AADL Talks To: Steve Gilzow, Ann Arbor Observer Cover Artist

Tue, 10/08/2024 - 4:52pm

When: May 16, 2024

In this episode AADL Talks To Steve Gilzow, a prolific cover artist for the Ann Arbor Observer, retired teacher, and writer. Steve talks about the inspiration behind his art, the people and places captured within his covers, and how his work with the Observer has allowed a deeper understanding of the community.

Transcript

• [00:00:09] ELIZABETH SMITH: [MUSIC] Hi. This is Elizabeth.
• [00:00:10] KATRINA ANBENDER: And this is Katrina. In this episode, AADL talks to Steve Gilzow, a prolific cover artist for the Ann Arbor Observer, retired teacher, and writer. Steve talks about the inspiration behind his art, the people and places captured within his covers, and how his work with the Observer has allowed a deeper understanding of the community.
• [00:00:29] ELIZABETH SMITH: Thank you for chatting with us today, Steve. We're just going to start by asking what brought you to Ann Arbor, and where did you grow up?
• [00:00:39] STEVE GILZOW: I came to the University of Michigan in 1967, summer of love. Really never escaped the gravitational pull. I've been here in the area since 1967. The growing up part is scattered, born in upstate, New York, Buffalo and moved outside Pittsburgh earlier than I remember, moved to Long Island, Hempstead. That's where I began going to school. Then, let's see at the beginning of fourth grade, we moved to Wichita, Kansas, which was a completely different universe from Long Island. A couple of years in Wichita, and then we moved to Toledo, Ohio. All of these moves were related to Dad working for Macy's. Then we got hired at Jacobson's, we moved to Jackson. I went to high school in Jackson, and then went to the Big U.
• [00:01:51] KATRINA ANBENDER: What did you study when you were at the university?
• [00:01:54] STEVE GILZOW: Keep in mind, this was 1967-71. Apart from studying everything that was happening in American politics and reality at that time, my degree was in American Studies, which is a pretty useless degree, I suppose. My apologies to anyone who has that degree. But during those last couple of years, the word on the street was that you could get a deferment from being drafted by teaching. I began taking Ed courses, and I had my letter to show up for a draft physical in advance of my May '71 graduation. I had a low lottery number. I knew this was coming, but as it turned out, the knee I had dislocated in high school that had caused me to spend a lot of my senior year using a cane, and had been at the time, a real drag, turned out to be my get out of war pass. I was found physically unfit for army service. I went back for a fifth year to finish the Ed courses, and ultimately wound up teaching elementary school as a career and loved it, had a great time.
• [00:03:26] ELIZABETH SMITH: You've done a lot of work for the Observer as a cover artist. Have you always had an interest in art or when did that develop, and how did it evolve over time?
• [00:03:34] STEVE GILZOW: Always had the interest. I have three older brothers and the older brother that's just two years older than me, Doug, we would just draw a lot as kids. We had another friend, Jerry, and the three of us would get together on Saturday mornings and just draw. Drawing was always something I enjoyed, and felt that I could do. As I went through those years teaching elementary school, I always did a lot of drawing with the kids. I wasn't their art teacher, but I looked for ways to incorporate drawing into what we were doing. When I was coming down the home stretch of being an elementary school teacher, I thought it would be fun to do a cover for the observer. I really loved that they then, and to this day, put original artwork on their covers. I had done some artwork for the Huron River Watershed Council, and for the Ecology Center. Those had all been line drawings. I had just been pen and ink, so doing a cover would mean working in color. I was very limited in that at the time. That was part of it, was to learn how to work with color by just saying, I'll do one, I'll do a cover. They didn't know me, I didn't know them, John Hilton and Patricia Garcia. I just pitched an idea to them during my last year of teaching. They okayed the concept, and then I began working on it while I was still Mr. Gilzow teaching fourth grade.
• [00:05:23] KATRINA ANBENDER: What was the subject of your first cover that you pitched to them?
• [00:05:27] STEVE GILZOW: It was the Sunday Morning fountain out between the League and the Bell Tower. To me, the starting point was that you have these naked bodies in the snow. They've used this fountain on other covers with the water gushing out of it, but I liked the idea of it just being still during the winter. I worked in my daughter in the background on her phone. This was colored pencil. That was the first one.
• [00:05:59] ELIZABETH SMITH: I was curious about your preferred medium, so you started with drawing, and now you use painting, is that correct?
