Photo of Greg Ruth by Tara Young for Criterion
In Conversation with Illustrator Greg Ruth
On a visit to the world of Illustrator Greg Ruth you will find the stories of life spread before you. Those films, television shows, and books that are created to hold our secrets and dreams, they are there. Ruth has drawn them. In his portrait of Thanos you will find the villain, sorrowful. Morose. Ruth gently pulls apart the layers of character until he finds the unheard voice within. In his words, Ruth explains, “…an early a-ha moment I had surrounding Captain Hook and the crocodile. The idea that a nemesis could have his own nemesis blew my mind and threw open the gates of that area of stories I had always been drawn to but never knew why.”
His skill as an illustrator is unmatched, and not due simply to his mastery of his tools, but because he truly seeks purpose in each sketch to reach a final piece that advances the subject matter. In Ruth’s extensive work in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks universe you will find those elements of the story that are unseen yet felt. In his illustrations, Ruth is dedicated to bringing something unique and alive to the canvas, each work their very own a-ha moment.
Interview by Chris Jalufka.
CJ: I believe the first time I saw your work was for your Twin Peaks gallery show at Mondo. You are one of the rare artists that had a solo Mondo show without having years of Mondo work under their belt. The work from Twin Peaks: An Interpretation was vast—sublime and as alarmingly rich with ideas as Lynch’s work. The portraits feel like one side of a dialogue, responding to Lynch’s voice and ideas.
GR: Is that so? Makes sense I guess, I was definitely fairly new and, in fact, had not even met in person many of the Mondoians like David, Mo, Mitch, Rob, Eric, etc. until that gallery show. That show was such a gift and a reward to that humongous 63+ piece project I had taken on myself. I had a few years previously created a self-assigned exercise under the umbrella name of the 52 Weeks Project, which basically was originally built to force me to start the work week from a place of just pure art fun, and not lose sight of that impulse and reservoir while being a working professional. From that project came so much, including a Kickstarter book collecting the first two years of the series, and then a children’s book with a newly elected Barack Obama, and Twin Peaks. So that show and print series was a tremendous validation of that seemingly anti-work exercise.
Twin Peaks came to us while I was just a sophomore in college and remember fondly the race to gather around whatever rare friend owned a television on campus we could all gather around on Saturday nights like apes around the monolith to see the weekly episodes of David Lynch & Mark Frost’s masterwork. I was a big fan immediately and dove into Lynch’s other material as well.
For a kid in art school in the ‘80s and ‘90s Lynch was the peak of cool for sure. It never once occurred to me that I would execute such a body of work from that series, and later get to know so many members of the cast and creators of that show. Not until Mondo said hell yes to doing this. In this life an importantly placed YES can change everything and this certainly did that.
I know the feeling of experiencing an event / moment / creative work and having my thoughts immediately pool in my head, forming my own ideas of how to translate that feeling of inspiration / motivation into language and story. I was curious: for a project like An Interpretation, did the drawing help you process the many themes of the Twin Peaks universe?
I had seen the show SO many times, it was in many ways like Dune was for me—something that was in my bones. All the littlest of details and meaningful keys to unlock the story of Twin Peaks were always there, those characters being both so real and naturally magnetic, but also representing tropes and aspects of the full body that was the town of Twin Peaks and the soap opera format it was told in. These ideas came like they do when I get my hands on a project that is rich with potential like this, the ideas just explode. I kept a little book of sketches or just descriptives as I went so I’d not forget them… “Agent Jeffries as a lodge creature remembering Judy,” or a visual map in portraiture of what Diane actually is,” “Cooper split but held together by “the arm,” are some of them. Weird and mysterious to read maybe, but they signified whole worlds to me immediately.
The process of drawing always brought more with it too, so no piece birthed itself exactly as I may have initially conceived. The “Interpretation” held the benefit of being an accurate description of the work but also helped me unburden myself of the canon a little bit that can stifle an exploration like this. I was frankly astonished that David approved of nearly all the pieces in the series save for one of Laura Palmer I had done early on when I was just getting started with the graphite medium. It made me feel both seen and my seeing validated tremendously. A credit to David who as an artist and a painter himself, to be able to see someone else reinterpret his work and regard it approvingly. That’s a rare and hard thing to make happen and I pinch myself even to this day that it did at all.
