Best-Selling Author Paulette Bogan On Being a NYC ARtist

In New York, artists roam the streets free-range and organic (for the most part) and they always seem to have a hand in the best parts of city life. Paulette Bogan, a fifteen-time published children’s book author and illustrator, talks about pursuing the arts as a young person in New York City, and all the job-hopping, mentor finding, and bull riding (really) that comes with it.

Never have I respected the art of camouflage more than when I was tasked with finding Paulette Bogan in a West Village coffee shop. Having proudly claimed the neighborhood decades ago, the illustrator has such a New York prowess that she seems to define the very mood of the west side by the color of her toenails. As such, she blended brilliantly with the flora and fauna of the area and left me searching the coffee shop in dismay. When I did spot her (at a metal table in the outdoor shed, shielded by a large-leafed plant and a stray umbrella), she sat with all the comfort that a 15-times published author deserves. I was left stumbling into the seat beside her, murmuring apologies for my lateness while she slid the sunglasses from her nose, glanced briefly at the menu, and dove into the Odyssey of her career.

I know you went to Parson’s School of Design, was that when you first moved to the city?

I actually went to the University of Miami for two years. Started college when I was 17 and then I transferred. I wasn’t ready to go to art school straight out of high school, and I thought it’d be more fun to play in college a little bit. So in my second year, I applied to a bunch of different art schools and I picked Parsons. I liked Pratt too, though, which is funny because I’m talking to Pratt and Parsons classes about a book that I just did on Thursday. 

Oh, amazing!

Yes, and Pratt has a really pretty campus, but I digress.

So you came to New York in the third year of college?

Yes, and I did three years at parsons.

And that was your intro to New York, that was your social scene. Did you know anybody before you came?

I didn’t know anybody.

Oh wow, how did you make your social circle?

I had a big attitude. I met a girl behind the counter at Parsons and— I was also at that point, maybe turning 19 or 20, so I was a little more mature.

Right— because you’re mature at 19.

Right, but it is a big difference. You’re not straight out of high school. So anyway I met a girl that was working at Parsons and I moved into her apartment with her. It only lasted six months but. And then I met a lot of people at school and going out. And then after I graduated I waitressed.

Did you have a plan before you graduated? Goals you thought you had to meet? Places you thought you had to go?

There was no “college helps you get a job” in art. And it’s not that different now, I don’t think. So I was doing freelance illustration, and there was a formula you could use: there were drop-off days for portfolios and you could get interviews with people if you network. So I just did that. I waitressed for money and I started showing my portfolio around. And I said “By the time I’m 30, I want my own apartment, I want to be teaching at Parson’s or Pratt, and be self-sufficient” or something, I don’t know. But it did happen, so it wasn’t really that hard. But my plan was just to do what everybody else did and then I waitressed because I needed to make money to survive. 

Was there any “practicality pushback” from people who wanted you to get a more stable career?

My father wanted me to get a teaching degree as well as my art degree because he thought that if I ever needed something to fall back on, I could teach. But I said to him “I’m going to teach college, so I don’t need a teaching degree.”But that was it, so I had no pushback. Then, in my senior year, I started getting work and I wanted to quit college, but he convinced me to stay. I think he bribed me. And then after that, one day when I was waitressing, this guy came in and he was a very well known illustrator, young guy, and he calls me up a couple of days later and says “You should quit your waitress job, work as my assistant two days a week because you need to do more of your illustrating career because you’re getting too reliant on waitressing.” And my father was the one that said, “I agree with him, quit your job, do this.” I really had great support from a very traditional father. He was really the one who said “If you want to do this, you should do it.” So I was very lucky.

That does seem to be a rarity in the arts. 

The problem is, when you’re in the arts, there’s no linear path. Most people give up for a number of reasons: it’s too hard, too much rejection, and whatever job survival they’ve taken suddenly becomes very comfortable. That’s my advice: don’t get comfortable. I was waitressing, making good money, I chose a place that closed at 11 which didn’t pay as well as the late-night places, but I liked that because it didn’t eat my nights and I wasn’t going to get dependent on the money. I didn’t want to be a bartender because the money was too good. I’d just get comfortable. And the more comfortable you get in your job, the harder it is to achieve that goal outside of it. And you should never let the pressures of society, peers, boyfriends, parents— tell you that you should settle down and get serious.

Oh god, especially not boyfriends.

