If you want to paint, craft, illustrate, or design, and make it lucrative and exciting, then this is the book for you.
I was reading today that for every person on our planet, there are fifty birds. Wow! I would love to meet my fifty birds. They are all out there, and we don’t even know which ones are ours. Work with me here on this metaphor. I’m going somewhere with it.
If you think of the life of your career as having fifty birds, what would they be? Let’s let them equal fifty meaningful events or highlights in your career. They are out there, but like your birds, you just don’t know what they are yet. You won’t know until you reach the end of your life and look back; but in the meantime, they will happen.
Can you picture it? Can you see a long timeline of your life and those dots and bursts—those fifty events—strung along the line? This book is going to help you find some of those birds. It’s going to help you create magical moments in your career. Think of yourself as an explorer, as an adventurer. Rise to the challenge.
In this book, I’ve distilled all I’ve learned from more than three decades as an artist, agent, and teacher, to make your journey to creative success as easy and smooth as possible. You’ll discover how to stay in touch with your creative passion, get great at your work, and deal with the psychological hurdles that we all face. You’ll learn how to find opportunities that, like the birds, are out there just waiting for you. I’ll show you the hottest markets (the ones buying the most art), what kind of work art directors buy, and how to get the gig.
You’ll meet some of the top art directors in the business. They’ll share what they look for and where they find artists to work with. I’ll help you match your own unique skill set and creative style with the right creative career. Then you’ll put all this together in your own customized game plan. Get ready to dive in and enjoy!
Big Red, 36" × 72" (91 × 183 cm), 1989. Oil paint on canvas.
I’m going to tell you about my creative life story in a nutshell for two reasons. One, I want you to see how one thing leads to the next. And two, I want to give you a little history on creative opportunities and how it’s gotten so much better for the creative person. It really has.
I always wanted to be an artist. There were basically five careers for girls when I was a kid: teacher, nurse, beautician, secretary, and housewife. To say I wanted to make a living as an artist was like saying, “I want to be the Pope.” Welcome to the 1960s.
Art and creativity were valued in our house; my mother had studied with Stuart Davis at the New School in New York and worked in an ad agency writing copy in the ’40s. In the ’60s, from humble beginnings on our dining room table, she created an international business called Smokenders.
I’m the third generation of female entrepreneurs. My maternal grandmother had a chic clothing shop in the ’30s and sustained it throughout the height of the Great Depression by holding a weekly raffle for her loyal customers, the wealthy coal mine owners’ wives in Pennsylvania. My mother, as a young girl, would go around weekly and collect 25 cents from each lady. The winner won a stylish, extravagant dress worth $2.50 that Grandma Lillian had bought wholesale from New York City on her regular trips to the garment district.
Lesson learned: Creativity can help you survive any obstacle.
Being from an entrepreneurial family, I was exposed to a business mentality. How to find creative solutions to problems, how to think outside the box, how to focus intensely on your goal. My father often said, “To be great at business, you have to eat and sleep the business.” The term workaholic hadn’t been invented yet, obviously!
While my peers were going off to schools to major in English and history, I went to art school in northern California in the early ’70s. It was a dream come true—art school and palm trees.
After graduation, it was off to rural New Jersey to teach middle school art. I was dying to have my own classroom to teach art to kids. It was primarily a factory town, and I gave those kids my heart and soul. I asked the phone company to donate old colored phone wire for jewelry projects. Teachers donated their old lipsticks and eye shadow for my students to use to draw portraits—anything that would make a good experience for these kids who didn’t have that much.
My principal—bless him—let me do anything I wanted. I wrote a grant for a Super 8 camera to do animation with the kids and didn’t get it. He said, “You know what? I can find the money for you to do this.” So, I got a little movie camera, a tripod, a couple of rolls of film, a little hand splicer, and I taught my kids animation through claymation and stop-motion paintings. It was fantastic. We showed the final work to the entire school.
The old days: My Rolodex circa 1985.
