Illustrating Plovers: Bruce Hutchinson

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine. Today I have with me in the studio illustrator Bruce Hutchinson. Thanks for coming in today.

Bruce Hutchinson: Oh, thanks for having me.

Lisa Belisle: So, Bruce, you reached out because you're doing a very special project. Tell me about that.

Bruce Hutchinson: A local author, Andrew, first reached out to me almost two years ago now to collaborate with him and illustrate his children's book. The minute I read the text, I was hooked. It brought a tear to my eye, and I've been plugging away at it. It took me a good year and a half to finish all the artwork. Now it's ready to go to the press and we're super excited about it.

Lisa Belisle: And what is the subject of your very special book?

Bruce Hutchinson: Well, the story follows a young girl. Her name is Aspen. She is actually based on Andrew's daughter. She goes to Higgins Beach often. One day she notices all these beautiful little birds late in the spring and she starts to take notes about the plovers. She has a sketchbook with her, so she brings her sketchbook along, does some drawings, and brings her notes and drawings into her teacher. And her teacher informs her that they are in fact piping plovers and they are on the endangered list. So Aspen gets super excited, as do all her classmates, and they sort of all band together. They go to Higgins Beach often and try to tell people to stay away from the nesting area. At some point in the summer, because she can't stay there 24/7, she actually even opens up a little lemonade stand with dog treats and pamphlets about the plovers. And that's basically it. The story comes full circle as the book winds down. One of the pages depicts her as a teenager returning to the beach and the plovers are flourishing. Not to give too much away, but the last page shows her as an adult woman with her own child, and that's the one that really got me. So it's a wonderful story.

Lisa Belisle: What was it about the piping plovers that appealed to you?

Bruce Hutchinson: Well, my wife and I and children, and my sister's family and her children, we rented a home right at the setting. It's the last house on Higgins Beach before you hit the Spurwink River. And we did that for like 15 years in a row. We used to see the plovers all the time. And truth be told, we knew that people didn't know it was a nesting area. So you'd get the occasional loose dog running over there and Frisbees and volleyballs flying through the dune grass. And when Andrew approached me with the story, I'm like, oh my goodness, I know that area so well. How can I say no? Apparently plover habitat in Maine is down by like two thirds. So the books really help.

Lisa Belisle: And this is because we've been building seawalls and jetties and there's been more kind of human impact on their nesting sites.

Bruce Hutchinson: That's partially it, partially climate change, sea level rise, and people sort of not being aware. Thankfully the Audubon Society puts signs up now and people are becoming more aware that it's really fragile. They are such fragile little birds. So once one dog off leash can really cause some havoc. Not that I'm not a dog lover. I am.

Lisa Belisle: And they are. They're tiny little birds.

Bruce Hutchinson: They're very tiny. My wife and I used to joke that the fledgling chicks look like a fluffy marshmallow on two toothpicks. They're just so cute.

Lisa Belisle: You didn't grow up near the ocean. You've lived there as an adult, but you actually grew up more inland. That's correct.

Bruce Hutchinson: Correct. Yeah. But almost every Sunday in the summertime, my parents would pack us all into the Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser and drive to Reid State Park, almost every Sunday. So I love the ocean. If you had told me back then that I'd be living a hundred yards from the water in Cape Elizabeth, I would've said no way, can't happen. But my wife is totally drawn to the ocean as well. I mean, we live in such a beautiful state. We're so lucky.

Lisa Belisle: So your parents putting you all in the car, because there are quite a few of you, right?

Bruce Hutchinson: Seven of us.

Lisa Belisle: Seven of you. And you lived in Waterville. So packing you all up to go to Reid State Park, that was a commitment.

Bruce Hutchinson: It was a huge commitment. And on Sundays, of course, all being good Catholics, we actually went to church at 5:45 AM. I mean, the thought of it. I have three children and the thought that we'd be getting them up to attend mass at 5:45 and then go to the beach, not gonna happen.