I sat in a restaurant over by NYU with this guy, and we weren’t engaged, but we were heading in that direction. His father owned a bunch of car dealerships out in New Jersey so he had some money. We’re sitting at a table and he’s telling me that he thinks it’s time for me to stop playing around and get a job. And I’m going “what are you talking about?” He said that I could work for him, doing the art for the car dealership and picking up jobs like that from friends of his. And I’m sitting there, thinking that that’s really not what I wanted to do and he tells me that he thinks it’s time I move out of the city (which I’d heard a few times) to somewhere more practical. Then he gets up to go to the bathroom and as soon as he leaves, these two guys sitting behind him jump into his seat. And they tell me “You have to get away from him right now. Do not listen to him. Follow your dreams.” And then they jump back into their seats right as he came back. 

So you’re telling me that two mysterious New York Guardian Angles saved you from this relationship.

Well, we didn’t break up right then but we did break up shortly after. And they didn’t even save me. It was just so shocking. First I’m thinking “it’s none of your business,” but then, hearing what they said, I thought “Why am I getting annoyed? That’s what I’ve been saying.”

Was there an interesting arts community that you fell into? Maybe one with better boyfriends?

Honestly, I hung out mostly with people I waitressed with, all the bartenders in the neighborhood. I mean, I lived on West 4th Street for ten years. I worked at a place called Blazing Saddles. The biggest artists community came a little bit later when I started working for this company called Inx, and what they did was every week we’d put out five or six timely political illustrations. 

Oh, that’s fantastic.

Yeah, that was my thing. In the Bush years, I had some great illustrations. He was easy to draw. And Regan, I had a couple of him. And I started again with Trump, but that’s another story. But the company was mostly men and the guy, Peter, who I was assistant to, he was in that group. I ended up becoming really good friends with one guy there, Randy, who was the biggest chauvinist, but we became really good friends. Anyway, we would sit and have a meeting, in the Pan American Building above Grand Central, and we’d sit around at the table and talk about what was going on in the country to start conic up with ideas for illustrations. Most of us did work for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, but we’d also put together packages for newspapers around the country and they would put our illustrations on their op-ed pages. 

Was it a heavily male environment at the time?

There were a few women, but they were very well known. The New York Times was one of the first places I worked and that was scary. There was this bullpen, all these art tables all set up, and people had their spot and they had their art supplies. And it was. All. Men. Now women did do some illustrations, a female art director hired me, but they didn’t do their work in the bullpen. The way it worked was you would go to the Times, they’d hand you the article, you’d take it home, make your sketch, and then you’d bring it back for edits and approval and it’d go back and forth until you had your final piece. But one time I'm there and they say, “We need this right away, you can go to the bullpen at work.” I go there and no one would let me sit down. So I’m like, “What am I going to do?” And I’m thinking “Never let’em see you sweat.” Even though inside I’m like “I wanna go home.” Eventually, some guy I don’t know says, “Oh, you can sit here.” And I sit down to start to draw and my hands are shaking. I just wanted to go home and do it there but there wasn’t enough time. But I got it done and then I never did that again. But you know you get that feeling of “They’ll think that I was handed this. That I needed a guy to give me a desk.” Which I did. Which really sucked.

I’m a feminist and I’m deciding not to do this today.

Exactly. Exactly— so I met a lot of people there, at the time. But I never really had artist friends as much until I started doing children’s books. 

And now you’ve published— I think I wrote down 15, is it fifteen?

Fifteen sounds right. I got married when I was 32 and I published my first book just after I had my first daughter so I must’ve been 34 when I published my first book. 

What was that transition like? Switching gears in your career?

Well, my mother always told me children’s books were what I should be doing. So I did everything except that first. She always loved my work, but she’d say “You know, you’d be really good at children’s books.” So when I got pregnant, I had really bad morning sickness, from the very beginning. I was doing some freelance work, but I really wasn’t feeling great. So I stopped pursuing work and instead started putting together a portfolio. I went to Parsons and I talked to this woman, Pat Comings, who is now one of my closest friends and is like a guru of children’s books. I gave her my portfolio said, “What do you think?” She gave me some advice. And then after that, I got my first book pretty quickly, which was a fluke. The doesn’t usually happen. But it did. I really would credit that to her and the advice she gave me. I just did everything she told me to, and now when I go to speak to crowds and give advice they ask “What should I do?” And I say “Whatever Pat says.” But the children’s book community is much friendlier and has much more of a community. I belong to a group called SCBWI. Needs an editor, right?. It’s the Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators.

