San Francisco magazine - 5/11
Click: AT & T Park
Comcast SportsNet BayArea - 3/11
Mark Ulriksen on Chronicle Live
San Francisco Chronicle - 3/11
Mark Ulriksen's painting a Giant among Giants
From the desk of... - 10/10
Mark Ulriksen describes his working desk
San Francisco Chronicle - 12/09
Painter Finishes Year Long Project
New Yorker Magazine - 10/09
Behind the Cover: The Money Issue
Chico Statements - Spring 09
My Greatest Assignment (PDF)
San Francisco magazine - 4/09
The Greatest Losers of All (PDF)
Dogs magazine (Germany) - 3/09
I Love Dogs (PDF)
Style Monte Carlo magazine - 2007
West Coast Irreverence (PDF)
Purina Newtrition magazine - 2007
Objects D'og (PDF)
San Francisco Chronicle - 9/06
Some Diamonds Really Are Forever
San Francisco magazine - 6/09
Play Ball (PDF)
Beyond Words: Reading and Writing in a Visual Age - 2006
What Details Matter? (PDF)
San Francisco Chronicle - 3/04
Outstanding In His Field (PDF)
Graphic Communications Today - 2004, The Role of the Illustrator (PDF)
3 x 3 magazine - Summer 2004
Mark Ulriksen (PDF)
San Francisco Chronicle - 04/01
Artists Work the Talk of the Town
Communication Arts magazine - May/June 1997, Mark Ulriksen (PDF)
PAINTER FINISHES YEARLONG PROJECT
By Sam Whiting
San Francisco Chronicle
December 24, 2009
Just in time for Christmas, Mark Ulriksen, 52, has delivered a 4-foot painting of 27 San Franciscans at a 50th-birthday party. That commission took a year, waiting in line behind his illustrations for the New Yorker, SFJazz and other clients.
Q: Latest project?
A: Today I'm working on a New Yorker cover. It's what they call a "run anytime," so nothing too specific. Ninety percent of the covers I do are my own idea. It's speculative work, because you don't get paid for submitting ideas.
Q: How many New Yorker covers are you up to?
A: 36. The first one was in 1994. It was Hillary and Bill and Chelsea Clinton.
Q: Out of how many submissions?
A: Probably 200.
Q: What is the fee for a published New Yorker cover?
A: $4,500.
Q: What happens to all the unused covers?
A: I'm putting them up on my Web site, www.markulriksen.com. They'll be up in a month or so.
Q: What about this group portrait?
A: I've never been asked to go to a party and document the people there. My wife, Leslie Flores, is a photographer, so we just took pictures of the party, not knowing a soul. Then I had to compose a scene. I really enjoyed the puzzle aspect of it - What's the body language? How does somebody overreact to a comment? How do people clutch a wineglass?
Q: What is your work routine?
A: My studio is upstairs at home, 150 square feet in a converted kitchen. I get up here between 9:30 and 10 and typically stop working around 11 at night. I take breaks to take the dog out and get some exercise and help with homework. Self-employed people tend to work six to seven days a week, and that's my routine.
Q: Which do you prefer to draw, dogs or people?
A: Dogs never complain about their likeness. I use my own dog, a chocolate Lab. I wrote a children's book about him, called "Henry Is a Good Dog." I've already missed three deadlines, so it's still to come.
Q: Where did you grow up?
A: San Carlos.
Q: What did you want to be?
A: Shortstop or center fielder for the Giants.
Q: Where do you live?
A: Cole Valley.
Q: Neighborhood hangout?
A: The Postal Chase on Cole Street, which has a FedEx drop and a Xerox machine. I'm there every other day.
Q: What kind of car do you drive?
A: My '63 Volkswagen Bug with a ragtop roof that I've driven for 30 years now. It has 245,000 miles. I bought it in 1979 for $650. It's been across the country twice. I need to find somebody who can work on it.
Q: Book on your nightstand?
A: R. Crumb's "The Book of Genesis Illustrated."
Q: Newest addition to your iPod?
A: "Roses" by a group called De Phazz. Also, the Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun." I have a playlist called "Embarrassed to Like" and that's on it.
