Job Q&A
by Eileen O'Reilly
[ More Job Q&As ]

Victoria Kann (snippee@aol.com) is a collage illustrator and teaches illustration at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. Her work has been seen in magazines, on book covers, in advertisements and on web sites and greeting cards. She works with materials as diverse as old medical textbooks, leaves, Scrabble pieces, photographs, nails and ribbons.

Monster.com: How did you get started as a collage artist?

Victoria Kann: A lack of marketable skills, can't type and I'm not good at office politics...

Mc: Okay, so what was your first job after Rhode Island School of Design?

VK: Working at a magazine, tracking the art, sending back photos to photographers.

Mc: Why did you decide to leave that and open your own illustration studio?

VK: I wanted to be an illustrator for magazines, ads, books and it's hard to work for one company and do all those things. I also wanted to be an artist and make money at it, to do art as a form of communication.

Mc: How did studying illustration at college help you get a job?

VK: It didn't at first. In the late eighties there weren't very many places with staff illustrators, only Hallmark and Disney. I wanted to work on a variety of projects with many different clients, so there wasn't much of a choice. You either had to work for yourself or in an art department doing graphic design.

Mc: How did you start using collage as illustration?

VK: I was having a lot of dreams--this is going to sound strange--I had a dream journal but I found the best way to get the dreams out of my system was to express them artistically. I needed to illustrate them.

Mc: How did you remember them?

VK: I couldn't forget them! I tried to draw them, but my drawing didn't really express the emotions I felt. I needed to unblock them, so I did what I had done in kindergarten, I picked up papers and started cutting them out and arranged them and put them together, juxtaposing different images, until what was in front of me expressed what was in my mind. In art if you're blocked, you try to do something different to change your point of perception. When you are too aware of what you are doing it becomes difficult.

Mc: You said that in the 80s, magazines didn't use very much collage. How did you convince them to use your work?

VK: I didn't, MTV did. MTV changed what is acceptable. Suddenly everyone wanted unusual and different design, they wanted the art to be hip and abstract like MTV. The computer also changed design, people became familiar with the idea of cutting and pasting.

Mc: You work alone, you're always doing different, interesting projects. What are the drawbacks to your job?

VK: I get to be creative every time I sit down, but when you are your own boss you make your own hours, pay your own salary, overhead and health benefits. You have to work harder, you don't get paid vacations or sick days so you end up working until 3AM. You have to do all the work, there's no secretary, you do everything. Simultaneously you have to keep up a high level of creativity and please all your clients.

Mc: How do you put together a collage?

VK: An art director will call me with an article to illustrate, they'll fax it to me, I'll read it and once I agree on the deadline I'll fax over a contract. Sometimes I only have a few hours to do a finished piece. That means coming up with the concept and doing a few thumbnail sketches, in a matter of minutes. If I get approval from the art director, I then research my collage material, make copies if I have to, cut out the images and glue them down. My goal is to create an exciting work of art. Magazines and newspapers like Time, Newsweek, Business Week and The New York Times usually have that kind of tight deadline. Other jobs have about a one to two week deadline. I actually prefer a tighter deadline, it's challenging and exciting and it means less time for editors to fuss over the illustration.

Mc: Can you make a decent living?

VK: Depending on how much work you can do at one time. You have to manage your schedule, you never know when you'll get a job. I seem to get a lot of jobs on Fridays after 4:00 that are due on Monday morning.

Mc: There goes the weekend. So, is this a competitive field?

VK: Extremely.

Mc: You can work at home though? And you could really do this work from anywhere, right?

VK: Yes, but for me New York City is the best place to do collage. The resource material is unlimited and if you need to have film processed @ midnight you can do it.

Mc: What would you say to someone who wants to do this?

VK: Find out what is interesting to you. Read an article and interpret it and don't imitate other artists in the field. Develop your own way of thinking, then express it.

And if all you are looking for is excitement, try petting a hungry pit pull.