AADL Talks To: Laura Strowe, Ann Arbor Observer Cover Artist

Tue, 10/08/2024 - 4:14pm

When: June 3, 2024

In this episode, AADL Talks to Laura Strowe. Laura's art has graced the cover of the Ann Arbor Observer 60 times and counting. She tells us about her start in etching, transition to pastels, how art has effected how she views the world, and the process behind designing sets for the University of Michigan Gilbert and Sullivan Society.

Transcript

• [00:00:09] KATRINA ANBENDER: Hi. This is Katrina.
• [00:00:10] ELIZABETH SMITH: And this is Elizabeth. In this episode, AADL talks to Laura Strowe, an artist with a total of 60 Ann Arbor Observer covers. Laura talks about her artistic process, finding inspiration in her surroundings, and making sets for the University of Michigan Gilbert and Sullivan Society. Thank you for joining us today, Laura. Usually, we just start by asking what brought you to Ann Arbor. Did you grow up here?
• [00:00:36] LAURA STROWE: No, I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. I came here supposedly to go to graduate school, although I really had no intention of doing it but my husband was going to do it. I dropped out, I like to say, during registration. He continued for three years and then he dropped out. There we were thinking, should we go back to New York? Should we go back to the East Coast? They offered him a job at the University of Michigan Dearborn, and we thought, we'll stay here for a while and then that led to 55 years. There we are.
• [00:01:13] ELIZABETH SMITH: What were you doing in that initial three year period when you first moved here?
• [00:01:17] LAURA STROWE: I got a job at the English Language Institute. At first, I was just a clerk because I couldn't even type to save my skin. Then I became a research assistant in the testing division, so we wrote, I don't know if you know about the Michigan test, which is a test of English language proficiency for non native speakers. I helped write the test and administer it and grade it. I did that for, I think, four years. Altogether, I was at ELI for five years. Then I dropped out to take art classes at EMU.
• [00:01:56] KATRINA ANBENDER: What time period was this?
• [00:01:58] LAURA STROWE: We came here in 1969. I got a Master's in Art Education in 1976 from Eastern.
• [00:02:08] KATRINA ANBENDER: When did you develop an interest in art, and how did that evolve over time?
• [00:02:12] LAURA STROWE: I'd always loved to do art. I had done it as a child a lot, but I thought, I can't be an art professional, that's too hard, too impossible. It never occurred to me to try to do that. My uncle, who lives in California, who was an etcher, and my house was growing up was filled with his artwork, and so I really wanted to do etching. The first thing I did it at Eastern was take courses enough so that I could get up to the point of taking the printmaking class there. I took drawing and painting. I didn't take art, or, I took a few courses in college, but I wasn't at a college that had a very good art department, and so it wasn't attractive. I don't think my parents would have appreciated it, I waited until I was on my own and then I took all the art classes I wanted. Eastern was a great place to go. They were very welcoming of nontraditional students. At first, I wasn't really enrolled. I was just taking it by the class, and they were great with that and wonderful teachers there.
• [00:03:16] ELIZABETH SMITH: Do you have a preferred medium?
• [00:03:19] LAURA STROWE: No, I was an etcher at first. I did the Art Fair for 22 years, and at first I sold etchings, and then I branched out to do pastels. I don't remember when. Let me think. It must have been around 1985 or so, maybe a little later than that. I happened to go to one of those conventions kind of thing where they sold materials and demonstrations, and there was a booth giving away free pastels. I took a little set of free pastels, and I started playing with it. People had asked me if I would do commissions for them of their houses and etching wasn't the right medium for that. I mean, why go through the whole process of making plates and then just print one. As soon as I had the pastels, I thought, maybe this would work, and I liked it better than painting because I liked the directness of it, holding the pastel and going directly onto the surface of the paper was more satisfying to me than having a brush and mixing paint. Pastel you mix in a different way by layering. That appealed to me, too. Little by little, I bought more and more pastels until I had literally thousands.
• [00:04:39] KATRINA ANBENDER: You said you participated in art fair. Can you talk about when you became involved with that and what that experience was like?
