20+ Questions with Drew Friedman

Hi, Drew! Thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions. First of all, can you tell us a little about your background?
I was born in 1958, grew up in New York, first on Long Island and then my family moved to Manhattan when I was 13. Early on, I had a love for all things cartoon art, comic books, animated cartoons, bubblegum cards, MAD Magazine, New Yorker cartoons, caricature, and I knew that somehow, some way, that’s what I wanted to do with my life. My parents would send me to afterschool art classes, then I was enrolled briefly as a teenager at the High School of Music & Art, and finally I attended the School of Visual Arts, which had a “Cartoon Department” taught by many working cartoon professionals.

When did you realize you could draw for a living? Was it always your goal to be an artist?
Yes, really early on and probably when I was 5, I realized that’s all I would ever be suited for as I hated school and only wanted to draw cartoons and funny faces, much to my teachers’ anger. My earliest goals were to someday work for MAD Magazine, to be one of the “Usual Gang of Idiots,” and to also do work for the Topps bubblegum company, who were then producing “Ugly Stickers” and “Wacky Packs,” two series I was particularly obsessed with. At that time I thought my goals were probably impossible to achieve, but I somehow managed to achieve them both!

What is a typical day like in the life of Drew Friedman?
Typical day is to get up fairly early, run the two beagles in the yard, then get to work around 10-ish. I have a downstairs studio, so joined by the beagles, that’s where I can be found through most of the day, with a quick break for lunch. I’m usually wrapped up by 5 or so, even if I’m on a deadline, and that’s it as far as work. When I was younger, I’d sometimes work too late, or even occasionally [pull] the dreaded “all-nighter,” but no more. My nervous system finally couldn’t stomach it!

If you couldn’t do what you do now, how would you make money?
I’d be either a figure skater or a grave digger.

What art-related activities do you do in your free time, or, if not art related, what do you like to do?
Actually, pretty mundane. My wife and I live in the country, so aside from tractor pulls, there’s not much to do around here, which is just the way we like it. We tend to stay in, cook together, relax with the beagles by the pool or watch old movies on TV. We’re about 80 miles from NYC which is perfect since most of our friends live there so it’s a pretty easy visit. We love to drive into New York and also we love to drive home.

Do you take any art classes now? If yes, what? If not, what would you like to take?
No, no art classes. I’m basically self taught, or at least I learned how to do what I do by paying attention to other people’s work and through personal trial and error. I’m convinced that’s the best education.

You have a definite style that is unmistakably “Drew Friedman.” I am struck by how meticulously detailed everyone of your drawings is–how long does your process take?
It depends on the piece or assignment. If it’s a rush job for a publication, I just don’t have the luxury to put in the detail that I’d normally like to do. But if it’s a piece with no particular deadline, I’ll sometimes spend up to a week on the illustration. I love drawing the small details, even if it’s just people, or even portions of heads or bodies in the background of a drawing. Sometimes that’s more interesting to me than what’s supposed to be the focus of the illustration. I want the viewer to absorb the entire piece, not just the main image.

Much of your past work entailed stippling, but now you seem to be doing more painting–why the change?
I worked in the stipple style very early on, starting at art school, the School of Visual Arts in New York. I sort of stumbled into that style of drawing (tiny dots), and it let me achieve the more photo-realistic effect I was striving for in my early work and especially in my comic strips, where I was depicting actual people, TV actors, movie actors and celebrities, in semi-realistic, dark noir-type situations. The best example was an early comic strip I drew, written by my brother Josh, about a black man visiting the Andy Griffith town “Mayberry,” and the horrible aftermath. I worked in the stipple style for about a decade but finally switched to painting when I was concentrating more on magazine assignments, some with tight deadlines, and celebrity portraits. Also, the stippling was beginning to strain my eyesight, something my artistic hero and friend Robert Crumb had warned me might happen.

Can you explain your current working procedure and how it varies from the way you used to work?
I tend to work to actual size, or maybe just slightly larger, although when I take on a commissioned piece, I’ll work a bit larger (for me), up to 12 inches tall or so, since most people like to collect or hang up larger pieces. I work almost exclusively in watercolor, not oil, with some color pencil used for hi-lighting. I don’t work at all on my art on the computer, although my wife Kathy will touch things up before we send it out to whomever. I still do things the old-fashioned way!

