“Find a subject you care about.” — Kurt Vonnegut
A few years back I had the opportunity to write a freelance piece for Screen Printing magazine about Joe Petro, a, screen printer who produced art for a disparate range of high profile characters including, but not limited to Jonathan Winters, Ralph Steadman, Hunter S. Thompson and former president Jimmy Carter.
In the original conception of the article I was intending to write about the screen printed artwork of Jonathan Winters, whose paintings I discovered while searching for his recorded humor. I interviewed Winters for near forty-five minutes (a rare and highly entertaining privilege) and spent a great deal of energy shaping what amounted to a very weak piece about screen printing, because Mr. Winters didn’t actually do screen printing. Joe Petro did the screen printing for him.
The rejection letter from the editor whom I pitched was very kind, leaving the door open for another pitch. I replied that Joe Petro himself would make a great story, since he was doing work for all these other high profile people, and with a little luck I might get access to some of them. Sure enough, the finished piece appeared in January 2004 under the title, Serigraphy, Celebrities & Joe Petro. It was a lot of fun.