I was fortunate enough to see your work in person at MondoCon (2019?) and I was immediately struck by your Thanos portrait. It was soft as a memory, a menacing statue. It was an interpretation of the Marvel villain I hadn’t seen, elevating the character to the level of poetry. When taking on characters in pop culture, how do you balance staying true to both the character as well as your own artistic voice?
I really loved that piece too. I am pretty fond of villains in stories myself—they tend to be the characters with the most agency, depth, and arc in any story when you get down to it. I always approach them from that standpoint of the cliche that every villain is the hero in their own story, and that helps inform a desire to like and be interested in them rather than just see them as inhuman well-designed costumes or creatures. This goes back to an early a-ha moment I had surrounding Captain Hook and the crocodile. The idea that a nemesis could have his own nemesis blew my mind and threw open the gates of that area of stories I had always been drawn to but never knew why. Even a hero that saves the city from an attacking monster can be a villain to the families he makes homeless or in mourning from battling through the monster. So that kind of gray area approach really fuels a lot of this work, especially with an eco-terrorist like Thanos. Capturing that complexity is what makes it work I think, whether it’s Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth or Godzilla.
When working with pop culture subjects, how do you approach the audience’s expectations? Does that play a role in your process?
It does, though I try to not let that factor in, but it can be hard to cull that influence. I have to be the first audience or fan of the thing I’m working on, regardless of its popularity with an existing audience. Hard to escape when it’s, say Luke Skywalker, or Merida from Brave or Don Corleone. But I also have a real fondness for the weird lil arthouse films and cult shows and that means having to contend with a smaller base of that influence, but one that is exponentially more devoted and smart about their love interest.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a smarter fanbase than the ones that circle around David Lynch’s Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet. Severance is the only newest thing that seems to come close to that vibe and audience. But I’ve been doing this work for a long time and had to contend, pleasantly or not, with fanbases whether it’s for The Matrix, or Conan, Batman, or even the uber sub-genre’s of Prince fans when I did that music video for him, or the hyper enthusiastic bus and train obsessives when I did the work for the NY MTA mural and 5th ave bus poster.
You learn to respect them for the love they throw into their subjects, not to be subservient to what they think they want, and be measured in how you process their hate and praise that it invites to tackle their favorite things. I try to always have respect for them and the subject in that way. But not necessarily thinking about what they might want or not, and keeping my response and interpretation of the subject from a similar place they have: as a fan. This approach tends to solve or smooth over most of the conflicts that can come from, let’s call it a “vibrant” fan base. People have a lot of opinions and more now these days than ever. I try to keep that at a distance when I can for the sake of being present for the subject, rather than the subject’s response.
I think we’ve seen all too many times what happens when you try to overly submit to fan approval or expectations. Frankly, I find all that canon chasing a bit dull and am not loyal to any of it. I love seeing new interpretations of existing material and seek being challenged by it as a goal I hope gets reached. It informs how I also make work that interprets. Not everyone’s happy, or upset, but this is why I keep myself as the primary audience at least at the concept stage.
I am amazed how vast your portfolio is, especially given how time-intensive your drawings seem to be. Knowing traditional pen and ink illustrators who are limited to one major drawing a month, I can only imagine the time and patience something like your graphite portraits can take. For a project like The Piano for Criterion have some extensive sketching going on before going to the final. How are you managing your time, or is it a matter of prioritizing the ideas?
One of the true gifts of working in comics for 30 years is you get to be real fast by necessity. There is SO much to manage and consider when you’re making comics. There’s really no time to waste on being overly ponderous or laggy with. You’ve got to get that panel done so you can do the next panel, that page for the next page, and so on.
It’s helped me fuel my career as a kind of Johnny-on-the-spot type artist. A lot of my initial opportunities and even some today are made possible by that speed. If a project is the right one or a good one to play with, I’ll get ideas blooming in my head the moment I start thinking about it or reading it or watching the screener. Which works well for my ADHD brain to hop from one project to the next, especially when there’s overlap—and there’s always overlap.
When I started working in children’s picture books and became close to a lot of the colleagues in that medium, I was surprised to find how long most everyone spent on them, sometimes a year or more to just draw or paint them. From my perspective, an entire 40-page picture book held as much work as just 3-5 pages of a comic or graphic novel. It’s comics that taught me that, and that gift never stops giving.
