Thank you so much for attending Alta Live with artist Joe Ciardiello and host Beth Spotswood. If you missed any part of our conversation, you can catch up right here.
Here are some notable quotes from Ciardiello from the event:
- On working with clients and art directors: “I like to be left alone. Give me the setup, the theme, what the subject is, and I’ll read it, but I like to then come up with what I think might work.”
- On developing his signature style: “When I started out, there was not a lot of need for what I do in terms of portraits. There were very [few] portraits being bought. They either wanted a straight caricature—the classic, kind of exaggerated caricature mode—or they wanted something very realistic. I kind of fell in that in-between gray area, so I didn’t get a lot of work doing portraits for the first 10 years of my career.”
- On his all-illustrator band: “For about 15 years, with various members in and out, the consistent members were myself and Barry Blitt, who played keyboard—people know Barry Blitt, Pulitzer Prize winner, New Yorker cover artist—and Michael Sloan played bass, another Pulitzer-winning illustrator. We were the core trio, and we had other musicians in and out of the group.”
Check out these links to some of the topics brought up.
- Read “An Ode to ‘Desert Oracle,’” by Ken Layne, with illustrations by Ciardiello.
- Read Ciardiello’s A Fistful of Drawings.
- Check out Alta’s Desert Issue.
- Read “The Last Poems of Jim Harrison,” with illustrations by Ciardiello.
- Join us for our monthly California Book Club event tomorrow, January 19, at 5 p.m. Pacific time, with Jaime Hernandez, the author of Maggie the Mechanic.
- Join us for a party and a toast celebrating the Desert Issue on January 20 at Bookshop West Portal in San Francisco and on February 27 at Skylight Books in Los Angeles.•