Also, most of your work seems to be in black and white, with lots of vintage images. What do you use when you work in color?
Actually, these days it’s more 50-50 as far as color vs. B&W. Early on I worked exclusively in B&W, but as art directors were demanding color more often, I gradually taught myself to paint in color. It was a slow process of a few years before I was finally pleased with the results. I have a huge photo file of B&W and color photos, and of course these days you can just Google-image practically anyone, but one of the things I most enjoy is using a B&W reference photo and transforming it to full color. Two good examples of that are the full-color cover of my first Old Jewish Comedians book, Milton Berle. That was based on a tiny photo of Berle I had clipped from People magazine back in the eighties that I just had a feeling I knew I’d use someday. Also, my recent Sideshow Freaks book. The reference photos I had for the sideshow performers were, in most cases, grainy B&W photos. I did all the portraits in full color. Always a fun challenge!

Do you ever try to challenge yourself by working outside your comfort zone?
Well, honestly, I prefer not. At this point I know my strengths and weaknesses. I do hate drawing attractive people and try to avoid that. I like drawing people with more “interesting” faces. I’ll occasionally get an assignment that’s completely wrong for me and I try to be honest with the art director and steer him to another artist that might be better, even suggesting a particular artist. But there have been times I’ve accepted the assignment, maybe because the money was just too appealing or the challenge was exciting. One example is when Field & Stream magazine called me to do an assignment a couple of years ago. Now, I’m a Jewish, anti-hunting vegetarian, but since the art director was someone I had worked with at another magazine and liked, I took the job, although I agonized over it somewhat. So of course the editors were delighted with my illustration and I was hired to do regular work for them! Oy Vey! I did about a half dozen assignments for them till it slowly dawned on the editors that I was subtly drawing the animals to look heroic and the hunters to look as stupid as possible. Finally they stopped calling with the assignments.

Another example is when the TV sitcom Friends was popular, I kept getting assignments, especially from Entertainment Weekly, to draw the cast members in various situations. Now I don’t watch much TV, and I had never watched Friends, I didn’t want to (to this day), but I kept getting assignments to draw those people. Finally, I instituted a “NO FRIENDS” policy, and stuck to it. Mercifully, the show finally went off the air and I could breathe easily!

How do you handle doing a commissioned piece when you just can’t find the right reference photos?
The reference photos are so important to me. Like I said, these days you can Google-image almost anyone, but many times the same photos appear over and over, or it’s the same standard shot of the person looking directly at the camera, something I try to avoid. I do have a large photo file, something I’ve kept since I was a kid, so I have many rare, obscure photos of various celebrities, authors, comedians, etc. But sometimes, I just can’t come up with the right ref photo. When I was working on my three Old Jewish Comedians books, I really wanted to include Arnold Stang, the nebbishy comic actor who did the voice of “Top Cat.” Now, the novelty of these books is that I depict the comedians in their “golden years,” and although there were a couple of recent photos online of him as an older man, nothing struck my fancy. So I finally just had to leave him out. Not really a huge deal, but I had to break the news to Arnold Stang’s BIGGEST fan, who I’m in touch with. She was shattered.

A fellow just commissioned me to do a portrait of his hero, the author Raymond Chandler, but the same 5-6 images of Chandler, most of them already used on various book covers of Chandler’s stories or letters, popped up over and over on Google. And since I had no photos of him in my files, I finally had to decline.

Is there one celebrity that you struggle with in getting a likeness?
Well, like I said, I hate drawing “attractive” people, young celebrities...to me, in most cases, their faces are just so bland and uninteresting. One of the reasons I issued a “NO FRIENDS” policy. I remember struggling with a Brad Pitt assignment a few years back. Just nothing to sink my teeth into. The caricaturists’ lament. I love nothing more than drawing comedians, old and young. When I get to draw a Woody Allen or Howard Stern, I’m in heaven. Also Jeffery Ross, who wrote the forward to the latest OJC book. What a puss!! Have the Howard Stern endorsements helped or hindered sale of your paintings and books? Ah, Howard. I love the guy. He’s always been so supportive to me, repeating that I’m his “favorite artist,” hiring me to illustrate his two books, and always plugging my latest books on his show. As far as Robin...