A Conversation with Artist and Friend DeLoss McGraw held in Geisel Library at UCSD, University of California, San Diego on May 19th, 2026. UCSD Acquisitions Night featured myself and my friend Del, a well-known painter and printmaker.
His recently featured exhibition DeLoss McGraw – Painter Poet, celebrated the acquisition of 12 of McGraw’s paintings along with an original edition of Midnight Carnival gifted by the Stéphane Janssen Art Foundation.
DeLoss McGraw’s work is intent on emphasizing the comic dimension of a world that has troubling and often tragic undercurrents.
His art never ignores dark truths, even as its exuberance and passion mean to keep us from despair. It is intent on maintaining a state of wonder that remains connected to childhood.
The fantastical keeps company with the real. Within his paintings and sculptures, the world isn’t populated by humans alone; angels, animals and fanciful creatures make appearances too. The landscape they occupy is rich in atmospheric color and the architecture defies everyday proportions.
A new episode of Art With Bob Pincus on the DeLoss McGraw – Painter Poet exhibition is coming soon.
Videos on YouTube @ArtWithBobPincus
The Talk
Robert L. Pincus (“Bob”): It seems to me also very worked out and structured to get that effect.
DeLoss McGraw (“Del”): Yeah, got to do it. It’s kind of cheating.
Bob: I don’t… maybe paradoxical is a better word than cheating, I don’t know. But you can call it cheating if you want.
Erik Mitchell: Good evening everybody, it’s so wonderful to see a full room tonight. Thank you all for being here. If I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting you before, my name is Erik Mitchell. I’m the Audrey Geisel University Librarian, and it’s a real honor to host you all and of course our amazing guests here tonight.
We’re here tonight to celebrate a very special addition to our library’s collection, the recently gifted artwork of DeLoss McGraw. We’re honored not only to share these works with our community, but to welcome DeLoss here with us tonight along with noted art critic Bob Pincus for what I know will be a thoughtful, engaging conversation.
We love to host events like this because it highlights how much research libraries contribute to our community. I was sharing earlier how exciting it is to see students stop at the gallery just to check out the artwork. They don’t necessarily know, they didn’t come to see that, they came to do their studies. But it’s wonderful to see them engage with our collections and become inspired by them.
That’s just one part of what our special collections and archives help us accomplish by inspiring students with creativity, helping them connect with materials that were created hundreds of years ago, material they never even thought existed before they came to UC San Diego. You know, the gift of artwork by Deloss reflects that mission beautifully. His work brings together visual imagination, intellectual curiosity, and a deep engagement with the human experience, qualities that belong very naturally in our university environment. Now, of course, collections like this don’t just appear on their own. They’re built over time through dedication, expertise, and stewardship, and that brings me to someone whose contributions to this library are truly extraordinary. It’s my pleasure to recognize and introduce our Director of Special Collections and Archives, Lynda Claassen, who will say a few words.
[Applause] Some of you may know Lynda’s been in the library a little while.
[Laughter] And her leadership has helped shape not only the collections, but the culture of care, scholarship, and accessibility that defines them. Literally, generations of students, researchers, and faculty have benefited from her vision and her work.
Lynda Claassen: As Erik said, it’s my privilege and pleasure to develop collections around selected areas that support research instruction for the UCSD academic community and the international body of scholars. Ideally, special collections libraries are carefully constructed physical and intellectual structures, paying attention and service to the institutions they serve.
But thinking about tonight’s event and how these materials and people all came together at UCSD made me think of Legos. [Laughter] How one ends building blocks over time to create a structure to which even more blocks can be added. So the structures which make up special collections keep evolving and are ever under construction, much like this campus I have to say. [Laughter] The first block in this particular structure was the acquisition of the Brighton Press Archives in 1999.
Brighton Press, as many of you know, was San Diego’s splendid fine press that produced a number of publications over the years, all of which included original work by a variety of artists. One of the artists whose work was included in some of their publications was Deloss McGraw, and that was our introduction to Deloss. His colorful works illustrated many works of poetry that the press produced. The second block of this structure was added in 2003, when the library acquired Deloss McGraw’s archive. These materials included correspondence, sketches and drawings, his own writings, mock-ups of the many books he was working on, and a large cast paper work, a big pink bear, which has graced the wall of our seminar room since it arrived. Additions to Del’s archives arrived in 2013, and you’ll be able to see more of Del’s work tonight in special collections after this evening’s particular event.
