Marc Phares

Diane and I just came back from a great trip to visit my long lost cousins and extended family outside of Wilmington, Delaware, celebrating my Aunt Barbara's birthday. What a terrific experience seeing how everyone was thriving and engaged in the world!

When I realized we were only a few miles away from the Brandywine Museum, which houses choice selections of the Wyeth family artwork, we wrapped up the weekend with a visit to the museum and a tour of N.C.Wyeth's house and studio.

I highly recommend this to fans of the Wyeths if you haven't had the opportunity.
Standing inside the huge studio space, extended to accommodate N.C.'s mural work, I felt a rush of nostalgia for my grandfather's studio in Hillside, NJ, which I remembered from my early years before he died. Frank E. Phares was an illustrator and painter of that same period, the Golden Years of illustration, and his studio had large paintings of indians by rivers, hunting and fishing paintings for Remington and Field and Stream, and personal landscape work in a similar American Impressionist style to that of N.C.'s.

On N.C.'s easel was an unfinished painting that was the last work he did before dying tragically along with his grandson on a rural train crossing in 1945. Most of the studio has stayed intact, left just as it was that year. You could really feel the energy of the decades of groundbreaking work that touched so many millions of reader's lives back in the early 20th century.

The museum has another tour to the Kuerner's farm, and there is talk of adding a third tour to Andrew Wyeth's studio in 2012.

http://www.brandywinemuseum.org

I just finished a fun project for my good friend and colleague Jim Novotny, who is rapidly building a reputation as an intelligence gatherer/sleuth for top pharma companies. As he explained to me, there are " Dark Hat ", " Gray Hat " and " White Hat " data sleuths in the business, with the white hatters being the good guys, i.e. non-law breakers who gather industry intelligence without stepping over the line. He came up with concept of combining an illustration of a white hat, similar to Humphrey Bogart's, along with a " 007 " barcode and the text " Pharmshadow " which I haven't seen yet. I added a backround molecule that is a hybrid of nicotine and caffeine, just to stay in keeping with the pharma/film noir/espionage flavor.