Well, at least it’s clear.

It’s a great organization that connects people. And then there’s the author’s guild and there are conferences and talks and book openings. It’s a very nurturing community. 

If you were 23 again right now, maybe just got out of Parson’s, what would you be doing?

That’s a good question, I don’t know. I’m trying to think about what I was doing when I was 23. I’d be smoking a lot of pot. Maybe doing some better drugs at this point. Partying a lot. I don’t know. I’m not sure I would’ve ended up in children’s books if I hadn’t gone the way I did. I don’t know what the market is now for freelance illustration. There aren’t all the print magazines. You used to go to Grand Central and spend an hour just looking through the magazines, writing down art directors’ names and editors, looking at the work, and thinking “Whom are they hiring? Oh, I could work here. This one would never hire me.” I don’t know what they do now, I don’t even know what freelance illustrators do. It’s very different. Obviously, I’d stay in the same vein, and I don’t have the kind of career where I look back and think, “Well, if I’d just done this…” I don’t have anything I’d change. And when people ask me, which you should ask me—

I’ll take credit for it.

— if my career changed when I had children, I tell them my career absolutely, 100% suffered by it, but I made that choice. I didn’t want to work that hard, but I was able to continue to work. And that was when I really started to do children’s books. And I married someone who happened to have money, which was a miracle considering whom I’d dated before then, so everyone was shocked by that.

It’s not the track record, it’s just the final lap.

Yeah, so don’t worry about it, don’t worry about it— the future has nothing to do with the past. But anyway, so in retrospect, I had to work a lot harder to get my career back, but I still wouldn’t really do anything differently. I don’t really have any regrets, career-wise.

Do you have any regrets outside of your career? Things you might’ve missed out on in your twenties? The “Oh, I should’ve gone table dancing that one time, no one would’ve known.”

No, I do not have that regret. Nope, do not have that one. I do wish I had gone—well, while I was in college, they had a Parson’s in Paris.

A Paris Parsons?

Yes, a Paris Parsons. And you could go for a year or a semester or something and my mother really wanted me to do it, but I was starting to really get work and I was very competitive so I wanted to jump in and get going right away. But I wish I had done that.

Very fair. I know you were going out a bunch, you talk about partying. What was that scene like? Was it a lot of house parties, were you going out and standing in line for clubs—?

Oh, darling, you don’t stand in line. 

See—

You cut the line.

Oh. 

I didn’t really do the club scene as much. There was Area Club and Limelight, and they were fun. But there are so many bars in the West Village that were full of 20 and 30 somethings. And there was a big country-western scene here for a while—

What?

It was so fun. I met one of my oldest, bestest friends in a bar with a bull-riding thing. I met her through a girl I was in school within Parsons who told me I had to meet her friend, Sue because we were so much alike. And this girl was very sweet, very suburban, and very sweet, so I was surprised that she had a friend like me. And we went to this bar with the mechanical bull…

And Sue went right up to ride the bull?

No, I did. 

OH.

Well, first we’re all sitting there saying “I could never do that,” right? But you had to pass it to get to the bathroom, and there are these two cowboys running this thing, and one of them says, “Do you want to give it a try?” And I say no, but then the other guy (who was cuter) says “What, are you chicken?” So then I was up there, and I was good at it, which was bizarre. And Sue was stunned, so that was the beginning of our friendship.

Wow. Country Western.

And then there was this other bar on 7th where the Gourmet Garage is now. It was a gay bar, and you could just go and they had this big dance floor and people would do these country dances. It was mostly couples and they would just ask you to dance and then they’d leave you alone. It was great. So I would go and dance with guy after guy, and some of them were really good. It was so much fun, I would just go by myself. 

What should a 20-something in the city do?

New York is a great place to be. Especially for people who want to be artists or anything out of the norm that doesn’t have a track to follow. But you’re only in your 20’s once and when it’s gone, it’s gone. You don’t go back. You become more responsible, you get home, you might have children, you might get married. This is the one time in your life when you have no one to worry about but yourself. You can say, “I want to be a writer and join a writers group for screenwriters” and you can go out and try it. And of course, you need to eat, you need a place to live, but you can always get a part-time job somewhere doing something. So that’s my biggest advice, don’t let anyone stand in the way of what you wanna be. Experience life. And that doesn’t mean you have to be crazy if you don’t want to be. It only means that you have to experience whatever you do fully. Be selfish— in a positive way.