Bob Pincus’s archives began to arrive in 2024 and officially became the third block of this structure in 2025. This archive sheds light on years of cultural and artistic events in San Diego and Southern California. Bob’s long and close critical relationship with Deloss McGraw was also of great collecting interest to us. So the final block in tonight’s story of collection construction began in early February of 2025. Deloss, who has a wonderful way of keeping in touch through little postcards or drawings, and he sends just every once in a while. (Things like this [postcard] arrive in the mail) contacted me about a private collection in Arizona, the Stéphane Janssen Foundation, that was going to desaccession its collection, or much of it, after the death of its principal. Their original works of art, including Del’s, would be offered to other interested and appropriate institutions at no cost.
Not the usual circumstance for things in a library. So following Del’s suggestion, of course I telephoned the Foundation and had a delightful conversation with the curator Ann Sanchez. Yes, the Foundation was making its works available to other institutions. She was thrilled to learn that we held Del’s archives and immediately suggested that UCSD should have the framed paintings of Midnight Carnival, which can be seen in the gallery exhibit. She also indicated that she’d send a list of other Deloss paintings for which I could select for UCSD.
Managing somewhat not to be too greedy going through that list, I did select a dozen paintings for UCSD, the ones I thought would make the most sense in relation to our other materials. So now we have all the pieces in place of our structure and why we’re happily able to bring two of the important personal elements of our structure here tonight, Bob and Del.
So let me talk a little bit about them. Bob Pincus is an art critic, art educator, and arts writer. He served for 25 years as the art critic and books editor for the San Diego Union Tribune after he had done the same for the Los Angeles Times. His seminal book on the artist Edward Kienholz, On a Scale That Competes With The World, was published by UC Press in 1990.
Bob holds a PhD in Art History and English from USC, where he also received an MA in American Studies. He currently teaches at Cal State Long Beach and University of San Diego. A legendary exhibition curator and a contributor to numerous art publications and exhibition catalogs, Bob has also been an avid interpreter of Del’s work.
The artist Deloss McGraw hails from Oklahoma, and his interest in and love of art was established at a very early age. He left Oklahoma for Los Angeles, where he studied at the Otis Art Institute and received a degree from Cal State, and then an MFA from the storied Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan.
After his service in Vietnam, Del taught at Northern Kentucky, then at the University of San Diego in the late 1970s. In the 1980s, he was active in the Los Angeles art world, and that’s when he, I believe, met Bob. Is that true?
Bob: It’s about right.
Lynda: Sort of, about right. It was in the 1980s that Del decided to devote himself full-time to the arts. He continues to paint, write, and create from his current home in South Carolina. So gentlemen, if you would please take your seats, and if everyone else will join me in welcoming Bob Pincus and Deloss McGraw.
Bob: Yeah, actually, you know, I’ll start off with just saying a quick word about how I had written about Deloss’s work before I ever knew him, and actually didn’t meet him until I came to San Diego as a critic and realized he was in San Diego. And then looked you up and you were living in Golden Hill at the time, and that’s when we did our first interview together in 1985, I believe, ‘86, right around there. Who can remember, ‘85, ‘86, you know? That’s a long time ago.
Del: I know that the article you wrote referenced my house as rambling.
Bob: Is that true?
Del: Yeah.
Bob: Anyway, so yeah, all of that was very fortuitous. I would start with saying it was very fortuitous to, I was assigned a review. You know, when I started out as a critic, I was writing at the LA Times, and I was the junior critic of course, and so they would give me assignments and they assigned me your show. That was the first, that was a great stroke of luck, which started the whole thing rolling. I thought maybe a place to start with all of this was to talk about your evolution as an artist a little bit.
Del: What?
Bob: Your evolution as an artist. And one question that I thought might be of interest to people is the idea that, when did you know that poetry and fiction would play such a large role in your art?
