Transcription of Scott Nash for the show Illustrating Maine #180
Speaker 1: You’re listening to Love Maine Radio with Dr. Lisa Belisle recroded in the studio of Maine Magazine at 75 Market Street, Portland, Maine. Dr. Lisa Belisle is a physician trained in family and preventative medicine, acupuncture and public health. She offers medical care and acupuncture at Brunswick Family Medicine. Read more about her integrative approach to wellness in Maine Magazine. Love Maine Radio is available for download free on iTunes. See the Love Maine Radio Facebook page or www.lovemaineradio.com for details. Now here are a few highlights from this week’s program.
Scott: It’s great to be taken to another place. A place that doesn’t exist. I mean I actually find that incredibly inspiring, but the idea of being able to transport somebody to a world that is believable, but doesn’t exist is pretty heavy stuff.
Melissa: That’s the key is that you can tell a story simply and honestly. When it is done that way, it has a wide appeal. It’s almost like a web. You will land on this one book that makes you want to find out about all sorts of other things.
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Lisa: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio, show number one eighty Illustrating Maine airing for the first time on Sunday February 22, 2015. If you have ever read a children’s book, no doubt you know that the illustrations play an important part of the experience. Children who are often preliterate rely on pictures to help them learn words and develop a love of reading. Adults enjoy pictures as a means of rounding out a story. Today, we speak with two award winning illustrators Scott Nash and Melissa Sweet about their work and why Maine is the perfect place for them to practice their craft.
Thank you for joining us. Here in Maine it’s hard to actually understand just exactly how much a wealth of creativity we really have. It’s interesting to me that I can know somebody’s name and then years and years later end up meeting this person and this individual that I’m talking to, Scott Nash is that person. Scott Nash is an illustrator, graphic designer and Chair of the Illustration Department at the Maine College of Art. He’s also the owner of NASHBOX Studios. He’s someone that I have known about I don’t know it’s probably got to be fifteen years or so.
Scott: That’s the way it goes.
Lisa: That’s the way it goes and here you are today and I get to talk to you and I feel really fortunate that you’ve been able to come in today.
Scott: It’s nice to be here.
Lisa: Scott, you are doing something that I think a lot of people have the opportunity to enjoy which is illustration and also the book that you’ve written, The High Skies Adventures of Blue Jay the Pirate.
Scott: I’m really into short titles.
Lisa: Yes, I can see that. Yeah and yet it’s something that I don’t think people know that much about. They don’t necessarily know why one becomes an illustrator. They don’t know how one becomes an illustrator and how one could be an illustrator who works on national shows and with national organizations and live on Peaks Island the way that you do. I’m fascinated about how you got to be where you are.
Scott: Well let’s change that. We’ll let people know exactly how to become an illustrator in Portland. Let me give you a little history. I moved here about gee whiz twenty years ago. I had run a design studio down in Boston. It got a little bit overwhelming for me. It was suddenly found myself managing a staff of eighty people. I really define myself as a creative person and what’s important to me is to make things.
Basically, a long story short is I started trolling around looking for places and had good friends that were here in Maine and found it to be not only a vital creative community but a very welcoming creative community. It’s not in the least bit stodgy. We got to know people that have become in the first couple of years of being years that are still fast friends for us.
We felt very connected to this place. It seemed like a place where I could have the best of both worlds. I could have the quiet time that’s needed to write and create and also find a place where I could really engage and connect with a wealth of creative talent in Portland, up the coast, throughout the entire state. As a matter, I refer to Maine as being a state of hidden treasures. They’re constantly revealing themselves to us. While I find that really intriguing, I also want to find a way to have them be a little bit less hidden and that’s why I’m very appreciative of being here today to talk about illustration.
Lisa: Well the funny thing is in the intro I almost said, “You can’t turn a rock without finding an artist,” but I thought that people might think that’s really negative. I think that what you’re saying is the same thing.