Q: Last vacation?
A: Camp Mather, down near Yosemite. It's by lottery only. It's a weekly camp primarily for San Franciscans. We've gone 12 years. It's the greatest week of the year.
Q: Regrets?
A: Bottom of the seventh, Game 6, 2002 World Series, Dusty Baker pulling out Russ Ortiz for Rodriguez. The Giants lost their 5-0 lead and never won the championship.
Q: Describe your hairstyle?
A: Cold on top.
By Sam Whiting
San Francisco Chronicle
December 24, 2009
Just in time for Christmas, Mark Ulriksen, 52, has delivered a 4-foot painting of 27 San Franciscans at a 50th-birthday party. That commission took a year, waiting in line behind his illustrations for the New Yorker, SFJazz and other clients.
Q: Latest project?
A: Today I'm working on a New Yorker cover. It's what they call a "run anytime," so nothing too specific. Ninety percent of the covers I do are my own idea. It's speculative work, because you don't get paid for submitting ideas.
Q: How many New Yorker covers are you up to?
A: 36. The first one was in 1994. It was Hillary and Bill and Chelsea Clinton.
Q: Out of how many submissions?
A: Probably 200.
Q: What is the fee for a published New Yorker cover?
A: $4,500.
Q: What happens to all the unused covers?
A: I'm putting them up on my Web site, www.markulriksen.com. They'll be up in a month or so.
Q: What about this group portrait?
A: I've never been asked to go to a party and document the people there. My wife, Leslie Flores, is a photographer, so we just took pictures of the party, not knowing a soul. Then I had to compose a scene. I really enjoyed the puzzle aspect of it - What's the body language? How does somebody overreact to a comment? How do people clutch a wineglass?
Q: What is your work routine?
A: My studio is upstairs at home, 150 square feet in a converted kitchen. I get up here between 9:30 and 10 and typically stop working around 11 at night. I take breaks to take the dog out and get some exercise and help with homework. Self-employed people tend to work six to seven days a week, and that's my routine.
Q: Which do you prefer to draw, dogs or people?
A: Dogs never complain about their likeness. I use my own dog, a chocolate Lab. I wrote a children's book about him, called "Henry Is a Good Dog." I've already missed three deadlines, so it's still to come.
Q: Where did you grow up?
A: San Carlos.
Q: What did you want to be?
A: Shortstop or center fielder for the Giants.
Q: Where do you live?
A: Cole Valley.
Q: Neighborhood hangout?
A: The Postal Chase on Cole Street, which has a FedEx drop and a Xerox machine. I'm there every other day.
Q: What kind of car do you drive?
A: My '63 Volkswagen Bug with a ragtop roof that I've driven for 30 years now. It has 245,000 miles. I bought it in 1979 for $650. It's been across the country twice. I need to find somebody who can work on it.
Q: Book on your nightstand?
A: R. Crumb's "The Book of Genesis Illustrated."
Q: Newest addition to your iPod?
A: "Roses" by a group called De Phazz. Also, the Carpenters' "We've Only Just Begun." I have a playlist called "Embarrassed to Like" and that's on it.
Q: Last vacation?
A: Camp Mather, down near Yosemite. It's by lottery only. It's a weekly camp primarily for San Franciscans. We've gone 12 years. It's the greatest week of the year.
Q: Regrets?
A: Bottom of the seventh, Game 6, 2002 World Series, Dusty Baker pulling out Russ Ortiz for Rodriguez. The Giants lost their 5-0 lead and never won the championship.
Q: Describe your hairstyle?
A: Cold on top.
PROFILE: MARK ULRIKSEN ARTIST'S WORK THE TALK OF THE TOWN
QUIRKY PAINTINGS IN NEW YORKER SHOW
By Jesse Hamlin
San Francisco Chronical
April 14, 2001
San Francisco artist Mark Ulriksen has created 15 covers for the New Yorker since 1994, when he joined the ranks of such esteemed artists as Peter Arno, Saul Steinberg and Edward Sorel.
But unlike many artist-illustrators, he never aspired to do covers for one of America's most prestigious magazines. His only ambition, he says with a laugh, was to play center field for the Giants.
