Written By Evan Balkan
As protesters raged in the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Republican Richard Nixon was in peaceful Miami Beach accepting his part y’s nomination for president. In a Woodlawn, Maryland, living room, six-year-old John Kachik was drawing the future commanderin- chief on the television. The portrait was remarkably accurate. Kachik’s parents knew their son had a gift.
The easy-going Kachik grew up the second youngest of five children in a small house. Although he describes the experience as wonderful – “loud, raucous, and loving” – elbowroom was at a premium. To delineate his own space, John drew. His father and mother, the daughter of Western Pennsylvania coal miners, encouraged the boy. “Follow your dreams,” they exhorted. “Take art classes; take music classes; play sports.” To that end, John attended Calvert Hall College High School in Towson, a long haul from his Woodlawn home. At Calvert Hall, he began his rigorous training as an artist. Kachik was so dedicated during high school that he even attended summer art camps.
By the time he enrolled at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, Kachik was something of a phenomenon. MICA professor Howie Lee Weiss enthused. “After teaching at MICA for 27 years, I have seen many students come and go. But John stands out as one of the most gifted and naturally skilled draftsmen I can remember. Even though he graduated 20 years ago, I can still recall almost each drawing he completed.”
Kachik actually began as a sculpture major, but soon turned most of his attention to illustration. Now, it is his drawings that earn him a living as well as an impressive client list that includes U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, Business Week, McDonalds, Readers Digest, TV Guide, Sports Illustrated, the National Geographic Society, The Wall Street Journal, Men’s Health, the Discovery Channel, Forbes, and Conde Nast Traveler, among others.
What Kachik creates depends upon the needs of his clients, but he is highly sought after for his nostalgic, Americana themes – what he calls “neo retro.”
His images, despite their often innocuous veneer, tend toward the playfully clever and tongue-in-cheek. Closer inspections can sometimes reveal the downright subversive: a smiling “nuclear family” – perfectly-coifed Mommy, suited and mustachioed Daddy, beaming daughter with baby doll – each clutching an ICBM. An iconic Elvis Presley image shadows the inscription: “1935-1977. Still Dead.” For an article in Chief Executive Magazine recording California’s woes, Kachik created a faux “Greetings From California” postcard chronicling gridlocked traffic, high tax bills, unemployment, and skyrocketing home prices, all presided over by a game show-esque, floating, Schwarzenegger head.
The 43-year old Kachik’s earliest influences included Jasper Johns, N. C. Wyeth, and Norman Rockwell. Although the artists helped to inform his work, it was his childhood surroundings that encouraged his artistic pursuits.
His older brother Joe was always drawing as well. And music was a constant. Several of the Kachik brothers, including John, played in bands. Observing what was going on at home, as well as being fed a steady stream of Partridge and Brady, Kachik assumed every family had a band in the basement.
Nowadays, the music that often floats through the studio on Sykesville’s Main Street that he shares with friend and graphic artist, Jeff Rogers, is web-streamed ’80s New Wave.
The studio is a smallish space, as conducive to naps as to serious work, wired for cable, and complete with leather chair and end table; the two inhabitants’ wives refer to it as “the clubhouse.” The walls are adorned with Kachik’s original framed pieces. It sometimes even serves as infirmary to a child unwell enough to stay home from school. It is easy to sink in and laze away.
But when Kachik is in the studio, all his energy and concentration is focused on the piece in front of him. Sometimes family duties call. Although Kachik generally spends Monday to Friday in the studio, he is quick to shuck it off if either his wife Maria or his two daughters, Emily and Isabel, require his time. As head coach of both daughters’ soccer teams, Kachik rarely stops for a moment. None of this would be possible, he says, without his supportive wife.
Aside from the time constraints, the addition of two daughters has changed Kachik’s artistic output. There was something dark and brooding about his earlier pieces. Women were often portrayed with dangerous eyes and a certain Mae West seductive quality. Nowadays, Kachik the father, hero to his girls (“I have to enjoy it now before they realize the truth about me,” he said), softens many of his images. Thinking of the world his daughters would inhabit, he wants to make things a little lighter and more pleasant.
His cover illustration for the book Tadpole, by Ruth White, shows two singing youngsters. One is described in the book as a handsome, dark-haired boy whom everyone adores. When daughter Emily, then eight, read the book with her father, she kept turning back to the cover so she could “see” the characters. The wholesome picture there set the tone for the story within.
Being able to provide visual accompaniment to text for people like his daughters is part of the reason Kachik continues to create. But asked why he became an artist in the first place, he searches hard for an answer. The best he can offer is the wholly unsatisfying but instantly recognizable rejoinder given by all serious artists: “You have no choice. In the end, you must do it. It’s a calling.”
Although pursuing a creative endeavor proves a frightening experience for many, for the true artist, the prospect of not doing it is far more terrifying.
So it is with Kachik. He remembers sitting in a McDonald’s as a little boy and hearing his parents tell the others not to throw away the Big Mac boxes, that John had to make something out of them.
Self-deprecating, he talks of eventually doing “serious art,” perhaps getting back to his sculpture and painting. It is true that illustration sometimes gets short shrift in the respect department, but in today’s world of icons and flash images, illustrators are highly influential.
Kachik’s images, gracing the pages of major magazines and newspapers, beer labels and billboards, provide a context for storytelling that words alone often fail to deliver.
Even with the unpersuasive suggestion that what he creates isn’t serious art, he does concede that a recent work installed at BWI Thurgood Marshall Airport may serve as his “legacy piece.” Stretching roughly 40 feet long by 8 feet high, “Common Senses” is a series of bucking and swirling grid tiles, adorning the Fifth Floor of the airport’s newest parking garage. It’s an airy space, punctuated by the thousands of orange tiles. Their intricate designs incorporate a light bulb, the profile of a human head, a DNA model, a compass, and a computer chip.
The piece itself provides less of an insight into John Kachik than the story behind the plaque that identifies it. Asked to write a brief biography, Kachik included a reference to his wife and daughters. The organizers suggested it wasn’t very professional, that it was, in essence, “too friendly.” “But I’m not a professional. I am friendly,” Kachik retorted.
He is not the only one who feels that way. MICA professor Weiss recalled, “John was one of those guys that other students notice the first day of class and then assume he might feel superior to everyone.
But John never let his amazing talent get in the way of being a really good and down to earth guy.”
The flap over the airport plaque illustrates Kachik’s philosophy on art and life. He shies away from potentially corrupting riches. Despite several offers and the promise of a big paycheck, he won’t do work for tobacco companies, for example. “I never wanted to worry about collecting things, or money. I’d be too afraid of missing out on life in the process,” he said.
This ethic goes a long way toward explaining why he happily calls Sykesville home. It is a great place to raise kids and feel safe. It is short on hustle and bustle and long on community and nostalgia. It is, in
his words, “full of old stuff.” It is a place where a man can match his pace to the leisure of life in a small, historic town. For now, it suits him fine. Kachik used to be a city guy, while at MICA and afterward, but he has had his fill. In short, he has no regrets.
But if he had his druthers, he would locate that old Nixon portrait.
