AADL Talks To: Gary Grimshaw

Fri, 12/09/2011 - 9:50am

Gary Grimshaw is one of the most renowned and recognizable poster artists to come out of the 1960s. His most prolific period as a graphic artist was his time spent with John and Leni Sinclair in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, first in the Detroit-based Trans-Love Energies commune and then in Ann Arbor with the White Panther Party/Rainbow People's Party. In this interview we talk with the former White Panther Party Minister of Art about creating art for the Grande Ballroom and the White Panther Party, the night John Sinclair met both him and the MC5, and how he made his art then and now.

Transcript

• [00:00:05.31] ANDREW: Hi. This is Andrew.
• [00:00:06.62] AMY: And this is Amy. And in this episode, AADL talks to revered poster artist and former White Panther minister of art. Gary Grimshaw.
• [00:00:16.06] ANDREW: We talked to Gary about creating art for the Grande Ballroom and the White Panther Party, the night John Sinclair met both him and the MC5, and how he made his art, then and now.
• [00:00:28.72] AMY: If you don't mind, just to get us started, we'd be curious to know how you got started in printmaking and poster art. What were your influences, and how'd you get started?
• [00:00:39.07] GARY GRIMSHAW: Gee, that's a good question. Well, for one thing, I'm from a family of graphic artists. And my father was an engineer, and my uncle's a printer. In fact, he printed all the Grande Ballroom posters. Crown Printing in Dearborn.
• [00:00:59.18] And so he taught me about graphic arts. And I didn't know anything about printing or anything like that, because I was 18 when I started. So I learned it all from my uncle, my Uncle Ivor. But once I got started, mainly through John Sinclair, he kept me busy, constantly feeding me work.
• [00:01:29.29] We started a newspaper called the Warren Forest Sun, and I learned a lot about newspaper production through trial and error, mainly error. So that's how I got started, basically. I'm a Vietnam veteran. I was in the Navy for a couple years. Actually, no. I was, like, 20 when I started working for John. Because 18 and 19, I was in the Navy in Vietnam on an the aircraft carrier, the Coral Sea.
• [00:02:01.90] AMY: You had also worked in San Francisco for a while? And--
• [00:02:05.38] GARY GRIMSHAW: Yeah. Through 1966 and '67, I was traveling back and forth between San Francisco and Detroit. And the Grande Ballroom needed a light show artist and poster artist. And that's mainly how I got hooked up with that, through my friend Rob Tyner, who was the lead singer in the MC5. And they had booked the MC5 to open the Grande and they were the house band.
• [00:02:40.75] So I was there are building the light show and doing the light show every night, and doing the posters every week and putting a newspaper out. So, you know, it was just--
• [00:02:56.60] AMY: Busy.
• [00:02:57.91] GARY GRIMSHAW: I was very busy. And John Sinclair was leader of the group. And he basically designed my career. So--
• [00:03:11.81] ANDREW: Where did you first meet John?
• [00:03:14.86] GARY GRIMSHAW: I met him the day he got out of prison. He was in DeHoCo, doing six months for possession of marijuana, and he had just gotten out. And there is a big party at the Artists Workshop, and MC5 played there. And he had never seen the MC5 before.
• [00:03:39.88] And because they were unfamiliar to him, they were booked late at night. Starting at, like, 11 o'clock at night, the last act. And they were way too loud. And the Artists Workshop was at a house in the Warren Forest area and it was all houses around there, you know?
• [00:04:04.36] And he was scared to death that somebody was going to call the cops, and he was going to go back to jail that night. So he freaked out and had Leni shut the band down. Pulled the plug on them. But it was the beginning of a good friendship between them. And he was apologetic about it. Sorry, I don't mean to do this, but I got to do it to keep from going back to jail. But he ended up managing them within a week. And--
• [00:04:42.69] ANDREW: Shut you down on a Saturday and--
• [00:04:47.12] GARY GRIMSHAW: Run your careers, starting on Monday. But that's how I met him.