• [00:04:45] LAURA STROWE: My first year was 1981, and I was eight months pregnant. I requested a booth that was near a bathroom. As a result, I got a great booth. As I said, I did it for 22 years. It was my first art fair in Ann Arbor. I had the previous summer done an art fair in St. Clair Shores, I think it was called. It was a great way to make a living. I guess I can't tell you now how many art fairs I did altogether, but different kinds. I think I did maybe 10 different ones in this area, in Michigan. The furthest I went was Chicago, and I did the old town art fair there for a good number of years, maybe 10, I think. It was a wonderful opportunity to sell directly to your customer and get the feedback and then get the negative comments too, the kids who would come into the booth and say, I could do that, and they really exist. It's not just a joke. And schmooze with the other artists was really fun. I made a lot of friends, and we would see each other at the other art fairs, and it was a wonderful experience. Then it got to be irritating. I stopped as soon as I was finished paying college tuition for my daughter. Stopped doing the art fair that is, I thought that I would continue to do more artwork than I have. But I've continued to do commissions and Observer covers. I love doing covers for the Observer. There's a whole city out there that sees them, and they think I'm famous and wonderful, and I'm not. I'm just Laura Strowe. It's a great audience, and John and Patricia, who took over from Mary and Don, was it Don Hunt? They've all been so helpful and supportive and encouraging and even put up with some of my demands. I got them to change the paper pretty early on because some let's see which was it. The color was so terrible that I was really embarrassed about it. They were supposed to be purple Irises. You see that they don't look purple at all.
• [00:07:12] KATRINA ANBENDER: Oh wow.
• [00:07:13] LAURA STROWE: The difference in the color between June '89 and the next one that I did was October '89. It was just the paper was different, and it was just a huge difference. Then I once got them to raise their rates. That they paid the artists. They've been great. I've never had one refused, I have a pretty good instinct, I think for what they want. I often ask them, what months are missing this year? Do you need anything? They've occasionally told me that they needed something.
• [00:07:52] ELIZABETH SMITH: When did you first become involved with the Observer and what was your first cover?
• [00:07:57] LAURA STROWE: My first cover was 1985. Mary and Don bought it at an art fair I think.
• [00:08:06] ELIZABETH SMITH: June '85, it looks like.
• [00:08:09] KATRINA ANBENDER: You had already made it and they came and saw it?
• [00:08:11] LAURA STROWE: It's an etching. My first ones were all etchings because that's what I was doing. Then I didn't start doing the pastels until much later. I was just doing etching. My first pastel was this one in January 1990. That was the first set of pastels that I got and it was in honor of North Side School. Where my daughter was going. It was their anniversary. Was it the 50th? Anyway, i t was a big anniversary and they were having a lot of hoopla parties and inviting alumni to come and so I did this cover.
• [00:08:53] ELIZABETH SMITH: You mentioned that you pitched most of your covers. Were there any assigned covers that you did over the years. Or were you always going to them with your ideas?
• [00:09:03] LAURA STROWE: No, the only thing that they sometimes suggested was that they were missing a month. But they never suggested any subjects that I recall. There was one that I had to argue a bit. Was two years ago and there was one where we divided it up. I did several views of the M. That was something really unusual to have. Four different images on the cover and it took a while to figure out how to do that. But they were pretty receptive right away as soon as I suggested it. I had originally seen this view. Every time I went from my house to the Produce Station, which is a regular place I go. My car would be stopped at the light there at the corner of Packard and State and I would see this alley way with the M at the end of it and I thought that would make a great cover that's so funny. That it's hovering there up in the sky above the buildings. Then I thought well, it would be not a very good cover by itself. Although now I look at it, I think maybe it would. But I thought it wouldn't have been funny to have different views of the M. I rode my bike around the neighborhood day after day taking lots of pictures and I came up with it, and they went for it. I'm really grateful for that.
• [00:10:30] ELIZABETH SMITH: Is that usually your process of taking photos and working from the photos?
• [00:10:33] LAURA STROWE: Always. I don't make anything up. I'm not that creative. I have to get the light right. I'll go back and take pictures repeatedly in different lights to make sure that I get the shadows interesting. I love shadows. They're part of the aesthetic if you can pardon the highfalutin words.
• [00:10:56] KATRINA ANBENDER: Can you talk about what artists have influenced your style and are there any local artists that had an impact on you?