"I never even read the magazine until I started working for them," says Ulriksen, whose quirky paintings for the New Yorker are on display at San Francisco's Meyerovich Gallery.
His original artwork and the magazine covers for which they were made share space with the work of three other Bay Area-based New Yorker artists: Owen Smith, Winston Smith and Eric Drooker. The show also includes 41 New Yorker cover images -- most are enlarged prints -- culled from the book "Covering the New Yorker: Cutting-Edge Covers From a Literary Institution," published by the magazine last year to toast its 75th birthday.
A self-taught artist who studied graphic design at Chico State, Ulriksen was the art director at San Francisco Focus magazine in the early '90s when he sent samples of his work to the New Yorker and other publications (he has also done covers for Time, Newsweek and the Atlantic Monthly). The New Yorker sent him a standard rejection letter.
Then in 1994 he got a call from New Yorker art director Francoise Mouly. She asked him to paint a cover image of Hillary Clinton wearing the White House on her head like a giant hat -- San Franciscans assumed it was inspired by "Beach Blanket Babylon" -- and to make additional illustrations for a long Hillary profile. Those pictures put him on the map.
Mouly told him, "Your work is kind of stiff and formal and so is Hillary Clinton," recalls Ulriksen, who says his work has "a simplicity, a kind of naivete. Especially for a cover, it has to be really direct -- simple enough to invite you in but with enough detail so that you'll want to linger with it a little bit.
"I like painting things I like. I love sports, in particular baseball, and dogs and color." But the New Yorker also gives him the chance to illustrate darker subjects, like the story of a Guatemalan priest accused of murder or a story about tensions in Jerusalem.
At first, Ulriksen aimed for cover ideas about Manhattanites, like his 1996 "High Tee," which shows guys playing golf atop skyscrapers. Then he realized he could create images about what New Yorker readers do, wherever they live.
"I thought of my wife and myself," says Ulriksen, standing in front of a comic image triggered by his own experience as a tourist: It shows a couple photographing a statue of a bull in Pamplona while the real bulls run wild behind them.
The show also features the artist's favorite Ulriksen cover, "Love the One You're With," which appeared on Valentine's Day 2000. It riffed on Art Spiegelman's controversial 1993 Valentine's Day New Yorker cover, which had shown a Hasidic man embracing a black woman as a comment on the strife in Crown Heights.
Ulriksen's cover portrayed a series of "non-politically correct" kissing couples -- a punk and a debutante, a cat and dog, an Arab and a Jew, a soldier and sailor, both male. The New Yorker asked him to remove one couple: a priest and a nun. Ulriksen agreed. But when he got the painting back he painted them back in.
"Sometimes you have something you want to see," he says. "I do it for my own satisfaction."
QUIRKY PAINTINGS IN NEW YORKER SHOW
By Jesse Hamlin
San Francisco Chronical
April 14, 2001
San Francisco artist Mark Ulriksen has created 15 covers for the New Yorker since 1994, when he joined the ranks of such esteemed artists as Peter Arno, Saul Steinberg and Edward Sorel.
But unlike many artist-illustrators, he never aspired to do covers for one of America's most prestigious magazines. His only ambition, he says with a laugh, was to play center field for the Giants.
"I never even read the magazine until I started working for them," says Ulriksen, whose quirky paintings for the New Yorker are on display at San Francisco's Meyerovich Gallery.
His original artwork and the magazine covers for which they were made share space with the work of three other Bay Area-based New Yorker artists: Owen Smith, Winston Smith and Eric Drooker. The show also includes 41 New Yorker cover images -- most are enlarged prints -- culled from the book "Covering the New Yorker: Cutting-Edge Covers From a Literary Institution," published by the magazine last year to toast its 75th birthday.
A self-taught artist who studied graphic design at Chico State, Ulriksen was the art director at San Francisco Focus magazine in the early '90s when he sent samples of his work to the New Yorker and other publications (he has also done covers for Time, Newsweek and the Atlantic Monthly). The New Yorker sent him a standard rejection letter.