Lisa Belisle: I don't even think they have mass at 5:45 AM anymore.

Bruce Hutchinson: I've never heard of it. And we had the third pew from the front of the church every Sunday.

Lisa Belisle: And your parents went with all nine of you?

Bruce Hutchinson: All nine of us.

Lisa Belisle: So how did you end up moving from Waterville to Cape Elizabeth?

Bruce Hutchinson: I lived in Waterville until 1976, went to college in Providence at RISD. Got married two weeks after graduation, and my wife and I were like, we're moving back to Maine, we're gonna live in Portland. So we lived in North Deering for 25 years. Well, we made a couple stops before North Deering, but raised our children there. And when it came down to downsize, we found this great little house that needed a ton of work, and it's been 10 years and we pretty much have it the way we want it now. And we're loving it.

Lisa Belisle: Is your wife also from Maine?

Bruce Hutchinson: She's from Vermont.

Lisa Belisle: And she's also from a large family. You had mentioned to me that.

Bruce Hutchinson: That's correct. She's from a family of eight. We're both number six in line, kind of a cool coincidence.

Lisa Belisle: That is interesting. Well, I'm the oldest of 10, so I know the one that is sixth in line has had a very different experience in our family than I did.

Bruce Hutchinson: I know exactly what you mean.

Lisa Belisle: Yes. It's almost like being part of different families. If you're the oldest, you're kind of the chunk of the older family kids. And then if you're towards the end, you're.

Bruce Hutchinson: So true. Yeah. I hear you.

Lisa Belisle: And also growing up in a Catholic family, although by the time I went through they did not have 5:45 AM masses, and nor, I agree with you, would my parents have probably been able to prompt us to get out of bed for this. But yeah. So I'm interested to know, as far as your illustration career, why you made the choice to go into that field.

Bruce Hutchinson: Well, I majored in illustration at RISD and was always, you know, most artistic my senior year of high school, and I just wasn't very good at anything else. So I only applied to one school, which I thought was, back then, a good choice. RISD has a great reputation and I got in, and when I got out, I did get a job at an advertising agency for about a year and a half. Made lots of contacts with graphic designers and art directors, creative directors. I realized I didn't quite fit in with that corporate environment. And I just made the jump. I had done some illustrations for the advertising agency I worked at, and then I saw a clear path. I could start doing this on my own and I really never looked back.

Yeah. So there was an old joke. If you were an artist or graphic designer in the early eighties and you were looking for work, we used to tell each other, just walk up and down Exchange Street a couple times and you're bound to meet a frantic art director who needed an overnight piece of artwork. And that was a long time ago. Times have changed. But somewhere along the line, maybe after just focusing on the local market and staying quite busy, one of my art director friends mentioned that I should look into getting an artist representative. I had never heard of it. So I reached out to try and find a representative, sent samples of my work out, I got a very positive response, and soon enough I landed my first representative who was based out of Boston, and she started getting me projects on a regional, national scale.

And it was surreal how quickly it happened. I was with her for maybe 20 years. She kind of got out of the business. I quickly contacted another rep who was great, out of Colorado, and she got out of it too after about 10 years. But she was wonderful. And now I'm represented by a fellow named Richard Solomon, who's been an artist representative for as long as I've been an artist, and he's based out of Manhattan. It's been quite a journey. Lots of interesting clients and really fun projects. I have to say though, working on this children's book with Andrew was the most rewarding project I've ever been part of. He was just so great to work with. I mean, it was a true collaboration. If I got stuck on an image, he always had a really good suggestion.

And we believe so strongly in the book, that's why we decided to Kickstart it, so we could keep creative control of the whole process. And we're really excited that it's done well, and we hope that the book's gonna be printed and ready to go, I think, in August or September. Unfortunately, we were hoping that it would happen a little bit quicker. We were hoping that it would be late spring, because the plovers are already back north, and we were out at Higgins Beach just a couple weeks ago and there were some nesting pairs. So, but it's all good. There'll be another spring around the corner.

