Classic WSJ Art
The Bard, William Shakespeare
This week, a survey of Classic WSJ art that I created while at the newspaper. I joined the staff of The Wall Street Journal late in 1979. All of the images in this post were published in The Journal in the 1980’s. I pioneered this celebrated technique for the paper over several months, refining the style to optimize the illustration for the rigors of newspaper production.
Llama
Above, an early image including the ample use of the stipple technique. This illustration took up a one-column space, a little more than 2-¼ inches. The Journal often ran common-interest stories in the A-head, or fourth, column on page one. That is where this appeared, as I recall.
Battleship
Tanker Ship
Above, a couple of industrial illustrations of ships. These were also full-column pieces. You can see that I paid some attention to the texture of the sea in the Tanker illustration. I used to put my signature on the art I thought was good.
A young Buffalo Bill
Above, yet another full-column illustration. Usually, a portrait would receive a half-column-space in the paper, but we made an exception for a few dashing figures like the one you see here.
Portrait of Judith Somogi
Here is another of those striking poses that earned a full-column. A few weeks ago, I heard from a colleague of Ms. Somogi. He was looking for a piece of art for a book he’s writing on her. He remembered the illustration he’d seen in the Paper and reached out to me about it. I immediately knew the illustration, and found this image in my box of photostats that I saved. The original art in archived at the WSJ, I presume.
Next, let’s sample a couple of half-column, standard portraits. These my team and I produced daily. At the time, the Journal ran several of these small portraits in each issue:
Portrait of William Shakespeare
Portrait of Margaret Thatcher
The two portraits above were created in different years. William Shakespeare is an early example of the Hedcut style we were perfecting. The portrait of Thatcher is a later piece that represents the arrival of the hedcut-style as a refined, distinctive art form. I was not a big fan of this politician, but was nice to her in my execution of her portrait, nonetheless.
Thatcher
To finish, I leave you with the illustration of another British person… a true Thatcher, carrying his bundle of thatch. We loved to illustrate these more interesting characters. It made our work at WSJ an enjoyable pastime. More next time!