Scott: You do have to turn over rocks to find creative people here because sometimes we’re hiding. We’ve come from another place and we’re thinking that we want that seclusion. Actually one of the questions on the survey here that was asked was what would I do if I could do it all over again, if I could go ten years back. It would be engage more quickly, really connect with people right from the get go. I sequestered myself for a while, but now I’ve flourished and as we talk you’ll see that I’ve really dedicated to engaging with the community both here in Portland and throughout the state of Maine.
Lisa: Well that is an interesting thing that I think we’ve talked with other artists about. There is the need to sequester and the need to have solitude and the need to create, but then also the very real need to connect. In your case, the need to interact and to teach and to mentor and to be a fabric in the creative community.
Scott: I’m sorry. One of the things I do in my teaching is I teach my students discipline and the discipline is actually a good thing. The way to, I’m finding this is more and more true of creative people is that we have to find a way to compartmentalize our lives so I have depending on how you count it three jobs that I do, three passions. In the morning, I get up on a good day make a cup of coffee, shuffle across our deck which we call our commute, my wife and I call our commute to my studio where I write for most of the morning.
Then in the afternoon come into the studio at NASHBOX or I head into Maine College of Art to work with students. Then I trundle back to Peaks Island, take a boat back to Peaks and spend ridiculous amount of hours at night illustrating and it seems to be a terrific time to create what I call ridiculous ideas. I also embrace the idea of creating ridiculous ideas. It’s the main impetus and main catalyst for a lot of stuff especially in kids media.
I think it’s important for creative people and just people in general, our lives are pretty frenetic to find ways to give yourself time throughout the day to do specific tasks. It’s worked for me and I think it works pretty well for my students as well.
Lisa: I was reading The High Skies Adventures of Blue Jay the Pirate last night.
Scott: Thank you.
Lisa: I know you’re working on the next book.
Scott: I am.
Lisa: When will that come out?
Scott: It’s called The Earthly Exploits. That is the question especially on Peaks Island where the kids come up to me and ask me if I’m on the boat why I’m not back home writing the sequel to this, but in fact it’s a longer process. I stepped into something that’s far more epic than I had anticipated. I have to say I’m fairly surprised that I’ve actually written a fantasy, something that could be categorized as a fantasy adventure and now I’m well on the way pretty much through the second version of the second edition of Blue Jay the Pirate and I have a third one in mind as well. There’s going to be I think three in this series.
Lisa: You don’t know when the next one will come out, but you’re working on it.
Scott: I am. Right I was just evading the question. No, no. It has to be finished, I have to really finish this up in the next couple of months so I’m well on the way.
Lisa: Well the thing that I like about this book it is very rich in illustration and that to me is wonderful because it reminds me of the books that I read when I was younger where there was a whole world that was created and created using illustration. I think one of your earlier illustrations is of the boat that they are on. They are lifting I believe it’s the egg and you label the various parts of the boat. This was one of the things that I so enjoyed when I was growing up was that there would be this world and an illustrator, an author illustrator would take the time to actually configure the entire world and label it. It makes it so rich and layered.
Scott: Well you’re speaking to what I see as one of the primary virtues of an illustrated book. I just recently read a book What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund who was suggesting that actually novels should not be illustrated that with a writer what we should be doing is engaging in a collaborative process where we are imaging what basically the general ideas that are laid out by the author. That’s fine if you have a frame of reference, if you’re an adult, if you have some sort of life experience, but for kids it’s really useful to have an illustrated world especially if it’s a fantasy realm.
I mean I’m sure that as an adult you could imagine what pirate birds would look, but I’m guessing most people can’t. I think having illustrated books helps to provide a context especially to kids for what this world is about. I used to love going through I mentioned Treasure Island earlier. I used to love those books. Those are the books that I great up with. One of the things that I especially appreciate about them is that the reading, the illustrations were a reward to, not that the reading wasn’t pleasurable, but it’s a reward to the reading or it enhanced the reading in very specific ways.