When I draw I draw intensely, and sometimes for hours at a time, and I try to get a lot done in that time. When I did the 52 Weeks Project series Songs of Ice and Fire (for Martin’s/HBO’s Game of Thrones), I was sort of surprised to find I could conceive of and execute one of those very large and intricate portraits in a single day. It’s just my process I guess. We all have our own.
I tend to like to draw the piece while I’m drawing it so I don’t lose a lot of time to prelim studies, unless there’s a need to capture a likeness just so, or draw something I’m not used to like a particular vine of flowers Jane Campion has found from her native New Zealand, or making sure I know how Oscar Isaac holds himself, etc. I will often do a series of quick recursive studies and sketches in those cases. For The Piano, the original drawing changed a good bit as we went through. The process is always ongoing until it goes to press, actually. I will often make major changes all the way up and into those final moments.
I keep returning to your Twin Peaks work, where you created a deluge of inspired work. Does creating more work than necessary help you find what it is the project needs?
I think it must—I do it all the time. I think I was asked to make maybe three or four sumi style pieces for my very first Criterion project, Three Outlaw Samurai, and ended up actually making 12 or more. I think they ended up using all of it in the final outcome, which I think made it better. I don’t want to encourage publishers to insist to make their artists work three or thirty different cover ideas for them to pay for one, but I do tend to find the special secret insights into a story when I work at them like this. I suppose in place of more classical sketches and studies, this is how I work. I think even for some private commissions I’ll do one or two whole extra pieces because I couldn’t settle on a particular one as a primary—so this is clearly a thing I do.
For Twin Peaks, again one always led to another. A piece about Wyndom Earle will suddenly lead into a piece about Cooper or deep dive into Nadine’s weird world. But as I mentioned before, my crazy bumblebee brain is richly suited for this kind of work and at my heart I am of the school of artists who see that most of art-making is about editing, which means having as much as you can muster to edit and build towards the perfect outcome. It does mean a lot gets left on the floor, but the final piece tends to be better for it and that is the ultimate goal anyway.
Was working with Mondo your first foray into the world of limited edition screen printed posters?
I had been illustrating book covers for years, children's picture books and comics before falling headlong into the film/tv world I now find myself swimming in. I had done some development work for films and spent a few years also developing stuff with a creative partner, but if I recall correctly, it was To Kill a Mockingbird, for a small private commission group that was my first dance. We did some for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Godfather Trilogy, etc. The alt-poster community is deeply interconnected, and everyone is seeing what everyone else is doing there and I think through that network Mitch Putnam reached out to come and play in the Mondo playground.
Like all the mediums I work in, I came to posters as a kind of dilettante outsider, which can have its benefits as much as its detriments. But that kind of formula fit well with Mondo who was then especially mandated towards finding new alternate ways to express these beloved films. Because I could capture a likeness well that put me in the path of also working on some new releases as we went on, and we did make a LOT of work there together.
You write extensively on your work over on Muddy Colors. Returning to the idea of mentally processing a subject / project, do these essays help you let go of, or move on from a job? Does the writing lead you to having discoveries into your own work habits?
I think the Muddy Colors articles are more historical or informative rather than any kind of catharsis in doing them. Sometimes they can be a place where the schedule lines up with a release like say, in the case of Dune, I can pad the release with extra unused art, sketch work and a description of the process to help support the final product. A lot of them are the sort of information dumps or career insights and lessons I felt I missed coming up through school—no one at Pratt really prepared the students for actually BEING artists once they left school: the gallery approach, working with an art director, submitting a coherent pitch or all the myriad of professional experiences that can be smoothed of rookie mistakes. Maybe they do it now they should, but in that area for me, this is a way to fix that lack I had coming up.
I also try to keep in mind the other artist/writers posting there—no need for me to do a demo as much when Dan Dos, Scotty Fisher or Greg Manchess are there doing it like bosses. So I try to see what’s available and offer a different area where I can. It’s more a service to the colleagues, students and up and coming artists, with fans taking up the tail end of that pecking order. It can also become an archive of one’s own work, like a kind of art diary of process, method, and experience.
A lot changes over time. Back when I was starting out in comics in the pre internet times, fax machines were how you pitched or got a meeting to sit down and meet an editor as an example. But most of these deeper lessons remain true despite how the deck chairs are rearranged on the industry table.
