Entry 4 – The start of slowly letting go of identifying as an artist
School of Visual Arts 1983 – 1986
What is desktop publishing?
Welcome to the fourth blog entry of My life and letting go. If you are reading my blog for the first time, I suggest you read the previous entries as well, there are only two written that are free. My last entry was designed only for paid subscribers but I received nice feedback from a free subscriber who somehow was able to read it, so not sure what’s going on there. I’m still figuring out how Substack works.
Getting back to where I left off in entry 2, it was 1988, I was newly single after my ex Debby dumped me and kicked me out of her apartment in Greenwich Village and I was now living on the Upper West Side (UWS) with my roommate Jeffrey and his cat that shat on my bed when I first moved in. I was miserable and lonely and was starting to not like living in New York City anymore and was contemplating moving.
However, I’m not writing about my big move out of the city just yet. While I was living uptown on the UWS, I was working all the way downtown in the financial district at a company I will call Fiduciary. At Fiduciary I learned desktop publishing (DTP). A new innovation at the time in the 1980s, desktop publishing was the process of using a computer application to layout a document that you could see on a computer screen before printing it. Basically the way all graphic designers work today, but the terminology, desktop publishing, is a thing of the past. At Fiduciary, I used a software called PageMaker, an early DTP application that was the industry standard, but it’s now obsolete. This on-the-job education was fundamental to my then future and now present career as a magazine publisher.
In the mid 1980s I was aspiring to be a yuppie (young urban professional) or guppie (gay yuppie)—a silly label that was created during that time period. However I was not close at all to being a yuppie or guppie. I was an artist and actually liked the idea of being bohemian. I just liked the idea of being financially stable after living on deviled egg sandwiches and Campbell’s Tomato Soup when I was a poor student in my last years at the School of Visual Arts (SVA). However, being a poor student at SVA led me to my job at Fiduciary and desktop publishing.
SVA student for hire
While I was a student at SVA, the school had this office with a terrific job board that I would check daily for companies and individuals seeking a student artist to work on projects, as well as for part time and temporary jobs. The job board was valuable, not only did it provide me with art world experience, it helped pay my expenses and tuition. It also exposed me to different work experiences that I would not have sitting in a classroom. For the three years I was at SVA, I checked the job board frequently and was fortunate to be hired for a variety of different jobs. The following are some of the jobs I was hired for.
One of the jobs included designing a sign for a pizza parlor—it hung from the side of a building. Sometime after I finished this job, I bumped into the fellow that hired me and he said the sign turned out well. I was relieved because I had never designed a sign before. I also designed advertisements for a local newspaper that I don’t think turned out so well because I didn’t know I had to create them in a specific size and the newspaper redid them. That was a lesson learned.
This nice older fellow hired me to create small illustrations on a grid for a bingo game he designed for his child with learning challenges. When he paid me in cash, he told me to hold out my hand where he placed each bill one by one while he counted. I hope his child enjoyed the game. I enjoyed hand painting each little illustration using watercolor gouache on board. All of the drawings are reproduced here, note the old telephone and television. They are emoji like but better quality, although the cat’s face looks kind of weird.
One of the first jobs I had was working for a fellow who lived in a brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn. This was the first time I went to that area. Years later, my wife Sara and I enjoyed living in Park Slope for a few years before it was totally gentrified. Decades later Park Slope would become an affluent area with million dollar homes. The fellow I worked for had produced a film. I accompanied him to some sort of event where he showed his film which was about gay men cruising on the piers in Manhattan, an activity that was part of the gay history of New York City. When I saw the film, it was an eye opening experience for me.
For a short time I worked for a professional illustrator located on the Upper West Side. I thought I could learn trade techniques from this illustrator but the work I did turned out to be washing his coffee mugs and being a gofer; I decided to quit after I picked up his dry cleaning.
I had a job drawing a pencil sketch of an expensive tie for an advertising agency. Stupidly I lost the tie. A serial rapist was at large in the neighborhood I was living in and I was so nervous about this that I accidentally left the tie on a subway car on my way to the ad agency. They weren’t happy I lost the tie but they did like my drawing.
A shady job I got was working for a place called Fun Factory, a textile company located in Chelsea. I took a textile design class at SVA and got the job after I showed them some of my school work. Reproductions of my textile design school work are included in this blog. At Fun Factory, my job was to copy other textile designs, then they’d print the design I copied on fabric or leather (or maybe it was fake leather). One of the designs I copied was from a Louis Vuitton bag. One of the owners, an older man, would tell some of the Spanish speaking women workers to sit on his lap. Their bathroom was always filthy and they paid me with an envelope of cash. Once when I went to use the bathroom, someone stole my pay. It wasn’t fun at the Fun Factory.