Getting the cover of the Sunday New York Times Magazine, one of the most coveted illustration gigs at the time, was a high point for me.
Lesson learned: One thing leads to the next.
But I had bigger fish to fry. I had been teaching for three years, and I craved a life as an artist. I left teaching and moved to Boulder to study at Naropa, the newly formed Buddhist arts institute, where Allen Ginsberg was in residence along with several other beat poets. I studied Buddhist arts education for teachers, Japanese poetry alongside Boulder Creek, and African dance on the Pearl Street Mall. Then I moved back to California to study painting at the San Francisco Art Institute. Out of curiosity, I also took a class in illustration at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. I fell in love with illustration, stayed for three years, and got my M.F.A. In the meantime, I worked at the Bay Guardian as a secretary and taught calligraphy classes in my apartment.
Oh, how I yearned to do kooky lettering for a living. But who does that? My style was odd and not very commercial.
Would I get work? Or would I die broke?
At about this time, it was exciting to see what was emerging in the illustration world in New York. Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast had been doing great things with Push Pin Studios and New York Magazine. This was the early 1980s when magazines were booming. They were beginning to hire a new generation of illustrators. Vivienne Flesher, Josh Gosfield, Michael Bartalos, J. Otto Seibold, Henrik Drescher, quite a few Eastern European artists, and a handful of others were changing the illustration scene in New York. The new annual, American Illustration, was embracing a painterly, edgy, European style, in contrast to the prevailing, more traditional mainstream illustration style of the previous decade.
Still in San Francisco, I got my first illustration job, for New York Magazine. That was a vote of confidence from the big time, so, after graduation, I drove cross-country. Terrified but determined, I moved to New York because that’s where you had to go to make a living as an illustrator. There were no fax machines yet, and certainly no Internet! You had to hand deliver your portfolio if you wanted to show your work.
Here’s what you needed to get set up as an illustrator in the early ’80s (get ready to laugh): art supplies, a landline, and an answering machine. No computer, no cell phone, no printer, no scanner. That was it. Every era has its good points; in the ’80s, it didn’t cost much to start up. The downside is that it was very difficult to find opportunities. You’d call the magazines, and, if you were lucky, the art director would set up an appointment to meet you or give you a time to drop off your portfolio.
After a while, I was fortunate to be really busy with work. I did work for Barneys, Bloomingdale’s, and Bergdorf’s. I painted a bunch of double-page ads for Levi’s, and I got an American agent, a Japanese agent, and a French agent.
In the late ’80s I was commissioned to do a page in the program for the Grammys, and the art director let me do anything as long as the information was there. I made this piece using Rubylith overlays, cut with a craft knife, and spec’d Pantone colors. No Photoshop buckets back then! Crazy.
At this point, my studio was on Bond Street in Lower Manhattan, around the corner from CBGB’s. I shared the first-floor storefront loft space with some nutty architects who I adored. Sometimes Jeffrey would break into a version of “New York, New York” on the electric piano. Late into the evening, he’d work on his architectural elevations, and I’d work on my illustration jobs. The Barneys job was fun. They would messenger over a variety of items for me to draw, like a bowler hat or a huge chic necklace. The only bummer was that I didn’t get to keep the items. I stayed really busy doing approximately seventy commissions a year for years and felt like I was a marathoner.
I was commissioned to do these full-page ads for Levi’s. Practically no mechanical fonts were used, which was quite unusual for an ad at that time.
One of my favorite assignments was for Anna Wintour at Vogue. She asked me to go to any restaurant in New York and draw anything I wanted. I invited a few friends, we got a big table at Indochine, and I did a large pastel piece there of the entrées and the waitperson. My hands were covered in colored pastel powder.
I was fortunate to be part of a great time in illustration and to get to go inside the offices of many, many magazines, ad agencies, and book publishers in New York. I also got to meet some extraordinary art directors and artists. It was a high point in American magazine illustration, second to the golden age of illustration.