Del: You would have to know my mother.
Bob: I have a question about your mother too, coming up.
Del: My mother was a lit teacher and all my life we were filled with Hemingway and Faulkner.
Bob: That’s it?
Del: Yeah.
Bob: And how did that make you encouraged to keep going with poetry and fiction if you only had Hemingway and Faulkner to work with?
Del: My father was an architect and my mother always said that I should be an artist because they were divorced and because my dad was an architect. I think she knew that I did not do well in math so I wouldn’t be an architect.
Bob: Do I remember correctly that you would come out to visit your dad and you would see some art in Los Angeles? Is that possible?
Del: Yes, I saw what was a huge influence on me was the Bonnard exhibition at the LA County [Museum of Art]. And not long after that I attended Otis [College of Art and Design] and I got to go to the Bonnard show every week. That was at Otis. And that stayed with me. Now I did leave Otis for particular reasons and I went to Cal State Long Beach. There was a man named Bob Evermon and he taught, it was new. Can you hear me? What was new and of interest at that time was lithography.
And a man named Bob Evermon was teaching it at Long Beach State and I went there and why lithography was so important to me is that I had been, people had been teaching me painting, other painting teachers and they taught it with the brushwork and I worked off of the stone. So is this making sense? So I had to make my things flat and I was making this up. No one told me about it. And lithography is planographic in that sense and that’s when I kept up painting that particular way.
Bob: Does that, what you’re saying about lithography and what you learned there.
Del: Yes.
Bob: How does that then segue into what your painting style became?
Del: Oh, I think that it had a lot to do with it because it’s so flat, you know, and these were not small. These were large stones that you ground and you drew on it and I thought that I would, I have made lithographs at Tamarind [Institute] and other places, but I’m not a craftsman. I was a painter, you know, but it gave me the direction of not painting with the brush. Am I making sense?
Bob: Yeah, and it’s interesting because if we think now about some of the work that’s out there, whether you’ve looked at it or not yet, there are a lot of paintings but prints also because you, as you talked about Brighton Press and how you returned to printmaking but kind of bringing your painting style back to printmaking.
Del: Yes. Yes.
Bob: And so the two seem very united to me.
Del: Yes, thank you. Usually I don’t talk about that because I confuse everyone.
Bob: Okay, we’ll move on to another subject then.
Del: Right.
Bob: Yeah, I’m thinking about, I’m going to return to this literature subject again a little bit.
Del: Yeah.
Bob: Beyond Hemingway and Faulkner.
Del: Right. Oh, I don’t know. [Laughter]
Bob: We have to go beyond Hemingway and Faulkner. But when did the poetry come into it? Because you were so, that is so key in terms of the pieces with Snodgrass and how that relationship-
Del: I think that even started, I could be wrong, but I think that even started in high school. I can remember my senior year. I went to state competition and they were handing out the awards and I won in English literature, I won third place and my mother fell out of the chair.
Bob: She didn’t know you wrote at all?
Del: Oh no, she knew that I was writing, but she didn’t know that I had placed anything. And she said, I had to drive her home with me to Okemah and she asked me to tell her the questions. It was a question, answer, and then you wrote an essay. And she said after I finished, “Your essay must have been brilliant because you missed all the questions.” That’s true, her statement.
Bob: Let me talk for a minute about you and Mr. Snodgrass.
Del: Yeah.
Bob: And how that came to be. Because if we follow the works out there in the handsome exhibition, you were making pieces about his poetry before you ever met.
Del: Yes.
Bob: And you were, were you sending him just images of the paintings? Or how did, and then how did that conversation then come to be?
Del: I sent him a, not a drawing, but I sent him a letter asking if I could use his poetry for my paintings.
Bob: And he didn’t know you.
Del: And he wrote back and said, you can do anything you want to, but spell my name right. That’s true. I remember now, I was asked to be a guest artist at Cranbrook Academy. And that’s when I wrote D and asked. I told him that they wanted me to make a print, and could I use a poem of his for that?
Bob: My sense of the work, if I may interject here as a-
Del: Yeah.
Bob: Critical comment, is that you started to develop a bit of a persona for him in your art.
