User profile: backusstudio

Joined: Feb. 12, 2009

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Posted on: Meet the mysterious Roger Von Bergendorff

It is sad beyond imagination for me to read that Roger Bergendorff has come to this. I went to art school with Roger. He was one of those individuals so dedicated to what he was doing that he seemed possessed. Most of us just stepped back and let him be the best. In the mid 1970s commercial illustration was not just a viable living, it was a way to be a rock star in the visual arts. Movie posters, record album covers, Time magazine covers, TV Guide covers. The top illustrators earned incomes on a par with a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon. The dedication that Roger gave his studies and later his professional work was not unreasonable. It was a serious profession that offered considerable rewards.

What Roger did not know, that none of us could know, was that our profession would be rendered irrelevant by economics, technology and the whims of fashion. Movie poster work went to digital photo collage. Records gave way to CDs and on the smaller canvas any kind of graphic seemed adequate. Time, TV Guide and the other periodicals had their own challenges to deal with and soon settled for photography rather than artwork. The high profile projects that we had known through the 1980s dried up and even living wage jobs became a game of musical chairs. All of us had to learn to get by with less. For people like Roger who had health issues, being self employed meant no health insurance. In America the path to bankruptcy and homelessness is too often paved with medical bills.

The immediate assumption in this post-911 age when Roger was found with ricin was that he had become some kind of terrorist. My first thought was that he meant to do himself in with this toxin if his circumstances became intolerable. Wallace Wood, my favorite childhood cartoonist in MAD magazine, shot himself when his health and finances failed in later life. A sad way for bright, talented, dedicated professionals to end their lives. I hope that Roger can find the way back.

(Suggest removal) 2/12/09 at 8:32 p.m.

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