You were charged with CODA’s first release, the score for David Lynch’s classic film Blue Velvet on vinyl. Having spent quite a long time with Twin Peaks, was it an easy return to the world of David Lynch? Twin Peaks is not the same as Blue Velvet, but both share Lynch’s unique voice. When you were asked about the gig, did any images or directions to take make themselves immediately known?
In many ways, yes it very much is a return to a familiar arena of stories. Though Blue Velvet occupies its own world, like all his films for me personally, there are through lines that circulate in and out of David’s work. Themes of light and dark, an innocent girl in distress and falling, a fight against darkness and their intermix with the good.
Blue Velvet is a true historical masterpiece in its own right and marks the first real outing of Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch dreaming together. That alone is a major moment for those of us steeped in Lynch’s work and biography. Angelo became such a musical voice for his stories and characters from this point forward.
Facing these daunting moments, I decided to go personal, intimate, and smaller and set that against the larger themes that breathe through this film and through most of Lynch’s work. For its own reasons and due to its particular story, those characters and the way the narrative flows as Jeffrey Beaumont tumbles into Frank’s dark universe. It’s a film with some serious iconic images and moments that has been subjected to a lot of art interpretations already, so my job is to always try to see if I can find some previously undiscovered connection or unexplored theme to run after. So that means starting off with the foundational basics: Frank and Jeffrey. Then expanding out to include Sandy and Dorothy and so on.
For this new release of Angelo’s frankly amazing and timeless score, I wanted to stay close to the core relationships and characters. This, in many ways is akin to the Twin Peaks approach I did before but what’s different is the particular world that Blue Velvet occupies, that is unique, and cleaving close to that reality.
LP work like this offers a particular gift not just in terms of providing more real estate to express art in, but the inherent interactivity of how the work is met. You don’t flip pages like a book, but need to consider how the audience holds it, what they move to open it, what is waiting for them when they say, slide the pet sleeve off, what is hidden inside the interior housing the record.
Every step can be built and shaped to steer that experience and reward the audience by gifting them with more as they travel through it. For Blue Velvet we pull that sleeve to see Jeffrey and the ear, we open to see Frank and we hid a whole set of illustrations of the bugs and creatures that cohabitate in this world of macro and micro. LPs are a marvelous medium to play with if you take advantage of what CAN be done as opposed to what you can get away with.
From posters, books covers, and comics to your graphic novel collaborations Meadowlark and Indeh with Ethan Hawke, and as artist and writer for your own The Lost Boy graphic novel you have inhabited many styles and roles in your career. Do you see one style as being your main thing? Would the more comic style of The Lost Boy work in a poster? Does each style fit a particular type of task?
Yeah, I guess I’m not really supposed to do that, changeover styles and mediums. We’re supposed to pick a lane and hold it, but I get bored easily. I actually switched over to sumi at the tail end of my first published graphic novel from Caliber Comics called Sudden Gravity—I’d done the whole of the book in ballpoint pen and was losing my mind doing it, a final sort of extra-spacial hallucination sequence offered the chance to try sumi ink out and I spent the follow fifteen years trying to get good at it. Then I rediscovered the pencil doing a piece for Darren Aronofsky’s gallery show celebrating Noah, and that’s run the course throughout until now.
At the heart of it must be a sense of worry at getting stuck in a way of thinking. Doing the same kind of painting for years is an idea that makes me feel like I can't breathe to be honest. It makes me feel crazy thinking about it in a way that comes from looking at the tools of expressing a piece as secondary to the piece’s desire to be expressed in its best possible way. I feel like I’m already limited in what I can do, so the idea of not at least trying to push the boundaries of small self-made cage is a survival tool.
At this point I kind of use the various styles as a toolkit and apply them as the subject demands, sometimes preferring a recursive line approach or a piece wants to be made of gold leaf dots or whatever. For Indeh I wanted a solid black and white sumi ink/samurai style for that story. I’d shown Ethan Lone Wolf and Cub the greatest and I think longest single comic story in history, and it felt like the right suit to wear for it. Meadowlark needed something more practical, simple and Texas feeling, so pencil and two-tone color fit.