These are discussions that we have all the time at Maine College of Art. It’s one of the things about working in this program. We’re all really passionate about narrative, about thinking about narrative, thinking about plot, thinking about character design. Not only though in the writing realm but in illustration as well and drawing. As a matter of fact, I teach as an iterative or progressive sort of process where the students will use drawing as an inspiration for writing and writing as an inspiration for drawing.
It really makes the whole world a little bit more real and tangible especially when you’re working again within a fantasy realm or with subjects like I’ve worked on a book like Flat Stanley about a little boy who’s flattened to an eighth of an inch thick. I would contend that that has to be illustrated because the thought, the realistic thought of a kid being flattened to an eighth of an inch thick is not a pleasant one. I actually do want to control that make sure that he looks like a gingerbread boy as opposed to something else.
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Lisa: I love reading books of all different sorts and I get a lot of good information and I’m entertained, but I also I just love a good novel. It’s just something that I could sit down and I will do exactly what I used to do when I was ten and I will just forget everything and just sit there and read this book until I am done for no particular reason. I think there is something very enriching about that.
Scott: Oh, sure. It’s great to be taken to another place, a place that doesn’t exist. I mean I actually find that incredibly inspiring. I love the idea as I told you I was surprised that I created a fantasy novel. In some ways, it shouldn’t have surprised me because I’ve been working on picture books for years, but the idea of being able to transport somebody to a world that is believable but doesn’t exist is pretty heavy stuff.
Lisa: Scott, you’ve talked a lot about being productive and scheduling yourself and the things that you do and the [crosstalk 00:15:47] things that get done and these are very important especially as an artist and someone who is self employed to some great extent. What about the times when things aren’t flowing, when you don’t have the great idea …
Scott: Ah, good question.
Lisa: … when the illustration isn’t readily coming to mind? Is that something that you struggle with or is that something that …
Scott: Yes, of course. I mean there’s a tendency with artists. I think there’s two different impulses. I talked about the divergent thinker. That’s one sort of creativity. Another type of creativity is more myopic. It’s called convergent thinking. It’s move in on one assignment. It’s great to have both of those aptitudes but sometimes when we get too much into the convergent side you get into going deep in something you come up against a block because you have a narrower focus, a narrower range of options. What I suggest to any of my students or any creative person is go to your divergent side, go to the side that is about inspiration, start gathering, find things, walk away, sculpt something, connect with one of the other aspects of your creative life, sculpt, draw, sew something. Of course you can go for a walk or dance or play some music.
I often will if I’m in a rut, I will pick up any one of the number of instruments that are sitting around my space and plunk away on something. Again, it’s gets you out of that myopic approach, the convergent approach and gets you thinking more expansively. I think it’s important to touch that side of your creative soul, make sure that you’re constantly connecting and pulling things in, that inevitably is a great way to break in what we call any form of creative block.
The other one for me that I referred to this earlier and I think it really does work especially for visual artists is to write, draw, write, draw, write, draw. Let one inform the other so if you’re coming up against it, if you’re not able to draw something there is such thing as illustrator’s block as well. You just can’t get this thing, try as you might you can’t get this picture right, then, I suggest that you walk away and you start writing especially if you’re working on something that is a narrative that’s where the two are connected. If it’s one project, switch from one to the other. Otherwise, my advice is get out and do something else.
Sometimes you can have the greatest epiphanies when you get out of say trying to draw something. If you move away and then start to sculpt it, the sculpture will actually inform the drawing and add, this is not meant as a pun, dimension to what you do as an illustrator as well.
Lisa: I also wonder about times of transition. You describe being the head of an eighty person design organization and then making the decision to come to Peaks Island. I think that all of us go through times where something big has happened. Elizabeth Peavey I think was one of our first guests on the show. Her mother died and for a long time and she’s an author, for a long time she couldn’t write anything. She just needed to she described it as letting things [life out 00:19:34]. I’m wondering that if in these big times of transition there’s just some permission you have to give yourself to let things I guess percolate away without your direct intention.
