Madonna’s Illustrator Captures The Diva’s Vision

A bag of feathers, a gust of wind and a vision of an idyllic America turned West Chester artist Loren Long into a collaborator with international rock diva Madonna.
Long’s painting of a young boy tossing the feathers to the wind fills the cover of Madonna’s second children’s book, “Mr. Peabody’s Apples“, which goes on sale at book stores around the world on Monday.
Inside the book are another 19 paintings and 12 sketches by Long.

The book is a collaboration, but Long has never met the singer, actress and now writer. “I hope to meet her face to face next week,” during a publicity tour in New York to launch the book, Long said from his basement studio this week. He was working on a portrait of the star as part of the promotion campaign.

“I’ve always admired her career, and I followed the things she’s done“, Long said.
“I didn’t want to illustrate a story unless it was good,” he said. “When I read the manuscript I had a sense of relief. I liked it. I felt the story had merit and my effort would have merit.”
But he was curious how to fashion a working relationship with this dynamic international icon. The creation of the illustrations, he said, proved to be as idyllic as the tiny town of Happville appears in his glowingly nostalgic paintings.
“She and (publisher) Nicholas Callaway let me tell the story the way I wanted to,” he said. “My vision happened to be her vision. — She has extraordinary specific ideas about what she wants. She’s very concise, very creative, with a lot of feedback and vision. But she’s been nothing but creatively respectful to me. She chose me and gave me complete creative freedom.”

Throughout, Madonna and Long discussed concepts and details via e-mail. “She’s so busy in London and L.A. and New York. I would e-mail sketches and she would respond through her assistant, elaborating with detailed descriptions of what she liked and what she ‘envisaged.’ That was the term she used,” She’d say, ‘Loren has envisaged exactly what I envisaged.'”

Long felt the story was set around 1950, but no time period is articulated in the text. “Nicholas at one point suggested we nail down a time. I had a car in a scene and I wanted to be able to make it authentic to the time.

“Within two hours she emailed “1949,” and had a jpeg (a digital image) of a photo of the model car and color. I thought ‘This person is really involved with this.'”

The few changes she requested were minor, he said. “I had intended to put red hats on the baseball players, but she wanted blue hats. I thought, ‘That’s not an argument.'”

Long surmised that Madonna wanted the blue hats because that’s what she wore in “A League of Their Own,” about a professional women’s baseball league during World War II. “Maybe that’s why.

“If you can work with someone for five or six months and have no creative conflicts, that’s truly a wonderful creative collaboration.”

Long still marvels at how he got the job. Callaway, of Callaway Editions, is publishing Madonna’s series of five children’s books, each with a different illustrator. All artists were selected before the first book, “The English Roses,” debuted in September at the top of the New York Times children’s picture book bestseller list.

Long had no idea Madonna was writing the books before he was contacted by Callaway.

Callaway said: “Each book has a completely different story line, characters, setting and style. We wanted to match the story and style to the appropriate artist.

“We spent months looking through artist portfolios, agents’ Web sites, publications, art and illustration journals. It was a global search. We weren’t looking for a name, we were looking for what felt right.”

Long’s style is reminiscent of the great American regionalists of the 1930s and ’40s whom he admires – Thomas Hart Benton, John Stuart Curry, Grant Wood.

“We narrowed it down to a few, and she kept coming back to him,” Callaway said of Long.

On Halloween night 2002, as Long and his wife, Tracy, helped their sons, Griffith, 8, and Graham, 6, get dressed to trick-or-treat, Long’s agent called.

“He told me he was faxing a confidentiality agreement from Callaway Editions,” Long said. “He couldn’t tell me what it was about, but he said I’d want to sign it. I thought, ‘Callaway, those are the people who make the golf clubs. Maybe it’s something with Tiger Woods.'”

He signed.

“I find out Madonna has written a children’s book and she wants me to illustrate it,” Long said, still incredulous. “My agent said they want me in New York.”

But he didn’t have the job yet.

“They said, You’re the front runner. We’d like you to do a test painting. They gave me no direction, no comments. Just the manuscript and one week. Callaway said, “She wants to see what’s in your brain.”

Long painted the climactic scene in the story, when Mr. Peabody and young Tommy stand on the top of the bleachers in the baseball field and spread feathers over the town.

“It’s a magical moment and a magical image,” Callaway said. “When he came back with that painting. we were amazed. He captured the poignant emotion of that moment, when Mr. Peabody teaches Tommy the lesson, which is not to spread false rumors about someone.

“The picture captures the ethos of the heartland of America. It captures the emotional moment, the light and the gesture of the two figures. That’s what makes a great storytelling artist.

“It’s someone who takes you not only to a place the story is set, but into the emotion of the story.”

Callaway sent the painting to Madonna in London, and she decided she had found her artist.

In the story, Mr. Peabody is a beloved coach of the Happville baseball team, but his players and eventually the townspeople turn away from him after rumors spread that he is a thief.

Long read the story to his sons and used Griffith as the model for Billy Little, who looks up to Mr. Peabody.

It’s not the first time Griffith has been a model. A painting of the youngster in Halloween garb, on the Longs’ hall wall, was the original for a Readers Digest illustration. Long’s work also has appeared in Sports Illustrated, Time Magazine, Atlantic Monthly and Forbes. He illustrated the 2003 World Series program.

Madonna’s is his fifth children’s book. The last three had been completed before he was contacted by Callaway, but hadn’t yet been published.

“We didn’t know he did children’s books when we found him,” said Callaway.

Long is a graduate of the University of Kentucky and the American Academy of Art in Chicago. He came to Cincinnati for a job with Gibson Greeting Cards.

“It was a wonderful place for a kid like me to become a professional illustrator,” Long said.

He’d work at Gibson by day and he’d show his work, looking for freelance jobs, at night. His first freelance job was a newspaper illustration of Tony Bennett.

He did advertisements, posters, magazine work. He left Gibson to freelance full time in 1993.

“My first big break was the cover of Forbes Magazine in 1995. It was about investing in your own small town. When I got that I knew people had begun to tap into my regional style,” said Long, who has taught illustration at Northern Kentucky University.

“I’m drawn to the work of the great WPA muralists and American regionalists because there is a narrative quality to all their paintings. They were story tellers. That’s why I like doing children’s books.”

The newest book should catapult Long into international recognition. Already, he’s getting calls for interviews. “From what other artists tell me, that will get more intense.”

The biggest change so far in his career is that he is having to make choices, he said. “I’m beginning to get manuscripts sent to me from different publishers. In the last 10 years, I’ve managed to do OK by saying ‘Yes, I want work.’ Now it’s which work do I want. That’s a good thing.”

Long’s father, Bill Long, should be especially proud.

“Drawing was always the thing I was best at. But I wasn’t from an artistic family,” Long said. “My father was a sales representative for US Gypsum. He was a good salesman, but he told me, ‘My profession never excited me, but it gave me a means to live. I have no idea how you could be an artist for a living, but if you could figure out how to make a living, that would be a nice life.”

Article by Peggy Kreimer
Source: Cincinnati Post