Then in 1994 he got a call from New Yorker art director Francoise Mouly. She asked him to paint a cover image of Hillary Clinton wearing the White House on her head like a giant hat -- San Franciscans assumed it was inspired by "Beach Blanket Babylon" -- and to make additional illustrations for a long Hillary profile. Those pictures put him on the map.
Mouly told him, "Your work is kind of stiff and formal and so is Hillary Clinton," recalls Ulriksen, who says his work has "a simplicity, a kind of naivete. Especially for a cover, it has to be really direct -- simple enough to invite you in but with enough detail so that you'll want to linger with it a little bit.
"I like painting things I like. I love sports, in particular baseball, and dogs and color." But the New Yorker also gives him the chance to illustrate darker subjects, like the story of a Guatemalan priest accused of murder or a story about tensions in Jerusalem.
At first, Ulriksen aimed for cover ideas about Manhattanites, like his 1996 "High Tee," which shows guys playing golf atop skyscrapers. Then he realized he could create images about what New Yorker readers do, wherever they live.
"I thought of my wife and myself," says Ulriksen, standing in front of a comic image triggered by his own experience as a tourist: It shows a couple photographing a statue of a bull in Pamplona while the real bulls run wild behind them.
The show also features the artist's favorite Ulriksen cover, "Love the One You're With," which appeared on Valentine's Day 2000. It riffed on Art Spiegelman's controversial 1993 Valentine's Day New Yorker cover, which had shown a Hasidic man embracing a black woman as a comment on the strife in Crown Heights.
Ulriksen's cover portrayed a series of "non-politically correct" kissing couples -- a punk and a debutante, a cat and dog, an Arab and a Jew, a soldier and sailor, both male. The New Yorker asked him to remove one couple: a priest and a nun. Ulriksen agreed. But when he got the painting back he painted them back in.
"Sometimes you have something you want to see," he says. "I do it for my own satisfaction."
CATCHING UP
SOME DIAMONDS REALLY ARE FOREVER
By Heidi Benson
San Francisco Chronicle
September 17, 2006
Ask him where he grew up and he'll tell you "the Polo Grounds."
Eight decades ago writer Arnold Hano was a 4-year-old regular at the fabled Manhattan home of the New York Giants courtesy of passes from his Uncle Ike a city cop.
With that early seasoning Hano went on to write a classic of baseball literature. "A Day in the Bleachers" is his account of the first game of the 1954 World Series between the New York Giants and the Cleveland Indians.
Deep in the Polo Grounds' cavernous center field that day the Giants' Willie Mays made a miraculous catch followed by an even more impressive throw to second. An instant legend it's been known since as "The Catch."
Now in time for the 2006 World Series -- for which the San Francisco Giants are still in contention -- the book has been lovingly republished by Arion Press the Presidio-based fine-art printer in a hand-hewn signed limited edition of 400. (The $700 book not sold in bookstores is available through www.arionpress.com.)
The book is illustrated by Mark Ulriksen 49 the local artist and San Francisco Giants fan best known for his New Yorker magazine covers. Ulriksen's ballpark paintings ebullient with nostalgia for the era he depicts match the text perfectly.
"Does this look familiar?" Ulriksen asked Hano pushing a pint-size biography of Willie Mays across the table on a recent Candlestick-foggy afternoon as they chatted in the cozy library of Arion Press. The book-launch party was about to commence complete with hot dogs Nathan's mustard and a guest list starring Giants' owner Peter McGowan and the team's executive vice president Larry Baer.
"That's mine" Hano answered tickled to see a copy of another of the 26 books he's written in his lifetime. He added his autograph to the original inscription which read: "Mark Ulriksen 11 years old."
A generation may separate these two Giants fans but there's no daylight between them.
Ulriksen was 9 when he saw his first game at Candlestick. But you'd never know he was born too late to see the 1954 Series opener by his painting of "The Catch" the only color print in the book and a double-foldout.
He drew inspiration from Hano's crisp writing which makes that September afternoon virtually visible and the book's narrative pace as carefully crafted as a thriller.
In Chapter 10 Hano wrote: "Mays simply slowed down to avoid running into the wall put his hands up in cup-like fashion over his left shoulder and caught the ball much like a football player catching leading passes in the end zone.
