Mike Hinge - Resume 1

Todays post is of Mike Hinge's resume from the late 60's circa 1966/67, earliest entry from 1958. Thank you very much to Sanford Meschkow for keeping this resume safely all these years and to Matt Howarth for scanning and emailing them to me (there are also 5 more resumes from Sandford's files that I will share shortly). 


I have re-typed the resume and have also included the original scans. 


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RESUME

Name:       Mike Hinge

Address:   55 West 14^th Street, New York, New York (Apt. 14-M)

Telephone:  243-6939

EXPERIENCE

October 1966 – Present

  Experimental fine art –

       Light Sculptures

       16mm color movie

July 1966 – October 1966

YOUNG & RUBICAM, INC. – 285 Madison Avenue – New York, N.Y.

(Alan Thompson, Department Head)

Art Director (Freelance)

Eastern Airlines, Mexico Magnifico – conceptual designs

and presentations. Exhibit design, posters, displays,

corporate design, mailing pieces.

Gulf Oil California – 24-Sheet poster concepts, envelope stuffers, pamphlets

General Electric Co. – exhibit displays

Keebler – supermarket booth

General Foods – brochure

Plymouth – newspaper ads: full page, color, black & white, double truck. Showroom and institutional exhibit.

August 1965 – March 1966

THE FELDMAN COMPANY – 612 S. Wall Street – Los Angeles, Calif.

Designers and Manufacturers of Lighting Fixtures and Lamps

(Ed Fizdale, Chief Engineer)

Product Designer-Illustrator

  Catalog illustration: 3-point perspective (measuring)

Product design: Lighting fixtures, lamps, chandeliers

Drafting: Shop drawings, blueprint parts assembly

March 1964 – August 1965

FREELANCE–Mike Hinge–739 X. Hudson Ave.–Los Angeles, Calif.

Fashion layout, graphic design, P.O.P., type mark-up,

brochures, mailers, strip-in-separations

May 1963 – October 1963

BRAND-WORTH SIGNING & Graphics, STORE INTERIORS

16221 S. Maple – Gardenia, Calif.

(Gene Wild, Art Director)

Designer

  Dimensional design: supermarket and store graphics

  Store interiors: color and material selection

  Perspective, mural

November 1962 – February 1963

REPRISE RECORDS, INC.

(Merle Shore, Art Director)

  Record cover design and ideas

March 1961 – May 1961

CLIFFORD GILL ADVERTISING AGENCY

8701 Wilshire Blvd. – Beverly Hills, Calif.

(Cliford Gill, Pres.)

Art Director (Freelance)

  Space advertising brochures

January 1961 – March 1961

NIDES-CINI ADVERTISING AGENCY - 8201 Beverly Blvd. Los Angeles Calif.

(Jack Nides, Pres./Zelda Cini, Vice Pres.)

Art Director

  Presentation design, type mark-up, separations

July 1960 – December 1960

HERALD EXPRESS (EXAMINER) – 1111 S. Broadway – Los Angeles, Calif.

Promotion Department

Designer

  Space advertising ideas

Septemer 1959 – May 1960

MAY COMPANY – 801 S. Broadway/Hill Street – Los Angeles, Calif.

Advertising Department

(Jean Rains/Peter Daddio, Art Directors)

  Layout – institutional

ART CENTER SCHOOL OF DESIGN – 5353 W. Third St. Los Angeles, Calif.

REFERENCES

Roger Hines (Art Director, Young & Rubicam, Inc.)

One Deerfield Road

Wilton, Connecticut

Len Moffatt (Writer, Container Corporation of America)

5804 E. Gage Avenue Apt. 5

Bell Gardens, California

Gene Wild

Rober Tierney Associates (Exhibition Design)

3600 Wilshire Boulevard Suite 1930

Los Angeles, California

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Mike Hinge - a biography

Mike Hinge in his own words, a short biography circa 1980. This glimpse into Mike's life tells about the exciting era and of the interesting places where Mike lived and worked and his ideas. Thanks very much to Sanford Meschkow and Matt Howarth for sharing this. The front cover is a Mike Hinge ASCII art portrait.

Mike Hinge - an obituary

Thanks very much to Andrew Porter  for sending me the obituary, Mike is very much missed.

After a long delay, Tom Cardy's obituary for Mike Hinge was published in New Zealand's second largest daily paper. The Dominion Post (Wellington, New Zealand) December 11, 2003
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Michael Barry Hinge, illustrator and graphic designer. B Auckland, August 9, 1931, d Philadelphia, August 2003.

DESPITE success as an illustrator and graphic designer after moving to the United States 44 years ago, Mike Hinge remained virtually unknown in New Zealand. His success included portraits with a distinct pop art influence for the cover of Time magazine -- Japanese emperor Hirohito in October, 1971 and Richard Nixon, as the Watergate crisis deepened, in November 1973. The artwork for both covers are now held by the Smithsonian. Film-maker Stanley Kubrick hired Hinge to design a "cryogenic module" for a display at cinemas to promote his 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, but the display was never constructed.

Hinge illustrated many covers and interiors for American science fiction magazines Amazing Science Fiction, Fantastic and Analog in the 1970s, as well as book covers. A comic strip, which he also wrote, appeared in the graphic magazine Heavy Metal in 1982.

As a professional artist, Hinge was nominated for a Hugo Award -- sci-fi's most prestigious trophy -- in 1973. New Zealand has featured in the awards only twice since then, when Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring won best dramatic presentation last year and The Two Towers this year. Hinge was also nominated six times for the Locus Awards bestowed by American sci-fi news magazine, Locus.

