Not Oprah's Style?| Raymond Biesinger's blocky illustratin style just wouldn't adapt well to the pages of O.
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100 B/W: 100 BLACK ON WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS
By Raymond Biesinger. Launch party: Empress Alehouse (9912-82 Ave), Mon, Nov. 24 (9pm).
As Raymond Biesinger now knows twice, there are few things as gratifying as holding a book you’ve created in your hands. It’s 50,000 times as uncommon as fathering a human child. And in this liquid taxonomy of impermanent blogs and vaporizing digital news, the physical fact of the local illustrator’s second DIY offering from Belgravian Press is grounding try the cheaper Cru instead and inspirational.
The portable 100 B/W: 100 Black on White Illustrations is a selected summary of Biesinger’s influential style, which incorporates Charley Harper retro blockiness, intentional weathering, and a sense of humour that’s taken him from the U of A’s Gateway to “mercenary” gigs as far up as The New York Times and BMW.
Monday night is when the book gets officially unveiled at the Empress. But let’s hand the mic over to Biesinger to discuss the cloud of lessons around the illustrator, musician, and now publisher. “I’m just making sure to always work on two books at the same time,” he says. “Lyle Bell’s book [a collection of ads] is still awaiting approval from the Black Dog as the whether or not I can get rights to them or not. And do you remember a band called The Molestics? Mike Saurette, the lead singer, has submitted a 60,000-word manuscript of his memoirs in the band, which will be out in February.”
What Biesinger has already learned is that home-pressing books you can fit in your back pocket scares booksellers. “Problems involve it being too small, so it gets lost on a lot of bookshelves,” he says. “We’ve decided to make the books a little bigger and get ISBN numbers and I think we’ll find it easier to get into stores that way. But so far online sales have been fantastic. People might spend $80 for a print, but if they can get 100 teensy illustrations for $14, they’re quite happy.”
The culling allowed the artist to see wider trends in his own style. “I followed my own whims, but that was tempered by needing to show the work on a 5x5” canvas. I cut out a lot of the long things. I’m very proud of the Edmonton chronology of bands, but there’s no way in hell that would fit in this format. I went through my archive of about 800 illustrations since 2001.
“It’s actually a bit of a misnomer to call it 100 Black on White Illustrations, because I’d say about 20 per cent of them were in colour and it’s also far more than 100 illustrations,” he laughs. “Lies everywhere. Colour just doesn’t excite me nearly as much as the sheer contrast of black and white. It’s almost a religious experience when I see 100 per cent black and 100 per cent white next to each other.
“There still is a lot of experimenting going on. Nowadays I find on one end is the usual, heavy black slabs, distressed, with everything serving this greater thing, the concept of this which is super-important because thinking is half of the illustration.
“But there’s this other thing showing up, this fun, rendering thing that looks very ’50 children’s book-ish. It’s retro and kitschy and not too challenging. And its problematic. In one week I got a call from Oprah’s magazine and they wanted me to make something really benign. And then More, a magazine of choice for women over 50. They both requested I illustrate some totally benign crap and realized that I have to not do that stuff anymore.”
Copies of the book are also available at Biesinger’s wife Elizabeth’s store Nokomis on Whyte.
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