• [00:06:06] STEVE GILZOW: Yeah. The first six were colored pencil and the advantage to that is that it's really easy to control. You can go real slow and your error margins or you're not going to skid off the rails quickly and irrevocably. But it's really time consuming to do because all of the 40 covers I've done for the Observer have been done at about 180%, much larger than the finished published 9.5 by 12.5 cover. The first six were colored pencil, and they were really slow. All during that time, I was working on learning, watercolor. It was very frustrating because, everything I had done up to then, had been technical drawing pen, and then colored pencil. Watercolor does not behave as predictably as pen and ink and colored pencil. It really—I tried watercolor, I thought, I just can't get it to behave, and I would abandon it, I'd come back to it. I had two wonderful teachers, Taylor Jacobson from Saline. He's a few years gone now, but wonderful man, and then Keith McGuire. Eventually, I felt like I was getting the hang of it. The next several were watercolor. That was very gratifying and my confidence was building with it. But I also really was curious about oils. While still doing some in watercolor, I was doing oils for myself, and then eventually felt like I'd got them to a point where I could do a cover. The majority of them have now been in oil.
• [00:08:19] KATRINA ANBENDER: You said that you pitched the first cover. Can you talk about what the process is for assigning covers, decided in advance, maybe, or are you choosing the subject?
• [00:08:29] STEVE GILZOW: Yeah, out of the 40, I think John and Patricia suggested two of them. One for sure that I remember. They wanted one of the new Mott Hospital when it was completed, the big addition. But typically, as I'm walking around town, I'll be struck with something that organizes itself visually as "Oh, that would make a decent cover." For me, the starting point is ideally, it would be something you're not going to see anywhere other than Ann Arbor. I'm more interested in things that have a lot of specific to this place identity as opposed to buildings in neighborhoods where potentially that could be a building in a neighborhood in another town. I try to look for things that are distinctively Ann Arbor centric.
• [00:09:30] ELIZABETH SMITH: Can you talk about a few of the spots in Ann Arbor that you have covered. Are there any that are no longer standing?
• [00:09:36] STEVE GILZOW: Yes. Many. One that comes to mind immediately is the Le Dog stand on Liberty, and Jules still keeps the one going, I think, in the little arcade there on Main Street. But that's one that went away. Another one is this greenhouse, the Nat Sci Greenhouse, used to be a beautiful old greenhouse on the back of the Natural Sciences Building. That's gone. Jay Stielstra, himself is gone. For a while, the tea room was closed up at Crazy Wisdom. I think they've reopened that. The Royale, Espresso Royale, they're no longer where they were. The place that made keys begins with the V. [Vogel's] Vogel's. They say in Unison. [LAUGHTER] They're no longer part of things. I think that's it for extinction. I hope so.
• [00:10:43] ELIZABETH SMITH: Were there any of your covers that are your favorites?
• [00:10:46] STEVE GILZOW: Well, some hold particular back story for me. I'm actually in the process of writing the background of each cover. I've been doing this for my daughter. They're called Cover Stories. [LAUGHTER] But one that holds particular significance for me is the painting right there. It's the Mural on Liberty. When I began that one in 2010, I'd already done the drawing. The observer, John and Patricia create a lineup for the calendar year. The general rule is that no one artist does more than three covers. Usually two is the max in a given year. I had known for some time that I would be doing, I think it was this September cover.
• [00:11:49] STEVE GILZOW: This was the year that my first wife was dying of lymphoma. After Ava died, one of the impacts of being without this it felt like an amputation, and I looked at work I had done that was on the walls, and I just had no sense of how I had managed to paint these things. I went back into the drawing and above the mural on the upper story of the building there, I was going to do a brick wash sort of a suggestion of the colors of the bricks up there but I went back into that passage of the painting and measured out three millimeter by six millimeter bricks, scores of them. Those bricks were my pathway back into regaining how to paint in watercolor, how wet to make the paper, how much to mix on the palette, how much to mix on the surface, and I am so grateful to those bricks, they were my re-entry. By the time I got to the end of the painting, I was understanding, again, enough about watercolor that I could do a little blur on the forward motion of the guy's leg there, something I wouldn't have remembered how to do when I began. The other element to this one that was very gratifying was that when I painted this, the paint was peeling off the mural, and it really needed to be restored. The guy who had painted it in the 80s, I think his name is Richard Wolk, I lettered his name on there. He had asked Oxford Housing a few times if he could restore it, and they had rebuffed him. Then when this was on the cover, and I'm quoting here, this was in the Ann Arbor News. The company felt that the community had spoken. They did have him restore the mural, actually that month. That was a real high impact thing. That's a very favorite one, but I have so many really rich and warm memories because as I began doing this, it opens doors. You can call people and say, I've been doing covers for the Observer, I'd like to... For example, when I wanted to do one at Hill Auditorium, they let me in on a day when there was nobody there, and they turned the lights on the way I wanted them, and they let me wander around with my paint cards to see which colors were going to go where. Then I also got free tickets to attend a concert through the University Musical Society and take pictures during the concert. Then there was one at Domino's Farms, where my friend John who took reference photos for me, he and I got to follow the truck feeding the bison. There's a lot of stories like that where because I wanted to get reference photos, it put me in contact with people, and I got to do things that I wouldn't have gotten to do, otherwise.