• [00:04:52.67] AMY: You've stayed friends all these years?
• [00:04:54.79] GARY GRIMSHAW: Yeah. Yeah. Pretty much. He lives in Europe now, and he's back and forth, you know? He lives in Detroit at the-- I forget the name of the place. But he's constantly traveling. I can't believe that he's, like, three years older than me, and-- three or four years older-- and he's constantly moving. He just carries around everything he owns in a suitcase, you know? He's an amazing guy.
• [00:05:23.18] AMY: You were the minister of art--
• [00:05:26.37] GARY GRIMSHAW: Right.
• [00:05:27.03] AMY: --of the White Panther Party.
• [00:05:28.99] GARY GRIMSHAW: Right.
• [00:05:29.36] AMY: What did the minister of art do, besides posters and covers of underground newspapers? Was there other work that you did?
• [00:05:37.79] GARY GRIMSHAW: Well, I had sort of a general responsibility. I had to coordinate all the art, and there were other artists, too. So I was like the central person in the art world, and everything went through me.
• [00:05:53.49] The whole idea of moving to Ann Arbor was caused by the Detroit Police Department. We were basically run out of town. So the obvious thing is to move to Ann Arbor. The garden spot of the Midwest, you know? So Ann Arbor it was. And John and MC5 moved there first. And then I moved up there later.
• [00:06:20.12] ANDREW: Music was pretty clearly a big part of this vision in the political movement. What role did the White Panther Party see art playing, in that was it seen as a tool of propaganda? I don't like to say it that way, but I mean how was it viewed?
• [00:06:34.42] GARY GRIMSHAW: Oh no, we used to call it propaganda.
• [00:06:35.81] ANDREW: Did you? OK, that's interesting.
• [00:06:37.77] GARY GRIMSHAW: We thought of it that way ourselves, so we we're big fans of Chairman Mao and stuff. So we'd use all his dialogue and his terminology for different things. So we'd generally refer to it is propaganda ourselves. We had a very practical view what we are doing
• [00:07:03.83] AMY: Did you feel at the time that the art and the pamphlets and posters were a-- were you are conscious that it was a particularly democratic form of social expression? Or were you more thinking about how you wanted to change people? Is it more rooted in free speech or more about really changing people's minds as a motivating factor?
• [00:07:26.37] GARY GRIMSHAW: Well, we were driven. John talked about this a lot. How we had a vision of ourselves. And there was, like, 30 of us in a hard core group and we were driven. We wanted to change people. And we were constantly harassed by the police, constantly. So we were determined to do what we wanted to do, and regardless of the police. But they would just be always getting in our way.
• [00:08:06.62] ANDREW: For a certain period of time, you were actually producing art, but you were a fugitive. There was a warrant out for your arrest?
• [00:08:14.41] GARY GRIMSHAW: The warrant for my arrest came later when the group moved to Ann Arbor. And at that time I had moved out of the house and was living across town, and so I wasn't there when they came to the house to arrest me. So at that time I wanted to move to Boston. That was sort of the reason why I moved out of the house. Me and my girlfriend, Judy, had plans to move to Boston. So that just kind of hurried things up.
• [00:08:47.39] And I moved to Boston, found a place, got a job at the Minute Man Messenger Service, and traveling all over town delivering messages. And Judy got a job at Boston University. So we both were gainfully employed, and with the warrant for my arrest hanging in the air.
• [00:09:13.66] So we stayed in Boston for six months, and then we moved to California. Judy's parents died and left her some money. Not a lot, but some. And we stopped in Detroit at the bank, and we got the money and moved to California. And while in California, I was the art director for the Oracle and The Berkeley Tribe, and a couple other papers. And I did cartooning.
• [00:09:47.04] AMY: Was this before your period with The Ann Arbor Sun, or after, and then before moving back to Ann Arbor? I'm trying to get the chronology right.