Del: Yes.
Bob: Even before you two got together.
Del: Yeah, I think that’s true.
Bob: And then you, here’s where I am asking you because I don’t really know. How did the, because you guys created a character which is not the poet, not you, but you called him W.D. And became his own character that was in the paintings and the poems.
Del: Right, right.
Bob: How did that come to be?
Del: The way you just described it.
Bob: I described it, yeah. But did you guys just talk about it? Or did it just happen?
Del: No. No. There was never any talk. I just would send him letters and drawings, sketches, and he would reply. But we didn’t use the phone, telephone. No, I think that just turned out to be wise. He would write and ask questions about particular ideas, or that it appeared to be. But no.
Bob: Yeah. So now, to me it seems like you developed a true collaboration.
Del: Correct.
Bob: It’s not, and I never would call what you paint is illustrating a poem or vice versa.
Del: But I loved his work.
Bob: Would you talk about that for a moment?
Del: Oh.
Bob: What did you love about his work?
Del: Sure. I loved, it was so straightforward and honest. And I liked, it wasn’t so much that I liked, it’s that I loved it.
Bob: So if that’s the case, do you feel like part of what you liked in him was the music of his language, the way he used words.
Del: What?
Bob: The music of his language.
Del: The music of his language? Not music, but the music of his language. Yes, yes.
Bob: Yeah. I was struck actually reading, again, the poems from W.D.’s Midnight Carnival.
Del: Yes.
Bob: I reread those for thinking about this evening. And of course, all those etchings, those colored etchings are on the wall, so you can look at them if you haven’t yet. But I was reading you one passage from the first poem, which is about, and I just thought, ‘Amazing use of words.’ I’ll just read the… It was about Mr. Sun, is it that?
Del: Yeah.
Bob: He says, “The sun is a lion circling his cage, caught for you, brought for you on this wheeled stage, through fixed bars glaring his wrath and his rage.” I mean, it’s just beautiful use of language. And the thing is that what I’ve discovered rereading these things is that he is, and this isn’t any way to trivialize it, he’s very comic in his poetry. Very funny, switches from vernacular to very formal language, back and forth. And I think that comic effect is, and I don’t mean it as just comedy, but it can be very dark sometimes. But it always has that exuberance, which is in your work as well.
Del: I had recently around this time, remarried, and the woman I married said, “My god, everything you like is ironic.” And I think that so. D is the same way.
Bob: By that, you mean never straightforwardly sincere, there’s always irony in it?
Del: Right.
Bob: Yeah.
Del: Right.
Bob: Would that, sometimes one of the descriptors that’s been attached to your work is whimsical.
Del: Yes.
Bob: But irony doesn’t quite seem to go with whimsy, does it? Or does it, in your opinion?
Del: Well, I can understand how that word is used with my work, whimsy, right?
Bob: Yeah.
Del: But I still think the word ironic is closer to it.
Bob: Mm-hmm. For both of you?
Del: Yes.
Bob: So you were on the same wavelength as it were?
Del: Right, right. He would write or call even at times and say, “What did you mean by this?”
Bob: And did you think he was being ironic?
Del: No.
Bob: [Chuckles] I’m interested also in fairy tales.
Del: In what?
Bob: Or let’s say nursery rhymes for a minute.
Del: Okay.
Bob: You two seem to arrive at the idea of using nursery rhymes as a launching off point. Obviously, The Death of Cock Robin.
Del: Yes.
Bob: The House The Poet Built.
Del: Yes.
Bob: How did that come to be as a launching off point for you?
Del: I did Cock Robin because I wanted to work with that idea. And Cock Robin is the poem that introduces the child to death experience. And that’s why I selected it. And he enjoyed that. He goes through the whole animal kingdom.
Bob: Oh, yeah.
Del: “Who killed Cock Robin?”
Bob: Yeah.
Del: “I says the sparrow. I shot him with my tiny bow and arrow.”
Bob: And I noticed he uses different animals than the nursery rhyme as well. One of the other things I noticed also in rereading was the animals aren’t quite as admirable in his poetry as they are in the nursery rhyme. Like they’re all doing sort of noble things to help Cock Robin get buried and honored. But he’s saying they’re trying to sort of escape. They don’t want to be tied to his death.