Health magazine and photos of the Hudson River
A job that was a foreshadowing of my career was working for Health magazine (this was the first of four magazines I worked for before publishing my own). At Health magazine I was an assistant to the art director, I’ll call her Rickie. When I applied for the job and first met Rickie, she said I was “perfect.” Rickie was white, really cute with a great smile. I had a little crush on her. Health magazine was one of several publications owned by a large corporation.
One of my duties was receiving the illustrations for the magazine. I was astonished that a very simple drawing, maybe one or two lines, drawn with a black Sharpie on plain white paper was being used. The artist probably drew it in 10 minutes or less. I think the artist was paid $50 which would be about $120 today. I also received portfolios from illustrators that would drop them off for Rickie to look at. After seeing these illustrators lugging around these large black portfolios, I decided I didn’t want to be an illustrator (that’s what I was majoring in). Instead I turned my focus to graphic design (although I think I was better at illustration).
A fun part of the job at Health magazine was working on a photo shoot. We did a shoot depicting a party scene to accompany an article about lowering alcohol consumption to benefit one’s health. Rickie invited me to be in the photo and I was happy to be in it. I don’t recall if she thought the photo needed more people in the scene (or maybe she thought it needed more people of color). See the photo in the article on my blog, it’s from Health magazine’s September 1985 issue. Can you find me? Rickie’s husband is to my right. Another memorable photo shoot was of actor Jennifer Beals; she was being photographed for the cover. The movie Flashdance opened in 1983 and catapulted Jennifer Beals’ career. Of course this was decades before she was known for starring in the lesbian drama series the L Word. Jennifer arrived at the photo shoot all upset. I think she said she was pick pocketed, but you would not have known she was upset because she flashed a beautiful smile for the cover. If I had my iPhone back then I would’ve taken a photo of the cover with Jennifer Beals, but cell phones with cameras were not yet invented.
Once Rickie invited me to her home to hang out with her and her husband. I think they were living in the East Village. I had met her husband before at the office, a really sweet brown skinned guy from Belize. When I was hanging out with them, they were playing footsies with each other. Unfortunately my time at Health magazine didn’t last. Rickie asked me if I had a boyfriend. When I said I was gay, she let me go.
A job I really liked was working for the artist and designer Roland Gebhardt. Roland could look at an object, redesign it, and make it look better. If the object had a function, then he could also redesign it to make it function better. At least that’s how I felt about him. Roland was an artist I knew I could learn a lot from. While working with Roland I helped with designing a logo for a storage space company—their logo looks like a slanted cube. At the time I worked for Roland he was also working on designing a signage system for a retail store. Roland had a partner, this woman with very short dark hair. I believe they were a couple. She was also an artist and designer, so she was also my boss. His office was located in lower Manhattan and one of the nicest activities we did was to take a daily photo of the Hudson River from his office window. We’d line up the photos on a wall and compare them. On my blog are a couple of photos I took from Roland’s window during the winter season showing blocks of ice and New Jersey across the river. I was really broken up when he let me go. I think it may have been the perfume I used at the time, it made him sneeze a lot. But like I wrote in entry 2, all of my previous experiences, including the painful ones, have brought me to the good place of where I am today. All my experiences are stepping stones to my present state of being.
Letting go of SVA’s job board
The final job I got from the SVA job office was the full-time position at Fiduciary after recently graduating from SVA. How I got the job is an interesting story. I’ll call my boss at Fiduciary, Bill. Bill had bribed a staff member at SVA’s job office. Bill told the SVA staff person, “If you can get a worker in my office this afternoon, I’ll pay you $50.” I was the worker that showed up for the job. The SVA staff person never got their $50.
That was a foreshadowing of the type of boss Bill was that I should’ve taken heed. Bill was a difficult person to work for. I could never leave at 5:00 PM or 6:00 PM. If I tried, he would stop me on my way out the door and tell me to do some task. This was the case for all his employees. I don’t remember what time I worked until each night but the company paid for a car service to drive us home if we worked extra late. When Sara and I first met, I called that car service to take her home after one of our dates. She was impressed when I did that, saying she was driven home in a limo.
My work at Fiduciary involved creating financial display ads of bond redemption notices. These notices were simple rectangular boxes, black Times Roman type on a white background, very plain looking. I don’t know why Bill approached SVA for this type of work. These financial notices contained a lot of numbers and we had to proof read all these numbers to make sure they were accurate; very boring work. I was paid about $800 per paycheck which would be worth about $3,000 today.
Bill was quirky, had a few unconventional behaviors, and said awkward things. He invited his employees to a birthday party at his home in Brooklyn. There was a chocolate birthday cake there. While he was standing talking to us, all of a sudden, he grabbed a handful of cake with his bare hand, ate it without a plate or fork, and continued talking. Another time we were on a company retreat somewhere outside of the city, Bill’s wife and their very young daughters were there. We were all sitting around a table having a meal, Bill his family and his employees, when Bill addresses my male coworkers and asks, “Any of you want to marry my kids?”
