A KARMIC STORY OF MAGAZINE EDITING AND DESIGN
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, I designed and served as the art director for two very different magazines, both pertaining to specific genres of the arts. The first one, Glass magazine, which was originally known as Glass Art magazine, was published in Oakland, California, before it relocated to Portland, Oregon. The magazine was at the forefront of a burgeoning art form and industry, with several glass producing factories emerging in the Northwest at the time. Prior to assuming this authoritative role, which occurred rather as a fluke, I had become part of a group of exhibiting experimental stained glass artists living on the West Coast, our work collectively gaining recognition across the country. Simultaneously, a movement of blown glass art was emerging, and one of its most prominent exponents was Dale Chihuly. The magazine I edited and eventually also art directed covered all aspects of such artistic development and the rapidly growing glass industry.
Glass Art had also been the conduit that linked me to a group of artists and resulting exhibitions in which I participated when I first discovered it at my local stained glass supplier in Long Beach. The current issue announced a competition whereby artists could submit photos of their work to the magazine, which would publish those most favored. I had just completed the brainchild of what would more than a decade later become a life-long project, “The Underground Cathedral.” The artwork which I submitted, and is presented and discussed here: “The Secret Origins of the LA Metro,”
It was published as a full page image and quickly my first experimental stained glass artworks were being included in group exhibitions across the nation of contemporary autonomous stained glass artworks.
“I soon learned that most of these artists lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, which was no stranger to me, for I had studied at the University of California at Berkeley a few years earlier. As a lone wolf in southern California, I decided to become better acquainted with a few of these artists and ended up moving back to the Bay Area. Upon searching for somewhere to rent, I came across an ad for a home which had a glass blowing studio in the backyard. I met the owner at his home and discovered that he was the publisher of Glass Art. He informed me that his editor had just left, he was handling everything on his own and that the magazine was struggling to stay alive. I had a bit of journalism background, having been published since I was a university student at the nearby university. He asked if I would be willing to help out and invited me to accompany him on a trip to the Northwest, where a new glass school, Pilchuck, had opened and new stained glass-making factories were churning out sheets of colored glass that previously was available from a small handful of domestic manufacturers. One of several life-changing serendipitous moments to come later, I couldn’t turn my back on such a rare opportunity.
After the journey, I helped edit the next issue of the magazine, which contains a stained glass dollar sign I created on its cover.
It includes an interview I conducted with minimalist stained glass artist, Dick Weiss, articles about three “flat glass” manufacturers (Bullseye glass Co., Genesis Glass Ltd. and Spectrum Co.) and a page containing projects made by 12 to 15-year old students to whom I had taught the craft in a private secondary school, Crossroads, in Santa Monica. I asked them to think out of the box and come up with their own idea for a composition. Here are 6 of their creations:
The Northwest played a central role in this development, for gas that was required to operate glass making furnaces was relatively cheap. It also became advantageous to publish the magazine there because there were numerous printing facilities connected to the lumber industry. Printing was state-of-the art and also relatively inexpensive.
Upon relocating to Portland with the publisher, I transformed the magazine into a classy coffee-table quarterly, which contained such techniques as layering on top of a printed photo of glass art a transparent glossy surface. The cover seen here featuring colored marbles became the centerpiece of a promotional campaign, which I coined, “If we could, we would make the magazine itself out of glass.”
Soon afterward, the publisher sold the magazine, just as it was gaining international recognition. The new publisher fatally abandoned the high production quality that had become key to the magazine’s promising future. At the expense of betraying the standards we had established and the promise made to our readers, I refused to accept this short-sighted cost-saving compromise. So I quit and returned to LA. The magazine folded two issues later.
Here are covers of a few of the issues that I edited before relocating to Portland.
The last edition during my tenure as both editor and art director was a special issue: an international competition, named “Fragile Art,” containing published submissions which were subsequently juried by prominent individuals in the field of the glass arts and industry. “Fragile Art Productions” was the name of my business (architectural stained glass commissions, private courses and supplies sold to students) prior to becoming the magazine’s editor. The initials, F.A. are the same as my name. The volume contains an extensive text I wrote based on essays I asked be submitted along with photos of artworks. This was my parting contribution to the glass art community, my way of expressing gratitude for the fact that it was such a competition that brought me into contact with other glass artists, resulting in opportunities to exhibit my work with them.
Having become exposed to the greatest stained glass art from around the world, the first thing I did was to make my first voyage to Europe, where I witnessed the spectacular medieval origins of the medium. Yet, beyond this, I had the fortune to visit Germany in the region of Cologne and Dusseldorf, where a remarkably unique development in the artistic evolution of architectural stained glass had occurred during post-WWII reconstruction. One of the first issues of Glass Art that I edited brought attention to this artwork that had become profoundly influential among both some stained glass artists and architects:
Ludwig Schaffrath had been perhaps the most prolific of several painters who were asked to design large stained glass windows at a time when Germans did not want to recreate memories of their tormented recent past and sought for something new to enlighten them. He was also one of the jurors of the “Fragile Art” competition.