• [00:09:55.73] GARY GRIMSHAW: Right. Well, just to put things into context. In 1968, was the year that I moved to Boston. And then was stayed in Boston through '69. '69, we moved to California. And then, '70, we moved back to Ann Arbor. All this time John's in jail up in Marquette, which was very difficult for everybody, you know? That's a long way to drive.
• [00:10:30.22] ANDREW: Was it difficult doing things with the White Panther Party, because John was in prison, was Pun in prison at the time as well?
• [00:10:39.02] GARY GRIMSHAW: He was underground. He was not under arrest, although there were warrants for his arrest. But he was traveling around.
• [00:10:50.14] ANDREW: And then you were in Boston and California. So how did you get anything done? How do you communicate with one another and--
• [00:10:57.31] GARY GRIMSHAW: Telephone.
• [00:10:57.81] ANDREW: --try to make things happen?
• [00:10:58.81] GARY GRIMSHAW: Talked on the phone every day. So David was like the central figure at the White Panther Party at that time. He was the mastermind behind getting John out of jail, for one thing. He got sentenced to 10 years, but he only did two because of the John Sinclair freedom rally. That really highlighted the situation with the marijuana laws.
• [00:11:25.04] The freedom rally was a major event, with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and Stevie Wonder, and Bob Seger, and, you know, the whole nine yards.
• [00:11:36.29] AMY: What role did you play in that whole production in addition to the poster that you made?
• [00:11:41.70] GARY GRIMSHAW: Well, I did the program. It was a newsprint program. And between that and the poster and-- there was also many other events going on at the same time. Like the Grateful Dead were playing the Hill Auditorium that very next weekend. And I did a poster for that, and just a lot going on.
• [00:12:07.50] I remember the night of the event we had a rule that somebody had to be at the house. Because it was a big three-story house with 30 people living in it, and everybody had to be there at the event. Everybody had a job to do. And I had been awake for, like, 30 hours up to the beginning of the show. So I volunteered to be the one that stayed home. And--
• [00:12:37.69] AMY: Did you sleep?
• [00:12:40.64] GARY GRIMSHAW: Eventually. But I had been driving all over Michigan, you know, to get the printing done. The poster and the program.
• [00:12:50.34] AMY: How was that paid for?
• [00:12:51.75] GARY GRIMSHAW: I don't know. I really don't know. I didn't have anything to do with the money. I was not involved with the money. Everything was paid for. I had my own room, and food, you know? Everything was paid for. And I didn't concern myself with the money. And all the money that I made went into the general fund. And that's what it came out of, too.
• [00:13:19.22] ANDREW: When you first started making posters, was there a particular style that you had in mind, or did your style just emerge as you were doing it? Did you already know that's where you were going?
• [00:13:32.93] GARY GRIMSHAW: Well, I had been doing art all my life, you know? The first paying job I had was the first Grande Ballroom poster. I think I got paid $25 or something like that. But I had been doing art all my life, and like I said, my family was all graphic artists. And my uncle was a printer and my aunt was a designer for Kresge.
• [00:14:00.42] So every time the family would come over, like on Thanksgiving or something, they'd make a big show and tell, you know? When I was 12 or 13 years old, I had to drag out all my drawings and show them, and everybody told me how good it was. So I'd get lots of encouragement from my family.
• [00:14:22.71] AMY: In the mid '60s in San Francisco, with the Fillmore and the poster art boom happening then, did you feel particularly inspired by any of the artists over there on the West Coast?
• [00:14:37.11] GARY GRIMSHAW: Well, yeah. There's a whole bunch of them. Stanley Mouse, Rick Griffin, Victor Moscoso, and then list goes on and on, you know? There's a whole school of artists, and they're all-- knew each other. And it wasn't competitive at all. Everybody was sharing their ideas with each other, and it was a movement, rather than a style.