• [00:15:24] KATRINA ANBENDER: You talked about a few of your teachers. Can you tell us about what artists have influenced your style or any local artists that have had an impact on you?
• [00:15:33] STEVE GILZOW: Sure. Well, as a kid, growing up, I loved the Saturday Evening Post covers painted by Norman Rockwell. But I also had an appreciation and a little bit more than superficial knowledge of past golden age of illustration painters like N.C. Wyeth and J.C. Leyendecker and Maxfield Parrish. Those were the images that I brought to getting started on this. Then early into things, I befriended James Gurney, a wonderful guy, he did the Dinotopia books, which were pretty popular, I think in the 90s, and he's still doing a lot of beautiful paintings. His encouragement and a workshop, I did with him were very helpful. Then for a few years, I was in the Chelsea Painters, and that group of painters really fed into what I knew and how to go about it. John Copley is one of the Chelsea Painters, and he did the interior spot illustrations for the observer for many years. I put John on one of the covers, he for years, did paintings downtown with the Brush Monkeys. David Zinn, those are some of the local connections.
• [00:17:09] ELIZABETH SMITH: I was curious a little bit more about your process. You mentioned that you use reference photographs, but you also have gone in person to see the places. Is that how you typically work on something?
• [00:17:19] STEVE GILZOW: Well, the reference photos are taken at where I'm going. I'm not proud of this, but I work from the photographs pretty slavishly, to the point of using a light box or projecting them, or in the early days, it was more of a grid layout. I've also used in photoshop, my friend Patrick Young introduced me to this. He photographs a lot of the artwork and renders it ready for publication as a file, but you can, in photoshop, take a digital image and use a filler called finding edges. It really just drains all the color out of it and turns it into more or less like a coloring book page. I have used that on full size sheets of Arches oil paper. It just blows right through the drawing process and gets you straight to painting. But not all of the drawing, it only gives you the big shapes, and then all the interior detail, you're still rendering.
• [00:18:37] KATRINA ANBENDER: You've been doing covers for the Observer for 20 years now?
• [00:18:40] STEVE GILZOW: Twenty years.
• [00:18:42] KATRINA ANBENDER: Do you think that you have adapted your style to the Observer, or how has that influenced your style? You talked about you weren't using the same mediums that you use now?
• [00:18:55] STEVE GILZOW: Right, the medium has changed, the media, but I feel like in terms of composition and how fully I flesh out from edge to edge and think through things like, where's the lettering going to fall that says, Ann Arbor Observer, where's the address a little rectangle, go to work with. Actually, in working in the studio, I have strips of paper that I've enlarged then cut out off the logo and off the address thing, and I try those out on compositions to see how they're going to fit. I feel that in terms of composition, I haven't varied tremendously, there's generally a pretty high impact central focus to things, and again, the starting point being that if you're familiar with town, you immediately recognize this is a place in Ann Arbor. It's not Portland, Oregon, or something. I don't know that changing from colored penciled water color to oil influenced what images I attempted. I think it shifted what the look of the painted surface would be, but compositionally or in terms of ideas, the medium didn't drive the ideas that much. Good friends have suggested things to me. Like there's one cover of a woman walking at the labyrinth at the Botanical Gardens, and the woman depicted Deborah Bear is the one who suggested that, so Deborah is in the image. In this image at Sweetwaters, with the fairy door, these shoes belonged to Jonathan Wright, the guy who made all the original fairy doors. A lot of times the people that I've included are people I know. They're friends or family.