• [00:11:04] LAURA STROWE: The whole art world I guess has influenced me. I don't know. But I'm afraid that I feel that I'm just an interpreter of what I see. I don't have much of an imagination. I know David Zinn, for example, from Gilbert and Sullivan Society. I do sets for them and he was one of my mentors. Because he did sets for them a long time ago. He's a guy who has an imagination. He doesn't need any influence like this. I can't do anything out of my head at all. I can't even doodle I'm embarrassed to say. I see something and I think this would make a beautiful picture. I love the way the shadow is falling and I love the light on this or that combination of planes of roofs and walls. But I couldn't possibly make anything up. I feel like it's more the scenery around me that's been my inspiration than other artists. But when I was doing etching I shared a studio with Jean Lau. I think she probably influenced me as much as anybody. We influenced each other. In fact, sometimes we did the same thing. But she can draw out of her head. She's in her '90s now. She's quite a bit older than I am and she went to classical art school. She went to Cass Tech in Detroit. She learned anatomy and shading and perspective and all that. The classes that I took when I was in college didn't teach me any of those basic things. Because there was all impressionism and expressionism and do it from your head. I guess I don't have much of a head. I don't have an imagination as far as that goes. But I am influenced by beautiful things that I see. Anyway, Jean is great and we fed off each other. We did a lot of the same subject matter. Although she does people, and you might notice I hardly ever put a person in it. I'm not very good at that but she knows anatomy. She learned how to do bodies when she was a teenager, before that even, and I never learned how to do it. In one of the Gilbert and Sullivan shows I had to do an angel up in the air floating and I couldn't do it. I said, Jean, draw me an angel.
• [00:13:39] ELIZABETH SMITH: What are some of the spots in Ann Arbor that you've covered through your art and are there any of those that are no longer standing?
• [00:13:47] LAURA STROWE: No longer standing. Interesting, I don't know, actually. But especially in winter I don't go very far from my house. I used to be afraid that something would happen with the camera film and now I don't even know the technology that I'm carrying around in my pocket. I don't know whether cold does any harm or not. But I also get cold and it's hard to push the button down just the way you want it when it's freezing cold . Most of my winter scenes are pretty close. Let's see. I've done a number on Broadway. I've done a number literally looking out my front door. The last one I did in fact I had gone to Island Drive Park to take pictures on a particularly nice day. I have to find a day where there's a lot of snow. Where it hasn't been shoveled, where it hasn't melted and where there's good sun and shadows which doesn't happen every year even. This day was good. I went out with my camera and I took all kinds of pictures in the park. Then I wasn't thrilled with them although some of them would have worked, maybe. I got home and as I was opening the door I turned around and looked back and I looked at this, and I ought, wait a second. There's my picture. That was the last cover I did.
• [00:15:10] ELIZABETH SMITH: It looks like that was January 2024.
• [00:15:13] LAURA STROWE: Then I have this month's cover which is some people think it's my first funny cover but I thought the M was funny, actually. I think of it is my second funny cover. I don't know if you saw it. But it's a picture of a big sign that says road closed. I've gotten a lot of nice comments about that. People thought it was just really funny and typical of Ann Arbor but it's typical actually all over the country.
• [00:15:43] KATRINA ANBENDER: How has your art changed in the years since you've been creating covers for The Observer?
• [00:15:49] LAURA STROWE: Well, when I was doing etching I was doing it for a different audience and I was doing it to sell it. It's interesting. We like to say that we're not influenced by that. But it's hard not to think of it. At the very end of my etching career I thought you know what's bothering me is that I got too far afield with etching. That I started it because, like a lot of etchers, I love the black and white line. Then I realized that people wanted to put color on their walls. And it was fun. It was a challenge to figure out how to do etchings, with colored ink and multiple plates. I went with that. Then when I started doing pastels I wanted my etchings to look like pastels. Because I was getting so much more realism and variety in the pastels. I pushed the etching in a place that I didn't think it was appropriate to go. Especially after I didn't -- I realized that I didn't have to pay college tuition anymore for my daughter. I thought, I'm going to go back to my original do black and white and nobody bought those black and white. Literally, nobody at the Art Fair. I've given them away to friends because they like them but they didn't sell. It's hard to walk that path of what you want to do yourself and what the public might want you to do. I used to walk around town when I was trying to make a living as being an artist and I saw everything in terms of a picture, either an etching or a pastel. When I stopped doing the art fair, and essentially stopped making living at it, I felt so free that I didn't have to do that. That I could look at a scene and not interpret it and not figure "well, I could put that color on this plate and that color on that plate." It was so freeing not to think that way anymore. The Observer covers are all vertical covers. A lot of times I'll see something and I'll think. Well, that would be nice, but no, that's a horizontal.