Del: Right.
Bob: Yeah. I guess there’s the irony, right?
Del: They’re like us.
Bob: They’re more human.
Del: Yes.
Bob: Yeah, the animals in his poetry. Did you find that, was that hard to paint?
Del: No.
Bob: Not at all
Del: No.
Bob: How did you, I mean, I think of the-
Del: Those ideas come to me really quickly.
Bob: Yeah? Now the WD character, W.D. Snodgrass in the paintings, seems to be a little bit tied into the idea of a sorcerer or wizard or something because sometimes he’s wearing a, or is it a dunce cap? What would you call it?
Del: It’s a dunce cap.
Bob: Okay. Nothing magical.
Del: Right.
Bob: Why a dunce cap? It’s just-
Del: Because he and we are a bit of a fool.
Bob: Mhmm, all of us.?
Del: We get it wrong.
Bob: Yeah. And we do, probably.
Del: Yeah.
Bob: I would also say that I wanted to ask you about Alice.
Del: Yeah.
Bob: There’s only little bits of Alice in the show, but that book you did, Alice’s Adventures Underground of course, which has been illustrated by other people, but you felt really compelled to paint that.
Del: Yes, yes.
Bob: Can you tell me a little bit about your identification with Alice?
Del: Sure. It’s kind of interesting. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. HarperCollins published it, and I have to tell you that it did win Book of the Year [Illustrator’s Society]. And the woman who was my editor, Simone Kaplan, did not want me to do Alice. But I said, “I won’t do anything unless I do Alice.” You know, I was just convinced of the right, that for me. Alice had been important to me.
Bob: And did you identify with Alice in some way that made it important for you to do that book?
Del: I think that, I didn’t personally identify with her, but I admired the little child. And I think, in a way, it’s not so far from Snodgrass who did all the poems on his daughter.
Bob: Yeah, I would recommend everybody just, at some point look that book up because it’s beautifully done. And I wanted to ask you, do you feel that the way you did it was illustrating it? Or was it, again, the same way you did with, like Cock Robin?
Del: No, I think that it was done, I think the same way that the Cock Robin was. It emoted, can I say that? And I’ve always been in love with not the Alice character, but the Alice idea. The child, the adult child.
Bob: The child who has some wisdom?
Del: Yes, yes.
Bob: One of the things that he’s done is, he’s done more series with Alice going other places, right?
Del: Doing what?
Bob: You’ve done Alice going other places, like Alice in Oklahoma.
Del: Yeah. Yeah.
Bob: So Alice lives on, she sort of transcended the book, you know, transcended the Lewis Carroll version of Alice. Why did it endure? Why did it continue on for you? She must have a life then within your life beyond.
Del: Yeah, it brings in a few things, but I just wanted to paint her. And that’s, and . . . you know, some person calls you and they own a gallery, and they want your work, or they think they do maybe. And so you work it out to do what you want to do.
Bob: Yeah, yeah.
Del: In the Alice book, is that there were all kinds of problems with the publisher. And Simone Kaplan, the editor that I was told, went down there every day fighting to get what we wanted our way. They wanted it a different way. I don’t know what that was.
Bob: Do you think you’ll continue to paint Alice?
Del: Oh, yeah.
Bob: Yeah, yeah. I have to tell you just a little quick aside here that I remember when you had a show about Alice at the Cannon Gallery in Carlsbad, and you had done a table, right? You did a chairs and table.
Del: Oh yeah. Yeah.
Bob: The tea party.
Del: Yeah.
Bob: And I went in to see the show, and there were kids there that day.
Del: Yeah.
Bob: And they were all sitting around his table. And you can’t forget the expressions on their face. Like, “I get to sit on the rabbit chair at the table!?”
Del: Yeah.
Bob: Yeah. And I just have to think that would help bring literature to life for them, you know? It really activated it.
Del: Thank you. Yes.
Bob: I thought maybe I’d segue a little bit into the idea about your style of paintings.