• [00:21:01] ELIZABETH SMITH: I was curious. You mentioned you did the early drawings for the Ecology Center, and I think the Huron River Watershed Council?
• [00:21:08] STEVE GILZOW: Yeah.
• [00:21:09] ELIZABETH SMITH: Do you have any other commissions that you've done around town?
• [00:21:13] STEVE GILZOW: I did two covers for a little publication called Nature's Course that was a—I don't even know if it still exists. There was an author illustrator who had done some children's books, did she write me or did I write her? Long time ago. But I did a couple covers for this Nature's Course. Again, those were all pen and ink, but around town, it was the Watershed Council and the Ecology Center. For the Ecology Center, I did holiday cards, and for the Watershed Council, they did a booklet about groundwater so I did the artwork. But anyway, I did the drawings for this.
• [00:22:00] KATRINA ANBENDER: Having done work for the Ecology Center and the Huron River Watershed Council, would you say that there is a connection in your artwork to environmental preservation?
• [00:22:10] STEVE GILZOW: Well, there certainly is in my heart. As far as in my work. Those were just organizations, the two of them, Ecology Center and the Watershed Council. These are my advocates, these are people doing things that I want to succeed, so that was a natural. As far as that having any, I don't see a real overlap with what I've done for the observer in that regard, those are scenes around town.
• [00:22:43] ELIZABETH SMITH: You also wrote for the Observer?
• [00:22:45] STEVE GILZOW: Yeah.
• [00:22:45] ELIZABETH SMITH: What was that experience like? Going from the cover artist to the writer?
• [00:22:49] STEVE GILZOW: Well, they've had some associations.
• [00:22:53] STEVE GILZOW: I've loved doing both, again, mainly because of the people I've met doing them. I got to ride in a survival flight helicopter, and that all arose from watching survival flight repeatedly take off and land below my wife's room when she would be at the cancer center for a month following a bone marrow transplant, and did another piece about the Naval Architecture Lab that's in the old part of the Engine Arch there and, again, just meeting wonderful people doing interesting things. Sometimes, there was a story I did on the dioramas that had Native American villages in them being removed from the old Natural History museum, and that led to meeting Amy Harris, who was then the museum director, and that then a few years later led to doing a story about their big move. Moving from the old building, into the new one. I think that title was Why Did the Dinosaur Cross the Sidewalk. Meeting the people who prepare the exhibits and carefully dissemble them, that led to later doing a cover of the new entry. Sometimes there's been a real interplay between meeting people doing some writing and then later having that emerge as a cover. Things like, I'd gone up to the top of the Bell Tower. I thought I went up there to photograph rooftops, and instead, there was a couple up there making out near the Carillon bells, and I thought, this is so beautiful but it felt creepy to photograph them. Anyway, that led to meeting Tiffany, who's the Carillon player or was a few years ago. I realize I'm drifting a little bit from the writing here, but there's just been this one thing leads to another thing where because I met somebody doing this, this door opens over here to do that.
• [00:25:19] KATRINA ANBENDER: Do you have any close relationships with other observer contributors or other cover artists? I'm wondering how you all work together and share ideas or maybe get feedback from each other?
• [00:25:31] STEVE GILZOW: I definitely have close relationships and friendships with Marty Walker, Laura Strowe, Jill Wagner, Linda Klenczar. Laura is the undisputed and forever leader of the pack. None of us shall ever overtake her. We will sometimes bump into each other at Patrick's little studio where artwork gets dropped off and picked up to be photographed. As far as talking to each other about what we're working on, I did a little bit more of that when I was in Chelsea Painters, and Marty was in it too. Somewhat more of that happens at Top of the Park each summer, John and Patricia so generously have an evening where contributors and employees and advertisers can all sit right below, Rackham steps there. They have a tent set up, and there's food and drink in it. That's when we're really elbow to elbow and talking to each other and being with each other in an Observer centric way. But throughout the year, it's just as we happen to be in the same place at the same time or see each other. Sometimes Jill will post something on Instagram, and I'll comment. But I think for most of us, the work is done pretty much in isolation, and I do know that for several of the others, they will do paintings that they just wanted to do, and then later they may think, if I cropped this little bit of it, it would work as an observer cover. Whereas mine tend to be much more strategic. I don't even start seriously doing the drawing till I know that John and Patricia like the idea, so the whole thing, that's my method of work. But I know that for Marty and Jill, I'm not so sure about Laura. I think Laura may aim things, I'm doing this because it's going to be a cover. That's a good question, though. I'm sure you guys will be talking or have talked to some of the others and there's different ways of going at this.
