What is hip? The retro art of Daniel Guidera

PRIME April 2012 By Mike Briotta — PRIME Editor If you were a naysayer, you would claim that origami master Akira Yoshizawa did nothing more than play with scraps of paper. Pablo Picasso merely contorted noses; Jackson Pollock just had a drippy brush. By that faulty reasoning, the artwork of Northampton illustrator Daniel Guidera is just funny pictures — a bunch of silly drawings and whimsical ideas. Of course, that would be choosing to ignore all the aesthetic qualities of his art. For decades, the 52-year-old has created kitschy, retro images that capture a uniquely American sense of humor. His drawings have been featured in Mad Magazine and on Topps baseball cards. Smithsonian Magazine and Sesame Street Magazine have both published Guidera's illustrations. Target stores and the Boston Globe also rank among his long list of clients. Your next box of animal crackers might just have his drawings on it, as Guidera was also commissioned by a cookie company to re-imagine hundreds of classic cartoon animals. The images he assembled for a 2012 calendar are quickly recognizable: A Soviet cosmonaut, a Mexican luchadore, a beatnik with bongos and a black beret. His tongue-in-cheek renderings carry a wry sense of humor. His February drawing is for an event he dubbed the "Bouffant Equinox," with the image of a woman at a beauty salon. It evokes the puffy-haired punchlines of the campy film "Hairspray." His drawing for July features a hungry hamburger-eater and arbitrarily describes the 23rd of the month as "Sangawich Appreciation Day." "I call it illustration a-go-go," Guidera said. "It's a whole early to mid-sixties retro thing. There was a great style of illustration going on at that time. You see a lot of hand-lettered fonts in surf and rock-and-roll movies. That was the era when I was a kid, and I fell for that." He lists influences such as Saturday morning cartoons and lounge music, pro wrestling and creature movies, and bands like The Ramones. One of his influences is the cartoon Rocky & Bullwinkle. Guidera said of that character's creation: "Someone had hallucinated a talking moose while at a poker game. It's both majestic and goofy at the same time." So it would be a natural fit to see his creations decorating the walls of some of his favorite places: bowling alleys, amusement parks, and diners. Surprisingly, though, the artist whose muses include fun parks and flying saucers as well as "Dinoland, Dean Martin and diners" does not have his images plastered all over town. There's no local restaurant with his funky images on the kids' menu. No windows at Thorne's marketplace are festooned by Guidera originals. And no T-shirts are adorned with his work. Will he ever be a household name in Northampton? "No," he laughed. "I can't get arrested here." He's right about the lack of popular awareness. Google his name and you're equally likely to find his Web site as you are to find a cosmetic dentist in Vista, Calif. Humility is also reflected in his art. There's no pretense here. On his site, he names an illustration of a man walking his dog "Walking the Dog!" and the drawing of a cowboy singing while on horseback, riding next to a saguaro cactus is simply called "Singing Cowboy!" Detritus and Digitization In a half-unpacked box at his new home sits the infamous talking sea bass "Frankie the Fish" - as seen in McDonald's commercials among other places. A strange red lamp stands comfortably next to a penguin statuette. Opposite the scene, a curved red velvet sofa is reflected in a bright red lava lamp. Kitschy items populate the place. A nearby window is propped open by bowling pin from AMC lanes. Guidera proudly holds up a plastic Big Boy bank; on the table lies a 1970 San Diego Padres press guide. Oddly, there's a stuffed taxidermy pheasant wrapped in plastic in the background. "For years, I lived in downtown Northampton," he explained. "If you could see all of my things set up together, it's like the red lamp and the penguin times 1,000. It's a huge influence. I love that stuff. I'm a sucker for it." The unassuming illustrator now lives slightly closer to Smith College, on a quiet side street. "Just a little bit outside of the downtown area, it feels like Illinois," Guidera quipped. While he works, he listens to an Internet radio station called Luxuria music, the cultural consciousness of which includes surf music, psychedelic pop, and a genre mysteriously called "Space-Age Bachelor Pad." According to the station, its tunes