Interviews

Steve Wedemeyer (Poster painter)

Turtle Bay: How did you become an artist?

STEVE: My father was an art teacher, my mother a piano teacher, so I had a lot of exposure to the arts at an early age. I was encouraged to draw, color, and paint with the gamut of art materials my dad brought home from work. I’m left-handed, and teachers didn’t care for my handwriting. So I guess I learned to express myself more in pictures than words.

Turtle Bay: What are your influences?

STEVE: When I was in college, photo-realism was the big thing. I admire the impressionists, perhaps because I grew up near one of the best collections of that genre at the Chicago Art Institute. N.C., Andrew and Jamie Wyeth have had an impact on my work and they have a generational continuity that’s unique. Andy Warhol and the prolific body of work he did is amazing, and his ability to be popular, commercially successful and still maintain a fine artist status is remarkable. I also like and follow the work done by some contemporary illustrators, such as Marshall Arisman and Brad Holland.

Turtle Bay: Tell us about your work.

STEVE: My first real job was with a small agency doing spot illustrations, which eventually got me into the graphic design field. I did a lot of magazine design work, including editorial illustrations, and then worked for a computer software development company. They published a number of popular titles that I illustrated in the 80s during the advent of the home computer. Like most computer companies of the time, they closed their doors and I went to work for a bank. While there, I learned desktop publishing and set up a department to produce artwork digitally.

My current position is creative director for an in-house agency at one of the world’s largest horticultural companies. I recently won a design award for one of my catalog designs which will be appearing in the June 2005 Graphic Design USA magazine. Most of my current design work begins as pencil sketches and uses photography. I don’t have opportunities or time to do much illustration, but I try to keep in practice painting the occasional portrait, or other images that interest me.

Turtle Bay: You painted the poster for Stephen King's Gotham Cafe. Tell us about that process and your experience painting it.

STEVE: The entire experience has been a blast! And it all happened electronically through email, with a few phone conversations. I was sent an email calling for illustrators from a friend of one of the producers and sent some digital samples of my work to them. They liked what they saw and we started the project.

The producers had a good idea of the imagery they wanted to use to describe the movie, so I worked with that to come up with a composition and rendering style. I was given a good chunk of reference material to work with: Stephen King’s original short story, the information and pictures about making the movie that were on this website, and a copy of the movie itself. I wanted the illustration to convey the psychological disturbances that run through the story, so I decided to use a loose, nervous brush style and high-contrast, dramatic lighting.

I started with a pencil sketch that had all the elements we thought needed to be on the poster. I sent the sketch via email to the producers, got their comments back via email, and continued throughout the illustration and layout process that way. From my first contact to finished art, the whole thing took about six weeks. My biggest challenge was shear size of the illustration and the deadline for final art. Needless to say, this was a labor of love and there were many late nights involved in getting it done.

Turtle Bay: How can people contact you if they are interested in your work?

STEVE: The best way to contact me is through email at: swedemey@comcast.net.

  "Lunch at the Gotham Café" © Stephen King
Used by permission. All rights reserved