Then I fell in love, moved to Boston, had a baby, and became an agent. This gypsy settled down.
There is some magic that happens when you give everything that you know to help others.
One of my former students, Aliona Katz, came up with the idea for our logo, which we still use today.
I once again craved the joys of teaching, so I began teaching illustration master classes to other working illustrators in my studio in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I truly cared about helping my students, and I gave away most of my secrets, tips, and techniques. You would think that this was not the brightest thing to do since I was basically arming the future competition, but when I feel passionately about something, it flows. Creative passion is how I know it’s meant to be, and I don’t let the fear stand in my way.
Here’s what happened. I said to my students, “Your work is fantastic! You’re ready to go to the next level. Are you promoting yourselves? Are you sending out mailings of your work?” And out of the blue, one of them said to me, “Why don’t you do that for us? Why don’t you be our agent?”
The idea absolutely intrigued me. It was obviously not something I would do, or would I? Why would I leave my fabulous art career to be a rep? But I grew obsessed with the idea. It seemed like an extension of teaching but on a larger scale.
I became an agent because it allowed me to advocate for artists’ rights and help them get the financial remuneration they deserve.
What I had been doing all those years without realizing it was growing these artists in my classes. By teaching them everything I knew, they were ready for representation. And I was getting more work than I could handle. I had a roster of top clients in my Rolodex, so now I could leverage what I had built for more than ten years. I would be able to recommend my artists to clients, assuming the client was looking for that style.
Over time, I segued away from my own personal illustration career to become a full-time agent.
My first child was just six months old when I started the agency with about five or six artists. The intense focus required to make a piece of art for a client on deadline became more stressful with a baby. The idea of being an agent was intriguing: I would be able to start and stop what I was working on more easily, and I would be able to spend more time with my baby. I would be able to help others. I would be able to make a living in a new way. I wanted to go from acting to directing. I could mentor. I could guide a career. I could design direct mail pieces. Over time, I would create a website, write a blog, do social media, create trend reports, host studio open houses, offer workshops for artists, attend trade shows, write mission statements, write business plans, write promotional strategies, and work daily with my wonderful staff. My agency, Lilla Rogers Studio, now represents thirty-eight brilliant artists internationally.
Having been represented by agents myself helped me in determining what kind of agent I wanted to become. Each of my agents was a little different, in part due to the region of the world they represented: Tokyo, Paris, and New York. I wanted to create a design-driven, boutique-style agency with a focus on feminine aesthetic. It had worked for my own career, and I was willing to take the risk to stay true to the niche.
Developing talent is incredibly rewarding. What’s the right thing to say to point the artist in the right direction? How can I inspire the artist to grow even more? My years of teaching at Parsons, the School of Visual Arts, and the New School helped inform my teaching in the studio, and then mentoring my artists. You are the sum total of all of your experiences, my mother often said.
Now I’m steering the ship at my agency with a terrific staff I adore—Susan McCabe, Ashley Lorenz, Julia Parker, and Jennifer Nelson—and representing thirty-eight of the very best international artists—people for whom I have tremendous admiration. And recently, after years of loving crafts, I designed, pitched, and launched an international craft line, which I will tell you all about later in this book . . . and I was home to raise my kids.
I wrote this book to make the creative path easier for you and to show you the ever increasing lucrative options for creative folks. Everything I’ve written here comes from more than three decades in the art business, teaching, illustrating, and being an agent. I think I’ve lived every emotion in the book: failure, success, frustration, envy, compassion, fear, joy, fulfillment, excitement, and passion.
Settling into my studio for a day of making art for a client is one of the most enriching experiences I know, and I can help you get there. If you’re already there, you may want to leverage your talent in a new arena. I’ll show you how to do that, too.
I want you to know that it’s not always a smooth ride. I’ve had teachers tell me I had no talent, that I’d never make it as an artist, or I should just get married and have babies. Good times. But there’s nothing like making a living as an artist. Because I just like making things!
I loved working on this book so, so much. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