Scott: When I was in grad school which I came in my first year of grad school, I had studied graphic design at [Cranbrook 00:19:59], the second year students were going through developing their thesis, so it was a time of high emotion and neuroses and all sorts of things were exploding throughout the department. One day I walked in and I saw my studio mate and she was basically having a breakdown. I mean she was like, “I am not worthy. I’m terrible. I can’t. The work that I’m doing is awful. This is meaningless stuff.” Sobbing away.
I just didn’t know what to do. I had two minds. One was there’s a flight response on that.
Lisa: Just get out of there.
Scott: I’ve got to get out of there. I also thought, “What the heck am I doing in this grad program because it’s making people crazy?” What I ended up doing was because I couldn’t think of anything else is, “Um, um, here. Here’s a book. Read it.” I gave her believe it or not it was The World According to Garp. It just happened to be on my shelf. She sat there. She took it and she read it for the next whatever eighteen hours, twenty hours obsessively.
I walked in whatever the next day and she was crying again. I said, “What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” She says, “Oh this book was just so good.” What was great though, it was tears of joy but what was great is after that she couldn’t afford to get away or anything but the book took her to another place. She was able to get it together and she ended up creating a beautiful thesis, but it was like, “Here pull yourself away from yourself for a while.” That’s what art does. Get away from yourself sometimes.
In this case, John Irving did the trick. Thank you John Irving. It got me through my graduate experience as well.
Lisa: Scott, you’re the Chair of the Illustration Department at the Maine College of Art and that to me means that MECA has made a commitment to illustration as an art form. Maine has had illustrators for forever and will have illustrators coming up forever. Talk to me about the legacy of illustration.
Scott: Well Maine has the distinction of attracting some incredible artists. I mean we all know this. We know that it attracts a lot of fine artists. There’s the legacy of [Monhegan 00:22:31] Island, the painters there and such. I think probably something that’s lesser known is the incredible wealth both from a legacy standpoint but also continues to this day, there’s an incredible wealth of illustrators and writers specifically in the children’s book realm throughout Maine. I mean we all know part of my attraction to Maine was Robert McCloskey’s books about Maine. It was like, “I want to jump off the docks. I want to do this. I want to be part of that world.”
Robert McCloskey was a big inspiration. Again everybody should know that Robert McCloskey resided in Maine, Make Way for Ducklings all of that stuff. There’s [Dolof Fipcarr 00:23:14], Rockwell Kent who’s known for his painting but is also an exquisite graphic artist and illustrator and then of course N. C. Wyeth and the Wyeth but N. C. Wyeth in particular who’s one of the great masters of illustration. Again, it won’t surprise anyone that we’ve quietly built over the years quite a group, quite a cohort of illustrators here in Maine.
I mean we’ve got just here at Maine College of Art we have people like Steven Constanza, Jamie Hogan, Douglas Smith, Douglas isn’t working at Maine College of Art but these are some of the illustrators, renowned illustrators, Mary Anne Lloyd that are residing here and making not only are they making their artwork here but they’re creating, we’re starting to create a very cohesive community. Part of what I’m trying to do at Maine College of Art is to increase not only build a very strong illustration department, but also increase awareness about illustration and the value of illustration.
I mean I think in some ways Maine could, we could claim that we are one of the centers of illustration. I mean really there are that many illustrators in this area. What we’re trying to doing at Maine College of Art is to create more awareness, advocate for illustration as an art form. We’re doing that in a number of ways. We’ve initiated a series of exhibitions that are at the Portland Public Library. Two years ago, we brought the Edward Gorey exhibition here which is a wild success we attracted about fifty thousand people to … I’m sorry that one was thirty-three thousand people actually.