Del: I think that one thing, this is hard to understand. And I’m not sure that you’ll know who this artist was. But I was in Germany, and with a good friend of mine. He’s German, and we drove to the University of Hamburg to meet him.
You know who Wunderlich is? Wunderlich was his name. Okay. He was a printmaker, and we drove there, and he wasn’t there. They said he was in Paris or somewhere. And anyway, what was interesting is I went, or maybe I snuck. I went into his studio and he was known as this tremendous technician. And the studio was just a mess. And I realized that he didn’t, in making lithography, he was so good at it. He used things as painting palettes, just as he would use them. And they were just all over the shop. And that was an inspiration for me that I realized I had been schooled a different way in lithography, which was good and right, but it was to be really technical and clean. And this was not it. He was using it like a painting.
Bob: So you had license to-
Del: Like a studio, yeah. So I’m saying that was a great-
Bob: It was a revelation.
Del: Yes, realization.
Bob: Now, did that mean you felt like it could be more expressive and messy, printmaking?
Del: Yeah.
Bob: Yeah, yeah. As in like The House the Poet Built?
Del: Yes.
Bob: Yeah. Yeah, because you feel like there’s a lot of spontaneity in the work, which is probably not spontaneous necessarily.
Del: In the House the Poet Built?
Bob: Yeah. In the way it looks.
Del: But– Yeah, right. You’re right. It was more calculated.
Bob: Yeah. But I always was interested in how you made the calculated not look calculated.
Del: Yeah, I tried to do that, right. Right.
Bob: Yeah. Is that true of your paintings as well?
Del: Well, I don’t really separate them. The drawings, prints, and stuff. It’s all the same thing.
Bob: OK. Yeah, because I think your work, if I may use a description of it, is very expressive. And you could go as far as it’s expressionistic. But it seems to me also very worked out and structured to get that effect. Yeah.
Del: Yeah. You got to do it. It’s kind of cheating.
Bob: I don’t, maybe paradoxical is a better word than cheating. I don’t know. But you can call it cheating if you want. What do you feel like you’re working on now that interests you? Would you like to say anything about that?
Del: I am. Well, I have this idea that I’m just really in love with. And I attempted to do some things. And I think that there’s good in them. But it’s not in a way that’s going to lay out a large series for me. And that is, this comes out of the Bible. Eli is an elderly man. And Samuel is like two or three years old. And I just love it. And he tells Samuel to go to bed. And then Samuel does, but he gets up. And he says, “Here I am, Eli. You called me.”
And he said, “I didn’t call you. Go back to bed.” So he does. And this goes on in the Bible about three times. And he’ll say, “Eli, here I am.” And what’s happening is Eli then realizes that it must be God that’s calling Samuel. Then there is no more. Now what I’ve done is Samuel’s little, so I’ve made little bitty paintings.
And they’re little gouache and oil paintings. And I haven’t exhibited them or shown them. But I’m just in love with this idea.
Bob: Well, again, you’re back to the child. The child as the main feature of these paintings.
Del: Right.
Bob: You’re thinking about him and maybe what his life will become. Or is at that moment in time?
Del: I don’t know where it’s going. I just love this early part of Samuel thinking that Eli is calling him.
Bob: I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask you one more question.
Del: Yeah.
Bob: Okay. And that is, I realize, reminded looking at the exhibition here, how Stéphane Janssen was important to you. What does it mean to have a collector be that devoted to your work?
Del: Yeah. I think he owned like 80 or 90 paintings of mine. How many do you have?
Lynda: 12.
Del: 12? Okay.
Bob: That’s a pretty good percentage of them.
Del: And, but it goes. I was showing with a gallery downtown Los Angeles, Adrienne Simard, and no one sold anything ever. And then one day I got a phone call and it was the gallery receptionist. And she said, “Dell, a man came in today and bought all your paintings.”
And Stéphane was a collector in Europe. He was European from Brussels. And he collected the art called CoBrA. You might know it, which meant Copenhagen, Oslo, Brussels [Amsterdam]. And these were artists that used a, word and image.
And he saw my work and thought it was CoBrA.
Bob: Yeah. Well, he obviously identified with it.
