Adam McCauley is a San Francisco-based illustrator who has been creating smart, cool, diverse artwork since the late 1980s. In addition to doing extensive editorial illustration work, McCauley has written and illustrated a stack of delightful children’s books. In his spare time, he plays music with the band Bermuda Triangle Service (check them out and their great LPs here). And if that’s not enough, he’s also an avid painter, makes motion graphics and videos, and plays in a second band. McCauley works in multiple styles, saying “it’s been vital for me to constantly experiment.” I’m not sure where he gets the time (and energy), but he is definitely filled with creative power and spirit!

MY LIFE:
Both of my parents were/are abstract artists and arts educators and encouraged us kids to become makers. Although I was born in Berkeley, we moved around to Portland, Ethiopia and eventually Columbia, Missouri, which is where I grew up. When I was young my older brother Kevin was my role model; he was an incredibly talented artist and charismatic leader. He died from complications due to the treatment of Hodgkins disease when I was 13, and that was a very formative time for me.

My family moved back to the Bay Area—Palo Alto—when my Mom got hired at Stanford, and my father became director for Villa Montalvo Center for the Arts. They supported my decision to go to art school, so off I went in 1983 to New York to go to Parsons. My mom was disappointed when I decided to go into illustration instead of fine art, but that was my choice. I was fortunate to study under really fabulous professionals such as Steven Guarnaccia, Andrzej Dudzinski, Robert Andrew Parker and Katrina Denzinger. I was also fortunate enough to be in a terrific group of peers which included Mark Matcho, Graham Smith, David Gordon, Daniel Baxter, Andrea Cobb, Lexa Walsh, Chris Sharp, Dan Yaccarino and many other super talents.

I graduated in the late 80s and immediately started getting editorial work in good publications, but the work wasn’t regular enough so I continued working in restaurants and as a bartender. I also worked as an assistant for Brian Ajhar and Peter de Seve, from whom I learned a lot about the day-to-day business practices of an illustrator.

At the end of the 80s I moved back to the Bay Area—Oakland—to be near my mother as she’d been fighting breast cancer. Fortunately, around that time the fax machine was invented, as well as the advent of Federal Express, so I could continue to work with clients in New York and elsewhere.

MY WORKSPACE:
For the last 15 years, I’ve been working out of the house that I share with my wife Cynthia Wigginton and our cat Gertrude in The Mission district of San Francisco. I’ve also been teaching for the last six years in the amazing illustration department at California College for the Arts.

San Francisco has gotten a lot crazier with the tech boom, and the Mission is ground zero. It’s a great city that is being challenged by livability stresses from housing and the cost of living. A lot of artists are leaving. We’re very fortunate that we got our house when we did. I’m able to do my work in my studio, walk around the corner for incredible tacos and walk to CCA to teach.

Cynthia is a designer who’s art directed at magazines (Red Herring, Wired) and designed music merchandising and album artwork. We’ve done a number of picture books together, where I illustrate and she designs. We’re also both musicians; we play together in Bermuda Triangle Service and write and play music with other folks. Bermuda Triangle Service has commissioned the great Christian Northeast to illustrate both of our albums. I’m pretty sure they both appeared in American Illustration!

HOW I MAKE MY ILLUSTRATIONS:
When I first got out of school, I had four different portfolios of styles/techniques: collage, crayon, ink resist on acetate and watercolor. I got work right off the bat in the ink resist style and the watercolor style.

Each developed into distinctly different approaches. The watercolor style evolved into scratchboard combined with liquid acrylic, wherein I would xerox the scratchboard line-art onto wc paper and then stretch it and make a painting. Now I do this style all digitally and mainly for children’s books, but I’ll still do an occasional editorial or advertising job with it.

The ink resist style became straight-up ink paintings which get scanned and completed digitally. This is the style I mostly work in these days.

As long as we’re talking style, I’ve always been a bit restless when it comes to only doing one visual approach. It’s been vital for me to constantly experiment on my own time and occasionally on the clock for such trusting art directors such as the great SooJin Buzelli. Experimenting leads to new approaches toward solving problems and keeps things fresh.

As a matter of fact, the pieces that I got into American Illustration last year were from gouache experiments done for the Post-Its show that Mark Todd and Esther Watson put on at Giant Robot in LA.

MY FIRST BIG BREAK:
In the late 80s when I’d just moved back to Oakland I continued bartending and illustrating at night until I got a fairly lucrative, multi-image job for a New York Times supplement which paid for about four months of my expenses—so I decided to quit the bartending gig. The very next day a lunatic held up the bar I’d been working in with a machine gun, forcing patrons to disrobe and fondle each other. He also made the poor bartender give him booze. His siege lasted a few days and a SWAT team had to break in and kill him. I took it as a sign to never go back!

Around that time, David Armario—who was then art director at Discover—gave me a regular monthly back page “brain boggler” assignment. This encouraged abstraction and metaphor and really helped me develop my approach towards the direction in which I wanted to go. One of those pieces was the very first time I got into American Illustration.

MY INFLUENCES:
In terms of illustrators, like so many others Peter de Seve influenced me early on, as did Steven Guarnaccia, David Suter, Brian Cronin. I’ve always been pretty aware of the bad idea of studying other illustrators too closely, so I’ve learned to study Turner or Picasso or Stuart Davis or others. I have a soft spot for the 20s, 30s, 40s modernism and abstraction in general.