Fragile Art Competition Preface, Awards and Jurors
Upon visiting Germany I met not only with a studio which executed most of such monumental stained glass windows but with one of the most prominent artists, Wilhelm Buschulte, who showed me original watercolor paintings he made, which became powerfully luminous works of art.
Between firsthand exposure to this dramatic modern stained glass artwork, as well as the profound medieval Rose Windows of the Great Cathedrals in France, I returned home to Los Angeles, determined to create something new of monumental proportions. It was then that the heart of “The Underground Cathedral” began to take shape, as I engaged in the creation of my most ambitious artwork in that medium, “Les Routes de La Grande Odalisque (The Large Brain).”
Not long after, a friend informed me of a new Hollywood-based magazine covering rock music that needed an art director. I recognized this as an opportunity to apply my prior magazine design experience to an exciting new challenge, in a completely different realm of the arts, which had been percolating in various ways simultaneously, along side my contemporary exploration of an ancient art form.
Once again, I was in a position to build up a magazine with a small circulation, while operating on a shoestring budget. Just like I did at Glass magazine, I creatively pushed the envelope. Taking advantage of a town loaded with young talent, I met with ambitious photographers and illustrators and hired recently graduated art school students who had graphics design skills. As computer graphic design programs were yet to be invented, everything was designed on sheets of cardboard, incorporating printed photographs, handmade graphics, hand-drawn illustrations, printed text from typewriters and stick-on lettering. Every page consisted of some or all of these elements, which had to be cut and pasted together. The work was incredibly strenuous. Once I spent three entire days with my staff slaving without any sleep, in order to meet a deadline.
Visualizing a two-page spread layout as if a panoramic motion picture screen, I applied the idea of approaching magazine design, just as I do now with the full-screen background slide shows of these web pages. Two of the full-screen backgrounds on this page are examples of pages I designed for ROCK magazine. One is of David Byrne of Talking Heads, the other of David Bowie from backstage, as he walks offstage at the end of an outdoor stadium concert.
Further, my approach to magazine graphic design became directly influenced by my experience of designing stained glass artworks. My just-graduated, art school-trained assistants thought I was crazy when I projected onto the office the panoramic backstage image of David Bowie. On top of the large background, then I projected other photos as small insets, which visually told the story of Bowie’s “Serious Moonlight” concert tour. Next to these smaller images I then placed text, also right on top of the background photo.
My young staff had never seen anything like this before. The conventional way that they had been taught in school dictated that both text and photos were to appear separately against a neutral white background, akin to artworks and text on a pristine white art gallery wall.
The photos I had to work with for a cover article about David Bowie’s 1983 “Serious Moonlight Tour” were offered to me by his personal tour photographer. He showed me a collection of 35mm slides he had taken and generously said that for no fee I could use whatever photos I wished, as long as one of them became published on the next issue’s cover. My choice changed everything. The animated image of Bowie singing at an outdoor stadium reminded me of action shots that would have been perfect for Sports Illustrated magazine. However, this broke with a previously mundane consistency of ROCK magazine’s cover design – a standard still pose of a well-known artist placed before a solid-colored background, which was an imitation of the covers of US Magazine. After the cover was designed, the publisher rejected it, insisting that Bowie’s grimacing facial expression was unflattering. Worse, his hair was messy!
At that moment I put my foot down. “Either use the image or I quit!” I adamantly exclaimed, as I stomped out of the front office door.
The magazine had a very small circulation and I knew that something bold had to be done. With the best of David Bowie’s tour photographer’s photos at my disposal and at no cost to the magazine, no way was I going to blow this golden opportunity to take the monthly publication to the next level!
After I cooled off, I returned to the office a couple of hours later and the publisher relented.
Here is the original mock-up, which I have framed and on a wall in my home:
Days later, a handful of hot-off-the-press issues were placed in the magazine rack of a 7/11 convenience store nextdoor to the office building. Within no time every issue had sold out, convincing the vast company chain to sell the magazine in all of its stores across the US.
The result of this sudden overnight success, Larry Flynt made a half of a million dollar investment in the magazine. The publisher rewarded me by informing me that the art director of Rolling Stone magazine wanted my job, as he offered me a humiliatingly small raise. So I resigned, just as I had done years before in a similar scenario, when my enormous efforts went unrewarded.
Shortly after I left, the magazine’s editor called to inform me that ROCK Magazine won the annual Maggie Awards for most improved magazine of the year. The publisher, Jeffrey Jolson-Coburn, bought a Maserati, leased an expensive home in the Hollywood Hills and threw wild parties. Just as had happened with Glass magazine after it was sold, ROCK magazine lasted only a few more issues.
Colburn died in 2012 at the age of 55, the same year that I returned to LA after spending 25 years in Europe.
Here is a brief visual documentation of the four issues I art directed:
ROCK MAGAZINE COVERS AND MASTHEAD (1983-84)
