not that we didn’t make just awful things at times, and we enjoyed an informal popularity among artists in a pocket-sized, insular industry of interest to only a handful of insiders, perhaps a loving family member or two, but certainly not to someone outside, like Emmylou, or to my next-door neighbor, for that matter.

(1986: Done with brushes and pens)

Now, graphics are much cooler and tougher to make and there are still only a few people making them with any degree of competence. I am no longer one of them. And, my neighbor still doesn’t get, or care, what I do. And, watching Emmylou through my field-glasses, I could kind of figure that they were about the last thing on her mind, too.

And I’m cool with that.

But some people do care about what I do: kids dreaming of being artists care, and so do students studying art at universities. They care because they’re desperate to find a way to do what they love and to make a good buck doing it so that they can keep doing it their whole lives, as I was able to, without selling out.

Before, there used to be LOTS of Art jobs. Now, not so much. Sure, painters still starve today, just like always. But magazines aren’t hiring illustrators or cartoonists much anymore because it’s mostly now about photography, or photo-illustration. Publications are relying heavily on inexpensive stock illustration databases when they do need some artwork. Thousands of kids graduate from art schools every year and compete for a narrowing number of graphic design jobs. Need a design? Use a Word or Dreamweaver template. Middle and high schools are cutting their art programs out of the curriculum so that they can focus on No Child Left Behind standards. Kids love art, but grown-ups don’t seem to want it anymore.

Years ago I stumbled onto one of Art’s new little secret mutations for survival. Grown-ups DO want information and sometimes it’s too complicated to understand with words alone. Young people want it, too. We all want it easy and we want it fast and seeing confusing stuff interpreted for us clearly in a creative, visual way, is pretty popular right now. Drawing, Design and Creativity have another home in today’s techno-complicated world in the form of information graphics. Throw a little Content into the mix, and there are jobs, and not just in news. That’s why MSU wants me. That’s why I want MSU.

And I’m definitely cool with that.

(So, what was with the Emmylou thing? Hell if I know. I just start at the top and wind up somewhere at the bottom.)