• [00:15:12.85] And everybody had their own style, and mine just sort of involved. I wasn't trying to imitate anybody, because there is no imitation involved. It was just everybody was busy doing stuff in their own style.
• [00:15:30.10] ANDREW: Can you walk us through your process in those days? What kind of materials you used, and where you decided that this is what you're going to do for this particular poster?
• [00:15:39.04] GARY GRIMSHAW: Yeah. I didn't think too much about what I was doing. It was all mechanical. In other words, today I do everything on a computer, you know? And I designed in full color. But then, in order to separate the colors, you would have to do mechanical separations.
• [00:16:01.15] Start with the basic line drawing, and do overlays for different colors. And actually, the colors would all be in your mind. You'd imagine the colors. The mechanicals were all black and white, Then, when it gets printed, you see it in color and then you'd say, oh yeah. That's exactly what I had in mind.
• [00:16:27.94] There were some early posters that were mistakes. The colors were wrong. And particularly Sun Ra poster.
• [00:16:37.06] ANDREW: I don't think Sun Ra or anyone else would be bothered by a Sun Ra poster having unexpected colors, though.
• [00:16:43.01] GARY GRIMSHAW: Right. Yeah, that particular one worked out good.
• [00:16:49.09] AMY: Are there others, when you look back. When you think of your career, and all the work you've done, is there anything that stands out specifically as, wow, I really hit it with this one? One of your favorites.
• [00:17:03.09] GARY GRIMSHAW: Well, that Sinclair Rally one, particularly, I was happy with it, because I had time. I knew the event was coming, you know? I had, like, a month to work on it. And it was just always there to work on. And by the time I got it done, everything was just the way I wanted it, you know?
• [00:17:25.18] And the same with be Grateful Dead poster, which was a week later. That one, I put a lot of time into. Those two, in particular, were two that I remember, because I had time to work on them.
• [00:17:40.61] So most of the Grande Ballroom things were done overnight.
• [00:17:43.74] AMY: Oh, really.
• [00:17:45.71] GARY GRIMSHAW: I'd get the information in and then I'd have to have it at the printer the next day. And so, it was just drop everything and do it.
• [00:17:53.84] AMY: We weren't expecting that.
• [00:17:55.38] ANDREW: No. I thought you maybe had a week to do things. I can't imagine overnight.
• [00:17:58.68] GARY GRIMSHAW: No, a week.
• [00:18:00.02] ANDREW: A week would have been heaven, right?
• [00:18:02.17] GARY GRIMSHAW: Right.
• [00:18:02.59] ANDREW: That sounds so stressful. That sounds very, very stressful.
• [00:18:05.66] GARY GRIMSHAW: Yeah, it was. But it was good stress, you know? It was fun.
• [00:18:11.01] ANDREW: Did it help motivate you to churn those things, and you just, you know, go with your gut, sort of?
• [00:18:18.46] GARY GRIMSHAW: Yeah. That's what I meant. I didn't think about them too much. The design just sort of happened. And I didn't agonize over, you know, should I do this, or should I do that, or-- I didn't worry about it I'd just sit down and do it.
• [00:18:36.96] ANDREW: Apart from posters, you've done album covers, you've done book covers, you done a lot of other kind of work. But you made a choice throughout your career to continue to focus on posters for live events, for performances and things like that. What is it about performances that you're drawn to as something to make art about?
• [00:18:57.77] GARY GRIMSHAW: That's a good question. For one thing, a poster is an event in itself. It's the record of the show, and there's no other record of the show. Like, a show can happen, and if there's no poster, a week later, who remembers, you know? But if there's a poster for it, then that's something that's always there.
• [00:19:31.31] AMY: That's an interesting way to look at. I know just what you mean. Yeah. Because the performance is, otherwise, it's gone.
• [00:19:38.86] ANDREW: Yeah, so it's a way of documenting history before it's happened, sort of.