• [00:18:16] ELIZABETH SMITH: Do you find that the Observer covers being involved with that has influenced your style further than just the composition of the frame?
• [00:18:28] LAURA STROWE: Influenced my style? No. Influenced my life? Yeah. I mean, it's great. I used to joke with John Hilton and Patricia Garcia that I ought to be paying them for the privilege of having the covers because, I got more publicity from that than you could ever get anywhere. I guess doing the covers influenced my style because I felt like I had to keep on doing that thing that I did that people liked. There's nothing wrong with that, I think. Maybe I'm slighting myself, but I feel like I really have nothing to say except this is beautiful, and I want to share it with you. I saw this beautiful scene, and I want to share it with other people. It's not like I want to tell you something about life, or love, or the earth that's original. It's already saying it, and I'm just giving it to you.
• [00:19:31] KATRINA ANBENDER: Do you have any relationships with other Observer contributors or cover artists that you've developed over the years?
• [00:19:38] LAURA STROWE: Well, you mentioned Steve, and Steve and I have become friends, and that's really fun. I forget how it started, but I guess one of us asked the other, how did you do something? I think I asked him. We we were using the same photographer, so we had an intermediary there. He did a cover that was reflections in a store window on Main Street and I couldn't believe that he had gotten all that so right. Then I realized that there was actually something wrong with it. In fact, he had moved a person over a little bit. Anyway, so we started talking about techniques. I think he also works from photographs and we started talking about what's cheating and what's not in terms of how you translate the photograph into the image. Like if you used a projector to put it on your paper, is that cheating? That kind of question. It just makes it a whole lot easier than spending hours, gridding up your paper, which is mostly what I do. Steve Gilzow, I became friendly with recently. Jaye Schlesinger, I've been friendly with way before. We both have daughters, the same age and with the same name, and we met when the children were about 3 years-old. We've been friends ever since then, but we've gotten to be better friends now. The other artists, I'm friendly with Marty Walker. Marty and Jaye are both part of a women's group that have been having dinner together. Well, for a while, we were doing it once a month. I think the group started in the 70s, and I joined it in the 80s, and Jaye joined it later in the 80s. Marty and Jaye are part of that group. Let's see who else? Oh, Carlye Crisler. She was also part of the group. It fell apart during COVID, and we're just thinking about getting it back together again. I met a couple of new people that I didn't know, but I know their names. Last year, there was a banquet. The Observer got an award from an arts organization in Ann Arbor. I can't remember Arts Washington or something like that, I can't remember the name and they were invited to the banquet with John and Patricia, and they invited the art staff and the regular artists. I got to know a few of the people that way, sitting at the table eating dinner.
• [00:22:09] ELIZABETH SMITH: Do you have a favorite cover created by another artist?
• [00:22:13] LAURA STROWE: Oh, goodness. Actually, there was an artist that I didn't mention, John Copley, who happens to be David Zinn's uncle, and John did a cover once of the Broadway Bridge being demolished or rebuilt. I can't remember which it was, but there was something about it that really struck me. It was so beautiful. And he must have done it fast because it was still being demolished or built when the cover came out. Usually, I do mine a year ahead, which is a problem sometimes, but I still remember that cover, and then there was Milton Kemnitz. I don't know if you've come across his name in your research, but he died a long time ago. He was in a different generation. He was a little bit of an inspiration to me because he did a lot of local art and he did well by it. Although he had a funny thing he once told me. He said, being a famous local artist is the kiss of death. [LAUGHTER] But he did well. Also, he did some books there. He has a whole bunch of books of drawings of Ann Arbor and paintings of Ann Arbor. He did a picture of the Barton Dam with ducks flying overhead. It was a lovely scene and I remember that one.
• [00:23:34] KATRINA ANBENDER: You mentioned that you've also painted sets for the Gilbert and Sullivan Society. Can you tell us about how you became involved with that?