Office culture
Even though the work was not creative and my boss was not someone I admired, what kept me happy there were some of my coworkers (not all of them). I got a job there for a friend from SVA and I worked with some really nice people. To Bill’s credit he did hire a good number of people of color. A big adjustment was not having the regular connection with my coworker friends when later on I started working for myself at home.
Fiduciary operated from a small office in the financial district near the South Street Seaport, a historic waterfront area with a museum, restaurants, shops, and historic sailing ships. Sometimes on my break I’d walk down to the seaport and if it was warm and sunny, I’d take a nap on one of the lounge chairs on an outdoor deck that faced the East River.
Bill moved the company a little uptown to a new large office space in Tribeca that he had designed. It was actually pretty nice with high ceilings, large windows, and a conference room. The production team with our computers together was clustered in the middle of the office and Bill, the sales people, and accounting were on the periphery. The office was big enough that one day one of my coworkers gave another giggling coworker a ride on the handle bars of his bicycle around the production team. We were located close to Chinatown and I’d walk over there with coworkers to eat at Asian restaurants. Many times the company paid for food for us from a nearby deli and I ordered a turkey and arugula sandwich. That was the first time I ate arugula and loved its peppery taste. Now I eat it regularly. I had an embarrassing moment in the office once. I tend to be an overly hard worker and I was busy computering and holding off going to the bathroom to do number two. I held off too long and when I finally got up to go, I passed gas very loudly and my coworkers heard it and had a good belly laugh. It wasn’t a shining moment for me but I like to think of this quote my dear friend Flavia Francesquini wrote: “…I have long believed that being able to laugh at ourselves - and our children - is our saving grace, and what keeps us sane.” At that time I didn’t have a child yet but especially today in 2025 it’s good to find reasons to laugh (at least I feel that way). So I hope this brought a smile to your face.
At Fiduciary, because my main job function was so monotonous, I decided to ask Bill if I could do a little sales work. I didn’t receive commission, but I just wanted to try something else. Seemed to me the sales people were treated with higher regard and I thought, “I bet I could do that.” So on a trip home to Hawaii I approached the State of Hawaii about working with Fiduciary. I had a meeting with a representative inside the Hawaii State Capitol and presented information that I brought with me. An interesting backstory is that I actually took that trip back home to try to salvage a long distance relationship. But she basically said I was too different from her, I think she called me, “trendy.” She was starting her career as a lawyer so I guess an artsy desktop publishing computer geek was not good enough for her. So I was heartbroken and dying inside when I made that presentation at the State Capitol. But you know what? Even though I was crushed inside I was crushing it outside as a sales person and I returned to New York City with business from the state of Hawaii. Later I did another sales trip in the New England area when I first met Sara, but that’s a story for another blog entry.
Letting go of Fiduciary but not DTP
While at Fiduciary I still considered myself an artist, I still created art, and tried to also sell myself as a graphic designer on the side. I worked at Fiduciary for nearly five years and it was my last full time job in an office in New York City.
On February 27, 1989 my father passed away, he was 79. I inherited money from my father and decided I had had enough of Bill and quit Fiduciary. I don’t know if I left in the best way; I ghosted Bill. Back then no one used the word ghosting but one day I never went back to the office. I think I told some of my coworker friends what I was planning (I hope I did). I feel bad if I left my coworker friends short-handed and I apologize to them if I did, but I was done with Bill and creating boring bond redemption notices. Later he had me laying out a newsletter but it was equally as dull. As I said before, all my experiences are stepping stones to my present state of being, including working at Fiduciary.
Once Bill said to me in front of my coworkers, “You’re from Hawaii, isn’t that where they sacrifice people in volcanos?” I know it’s a silly thing to say, maybe he was trying to joke around? Even though he allowed me to do a little sales work I can’t recall him saying one nice comment to me. I did get one raise while I was there and if I stuck around and made five years, I could’ve received a bunch of money from stock shares he gave each employee as an incentive. I know some of my coworker friends received money from their shares when Bill sold the company, but I had money from my dad and was on another trajectory, one that I wasn’t conscious of yet. One that would move me away from my identity as an artist and with my new skills as a desktop publisher; one that moved me towards small magazine publishing.
Thank you
I hope you enjoyed this fourth installment and will continue reading my blog. Thank you to my wife Sara for editing this entry. My blog is a reader supported publication; to receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. And whether you are a free or paid subscriber, your interest and support is greatly appreciated. Until next time, thank you again for reading My life and letting go.
Sitting at an airport in Nairobi, I had time read your blog!
Very cool Angie!