VCU News interviewed two communication arts professors who have illustrated pages upon pages of children’s books, and asked them how they translate difficult histories into images for younger audiences. Stephen Alcorn and Sterling Hundley (BFA ’88) shared their memories of how they first began drawing, and how they navigate topics such as racism and war in their art.
How did you become interested in illustration?
Alcorn: I was fortunate to have come of age as an artist in a culture that fostered a holistic, humanistic approach to art education. When I was 12, my family moved from the U.S to Florence, Italy, where I enrolled in the Istituto Statale d’Arte. My first drawing instructor, sculptor and painter Marco Lukolic, was a seminal influence for me. … I have come to value work that is at once modern, ancient, sophisticated and naïf — in short, that lends itself to being appreciated on multiple levels, and ranges from the organic to the clinical and the imaginative to the literal. Perhaps most importantly, I learned early on to value tradition and recognize tradition, not as nostalgia, but as knowledge passed from one generation to another. I am grateful that his example encouraged me to see my artistic development as a microcosm of the larger history of art with a sense of belonging to a larger whole.
Hundley: Even though I grew up in a creative home with a father who writes and collected Civil War and Native American artifacts and a mom who draws, writes, designs and illustrates, it wasn’t until my sophomore year as a Communication Arts and Design major at VCU that I truly understood what illustration was. It was the perfect pairing of drawing and problem solving that appealed to my creative and logical interests.
Read the full interview at VCU News.
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