• [00:19:44.47] GARY GRIMSHAW: Right. Exactly.
• [00:19:45.73] AMY: Gary, I wanted to ask you, if you don't mind, just back to politics for just a minute. You served in Vietnam, and then fairly quickly became an anti-war demonstrator.
• [00:19:58.70] GARY GRIMSHAW: Right.
• [00:19:59.19] AMY: How quickly did that happen and was there something that sparked that, or were you feeling that way while you were serving?
• [00:20:05.89] GARY GRIMSHAW: I didn't know anything about Vietnam when I joined. I had no idea. And this is 1964. It was before it even got in the papers. So I didn't know there was a war going until I found myself in the middle of it.
• [00:20:24.82] So as soon as I realized what was going on, that we were fighting a war, and it was on the other side of the world, and it was a civil war, basically, between the north and south of Vietnam, and that we really had no reason for being there, it suddenly seemed crazy to me. Just insane. Why would we be doing this? I turned into an anti-war person very quickly soon as I realized what was going on.
• [00:20:58.11] AMY: It's still kind of a far stretch to go from just being anti-war demonstrator, to being a founding member of the White Panther Party.
• [00:21:07.57] GARY GRIMSHAW: Tell me about it.
• [00:21:10.28] AMY: But do you still feel today, similar convictions from how you felt at that time?
• [00:21:18.69] GARY GRIMSHAW: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I haven't gone through any big changes since then. I mean, that was a defining moment, really, in my life. And I've stayed true to my feelings then. I was convinced that I was right, and that my friends were all right. And that we knew something that, generally, the general public didn't know.
• [00:21:50.33] We thought it was obvious. It was just clear as a bell to us, but you try to tell somebody that and then they just don't get it. They start thinking, well, you're anti-American. You can't be right, because you're flying in the face of the government, and the government's always right.
• [00:22:19.30] That was the biggest problem we had, basically, was convincing the public that the war was wrong. And that it's just a simple matter of deciding that the war is wrong, and that we shouldn't be there. Duh. And it-- obvious to us. Obvious to a million people, but not the key million people.
• [00:22:53.09] ANDREW: As soon you started having strong feelings about the war did you begin your own political education, or is that something that you really started learning about politics, and Chairman Mao, and everything through John? I don't know if through John. I mean, he gave us direction, but it was an easy sell. I was ready for it. I was ready to go. And it didn't take any convincing to me. I was 100% ready to go. And that's pretty much the way the whole group was.
• [00:23:31.72] And the more we talked about it, the more we appeared in public, the easier it became. Until we discovered that, yeah, there's this whole generation of people that thinks just like we do. And they're a minority, but they're all young and they're influential. I mean we realized that there was a youth movement going on. There's this big bubble of people, and it's all of the babies that were born after World War II. Which, I was born in '46, you know? One of the early wavers, you know?
• [00:24:14.92] So it was just obvious. It was just so obvious to me, and to all of us. But there's a certain line that certain people can't get over.
• [00:24:34.86] AMY: I think I read, in 1973, when the White Panthers had kind of morphed into the Rainbow People's Party, you left. Did you actually decide not to be a member of the Rainbow People's Party? What happened?
• [00:24:50.19] GARY GRIMSHAW: Well, at that point, I was pretty much burnt out. I had been working at this constantly, steadily, for years, and years, and years. And I was just burnt out. And it got to the point where we had succeeded. We won. So it was time to quit. Not quit totally, but just to slack off. Do something else.
• [00:25:28.11] And I decided that I wanted to move back to Detroit, and that everybody else was in Ann Arbor. So I just moved back to Detroit. And it worked out good. I kept all my friends. I didn't have to flip anybody the finger or anything. It was nice.
• [00:25:55.01] John felt the same way. John had spent two years in prison, and he was totally befuddled when he came out. He didn't know how to handle it. He couldn't believe what was going on, for one thing. The fact that there's this whole group of people that organized around him, in getting him out of jail, and making him the issue.