Lisa Belisle: It seems to me that we've been paying attention to the plovers for quite a while now. When I've walked on beaches, and this has been years and years, there have been roped off areas and signs letting people know that these are protected nesting areas. Do you know whether that has made a difference?

Bruce Hutchinson: I do. I absolutely do. I can't give you any statistics. Andrew would be the one to have the scientific background to give you some facts and figures, but it really seems like it's having an impact.

Lisa Belisle: As you're doing your illustrations, I know you've worked for Shipyard, Basket Island Oyster, Bon Appetit, L.L. Bean, Texas Monthly. Have you ever done children's books before?

Bruce Hutchinson: That was another interesting thing. I'd been approached before several times, but the timing never, you know, scheduling as a freelance artist is really difficult, and it still is. So I always had to turn them down. Andrew's project came along at not just the perfect time, but it was the text that really made me think, I have to get involved with this. It's such a great opportunity to work on something that we're pretty passionate about. And to have the setting practically in our backyard, it was great. I was really super excited about it. And it's a big project, 28 full page illustrations plus the front cover and the back cover. And even after doing this for 42 years, it can get a little bit overwhelming to think how much we have to do.

It was Andrew's suggestion to just take it one page at a time. So I would work on actually three pages at a time. Do rough pencil sketches, run them by Andrew. And 99% of the time it was like, ah, this is gonna be great, I love it. So then I'd finish the three pages and then start on the next three and so on and so forth. Saving the front cover and the back cover for last, because I really wanted to have that perfect image for the front cover that would kind of hook people, get to the crux of the whole story, which to me was that people, if they're careful, we can live harmoniously with the plovers. It's not like we totally have to not go to the beach anymore. We can still do it. We just have to know where they're at and just be a little bit more careful.

Lisa Belisle: How did Andrew find you?

Bruce Hutchinson: He found me through, I think it's a website for RISD alumni that I wasn't even aware that I was on. I'm lucky enough to have a wonderful daughter-in-law who does a lot of social media stuff for me. And I'm not really aware, but God bless her, I think she got my work on that site, and Andrew found out that I was from Maine. He was living in South Portland at the time and he reached out to me, and this was right in the middle of the pandemic. And it was difficult at first. We would meet outside all masked up and talk about some of the images we wanted to include. And yeah, it's interesting thinking back. It seems like a long time ago, it seems like yesterday.

Lisa Belisle: I think the Covid pandemic definitely caused a little bit of a time shift for many of us.

Bruce Hutchinson: For me it was, I remember a lot of friends and family like, oh, I don't like this working at home stuff. And I love working at home. It was like, what's the problem? I've been doing it for 42 years. Working at home is wonderful.

Lisa Belisle: That's great perspective. I mean, this is your work. So for you it probably just meant that the people that you interacted with, who didn't work from home, were needing to shift their way of doing things, but not necessarily the way you did it.

Bruce Hutchinson: I totally got that too. You know, how many times did we all say, if you have grown children, like thank goodness our children were grown up when this thing hit, because I can't imagine the challenges we had. We have a grandson, and we had him on Mondays for virtual classroom work. And my heart went out to not just the kids and having to adjust to the new way of going to school, but the teachers, how they had to switch everything around.

Lisa Belisle: Kind of glad we're getting out of that phase.

Bruce Hutchinson: You and me.

Lisa Belisle: Yes.

Lisa Belisle: So one thing I've been interested in when it comes to illustration is that it seems like it's been impacted by the digital world and the ability to do things differently than just simply with pencil drawings. So how has that been the case in your life?

Bruce Hutchinson: Stylistically, the digital age hasn't changed anything that I do really differently. Occasionally someone will reach out to me who sees my website or my representative's website and get back to me and ask me what app I use, which always cracks me up. And I usually reply, I use the old fashioned, start with paper and pencil, and then move on to traditional tools. One really nice thing though about what's happened with the digital age and art is that I can scan my work at home and just send the file out and hold on to my originals. Early on in my career, working for a big advertising agency, you'd have to send the physical artwork out and maybe 50% of the time they'd send it back. And if you tried to reach out to them, they'd be like, if we can find it, we'll get it back to you. But oftentimes, who knows what happened to it. So it's great. I've got six blueprint files just filled with artwork.

