Ed Fella: A Studio Chat
Posted on 25. Aug, 2011 by niki in Artists, Ed Fella, Interviews
The following is taken from a conversation had with Ed Fella during the process of developing his tee collection.
We hope you enjoy his design insight as much as we did.
I was showing some friends your old style sheets from the 50’s and they recognized a lot of the work. It seems like a lot of illustration work from that era had a very particular look.
Why is it that these images are still so distinguishable?
They only recognize it as styles; they don’t recognize it as anything they’ve ever seen. The stuff was done in the 60’s and 70’s for dealer promotions. Most of the general public never saw this stuff. It never hit the national scene at all, but everyone thinks they’ve seen it because it’s so generic. They see these styles and they say, “Oh I’ve seen this stuff” but the actual work they would never remember out of billions of little spot illustrations. They were just generic styles that everyone did at the time. They aren’t really unique. Any number of people did that cartoon style of illustration. They were all just commercial art styles. On the other hand, in the 80’s when I became a signature style, this is my style of using the vernacular, but again it’s not any one particular thing. It’s all of the stuff put together. What’s kind of uniquely mine I suppose would be the Fella Parts as they were called these kinds of …they almost look like texts, yet they are not; they’re the connotations of typography, and this kind of bizarre lettering that was based on a kind of commercial art vernacular. And then this mix of putting that all together and a way of composing it, which became this kind of post modern pluralist deconstruction of this kind of commercial art. So it was all redone, like in my flyers it was all redone and skewed and repositioned so it became this kind of mash up. But then it also was continuously reworked. Right? So even Geoff McFetridge; his content is interesting but his style is just a generic 60’s illustration style that was actually quite anonymous because so many people could do stuff like that. It’s his subject that is so different and then he also uses a lot of children’s book styles. So his stuff also is actually very uniquely his because of what he draws with it what’s added to it, not the style itself. Even Milton Glaser; he did a series of styles that were all based on earlier styles that were re-workings of Art Deco, Art Nouveau… but everything is like that always anyway; it’s this kind of mix of things. Every once in awhile somebody hits on something that makes it more uniquely theirs; like in my case, doing this stuff with mechanical instruments, a mechanical cartooning style, but even that has gone on to, you know, now there’s all this kind of computer stuff that’s done in these vectors that’s very tight.
Yeah, it seems the computer has truly taken over. There’s really no element of design done by hand any longer. Everything really begins to look homogeneous.
Yeah, you don’t need to use templates anymore. The computer is the template for it. So if you draw an oval the computer can make it exactly the kind of oval you want.
That was the same with me. If I needed an oval, I just took a template and traced the oval. That’s what made some of these kinds of styles, they would have been done by using rulers and templates as guides. Just little bits and pieces. Each time you made a line you had to move the template. It was always a ruled line; it was never actually a hand drawn line. Template styles, none of it is hand drawn. That’s why it’s so perfect in a way. There’s no way you actually do that without using rulers and templates to guide the lines. These were huge jobs and the illustrations would be inside a little brochure of some sort, so nobody would have actually seen this. Although now you see it and you think “Oh yeah” because it just becomes a generic kind of commercial art style that you think you’ve seen and you have seen it. You’ve seen thousand of these things in your lifetime, but it’s just this idea of a visual culture. It’s just like if you’ve seen a portrait done by Gainsborough. You’ve seen it a million times too, because it’s a generic portrait, beautifully painted and blah blah blah and people still do them today.
For me, that’s what makes your later work so special, you broke all of the type rules and your hand is everywhere.
Are there stories behind some of these t-shirt designs?
Well, they come from other pieces; they are parts of other pieces, but I don’t know if explaining it makes a lot of sense. You know like that Letters On America is the title of my book; the lettering was. This was a style sheet from a certain time. I don’t want to say what this is for because it was Motown. Motown was down the street and they called me up asked if I wanted to do album covers, so I said I’ll send you an example. So, I sent them that ball of noise just to show my kind of disdain. I didn’t even know what it was at that time. It wasn’t anything. It was just a little record company down the street in an old house that said Hitsville, USA and I was a big time Detroit automotive advertising designer. I was too snobby to actually want to do anything for them. So I just sent them that ball of noise as a joke, just to end the whole thing. At the time I didn’t know what it was, nor did I care. It was just kid’s music and I was more interested in Jazz. I didn’t want to bother with this little shitty neighborhood record company that was just down the street from the building I worked in. I was just a snobby artist, even in high school. I wouldn’t be caught dead listening to Elvis Presley or any of that kind of stuff. Beatniks didn’t listen to pop music. Beatniks listened to Shostakovich and Coltrane. When I was in high school the big thing was beatniks and so beatniks were high culture. They weren’t pop culture. If you were a beatnik, you were a bohemian artist type, so you would be into Classical and Be Bop Jazz and then finally folk music, but very authentic stuff. I listened to that Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music.
I loved all that music growing up, I listen to that stuff now.
Yeah it’s still fabulous.
That was an exceptional era. It was such an inventive, exciting time in music culture.
Well you know it’s always been an exciting time in music. If you look back, every era had some big thing happening in it. Right? In the 50’s it was Progressive Jazz and Be Bop, the rise of Folk music and the beginning of Elvis Presley and Rock and Roll. And the 60’s; my god. The 70’s; my kids grew up during that time. There was punk music and what was that new, new something?
New wave.
But there is always something, right?
Yes, that’s so true. I don’t know about what’s happening for the most part right now though…
That‘s it though. You never know at that exact time what’s happening. Really the whole idea is that those are cultures that belong to kids. They make their own culture.
Photos © Niki Livingston