"He had turned so quickly and run so fast and truly that he made this impossible catch look -- to us in the bleachers -- quite ordinary. To those reporters in the press box nearly six hundred feet from the bleacher wall it must have appeared far more astonishing watching Mays run and run until he had become the size of a pigmy and then he had run some more while the ball diminished in the dark blob that was Mays' mitt. The play was not finished with the catch."
Ulriksen understands. In painting that moment he said "I wanted to show how much ground Mays had to cover. Every park is different and I wanted it to be about the Polo Grounds as much as 'The Catch.'
"You have to remember that in 1954 baseball was it" he added. "It was New York in the World Series. The first game. With a burgeoning superstar -- Mays. There were two men on base and the score was tied when he made that catch."
Neither Ulriksen nor Hano is stuck in the past. When asked about the influence of performance enhancing drugs on sports Hano said "Isn't coffee a performance-enhancing drug?" But both rue the day home-run hitters became gods. It's a team sport they say; play ball. As Hano told Ulriksen: "I once asked Casey Stengel how the game had changed since his day. 'The upper cut' Stengel said." Hano calls that penchant for hitting into the stratosphere "American League-itis" and regrets that the National League has caught it too.
The two men love their ballparks though Ulriksen doesn't miss Candlestick's quirks. He's a fan of the Giants' new waterfront home and when it opened in 2001 he made a portrait of the park for the New Yorker. And Hano's affection for the Polo Grounds is plain. Even when he lists the ballpark's many deficiencies he speaks in present tense though it has long since been torn down. "The blind spots are ridiculous. The short home-run foul lines. Pop flies! The stretch of pastureland to center field" said Hano still exasperated. "Ridiculous!"
As the party heated up Andrew Hoyem -- the erudite publisher of Arion Press and a San Francisco Giants season-ticket holder -- took the microphone to wryly recount the creation saga of this special edition of "A Day in the Bleachers."
"For years I have wanted to do a baseball book" he said. "But it had to have the literary quality of the rest of our books." ("Melville Joyce Einstein ... Hano" the author later joked.)
A friend asked if he'd ever read "A Day in the Bleachers." He hadn't. The friend a private investigator tracked down the author in Southern California. Hoyem called. On hearing that it had taken a professional sleuth to discover his whereabouts Hano had this no-nonsense retort: "Well that's no mystery. We're in the phone book."
Hano switched coasts in 1955 two years before the Giants moved to San Francisco. That year he quit his job as editor of Lion Books the paperback publisher famous for lurid covers where he had signed Jim Thompson to write the seminal 1953 noir thriller "The Killer Inside Me." He braced himself for the free-fall life of a freelance writer.
He and his wife Bonnie to whom "A Day in the Bleachers" is dedicated (they've now been married 55 years) drove across country and settled in Laguna Beach. The book was published while they were on the road and has been almost continuously in print.
Escaping New York didn't quell his passion for the Giants or sever the tie.
As he quipped to a reporter "Sweetie they followed me."
SOME DIAMONDS REALLY ARE FOREVER
By Heidi Benson
San Francisco Chronicle
September 17, 2006
Ask him where he grew up and he'll tell you "the Polo Grounds."
Eight decades ago writer Arnold Hano was a 4-year-old regular at the fabled Manhattan home of the New York Giants courtesy of passes from his Uncle Ike a city cop.
With that early seasoning Hano went on to write a classic of baseball literature. "A Day in the Bleachers" is his account of the first game of the 1954 World Series between the New York Giants and the Cleveland Indians.
Deep in the Polo Grounds' cavernous center field that day the Giants' Willie Mays made a miraculous catch followed by an even more impressive throw to second. An instant legend it's been known since as "The Catch."
Now in time for the 2006 World Series -- for which the San Francisco Giants are still in contention -- the book has been lovingly republished by Arion Press the Presidio-based fine-art printer in a hand-hewn signed limited edition of 400. (The $700 book not sold in bookstores is available through www.arionpress.com.)
The book is illustrated by Mark Ulriksen 49 the local artist and San Francisco Giants fan best known for his New Yorker magazine covers. Ulriksen's ballpark paintings ebullient with nostalgia for the era he depicts match the text perfectly.
