- Q. Cassettifrom 3x3 Magazine (Spring 2011, volume 16)
Once in awhile you see someone sketching with such precision that it makes you wonder how and where she was trained. Was she an architect, a draftsman, a technical artist? Well, she was sort of all three. As I sat next to Q. Cassetti during a lecture at Hartford Art School, I noticed that she didn’t draw her lines in the same way a fine artist would render a sketch. It wasn’t gestural. Her lines were deliberate, controlled, and, I must add, close to perfect. Q.’s sketchbooks look like finished art. Beautifully decorative strokes fill the pages of her moleskines and burst from the bindings. Their expressive line quality captures the viewer and beckons you into their maze-like webbing. Cassetti knows where she is taking her line. Or at least it appears that way.
During high school in Pittsburgh, Cassetti worked as a student assistant to the calligrapher, Arnold Bank. There she learned the craft of hand lettering and developed the sensitivity to create the lines necessary to build letters with a pen or brush. She also learned how to dissect a letter, break the form down to its essence and render it in both text and headline sizes. When in college Cassetti had to pick a direction, it was a toss up between professionally pursuing calligraphy or graphic design. And design won. Little did Cassetti understand then that it was drawing that linked the two.
After 20 years of creating communications design, packaging and branding work for local and national clients (such as The Corning Museum of Glass, Steuben Glass, Corning Incorporated, Estee Lauder, Tiffany and Company, Cornell University, Quest Diagnostics), Cassetti found she was bored with the limitations of a career focused on other people’s voice and vision. On a whim, she decided to study illustration, to mix things up and to see what would happen. Cassetti enrolled in Syracuse University’s graduate program to get her MA while indulging in the camaraderie of other professional illustrators. A low-residency program allowed her to maintain her family life in Trumansburg, near Ithaca, NY and still travel periodically to attain her degree.
“I like solving visual problems, and both graphic design and illustration have that. Content styling and logo design appeal to me. I love form development, and found illustration to be more magical than graphic design.” From the outside, Cassetti appears to have made the transition seamlessly. She has a solid foundation in design, so therefore her compositions are fully thought out. Her images are appealing because they are not just drawn, they are designed and contain a well considered and always appealing color palette.
It’s easy to see the confluence of both traditions in her work. Not only is the work beautifully executed, but her strong foundation in drawing is obvious in her work. Her images feel balanced. Symmetry happens as a consequence of the technique she uses to complete her line work. Cassetti creates half of an image then copies and flips the image horizontally to create its mirror image.
Cassetti’s other current style is more asymmetrical. She creates vector images, often portraits of people or animals, drawing the color fields with points and lines. She edits the image as she draws it independent of brushes or “tricks”. The outcome is similar again to traditional scratchboard but much cleaner, with a sleek computer-generated look that still manages to retain the sensitivity of her hand drawn lines.
A stylized line quality appears consistently in Cassetti’s drawings. Like wallpaper and fabric, her work contains repeated characters such as spirals, leaves and trees that make frequent appearances to create patterns and textured backgrounds.
It is not by accident that her illustrations echo of the work of scratchboard, woodcut, cut-paper, etching and silkscreen. Cassetti constantly experiments with different techniques and styles from which shedraws inspiration. Posada skeleton woodcuts and detailed skull engravings, Klimt spiral trees, Pennsylvania German Fraktur primitive horses and figures, all call to us from the depths of Cassetti’s work. She mimics their styles and techniques using contemporary tools. Cassetti sketches her woodcut lines in pen and ink then converts the images to Photoshop to adjust color and duplicate and flop the image to get a symmetrical design. She also brings images into Adobe Illustrator to redraw and create a new image with a clean shape line that can be enlarged without pixilation. She draws upon the work of Pennsylvania German Fraktur artists, Will Bradley’s gorgeous line work, 16 th Century Indian Court Paintings, Chinese cut-paper artists, contemporary scratchboard artists; all while honing a look and style that is her very own.
Q. Cassetti is an art director’s dream. She’s the type of person who goes above and beyond the call of duty with her assignments. It’s not unusual for Q. to present a series of almost finished renderings as sketches for a clients’ first round of choices. That’s rare. She doesn’t look for short-cuts; she pushes the assignment beyond its limits, and often finds solutions to problems that might not have been initially obvious. Much of this comes from her years of experience as a designer and calligrapher.
Cassetti explains, “I have learned that I love the process as much as the final illustration. I love research and reading to prepare for the work. I love sketching and drawing to think out the illustration(s). And I love the wonder of the pen on marvelous paper—how the ink flows and joins with the surface, how the pencils feel and works with the pen; the wonder of tracing paper and how it can change a design and your thinking. I have come to love revising the illustrations, rethinking aspects of the design, redrawing the parts and bettering the piece.”
“Q. is amazing,” Murray Tinkelman says, “her career does not fit neatly into a category. Is she a designer or an illustrator? Is she a designer who illustrates or an illustrator who is also a designer? My answer would be all of the above. (why is this different?)
Tinkelman adds, “Already a successful graphic designer (why capitalized?), Q. entered the Low Residency MFA in Illustration Program at the Hartford Art School and allowed herself to flourish in the sister field of illustration. In the tradition of great talents such as Milton Glaser and the groundbreaking Push Pin Studio Group, Q. seamlessly melded her prodigious skills as a designer with her new passion for decorative illustration. Q.’s final thesis exhibition upon her graduation from the program was a stunning success.”
Q. Cassetti’s illustration life is just in its infant stages, as her “encore career,” but it by no means looks elementary. She has a fluidity of line that draws you in and keeps you, long after her illustration has communicated its message effectively. Just out of graduate school as a Presidential Scholar, she has already won many prestigious awards that are beginning to bring the notoriety that an illustrator needs in this economy. Cassetti won a bronze medal in 2008 at Society of Illustrators Los Angeles and a silver medal at the same in 2010. As prolific and talented as Q. Cassetti is, I suspect we’ll be seeing more of her work in the coming years.
Finally, I asked Cassetti how she got the unusual name of Q., and she told me that it was an abbreviation of family name passed down through several generations. In my opinion, Q. deserves to have this most elegant letterform of the alphabet as her name and mark. For someone whose line flows like a ribbon in the wind, this seems particularly fitting.
Ursula Roma
January 18. 2011
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