• [00:23:42] LAURA STROWE: Well, my daughter and I started going to the shows when she was a little kid. When she was going away to college, I made a list of things that I thought I could do to fill in the gaps. One of them was Gilbert and Sullivan. The others -- learning German, taking cello lessons -- they didn't happen, but the Gilbert and Sullivan did, and I've been doing it ever since. I've done 50 shows already. Not necessarily as designer. As I mentioned, at first, David Zinn and Cynthia Lempert were the designers and then little by little, I was doing more and more. Now I'm the chief designer. I design them, and then I also am in charge of painting them. Cynthia Lempert, the other person who I worked with for many years, she says, "this is so much fun it ought to be illegal." Because you not only get to work in the shop with the carpenters, and they are wonderful people, but then you're part of this incredible production, which is really fun.
• [00:24:43] ELIZABETH SMITH: How does working with theatrical sets at that scale differ from your other art practice?
• [00:24:48] LAURA STROWE: Well, it's very different. Etching, I don't know if you know how the etching process is, but you work with a stylus, a little metal pen that you scratch away at a ground that's covering a metal plate and that's how you do the line work, and then you put it in acid, and where you've scratched and exposed the metal, the acid eats into the metal and creates a groove and the ink settles there when you print. You're working really fine with this little metal thing. And doing sets we use house paint brushes and house paint, actually. It's painting, which I haven't really done very much of. I wasn't much of a painter. Pastel is very different than painting. It's very different and it took me a while to get into that. Also, etching and the pastels, you're looking at close up at most distance of a room, whereas sets you are seeing 100 feet away at the closest even. It's quite amazingly different.
• [00:25:59] KATRINA ANBENDER: You said that you've started doing more of the design for them. Can you talk about what that actually consists of?
• [00:26:05] LAURA STROWE: First, working with the director to find out what the director wants, and then figuring out how to actually do it. You have to figure out how to do it with the materials that are available. The set shop, which is where all the student groups work, has stock pieces. They have stock platforms, and they have stock flats, which is what you put the background stuff on. You want to use as much of that as possible if you have a budget, which we have. Some of the student groups have much bigger budgets than we have. They make more from scratch of their stuff. We try not to do that partly because we want to save money, but also because it's horrible to be using all that wood and throwing it out afterwards. But sometimes it's unavoidable if you want a particular look. You work with the director and then with the carpenters, and so I've been doing it long enough that I know that everything I do has to be in units of four by eight sheets of lauan. I'm not going to make something that's 4.5 feet, because that would be a waste.
• [00:27:13] KATRINA ANBENDER: You said earlier -- creating things based on pictures or things that already exist. Can you talk about then the sets? Is that coming from your imagination?
• [00:27:22] LAURA STROWE: That's a problem. It's a real problem. I often do research. If it's like this last show, the first act was supposed to be Fairyland. It was Iolanthe we did. The first act is supposed to be in Fairyland and the second act is supposed to be in front of Parliament. Well, we have pictures of Parliament, so I can go online and look at Parliament. Somebody was helping me who was actually, I gave her the job of doing the Parliament part. But I wanted to put tulips. I don't know if you've ever been to London. But there's a park nearby St. James's Park, and I wanted it to look like that. I went online, looked at pictures. I had photographs because I happened to be there fairly recently and I just happened to take pictures and had pictures of tulips and pansies in a park. I used my photographs of the tulips and the pansies and created the backdrops for the tulips and pansies. Fairyland was a little bit more of a stretch. I said to Cynthia, I can't do animals. You're going to have to do all the animals. She did the frogs. I wanted eight-foot frogs because I wanted frogs and toadstools that were bigger than the people to make it look like Fairyland. I could do the toadstools. Again, I went online and looked up pictures of toadstools and mushrooms. She did the frogs, and she did pigeons for the Parliament part and dragonflies for the Fairyland part. That's how I do it. I look things up. I really am not good at making things up.
• [00:29:01] ELIZABETH SMITH: What are you most proud of?
• [00:29:06] LAURA STROWE: I'd say my daughter. But, you know, my parents were very political, and it was important. They felt they wanted to do the world good by being involved with politics. I felt that I didn't want to do that, that they were not happy because nothing ever turned out the way they wanted it to. I feel lucky that I was able to do something that gave me such pleasure and that gave other people pleasure. I feel really lucky that I could do something that didn't harm the Earth and that made people happy.
• [00:29:52] ELIZABETH SMITH: Thank you so much.
• [00:29:53] KATRINA ANBENDER: Thank you so much.
• [00:29:54] LAURA STROWE: You're welcome.
• [00:30:01] ELIZABETH SMITH: AADL talks to is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.