I guess I see the medium shift as a challenge to pickup and give a go. Sometimes it runs far and wide and I spend years on a medium, other times it has so many restrictions, like the gold-leaf painting pieces recently, I either haven’t found the perfect application for it or it’s just self limiting enough to, well, self limit.
Clients generally do prefer a consistent approach—mostly because you tend to get hired based on what you’ve done before and hope you can do it again for them. That sort of precedent making doesn’t really beg for wild changes. There are clients that are all in for me trying something new out, but in illustration, as a difference from more standard art-making where you can just let the way you work explore itself, I am not doing my job well if my own artistic license gets ahead of the subject I’m there to express. Sumi ink would be a terrible medium for say, The Last of Us work, and the pencils approach would not have served The Lost Boy. I see mediums like a carpenter uses her toolbox—you reach for the one that does the job right.
In my own noncommercial work I will certainly abandon that principle and indulge the pure art experience as much as I can. If I can import that to a book or a project for a film or LP, then I do. But the laws of physics between each arena are different and demand different masters.
There’s a conversation I have with myself quite often that I feel you might have some perspective on: the nature of drawing a portrait. I’m always amazed by the point in a drawing when pencil scratches change into a proper likeness. What is that point: the eyes, mouth, nose? What part of the face makes a true likeness happen?
Well I can absolutely talk about this because YES, I deal with these moments and questions all the time. For good or bad I’ve definitely become known as the portrait guy. What it’s taught me so much is a way of looking I can no longer turn off: I’m always sizing up bone structure, regional and racial influences on shape, build color, all of that comes to play. The dozen or so book covers I’ve done for Nnedi Okorafor’s novels has been the most tremendous lesson in this. Nnedi’s especially, in teaching me how to spot and differentiate a Nigerian from a Tutsi or an Igbo look from a Ugandan. To pick up on certain builds and traits that make a Somali woman look like she should, even though we are inventing these portraits from nothing, to make them look like they are real and true. Especially when a Somali reader picks up a copy. I want her or him to see in that portrait that I get them, and that I see them.
What would you have to leave out of a Kyle McLaughlin portrait for it to no longer be him?
For Kyle—he hosts the classic Scottish of my people, so I’m familiar. As almost any likeness, if you get the eyes, nose and mouth wrong- any one of them, then it’s a dead fish. For Kyle his most distinguishing bits I always fail when I fail to get right are his eyes and how they’re set, his super distinguished mouth, and skull shape. Things fall into place after that pretty well.
Can you nail a likeness for a film character so well that the audience sees the actor and not the character as intended?
Actually that’s a job for the actor and filmmaker—I do say a portrait of Rebecca Ferguson as Jessica of House Atreides, that happens to be played by Rebecca, but I draw her as if this WERE her. Any well known actor has to get over that self made hurdle of becoming the character even more-so than a new unknown person, because of their recognizability. Those that manage to do this well, do the work for me, and if they don’t my portrait of them will reflect that performance in the eye of the viewer. As the artist of the portrait, if I don’t make it an authentic picture of the character, but instead make it look like Florence Pugh cosplaying Irulan instead of BEING Irulan, then that’s my failure.
Your recursive drawings explore the simplicity of a likeness. How much do you need to draw until the likeness is there?
I use those recursives to work through getting those characters nailed down… so often a good half of them end up in the bin. It’s always easier if I’m familiar with them, so say “casting” Ethan Hawke as Jack Johnson in the Meadowlark graphic novel, is easy because I’ve spent way too much time with him already not to have his build sort of in my mental database.
Can you overdraw a portrait and lose that magic, if it is even magic and not simply a formula.
As for that magic, I think it is as much that for me as it is for the viewer when it works. That moment when the drawing becomes that character, it’s just a culmination towards sentience I think. Like shocking Frankenstein’s monster to life: it either moves and has that spark of life or it doesn’t. And if it doesn’t, well, then, try again until it does. There’s a certain point where you can really overwork a piece and it comes sooner than you think, and it’s always better to just try again, fresh and clean.
For the Severance LP you pushed the portraits in the composition, yet they all read like who they are. They’re brilliant.
That was one of the most challenging of projects but also one of the most rewarding. Everyone on the show was great and we had a terrific and enthusiastic partner with them and Apple on that. They just let us run amok, and doing those real practical pieces alongside the Sevvy cartoons and other little additions was a real stretch of the muscles for sure.