Then it was followed by [Maurice Sendak 00:25:07] show which actually did attract about fifty thousand people. Then the most recent one was actually one of my personal favorites. It was a comprehensive exhibition of the art of pulp fiction from the ’30s and ’40s. Next year we’re planning to do a show on it’s a hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Alice in Wonderland so we’re going to do a show called Wake Up Alice which is a contemporary illustrators view on Alice in Wonderland.
We not only have created a strong department at Maine College of Art, we’re also creating exhibitions, creating film series, and starting to also creating a resource, a [repping site 00:25:51] so that people companies like Maine Magazine or any number of media companies could connect with very easily with the creative talent in illustration that exists here throughout Maine.
Lisa: Well it sounds like you’re doing exciting things personally, professionally, educationally. It sounds like you really have just a lot of richness to your life as a person.
Scott: I’m very grateful for it. This place actually affords me the opportunity to step into all of these realms.
Lisa: Your wife Nancy Gibson-Nash is a collage artist and illustrator.
Scott: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Lisa: Does it help to be married to a fellow artist?
Scott: It does. I mean I’ve heard it go both ways in that realm. I think what really works for Nancy and I is that we’ve been dear friends for years. We’ve known each other for many, many years but our disciplines are very different. I draw. She gathers things. She makes pictures by gathering things together. I joke that we used to call her a collage artist but since she’s moved to Peaks Island and gathers most of her materials from the shoreline, we call her instead of an assemblage artist, we call her a [flatzemblage 00:27:19] artist.
She gathers a lot of inspiration from the place. The truth is with Nancy’s connection to artwork is that I think that she has a pure sense of creation in that she really is not as interested in the business side of making art. I think if she had her way everything would be given to people. She’s got an incredibly generous spirit. That said, she has her creative practice, her collage work, her [flatzemblage 00:27:51] work, but then we also work together at NASHBOX. She does most of the client work and a lot of the creative work as well there.
We’ve managed to I think we’re a case of definitely opposites complimenting one another. I think we’ve got different perspectives but have a great and deep appreciation for each other’s perspectives on the world. I’m more idea based. She’s more intuitive and exceedingly giving.
Lisa: Scott how can people find out about the work that you’re doing and your thirty children’s books and your novel for children, I guess fantasy …
Scott: My fantasy genre.
Lisa: … fantasy genre. The next two that are coming and all the work that you’re doing?
Scott: I’ve got probably too many websites. There’s the Blue Jay the Pirate website which I would encourage people to go to, not only for the artwork and the story that I’ve created but I actually think it’s worth it to go see the artwork that kids have created around Blue Jay the Pirate. Then there’s our studio which his NASHBOX which can be found at nashbox.com. Then my website is scottnash.com and Nancy’s is nancygibsonnash.com. We got all those URLs very early on.
Then I would also encourage people to check out the Facebook page for Maine College of Art illustration. We call it illustration MECA and of course take a look at the Maine College of Art website as well which his meca.edu. Is that too many?
Lisa: I think that just about covers it. At the very least if people have an interest in knowing more about you they can Google you. You’re Scott Nash.
Scott: Yes.
Lisa: It’s sounds like any number of things will come up for them too if they want to find out more.
Scott: A rabbit hole [crosstalk 00:29:56].
Lisa: Just like Alice and Wonderful.
Scott: Yeah exactly.
Lisa: It’s really been great to talk with you.
Scott: Likewise.
Lisa: I know it’s such a fascinating thing to know that there are so many people with very different sorts of creative spirits that are in the state of Maine and I think that it’s appropriate that we finally have Scott Nash on Love Maine Radio having now picked up this book, it must be three years ago. I knew you’d eventually make it here. We’ve called you here in spirit and you are here.
Scott: Thank you.
Lisa: We’ve been speaking with Scott Nash. He’s an illustrator, graphic designer and Chair of the Illustration Department at Maine College of Art. Thanks so much for coming in.
Scott: Thank you for having me.