• [00:26:35.04] And he just didn't know how to handle it. So he kind of walked around in a daze, you know? Always trying to make sense out of it, always trying to put it in the context, and try to figure out.
• [00:26:52.33] About that time is when I decided to move back to Detroit and quit. And I can't really think of it as quitting, because I kept all my friendships, and I kept doing what I was doing. But I just stopped taking on so much work.
• [00:27:12.64] AMY: Changing directions, maybe a little?
• [00:27:14.50] GARY GRIMSHAW: Right.
• [00:27:15.07] ANDREW: Could you talk a little bit about those blues and jazz festivals that you worked on, and how you became involved in them?
• [00:27:23.20] GARY GRIMSHAW: That was mainly the work of John Sinclair and Peter Andrews. They were the two main forces behind the blues and jazz festivals. And Peter handled the physical aspect of it, and John did the booking and the artist relations. So between the two of them, they did the blues and jazz festivals between them. And then I would work with both of them.
• [00:27:54.04] And they were very, I mean the 1972 Blues and Jazz Festival was totally from scratch. There had been a blues festival before that, but the John Sinclair, Peter Andrews version of the blues festival was fantastic. It was three days of just the killer blues. There were so many groups.
• [00:28:20.91] But by the time that the show happened, I was done. I had done all of my work. And I just went and dug it. I didn't have a job there. I would just go. It was fun.
• [00:28:40.45] And '73 was more of the same. '74, we ran into problems with the city. The '74, the whole thing moved to Windsor, and that was a problem. Because mainly through getting there and back was a problem, because you had to cross the border.
• [00:29:03.86] AMY: What are some of your favorite memories of Ann Arbor? What were some of the clubs you went to? Some of the places you remember fondly from that period of time?
• [00:29:12.71] GARY GRIMSHAW: The Primo Showbar was probably my favorite place. It was a very nice bar. Lots of good acts. And it was right downtown, and I lived a block away. So I'd go there every chance I got. And our offices, the Rainbow People's Party office, was right downtown, a block away from the Primo Showbar. It was just all in this neighborhood, you know?
• [00:29:38.99] That there was '72, '73. I remember the '73 Blues and Jazz Festival. We had a billboard right on top of our building, and it was a full-size billboard. And me and Mike Brady painted a sign, basically. And it was a painting of the blues and jazz festival, the whole thing. The whole crowd, the whole outdoor-- and it was big.
• [00:30:11.88] And we did it on the wall in our building, and then we saw them put it up. It was put up on a Sunday morning, the guy who put it up was, you know, drunk or something. I don't know. He kept falling down. But he did it. I don't know how he did it.
• [00:30:34.21] ANDREW: How did you get involved with Cream? How did you first start working for Cream? They did a program for the Blues and Jazz Festival, '72. And my first work I did for them was putting this festival program together. And at the time, they were, like, way out in the country. I couldn't even tell you what city it was. It was just way out in the country, near Detroit.
• [00:31:01.76] So that was the first thing I did for them, was the program. And then, after a while eventually, I just started working for them full-time. And it got to a point where I was pretty much, that's what I did. I was paste-up, Cream magazine. Until I got sick of it.
• [00:31:21.61] ANDREW: You were talking about how much you had learned from your family, and how much you had learned from artists on the West Coast, and other artists you work with. And you've been a minister of art, and art director. And I was wondering, since you have learned so much, how important has teaching and mentoring other artists been to you over the course of your career, and over the course your life?
• [00:31:44.69] GARY GRIMSHAW: Well, I've done a lot of it, and it's just a natural thing. I'm not a teacher. I have never deliberately set aside time to teach. But just from knowing other artists and hanging out, I end up transferring my knowledge to other people. So it is like a natural thing. It's not something I deliberately set out to do. But it works.
