InternationalThe cerebral and very artistic Raffi Anderian
Making the right decisions to avoid becoming a “starving artist”
Published: Friday September 04, 2009
Mad Men published August 16, 2009, on the Sunday Entertainment cover of the Toronto Star.. Raffi Anderian
Toronto - What happens when you are a gifted artist, but your father dreams of you becoming a doctor or lawyer? You make smart choices, study hard, work even harder, get a leading national newspaper to create a position specifically for you, and then go on to win the National Newspaper Award for editorial cartooning – Canada's version of the Pulitzer.
This is what Raffi Anderian, the illustrator for the Toronto Star, did. His insight, talent, and technique are unrivalled in the field of editorial cartooning in Canada, and today he is creating landscape paintings that are being snatched up by art collectors.
In an exclusive interview with the Armenian Reporter, Raffi talks about his roots, his choices, and his rise in the art world.
Raffi emigrated with his family from Beirut when he was eight years old; they settled in Cambridge, Ontario. He lived there till the age of 19, when he decided to pursue a career in illustration. "I chose illustration because it paid and I could avoid being a ‘starving artist,'" he said. Because of his academic record, his father wanted him to pursue a career in medicine or law and always believed that his son's obsession with producing art was a passing phase. "He was disappointed to find that something I had loved to do since the age of nine was something I wanted to stick with – especially after winning both the grade 12 and grade 13 art awards at my high school in the same year. I was pretty proud of that accomplishment since even my art teachers told me to only take one. Nobody who had taken both courses in the past had passed both," Raffi explained.
Connecting with the word artist
Raffi always knew that he wanted to become an artist. He recalls having a keen interest in drawing people and animals. He was always the artist of the class and relished the challenge of being able to record images on paper. "I remember also connecting with the word ‘artist,' whenever I heard it. In high school, like most adolescent boys, I loved fantasy paperback covers featuring the work of Frank Frazetta and Boris Valeijo," he said.
After making the decision to pursue his artistic side, Raffi studied at Sheridan College, which is renowned today for computer animation. He contemplated studying at the Ontario College of Art, but when he visited the campus, all he saw were students "throwing paint on canvasses and that wasn't what I wanted to do at the time," he explains. "I wanted a little more discipline."
The aspiring artist finished the three-year course at Sheridan, where he majored in advertising illustration and minored in editorial illustration, "Advertising paid much better," he notes. He started out doing freelance jobs illustrating school textbooks – a common way to start since only hungry graduates would take on the paltry pay, he recalls.
For the next six months he continued illustrating textbooks until he got a call from a classmate from Ottawa who told him about a job opening at the Ottawa Citizen, where he worked as a staff artist.
"The senior artist who hand drew the weather map and location maps or charts to accompany stories was retiring and they needed a replacement. The applicant also needed to be a good illustrator, since the paper also wanted to show off their brand-new color presses," Raffi said. There had been other applicants, but the managing editor at the Citizen wasn't satisfied with their work. The paper flew him to Ottawa and put an actual story in front of Raffi and asked him to illustrate it. "They wanted to see how I would perform under pressure. I did something for them that took about four hours and they liked it so much that they paid me a freelance fee to publish it in the paper," he said.
He was offered the job, and he took it. At the time, Raffi felt that the job with the Citizen would be temporary and then he would return to Toronto to pursue a freelance career; and in the meantime, the position would also be an ideal way to get some printed samples for his portfolio. The position ended up being very rewarding. Three years later he won the National Newspaper Award for editorial cartooning and "I knew it would be a ticket to finally return to Toronto to be near family and friends," recalls Raffi.
In May of 1989, after impressing the art director at the Toronto Star with his range of styles, Raffi started at his newly created position with the paper. "They felt hiring me would cut down on their use of freelance illustrators and be more efficient since I would be on staff and available on a moment's notice," he told the Armenian Reporter.
Raffi continues to work at the Toronto Star creating illustrations for a wide range of stories. He has won about three dozen awards, mostly from U.S. competitions in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. These include Society of Newspaper Design, Art Directors Club, Creative Source, Applied Arts, and Mobius.
Exploring the personal
After moving to a bigger studio space from a downtown condo in Toronto in 2002, Raffi started to paint canvasses in oils. These include mostly landscapes, but also abstracts and portraits. "I have always painted in acrylics and watercolors or used inks and pastels, even air brushed, but I always wanted to paint using oils but didn't have the space to avoid the strong solvent smells," he says. After getting married and having two young children, finding enough time to paint and to explore his personal artistic side creating canvasses became a challenge.
While this artist has used water-based mediums for his illustrations, since they dry very quickly and need to be scanned almost immediately for the paper, he enjoys working with oils for posterity. His new landscape pieces were featured in the Toronto Star on several occasions and his work started quickly selling to collectors.