MY MOST ADMIRED CREATIVE PERSON:
In the design field, Milton Glaser continues to be a beacon of grace and deep wisdom. My fellow faculty member and amazing illustrator Robert Hunt and I took a group of students to see him last year and he quietly blew our collective minds with his clarity of purpose and articulation of his methodology and work ethic.

In music, it’s Brian Eno. I love every piece of music he’s ever made. He’s been so influential on so many levels, both musically and intellectually. I’ve learned a lot from listening to him, and I think the world has as well. Music for Airports is regularly the soundtrack to my workdays.

MY CREATIVE INSPIRATION:
I simply try to see the world clearly and honestly. Glaser talks about really looking at the world right there in front of you. Museums, galleries, exhibits of all sorts—it’s really, really important to go out into the world and see and experience things in situ.

THE BIGGEST CHALLENGE OF WORKING ALONE:
Cash flow. Ours is an industry where it’s sadly become rare that a client pays expeditiously.

A MEMORABLE ASSIGNMENT FROM THE PAST YEAR:
After working for over 20 years in the field, it’s been fun to go back and do Op-Ed assignments for The New York Times. They have a new system where they establish an illustrator to be “on-call” for every day of a given week, so I’ve been doing that and it’s turned out to be really fun and challenging.  I just illustrated a piece by Bernie Sanders on a three hour deadline. It’s the essence of what illustration is.

Another really fun one was illustrating advertising materials for Make Music New York, which is a live, free musical celebration on June 21, the longest day of the year, with over 1,200 concerts on streets, sidewalks, and parks across the five boroughs.

DREAM ASSIGNMENT:
To get hired to travel the world for a year and draw whatever I want to. We love to travel and I love drawing/painting/collaging while I travel. I can’t figure out why more magazines and design firms don’t hire illustrators to do this.

MY FAVORITE ART DIRECTOR:
Ronn Campisi. Ronn’s the best and he’s a fabulous designer. As an art director, Ronn knows how to lay back when necessary and also when to push when necessary; he really cares. Plus he’s hilarious and fun and because he’s also a musician so we can talk music, which is great. He wrote and played with the Rockin Ramrods and toured with the Stones.

Ronn’s always responded to my experimentations and has even commissioned me specifically to experiment, which is the sign of his trust and encouragement. Mostly he assigns work for one of a number of the editorial publications he’s designing, but I’ve also done things like a huge job for the Social Security Administration through Boston College.

As for children’s books, Sara Gillingham is amazing as well. Cynthia and I have done a number of books with her art directing and she expertly shepherds a very complex set of problems with grace and logic. She used to be at Chronicle Books and is now on her own and has recently been moving into illustrating her own beautiful books.

SOME OF MY FAVORITE ILLUSTRATORS:
There are so many. Barry Blitt, Gerard Dubois, Vivienne Flesher, Steve Brodner, Melinda Beck, Brian Stauffer, Katherine Streeter, Jeffrey Decoster. And youngsters like Jon Han, Olimpia Zagnoli, Roman Muradov, JooHee Yoon and Yann Kebbi. Brilliant minds coupled with brilliant skills.

One side note—John Hersey is a total badass. His work has always been at the forefront and is always deeply satisfying in its confidence, innovation, re-invention, poetry and integrity. I’ve been lucky to become friends with him; John’s vivacious, honest spirit is contagious.

OTHER WORK:
I enjoy doing creative things outside of illustration. For one thing, because I’m always creating figurative imagery, even at its most conceptual and abstract it doesn’t fully satisfy my needs for art making. So I like to take time to make more purely abstract work, such as what you can see here.

As a musician, I also like to stay active in band projects and writing and other endeavors. I actually just got commissioned by Ann Field at Art Center College of Design to write a piece of music for a promotional motion piece at Icon 9 for them, which I’m looking forward to working on in the coming days.

And in this day and age, playing in bands means making videos. So, I dabble in this and have made a number of them now, mostly for Bermuda Triangle Service. You can see them here, as well as another band I play with, Little My, here. 

HOW I STAY CURRENT:
I’ve definitely become much more open to new possibilities. For instance, my wife and I were hired to work on a private, family-funded children’s book idea which ended up being a blast and bloomed into a beautiful product. I was able to have fun using croquille pen and modeled the technique on people like Tenniel and Sendak. The result was Mr. Dog’s Christmas at the Hollow Tree Inn, which you can visit here.

HOW I PROMOTE MYSELF:
I used to do the source books and send postcards. Source books sort of dropped off the face of the earth as the internet developed and flourished, but I still send out a postcard from time to time. There’s Instagram and Facebook. I have a rep in the UK, Helen Cowley and Joel Minter at DutchUncle. I honestly don’t know what works anymore. Every art director tells me different things about how they find talent, but the common thread is that they look at the annuals. So I always enter American Illustration and Society of Illustrators and hope for the best.

ADVICE FOR SOMEONE STARTING OUT:
Work your ass off, draw every day, get out to museums and exhibits, travel as much as you can, experiment a lot and don’t give up. And above all, educate yourself on how to properly protect and value the usage of your work and stick to it come hell or high water. Keep your day job until you have enough money to make the plunge. Do your best to never do Work For Hire unless you are being very well compensated.

See more Adam McCauley illustrations, new work and updates:
Adam McCauley website
DutchUncle (rep)
Instagram: @adam_mccauley