We have no idea what we are doing.
Craig Cutler and Craig Frazier
Week 21: “Small”
Photographer Craig Cutler and illustrator Craig Frazier might be creative collaborators with the same name, yet the two have never actually met one another. After their professional worlds collided virtually a handful of years ago, they found a kindred creative spirit in one another and decided to devise a way to keep working together. Thus, 2 Craigs was born, a weekly series in which each Craig creates a four-by-five image in response to a single word plucked out of a Pyrex container by Frazier’s son’s girlfriend, Liz (shoutout to Liz!).
On the cusp of the 52nd and final week of the year-long series (next week marks week 49), I recently spoke with Cutler and Frazier independently of one another—so as not to tamper with their never-having-met mystique—about the 2 Craigs project and their relationship. Our conversations are woven below, edited lightly for clarity and length.
Week 47: “Effervescent”
How did you two first begin working together?
Craig Frazier: I’m an illustrator, but that’s my second career after being a designer; I was a graphic designer for 20-plus years, and like riding a bike, you don’t forget that. I’m an interesting designer in the sense that, because I can draw, I can really do the whole thing for somebody, so I don’t shy away from the right kind of design assignments.
I’m located in the heart of wine country, so I’ve been doing a lot of work lately for wineries. There was one winery I’d been working with for the last six or seven years, and I did a rebrand for them, and last year we decided to re-look at their photography. I had this idea that I didn’t want to do traditional wine photography. I didn’t want to do food pairings and flowers and stuff that everybody does in wine. I wanted to try to make something that was just a little bit more poetic, and my idea was to shoot the bottles in the proximity of Heath Ceramics. But I’d been out of the game for a while, and I didn’t know who to hire as a photographer, and a friend of mine said, “You should look at Craig Cutler’s work.” I knew of his work historically because he’s been around for a long time, so I guess I emailed him, or whatever I did, and somehow we ended up talking.
I didn’t have much money to pay him, but I bought $300 worth of ceramics, sent them down to him, and said, “Just do arrangements for me. Just do beautiful compositions, and that’s it. I want these things to be really simple and elegant.” And he was like, “Got it.” He’s a classic photographer, with Irving Penn-style lighting. The photographs came back, and they were just beyond what I was hoping for. They were just fantastic, just gorgeous. He over-delivered.
Week 9: “Contain”
At what point did the idea for the 2 Craigs project come about?
CF: We started having conversations post-project, and I was just appreciating what he had done. I showed him some of the stuff I was designing, and he really liked what he was seeing. We started to understand a little bit about each other really quickly. We both thought, “God, we should try to keep working together.” So somewhere in there, we both said, let’s dream up some kind of a project.
We both thought, ‘God, we should try to keep working together.’
There was a curiosity about how each of us solves problems. What was also very evident was that there are some similarities in the way we work; both our work is very simple, and we gravitate toward simple solutions. And we’re both about ideas. A lot of photographers really want direction, they want to be told how to take their pictures. Craig doesn’t need that. He wants his autonomy, which is the way I work as an illustrator. I never take art direction, I just refuse it, because it’s not the way I solve problems.
So we thought, what do we do together? And I don’t remember who, but we thought, what if we could come up with a problem that both of us had to solve independently to see what we would come up with? And immediately, both of us said we could see our stuff going side-by-side, because there’s some kind of relationship already happening in the way that we see the page, even though I’m drawing and he’s taking a photograph.
Week 40: “Quiet”
What are the exact guidelines for the project? How did you come up with those?
CF: Somehow, the idea we came up with was: Craig Cutler, you write 52 words; Craig Frazier, you write 52 words. We do not get to see each other’s words. We put them together. An independent party draws them out of a hat, one a week. I don’t even remember my words, and Craig doesn’t remember his. We quickly came up with the parameters, saying, let’s give ourselves a week. We’ll get the word at the beginning of the week, and then BAM! We’ll just go after it. But we won’t talk about it with each other, we just reveal one final solution. It’s always in the same four-by-five aspect ratio, and that’s it. Those were the only rules. And right off the bat, we could see that this was going to be something interesting.
We’ll get the word at the beginning of the week, and then BAM! We’ll just go after it.
Are you two often surprised by what the other Craig’s response is compared to your own?
CF: I’m always so excited to see what he’s going to do, because I have no idea what it’s going to be. He surprises me every time. I hope I do the same for him. That’s a goal of mine; I need to be surprising me with my own work. But then, when you put them together, something else happens. It usually takes us a day or so to just digest it. Sometimes there are incredible similarities. Sometimes there are tremendous differences. More often than not, we’re seeing relationships between the two that are so interesting, it’s as if we’d been talking to each other.
Craig Cutler: The surprise is the best part. I have no idea what he’s going to do.
Week 28: “Red”
On the 2 Craigs website, you write that the only rule is to “work fast and carelessly.” Can you elaborate on your individual processes for responding to each word in this way?
CF: As soon as that word comes in, I start thinking; I’m excited about it. Compared to a real assignment where I have parameters and other things, this is just one thing. It’s just one single word. And I know my job is to make sure that whatever it is that I draw is interesting. It’s got to be really, really interesting. It can’t just be a picture of the word.
I’m trying to defer a lot of that judgment that I normally would have with a real assignment.
I’ll typically do a few thumbnail sketches, I’m just wired that way. I don’t spend very much time on those, and then I’ll go into the sketchbook and I’ll just build the finished illustration. For the most part, I’m trying to defer a lot of that judgment that I normally would have with a real assignment.