Lisa Belisle: Bruce, when you were growing up, did your family encourage you to be an artist, or was there someone at school that encouraged you to be an artist or be an illustrator?

Bruce Hutchinson: My mom dabbled in oil paints and I have these really early memories of looking over her shoulder and just being incredibly fascinated. She made it look super easy. I mean, I guess I had an aptitude for it early on. I remember some of my teachers early on saying, oh, he has good eye hand coordination, he doesn't want to use the big fat crayons. Really strange things that stuck with me. And looking back, I still have some of my early middle school, high school art, and I look at it and I'm like, who told me I was talented? It was very rudimentary, but I stuck with it. I had a really talented art teacher in high school, and she was, gosh, lost touch with her, but she was a huge inspiration.

Super talented, very approachable. I do remember when I told her it was RISD or nothing, she was like, you better have a backup plan. And my backup plan was to join the Marine Corps, like my dad. How about that? So luckily I got in. And it was interesting being voted most artistic in my senior class, then when I got to RISD, it was a whole new world. I remember the first day of figure drawing class, I was absolutely floored. It's like, I'm not a big fish in a small pond anymore, however the saying goes. I was absolutely floored at the talent, and like everyone else, you see that and you just have to pick up your game. And one of my drawing teachers became an incredibly successful children's book illustrator, Chris Van Allsburg.

Yeah. I mean, when I had him, he was working on his first book, and he would bring in, page by page, these unbelievably beautiful drawings. And I think that's why my whole career I was like, hmm, I really wish I could get into the children's book market. And I think that was seeing his work, and what he subsequently did with Jumanji and The Polar Express and all that. He was such a soft spoken, wonderfully talented instructor. Very dry sense of humor. He was huge. And he actually did put one book out that was a similar style to the way I work now, pen and ink. And he taught us all that time tested engraving style.

And it was interesting, when I got out of RISD, I had a portfolio filled with watercolors and pencil drawings, and I had one or two pen and ink drawings. Back in those days you would just go around to different advertising agencies with your portfolio and show your work. And everyone you know liked my work and was very positive about it. But those two black and white pen and ink drawings, everyone would be like, wow, I haven't seen anything like that, these would reproduce really well in the newspaper. And I didn't choose that as a career path, black and white line and watercolor combined, but it turned out to be a pretty good fit.

Lisa Belisle: Bruce, I really look forward to seeing your book when it comes out, hopefully in August.

Bruce Hutchinson: Thank you. We'll see that you get a copy. Thank you.

Lisa Belisle: Appreciate that. That would be great. And where will people be able to get a copy of this book?

Bruce Hutchinson: Well, we're scouting locations around Scarborough, around Cape Elizabeth, South Portland area. Depending on how many we print, we'll expand out from there. But if you go to Higgins Beach in the summertime and stop maybe at IGA or the Higgins Beach Market, or maybe the Black Point Inn or Inn by the Sea, we're looking into all these different places.

Lisa Belisle: And will there be information on your website?

Bruce Hutchinson: Absolutely, yes.

Lisa Belisle: What is your website?

Bruce Hutchinson: brucehutchison.com.

Lisa Belisle: Very good. Well, it's been a pleasure to talk to you today.

Bruce Hutchinson: The pleasure is all mine. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

Lisa Belisle: I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you have been listening to or watching Radio Maine today. I've been speaking with illustrator Bruce Hutchinson, and I'm looking forward to seeing his finished book that will be featuring one of our most important protected endangered species here in the state of Maine, the piping plover. Thank you for coming in today.

Bruce Hutchinson: Thank you. Appreciate you.

Lisa Belisle: Appreciate you too.