Del: Yeah, identified with that. And there’s a painting there that is, I think, like the first painting that he bought early. And that’s the one where it says The Poet is Terrified by His Own Thought.
Bob: That was the first one? Is that-
Del: I think it’s close to it.
Bob: Yeah. And he never stopped acquiring your work.
Del: No. No. He passed on, but he never, he even bought work of mine through photographs.
Bob: Oh, yeah.
Del: Early work of mine. I tried working in photography before and I had some photographs. I noticed those were bought in his collection.
Bob: So he wanted to see your work from sort of the whole evolution of it.
Del: I guess.
Bob: Yeah. Well, that’s what I’m seeing from that. And I think it’s interesting because what it says to me about him as a collector is that he collected for the right reason.
Del: What?
Bob: He collected for the right reason. He loved, he just collected what he loved.
Del: Yes.
Bob: He didn’t worry about what other collectors did or trends or whatever.
Del: He said that I could, I wasn’t the only one. There were other artists too. But that when he passed on, he left the word with Ann. She’s his wife.
Bob: Yeah, Linda men-, Ann Sanchez.
Del: Ann Sanchez, right. That I could donate my work to any place I wanted to, but I could not receive any money from it.
Bob: Mh-hmm, interesting. Maybe should we open it up to questions now? Yeah. People might have from anything I said or anything Deloss said.
Del: I don’t think too many of them are asleep.
Bob: No, I don’t think so. I think you’ve kept him awake. Would anybody like to, have a question for the artist or me or both?
Del: The biggest influence?
Bob: Biggest influence on your work. I’m assuming among artists, right? Yes.
Bob: From other artists? Yeah.
Del: Well, I think it’d be early on that artist Paul Wunderlich. People can’t believe it when I tell them that.
Bob: Because the work doesn’t look like your work.
Del: No. I mean, he basically became a pornographer.
Bob: Oh, god. And that’s not the work you were interested in?
Del: But he does these beautiful water washes. You know, and all of his work is lithography, and he really understands it. But the interest that I took from it was in painting. And I mean, I never could make prints like his with the water washes. It’s too difficult.
Audience: Tell us about the book, Alice.
Bob: Yes?
Audience: I hadn’t heard of that. Is that something you wrote?
Bob: No, no, no. To explain, it’s the classic text, Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland. Although Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is the full title. And so you’re just reading it with, instead of the original illustrations by John Tenniel, you’ve got his illustrations in it. But I would just sort of put the word illustrations in quotations since he’s not literally illustrating it. But you’re kind of, would you say, playing off of the text?
Del: Yeah.
Bob: Yeah. It’s very colorful. No black and white illustrations.
Del: No.
Bob: Yeah. It’s beautifully designed by the way, and I’m going to interject here. He, because Deloss told me that the woman who designed the book, and I don’t know her name, he’ll tell me. It was the first book she ever designed.
Del: Yes, correct. She was a kid.
Bob: Yeah. I was, it was uncanny when I saw it.
Del: HarperCollins did not really like me. So they didn’t give me anyone, really, I’m serious, anyone good. And they thought-
Bob: They didn’t think she was good.
Del: They thought she was bad. And her first designs were terrible in the book. And I said, “Don’t try and please me. You just please yourself.” And she did this beautiful design work.
Bob: Yeah.
Del: Yeah, it is. You can, I can say this. If you want to buy the book, you can buy it on Abebooks for about $10. You can. You can buy it online.
Audience: How do you create art based on poetry? Do you read a poem and then think about what the poem means to you? Or is it just an image in the poem that you focus on, like one stanza? What’s the process? I’m just curious.
Del: Works both ways. It’s whatever tugs at your heart. And it’s like Eli and
Bob: Samuel.
Del: Samuel. I just fell in love with that image. I think that’s important. That’s what gets it across. Your passion about the idea.
Bob: Thank you all for being such an attentive audience, really. It’s been great. And pleasure to hear, I’ve learned new things.
Del: Oh, he didn’t learn anything.
Bob: Yes, I did. I did. I really did. And so we can end it there. That’s perfect.
Del: I’m greatly honored to be here.
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