Diana Sudyka
Issue #33
After years of working unrelated day gigs, the illustrator scores her dream job: full-time artist
By Eugenia Williamson
Published: September 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
Illustrator Diana Sudyka spends one afternoon each week as a voluntary taxidermist at Chicago’s Field Museum. Sudyka’s no indiscriminate stuffer — she does birds brought to the museum by nature enthusiasts and stored in an archive that looks like library stacks. “I’ve always had an interest in natural history,” says Sudyka, who paints a watercolor sketch of each bird she prepares and posts it to her blog, The Tiny Aviary. The sketches are dreamy and delicate and not without whimsy — her rendering of the Nashville Warbler has a tiny guitar and is wearing cowboy boots.
Although they provide a good representation of what she’s about, these birds comprise only a fraction of Sudyka’s ouvre. She’s best known for her work with the Bird Machine, a Chicago-based silkscreen print shop responsible for innumerable indie-rock posters and a reliable presence at festivals such as Bumbershoot and Pitchfork. The Bird Machine was founded in Sudyka’s basement by her husband, poster impresario Jay Ryan, and has given her the one-in-a-million chance to get paid to create art for musicians she admires while exposing her other work to a wide audience. “I started noticing bigger jobs coming in after I did a couple of posters for the Decemberists,” Sudyka says, referring to an increase in freelance illustration and two recent gigs illustrating children’s books.
Sudyka began making Decemberists posters after contacting frontman Colin Meloy’s partner, Carson Ellis, to design her tattoo. Sudyka feels a great “affinity of aesthetic” with Ellis, whom she admits she was “stalking online” before the two met in person at Flagstock in Seattle. This affinity becomes apparent when approaching Sudyka’s work through the lens of dark whimsy it shares with Ellis’.
Although Sudyka received her MFA from Northwestern University, she is reluctant to associate herself with academic art. Sudyka isn’t above using her work as a means of promotion rather than simply as art. “I consider myself more of an illustrator than an artiste because almost everything I do serves some sort of utilitarian purpose, whether it’s illustrating a book or making a poster for a rock show,” Sudyka says. She likes printmaking because it involves process, labor, and a touch of populism. “You’re creating artwork that’s affordable and gets out to a lot of people,” she says. “There’s something very democratic about that.”
Like her process, Sudyka’s success was both gradual and hard-won. After graduate school, she worked a series of jobs only tangentially related to her artwork, one which ended in disaster. “I lost my job, and I had no idea what to do,” Sudyka explains. “I hit rock bottom, and that turned out to be the best thing because I realized that I had to rely on my artwork. I took it much more seriously. It forced me to be much more active in getting it out there for people to see.” This involved taking every job that came her way. Despite the lack of security or consistency, the strategy worked. At 35, Sudyka says she’s now in a position that allows her to make a living with her art. “For a long time, I had no idea how to approach [being an artist],” she says. “I was really insecure. Now I’m getting jobs that are paying the bills, and I’m really interested in what I’m doing.”
Diana Sudyka’s artwork is available at dianasudyka.com.
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