have a highly intoxicating and sometimes hallucinatory sound. He simply calls the inspiration "Elevator music without the elevator." Much like Guidera's drawings, the music has an easily identifiable modern-retro style. Both offer a lighthearted, clever take on popular iconography. Guidera has made the transition to the digital age almost completely. Although he paid the rent as a newspaper illustrator in years past, his current works are done via a stylus on a computer screen. "All my stuff is digital now," he said. "I haven't touched ink to paper in a long time." His most recent opus was to illustrate a new online children's book: the iPad e-book "My Dad Drives A Roller Coaster Car," which is currently available in the iTunes store for $1.99 each. The book has already sold more than 1,200 downloads. "It's essentially a book that a kid can read on the iPad," Guidera said. "It's about an eccentric family and their modes of transportation are amusement park rides. The father has a roller coaster, the uncle a rocket ship, and the aunt a teacup. Kids can read it and manipulate the sounds and pictures on the iPad with their hands." He continued, "I grew up with those rickety roller coasters, the boards coming loose. The old style amusement parks. Sure, they induce vomit. But kids love vomit." Small Format, Big Talent When he was in college at UMASS, Guidera penned a comic strip called "Nuke the Whales," presumably named for an amalgam of two popular bumper stickers at the time: "No Nukes" and "Save the Whales." It was a humorous jab at Amherst-area culture. His first professional gig came when he worked at the Holyoke Transcript-Telegram, a daily newspaper in the 1970s and 80s. Guidera vividly recalled when a hasty editor snatched from his hands a drawing of Jimmy Carter that he wasn't quite finished with. The editor shouted: "No plaid shirt for Jimmy Carter today!" Deadlines, of course, had to be met. "In the early 80's, to be a newspaper cartoonist and illustrator was a big deal," he said. He added jokingly, "My policy was to do a lot of really awful work early on." He later worked for the Springfield Daily News as the newsroom artist. Guidera is very well aware of some of that city's notable claims to fame. "There was Dr. Seuss, [James] Naismith, and Art Linkletter," he said of the holy trinity of Springfield celebrities. In Northampton, Guidera's path to success couldn't be more divergent from that of area comic book superstars Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird. The duo famously created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles characters. "They made it big," Guidera said of the Turtles co-creators. "I guess I should have crossed paths with them at some point. I do remember they had that museum of comic book art." The former Words and Pictures Museum in Northampton was owned by Eastman. Unlike the commercial cashing in of Dr. Seuss and the Turtles creators, however, fame has eluded the humble illustrator thus far. Perhaps its because he's not really seeking the limelight. Guidera is content to be something of a cultural enigma. "Everything I do is small-format," he said of his illustrations. "My mind is so linked to that: a sketch the size of your hand," he said of his focus. "It's a tic, really. I don't know if I could work in a larger format." He added of his drawing technique, "Your hand just kind of moves. I don't envision it out." Regarding the perceived importance of his work, he humbly recalled an admonishment from a Spanish tutor at UMASS. Asked to describe his job in Spanish, Guidera said he would refer to himself as an "illustrador." No, the tutor replied, that honorable term was too grandiose for Guidera. She demoted him to "dibujante" for "one who draws or sketches" instead. "She told me that the first word I mentioned has to do with art, but what I do is just drawing," recalled Guidera. "There's serious illustrators, and then there's the rest of us." He added, "Everybody knows this ain't art. It's just drawing for money." Of course, anyone who's seen what he's able to convey through his creations will come to a different conclusion. His old language tutor couldn't have been more wrong. Guidera doesn't just sketch silly figures. He creates microcosmic worlds of art. PRIME For more information about Daniel Guidera's artwork, please visit his illustration web site at danielguidera.com . To download "My Dad Drives a Roller Coaster Car," please see the iTunes store. A free preview of the app is searchable on Youtube.com .