• [00:32:17.52] ANDREW: How much contact, how much relationship do you have with the other members of the White Panther Party? With John and Leni, and Pun, and--?
• [00:32:25.70] GARY GRIMSHAW: Leni and I work together on a book she wrote, where we see each other a couple of times a week. And Leni and I work together a lot. I think of all the White Panthers, Leni and I are probably the closest thing to a working relationship. I get along great with John, and I got along great with Pun. And I can't think of anybody in the White Panther Party that I don't like.
• [00:32:54.23] ANDREW: Everyone seems to have remained friends, and everyone has remained fairly close, too. And I find that really interesting. Is that because you lived in such close proximity and you shared that, that that's sort of a bond that doesn't go away, or-- why do you think that is?
• [00:33:08.90] GARY GRIMSHAW: Well, I think we had to be predisposed to like each other in the first place in order to work together. And it just continues out onward, regardless of whether you're working on something or not.
• [00:33:25.11] AMY: If you had to pull a couple adjectives out in the air to describe John Sinclair, what would they be?
• [00:33:31.64] GARY GRIMSHAW: Very intelligent, for one thing. He can juggle a whole bunch of different things in his mind and compare things. It's sort of the definition of intelligence is the ability to compare things. Seemingly unrelated things, and relate them to everything else, and he's got that ability. And he doesn't seem to care that much about his own success, in simply objective terms. I feel, like, really selfish, compared to him.
• [00:34:12.72] AMY: When you look back on your career. Artistic, political, what are you most proud of?
• [00:34:20.18] GARY GRIMSHAW: I guess it's where I meet younger people and they're impressed by what I did. And I just don't think it's all that impressive, but I seem to have an effect on people. And just the way younger people relate to me. I'm not considered old-fashioned, or the previous generation, although I might be. I'm probably mostly proud of that, the fact that I haven't really aged.
• [00:35:02.24] AMY: That's a good thing, relevant, that you're relevant today, yeah.
• [00:35:05.86] GARY GRIMSHAW: Right.
• [00:35:06.32] ANDREW: How have things changed for you as a graphic designer, both as you've become more well-known, and I mean now I assume they give you more than an overnight to get jobs done, but also as the technology has changed, you said you do all of your work on a computer now. How has that affected your work, and affected your thinking about work?
• [00:35:27.17] GARY GRIMSHAW: Well, for one thing, I don't have a choice. The computer has taken over graphic arts. And the way we used to do things back in the '60s, and '70s, and '80s is no longer relevant. You can't do things that way anymore. Printers just don't like it.
• [00:35:50.46] You go into a printer with a black and white piece of art, and they say, what the hell? What are we supposed to do with this? They want a slide. They want a disk. They want to see it in full color, and they know what to do with it. They don't know what to do with black and white art. So doing things on a computer is necessary. It's not something I choose to do, although I do enjoy it.
• [00:36:21.84] But it's not something that I would even predict, you know? Is somebody come back to me in the '60s and say, well, you're going to have a TV set, and you're going to see the thing in full color. And you're going to be able to change the colors. And you wind up on it with a disk and you just hand this to the printer. To me, that would be absurd. Huh? It's the way it works, though.
• [00:36:52.58] ANDREW: I also wanted to ask about identifying yourself as a graphic artist and everything. Have you done much work in the fine arts? Have you done oil painting and water colors or sculpture, or?
• [00:37:05.44] GARY GRIMSHAW: Yeah. I know how to do that and I enjoy it, but my problem with it is that there is just one copy. You know, when you finish it, what good it is? Hang it on a wall? What?
• [00:37:22.46] AMY: You want to get the message out there.
• [00:37:23.87] GARY GRIMSHAW: Yeah. I want something that could be printed.
• [00:37:33.23] AMY: To learn more about Gary Grimshaw, go to freeingjohnsinclair.org.
• [00:37:41.23] ANDREW: AADL Talks to Gary Grimshaw has been a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.