"Does this look familiar?" Ulriksen asked Hano pushing a pint-size biography of Willie Mays across the table on a recent Candlestick-foggy afternoon as they chatted in the cozy library of Arion Press. The book-launch party was about to commence complete with hot dogs Nathan's mustard and a guest list starring Giants' owner Peter McGowan and the team's executive vice president Larry Baer.
"That's mine" Hano answered tickled to see a copy of another of the 26 books he's written in his lifetime. He added his autograph to the original inscription which read: "Mark Ulriksen 11 years old."
A generation may separate these two Giants fans but there's no daylight between them.
Ulriksen was 9 when he saw his first game at Candlestick. But you'd never know he was born too late to see the 1954 Series opener by his painting of "The Catch" the only color print in the book and a double-foldout.
He drew inspiration from Hano's crisp writing which makes that September afternoon virtually visible and the book's narrative pace as carefully crafted as a thriller.
In Chapter 10 Hano wrote: "Mays simply slowed down to avoid running into the wall put his hands up in cup-like fashion over his left shoulder and caught the ball much like a football player catching leading passes in the end zone.
"He had turned so quickly and run so fast and truly that he made this impossible catch look -- to us in the bleachers -- quite ordinary. To those reporters in the press box nearly six hundred feet from the bleacher wall it must have appeared far more astonishing watching Mays run and run until he had become the size of a pigmy and then he had run some more while the ball diminished in the dark blob that was Mays' mitt. The play was not finished with the catch."
Ulriksen understands. In painting that moment he said "I wanted to show how much ground Mays had to cover. Every park is different and I wanted it to be about the Polo Grounds as much as 'The Catch.'
"You have to remember that in 1954 baseball was it" he added. "It was New York in the World Series. The first game. With a burgeoning superstar -- Mays. There were two men on base and the score was tied when he made that catch."
Neither Ulriksen nor Hano is stuck in the past. When asked about the influence of performance enhancing drugs on sports Hano said "Isn't coffee a performance-enhancing drug?" But both rue the day home-run hitters became gods. It's a team sport they say; play ball. As Hano told Ulriksen: "I once asked Casey Stengel how the game had changed since his day. 'The upper cut' Stengel said." Hano calls that penchant for hitting into the stratosphere "American League-itis" and regrets that the National League has caught it too.
The two men love their ballparks though Ulriksen doesn't miss Candlestick's quirks. He's a fan of the Giants' new waterfront home and when it opened in 2001 he made a portrait of the park for the New Yorker. And Hano's affection for the Polo Grounds is plain. Even when he lists the ballpark's many deficiencies he speaks in present tense though it has long since been torn down. "The blind spots are ridiculous. The short home-run foul lines. Pop flies! The stretch of pastureland to center field" said Hano still exasperated. "Ridiculous!"
As the party heated up Andrew Hoyem -- the erudite publisher of Arion Press and a San Francisco Giants season-ticket holder -- took the microphone to wryly recount the creation saga of this special edition of "A Day in the Bleachers."
"For years I have wanted to do a baseball book" he said. "But it had to have the literary quality of the rest of our books." ("Melville Joyce Einstein ... Hano" the author later joked.)
A friend asked if he'd ever read "A Day in the Bleachers." He hadn't. The friend a private investigator tracked down the author in Southern California. Hoyem called. On hearing that it had taken a professional sleuth to discover his whereabouts Hano had this no-nonsense retort: "Well that's no mystery. We're in the phone book."
Hano switched coasts in 1955 two years before the Giants moved to San Francisco. That year he quit his job as editor of Lion Books the paperback publisher famous for lurid covers where he had signed Jim Thompson to write the seminal 1953 noir thriller "The Killer Inside Me." He braced himself for the free-fall life of a freelance writer.
He and his wife Bonnie to whom "A Day in the Bleachers" is dedicated (they've now been married 55 years) drove across country and settled in Laguna Beach. The book was published while they were on the road and has been almost continuously in print.
Escaping New York didn't quell his passion for the Giants or sever the tie.
As he quipped to a reporter "Sweetie they followed me."