I’ve made a couple of other little constraints for myself, just to make it more interesting for me; I’ve done all these solutions in two sketchbooks, and they’re the same size. None of these look like my real illustrations. I do them as analog drawings, I scan them, and that’s it. They’re done. So I’m practicing stuff that I don’t do as much in my day job.
Week 46: “Thick”
What about you, Craig C.?
CC: My background is not photography, it’s design. So my entire career, I’ve always been into the whole thing of doing sketches, coming up with ideas. That’s kind of been my jam all my life; I’m very involved in the design and the concept part. So, to do this project with Craig, it almost feels like we’re going back to school a little bit. It’s so fun— we probably spend more time on this than we should. We can’t wait to get the word, and then we get obsessed with it. We’re like little kids with a school project.
We can’t wait to get the word and then we get obsessed with it. We’re like little kids with a school project.
I think the worst response is the one where someone exactly understands what the word is. That’s dull. As we move forward with this project, it’s like, What can I do that is gonna make people think more? As opposed to just solving the problem.
Do you have a favorite 2 Craigs response where the diptych you two created was particularly compelling when paired with one another?
CF: One that we recently did, the word was “fruit,” and both of us did these things with lemons. It just blew my mind. I remember how the image came to me: I was having breakfast upstairs, and I looked over and I saw this lemon there, and I said, ‘That’s it.’ I love drawing lemons. But then when his showed up with all those lemons, I just couldn’t believe it.
Week 33: “Fruit”
If you look at the “feather” responses, it’s striking that I drew that feather on its tip on top of that egg, and then he’s got that bird that’s up on a singular leg, right up through the middle, and you put them side by side, they bear so much resemblance, and yet they’re worlds apart in terms of their content. And those are just happy accidents, we’re not planning anything.
Week 36: “Feather”
CC: I like what we did for “puncture.” He had a thumb tack with a Pantone chip punctured into it, and then I did an exploding balloon. They’re completely different, but they work really well together.
Week 42: “Puncture”
What’s been your favorite aspect of the 2 Craigs project?
CF: When you take away anybody else’s judgment of your work, you’re left completely responsible, and you get all the credit and all the blame. This is the best that I can do, under the conditions we’ve laid out for ourselves. The satisfying part is that it keeps getting better. I’ve made a really great comrade in the business out there, and we’ve become really good friends over this, without ever meeting. I know that I’ve got to do good work to measure up to what he’s gonna’ do, because I know he’s gonna’ deliver. I know it’s a high bar. There’s no slacking here by any means.
CC: I just love the discipline. It keeps coming and keeps coming. I feel like I’m back in design school. The thing that I love about it is the idea part, the concepting. I do a lot of teaching, and I have so many students who have no idea how to come up with ideas. To me, it’s all about how you come up with ideas, and that’s the most exciting part about this whole project. Holding a piece of paper and drawing— to me, that’s still the foundation, even with AI and all that stuff. The best ideas still start with a piece of paper.
Holding a piece of paper and drawing— to me, that’s still the foundation, even with AI and all that stuff. The best ideas still start with a piece of paper.
I also find that, with the way the world is today with clients and stuff, everything gets so watered down and homogenized by group decisions. So we live and die with what we come up with, whether it’s good or bad. We just answer to ourselves. It’s not taken too seriously. It’s really about the idea. Craig is an amazing illustrator, and I do some pretty elaborate stuff myself, but this project is to be taken very lightly.
Week 7: “Fly”
It sounds like creating work without any outside opinions or factors has been incredibly freeing and inspiring for you both.
CF: Midway through this, we realized: We don’t even know who the audience is. We don’t have a marketing plan. We don’t have to do that. We can do whatever we want. Why do we have to make it so clear that what we’re doing is that word? Why don’t we start using the word as a prompt to go someplace else, and if it happens to easily look like that word, great. But we owe it to nobody to be able to explain this. It took a while to get comfortable with that, because I’m so used to making sure this thing communicates. But we both said, What if we don’t care? What if we don’t care about communicating? I have enough responsibility to go down a road that bears some relationship to that word, but the degree to which I get off the central path is the fun in it. How far can we get this?
We can do whatever we want.
Week 4: “Pattern”
When you’ve had a long career of learning how to design and how to think, you learn how to be intuitive, and sometimes you can’t unravel that. You don’t really know how you did it or why you did it. But what’s interesting about this, compared to commercial work, is we don’t have to explain it! We don’t have to sell it, we don’t have to defend it. To be truthful, this is what designers and ad people and photographers and illustrators know all too well: very often the very best stuff never ever gets produced because you can’t get through the marketing gates and all that shit that gets in the way of it. And we don’t have that here. It’s all gone.
CC: I’m just so bored with over-retouched imagery today— illustration, photography, it all just looks so slick, I’m so tired of it. I like the nuances of these not being quite right, having a little edginess to it, there’s that roughness.
What has it been like collaborating with someone so steadily for a year without having ever met in person?
CC: It’s been fun. It might just fall apart once we meet. I had an opening at the Museum of Natural History in March, and he said, “I’m not going to come because we can’t meet.” It’s like one of those weird dating shows.
Header image: Craig Frazier in his studio (left); Craig Cutler with his dog (right)
The post The Two Craigs Behind ‘2 Craigs’—Kindred Creative Spirits Who Have Never Met in Person appeared first on PRINT Magazine.