• [00:27:48] ELIZABETH SMITH: I was curious if you had a favorite cover by another artist from the observer?
• [00:27:53] STEVE GILZOW: Oh, many. One that comes to mind immediately is one by Jaye Schlesinger. Jaye hasn't done a ton of covers. I really love what she does. She did one during the pandemic of a little girl, and I should remember if this was a niece or a granddaughter, but I don't. But it's a little girl about the age that I used to teach. I think she was a third grader at the time. She's wearing headphones like this. You're seeing her from the back, and you can see a little bit of her laptop or whatever screen she's working on. It's this immediate image of what kids did for education during 2020, so that one is one that immediately comes to mind. Marty Walker's done several where I just love the glow, the color. I can't as specifically cite one, as I just did with Jaye Schlesinger. Then Laura Strowe, just so many, and she had one very recently of a snow covered neighborhood. It is beautiful.
• [00:29:15] KATRINA ANBENDER: You mentioned your favorite cover. Is there a cover that you are most proud of, or would it be the same?
• [00:29:22] STEVE GILZOW: This one I'll hold up. This is the Glazier Building on the corner of Huron and Main. Just getting in oil, the wet pavement and the sense of a wet car moving was very gratifying, and taking a chance on making the sky be fundamentally about as dead black as you can make it. I was happy with how that turned out. This Literati one, it was a real hold your breath moment to let the underpainting dry for about three days and then mix up some very wet, very thinned out white paint and practice off to the side with a particular raggedy old brush till I got my spray method down, and then just begin flicking paint at this thing I had just worked weeks on, and now I'm just hoping that I don't get a half dollar sized gob of wet paint. I was happy with how the snow settled there. There's a lot of things like that. This one on the right here was the first oil painting I did. This one I was much more tentative with the snow. There's supposed to be snow there, but I didn't really let it fly like I did with the later one.
• [00:30:54] KATRINA ANBENDER: That one is the Lydia Mendelssohn Theater?
• [00:30:57] STEVE GILZOW: That's Lydia Mendelssohn, and these are all friends of mine entering the theater to go see a performance. The dad is not in this little family shot, he bugged me for years and told me exactly how he wanted to appear. He wanted to be giving a thumbs up gesture, and I finally got him in with the Rubix cube out on North Campus. I submerge my name in each image in a way that's not always easy to find but I was proud of this one. My name is on the wall here in Morse code, and I thought that went with the idea of solving a puzzle.
• [00:31:47] ELIZABETH SMITH: Where exactly is the Rubix cube located?
• [00:31:49] STEVE GILZOW: I don't remember the name of the building, although I think it's something Brown, and it's on North Campus. It's not that far from the Dude, the Duderstadt. This was not that old when I went to paint it. I think it had only been there a year. It was a two year project of some engineering students, and it's the largest operable Rubix cube, I think on the planet.
• [00:32:15] ELIZABETH SMITH: What are you most proud of over the course of your entire career?
• [00:32:20] STEVE GILZOW: I think it's just that for the Midwest, this is a remarkable cultural community that we have here. I'm just proud of being associated with the Observer. John and Patricia have been so kind and generous to me. I know that John and I very much connected deeper with the passing away of both of our first marriages, and I think we formed a friendship that has just been very important to both of us and the abundance of relationships that's come my way through them is just incredible. The painting that I did of the movie marquee at the State Theater, I had come into the office when I was started on this. I told them I wanted to put It's A Wonderful Life on the marquee, even though that always shows at the Michigan, not at the State. Patricia said, I know somebody that was in It's A Wonderful Life. That led to meeting Virginia Patton, who had this small, but very important part in the movie. She was still alive at the time. She just died, I think last year, and we took a print of the cover out to Jenny, where she was at Glacier Hills at the time. Then later went to a screening of it's a wonderful life with Jenny. Am I proud of that or just grateful that it happened? To sit next to this woman who has kissed Jimmy Stewart in the line of duty, and to watch her face as her 20 something version of herself appears on screen, and she's now 90 something. It was powerful. Those are things that I'm just so grateful for. Pride is secondary to the gratitude. I think that's the main thing.
• [00:34:37] ELIZABETH SMITH: AADL talks to is a production of the Ann Arbor district library.