Quiet Color

by jake cohen

If you’re unfamiliar with what Tomer Hanuka is all about, you’ve been doing your eyes a great disservice. A slew of industry accolades and awards (including an Oscar nomination earlier this year) notwithstanding, the man’s images have been plastered across a constellation of commodities in our visual universe. His unparalleled comics-influenced combinations of strong line work and volatile color schemes have come to almost single-handedly define illustration in the early days of this century. Today, Tomer’s work continues to appear regularly in the pages and on the covers of some of the most interesting things in print.

Artist: Harlem Shakes Song: Technicolor Health

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I met with Tomer and my friend and fellow burgeoning illustrator, Rob Stites, over dinner at a little café in the shadow of Tompkins Square Park. There we bitched about the economy, cracked some jokes about our peers, and ruminated on the possibility that the whole industry is about to tank.

Quiet Color: Tomer, you’re a prince, thanks for taking the time out of a ridiculously busy schedule to speak with our humble blog.

Tomer Hanuka: Sure, no problem. I’m happy to be here.

QC: So we’re in the worst recession/depression/what-have-you since 1929. How far up does this crisis go? You’re a pretty big name in the industry; have you been able to rely on your reputation or is this storm sinking all ships?

TH: Well, you can’t really buy bread with your name you know. On my end I made a decision about a year ago to really scale back on illustration and take a very small amount of gigs, just enough to survive and try to develop other things in the background; two projects basically. So I didn’t really feel the recession, just kept plowing through self-inflicted assignment. You do have a point though in that it’s probably a bit harder to break in these days since budgets are tighter and people are less inclined to take a chance. Still, you see young hungry artists rise quickly if they’re committed and have something interesting to say. There would always be a fascination with the new; people need to bank on that more.

QC: So, you’ve got your comics, The Placebo Man and Bipolar, which you did with your twin brother Asaf that you can always go to as a passion project, but it seems that mainstream America is kind of getting into illustration; like Where the Wild Things Are was the number one movie in the country because it was part of our collective childhood. What’s next, Good Night Moon the movie? The Very Hungry Caterpillar?

TH: The Fantastic Mr. Fox

QC: Oh yeah, and that…

Rob Stites: Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs

QC: Yeah, exactly, do you think Hollywood is just mining children’s books for fodder or is this just another avenue for Illustrators to get work in an industry that seems to be deflating?

TH: I think the place that illustration is becoming very trendy is in advertising, in places that we’re not short of the classic places in terms of the aesthetic space they used to create. I see a lot of the corporate world taking street creds from graffiti artists and putting it on sneakers and putting it on billboards to get cool points in a very cynical way. And there’s a lot of like that anti-craft, scruffy, un-digital, unrefined illustration that finds its way into advertising big time. Magazines are shrinking, newspapers are shrinking but advertising is growing for illustration… nobody believes photographs anymore because there is so much Photoshop, so a drawn image is suddenly a silver bullet exploding hearts of unsuspected preteens and other desired market shares.

QC: You’ve worked on the animated documentary Waltz with Bashir. Is Hollywood the next big thing for illustrators?

TH: I’m not sure. The budget on Waltz With Bashir was so small that the only way to create it was to get the illustrators to draw out the entire key frames including backgrounds and figures and props and textures, and the animators made cut-outs of everything, like tens of pieces per figure, so that everything would look smooth when they moved it in flash and after effects. That specific film was a special case in the sense that I don’t see a mass movement of indie directors hiring many illustrators to do their films though it would be so cool if that suddenly became a legit subgenre. Of course Pixar and Blue Sky have amazing illustrators behind every frame, as they should with their comparatively healthy budgets. … QC: So that aesthetic you talked about before, that handmade look seems to have been very prevalent for the last couple of years. Do you think it will suffer the same kind of backlash that purely digital art has been feeling?

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TH: There’s a certain backlash towards digital stuff if it smells too shinny to be alive, people are experimenting beyond ready made fonts and seem fatigued with everything being slick and [Adobe] Illustrator and vectory. I feel like everything in the 90s was vectorized to perfection and a decade later there’s the mandatory reactionary response: suddenly people want to see that there was an artist sitting in a studio somewhere and their fingerprint is on it.

RS: I don’t think that the handmade stuff has reached its zenith yet; it’s not over saturated but it will be. It always seems to go that way.

TH: I sense that by 2011 there will be a new sort of way to react to digital stuff in a handmade way. I think that’s what young people are doing with things like collaging Youtube videos at sites like thru-you.com. Sort of like using digital media to do something very scruffy and personal. But who will do it and how, that’s going to be interesting to see.

QC: One thing about you that I’ve always wanted to pick your brain about is what you’re listening to. I’ve read in other interviews that you usually have the news on while you’re working, but is that always the case? What about in your spare time, is there any groups or artists that you’re really into right now?

TH: I’m not a big music guy, I listen to stuff occasionally and I fall in love with it and I listen to it in loops but I don’t know, music is almost too emotional, you know. It’s like you’re sad now, you’re happy now, you’re hopeful now; I don’t want these mental cues, not when I am working. Occasionally I’ll listen to Phillip Glass, I like soundtracks because it’s already a narrative. I listen to The Hours a lot, which is sad but hopeful.

RS: I feel it’s really useful to kick-start the process if I’m having trouble coming up with Ideas. I throw on an album that invokes something…

TH: So as like encouragement?

RS: yeah, If I put on something energetic…

TH: Really that works?

RS: For me it does. It helps me spitball with myself until I come up with something.

TH: I feel like [music] has an amazing power and I’m not using it as much as I should. I feel like music has a lot to give us, it’s such a primal human impulse, probably just as primal as drawing. Once every two months or so a song would just grab me and crash me to pieces, like an epiphany about everything connecting and coming together. A sense of being a citizen of humanity. But I relapse to cynicism quickly.

QC: Right on.  Being that you’re a comic book kid whose work appears in very highbrow literature arenas like book covers and The New Yorker, do you think that there’s going to be some kind of melding of the novel and the graphic novel? Sort of a reaction to the dying book market, I mean as of yet you can’t see pictures on a Kindle…

TH: I don’t think it’s gonna be too long before you can get color pixels on a Kindle. I don’t think they’re really going to merge though because a novel is such a distinctive thing and a graphic novel is such a separate product. I hope that graphic novels are going to keep growing and that novels are going to stay alive and an illustrated novel would be an amazing feast if these were demanded more broadly; I’d be dying to do one. If I had my way that’s all I’d do. I’ve pursued it once and got the doors slammed on my fingers and then got distracted. So it didn’t work out.

QC: You’re working on a graphic novel with your twin brother Asaf. He is drawing, you are inking/coloring. Was that always the dynamic between you two?

TH: It was always that way; that was sort of the vision. We drew together when we were young, but once we hit puberty, when you want to become your own person, we drifted apart. Years later we decided to work together and naturally slipped into a familiar routine. The act of drawing was much purer when we were younger, before we got contaminated by the need to make a living and work in the confines of an industry. It’s a challenge trying to get back to that frame of mind, and that space between us somehow invites that.

QC: So what’s it like to be so popular?

TH: I don’t know about that. There was a lucky moment, when I graduated in 2000, the illustration market started to change a bit. It used to be dominated with more painterly and somber images. Culturally comics where swinging back into the center, and I was there ready to spill years of absorbing comics art into an editorial context. Other and better illustrators (like Istvan Banyai) worked in a similar arena much before myself but it felt like suddenly everyone wanted it and the phone didn’t stop ringing. I took everything for a while and when I say a while I mean like a stretch of five years. It was reaching burnout so I had to change lanes and take some country roads, reprogram the GPS essentially.

RS: Aren’t you in a sort of self-imposed exile?

TH: I was young and hungry and living the dream, going on autopilot to the point where I forgot why I was drawing in the first place and that is a dangerous place to be in because once the work looses a certain excitement (of discovery and risk) it shows. I re-evaluated, a process that eventually led to developing self-generated content but also massively scaling down the amount of jobs I took on. I love illustration, and still take on an occasional job if I think it will be an interesting journey. It’s a balancing act.

QC: So is that something of a cautionary tale?

TH: Yes absolutely. You got to know where is the line that a job stops and you start. The thing is once you disappeared into an industry, when you’re completely branded and commoditized you’re either very boring or very bored. And no amount of money is worth going through life without the risk of gloriously failing.

QC: Well alright, with that inspirational note I think that we’re going to have to wrap it up. Thanks again Tomer.

TH: Yeah man, my pleasure.