Hinge grew up in a state house in Mission Bay, Auckland. His English father was a bus driver and his South African mother was a former nurse. Hinge's twin obsessions were sci-fi and everything American. As a child he would stay up till 3am, drawing spaceships and futuristic vehicles. By the time he was a teenager in the late 1940s, he regularly wore a cowboy hat, listened to the blues and Louis Armstrong and was learning to play jazz trombone.

By the standards of the day, he was a maverick. To the consternation of audiences at Auckland cinemas, the Americanophile refused to stand when God Save The King was played before each film. He hated the Union Jack on the New Zealand flag and suggested a koru design instead. Hinge studied at Auckland's Elam School of Fine Arts in 1947 and 1948, then worked as a commercial artist at the Farmers Trading Company and advertising agencies. In his spare time he helped illustrate several New Zealand amateur sci-fi publications.

Hinge remained fixated with the US. In 1952, he had applied for a green card to work there. In 1958, he was granted one and left in June. Until he boarded a ship to America, the only place he had visited outside Auckland was Waiheke Island. He enrolled at the Art Center School of Design in Los Angeles. Commissions included record covers, fashion layouts for JC Penney and supermarket interiors.

In New York from 1966, Hinge worked in advertising agencies as an art director and designer. His designs for typefaces and graphics won him several awards and were exhibited, including a show at the Brooklyn Museum. A book about his art, The Mike Hinge Experience, was published in 1973, and his work featured in the anthology The New Visions, in 1982.

Hinge returned home only once. In 1984, his brother Noel, who had won $333,000 in Lotto's predecessor Golden Kiwi, paid for the trip and bought him a house in Orewa. But Hinge found the pace too slow and advertising agencies would not hire him. He returned to New York the following year and resumed work as a freelance illustrator. His last professional work was the cover of Amazing Stories in 1993.

Hinge was based in Philadelphia for the past 10 years. He never married, fearing he couldn't support a family as a freelance artist.He lived alone and friends became concerned after they had not seen him for several days. Police broke into his apartment and found his body. He had died of a heart attack, most likely about a week earlier, around his 72nd birthday. His ashes were interred in Auckland.

 -- By
Tom Cardy. Sources: N Hinge, N Rowe, S Meschkow, Locus Online, The Mike Hinge Experience by James Steranko.

Mike Hinge 80th Anniversary : Sanford Zane Meschkow

Sandford is a writer and editor and met Mike Hinge in the mid 60's and has written a personal memoir for Mike remembering certain art projects and the materials and practices he used as well writing a short SF story "A Friend of Max". As well a clarification of Mikes actual date of birth.

See some of Sandford's early SF writing here:


http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ch.cgi?14512


MICHAEL B. (for BARRY) HINGE: A MIND NEVER AT REST

By Sanford Zane Meschkow

When I first joined science fiction fandom back in the 1960s, authors always seemed to be writing essays in fan publications about being cornered by fans asking them where they got their ideas. Knowing Mike for 36 years, I soon learned where he got his ideas: EVERYWHERE! The artistic potential of all sorts of objects seemed to fascinate him.

When several Philadelphia friends and SF fans helped me clean out his apartment after his death, his effects included a slide projector and a huge collection of slides. A few were of his artwork, most of them sold or lost items. Many more were of views of his kinetic sculptures and frames from incomprehensible experimental movies. But the majority of the slides were part of a huge reference file. Think street signs, fire hydrants, traffic lights, street lamps, sewer grates, manhole covers, store fronts, posters on fences, cast iron gates, etc. It was as if he was collecting reference material to build himself a gigantic back lot version of New York. You might say that this was just the act of a compulsive person. But what did it lead to?

Founded in 1923, Barney’s once was a landmark New York men’s store that filled the whole block at 7^th Avenue and 17^th Street. Here’s a short paragraph from one of Mike’s resumes: “For Barney’s Clothiers: Supergraphic street mural, concepts for building entrance, lights, graphics, colors, etc. (3-D lettering sign made up of plumbing fittings and pipe, spacing and positioning logo cutout from steel, backlighted in fluorescent tubes).”

That street mural? It was an eye-catching arrangement of representations of manhole covers in a contrasting color on a black background. There were easily a dozen different manhole cover designs represented. Who but Mike Hinge could have conceived of making art out of manhole covers? Yes, if you wanted an illustration of a New York street scene, Mike was the guy to see. No, he didn’t only paint robots on roller skates.

Mike was fascinated by found objects. He collected everything from cigarette packs to, well, money. The U.S. coins he spent, of course, but it astounded us how many coins from Canada, France, and Caribbean and South American countries he had picked up from the street over the years. He had also accumulated a vast collection of bits and stuff for a planned giant collage which, sadly, had to be discarded after he died.

What media did Mike work in? Illustrators and designers used to do rough comps with marker pens. We found a huge set of Berol® PRISMACOLOR ® professional-quality markers that must have included over 100 colors, plus many shades of grey. He had replaced the markers in the original set with newer certified non-toxic markers as he used the old ones up. We would have liked to have donated it, except the oldest markers were so old that the pigments were in solution in some smelly hydrocarbon (benzene? toluene?) that we feared were probably pretty toxic. Working with them in a small room might have made Mike dizzy, but what he would have like about them was their ease of use and their vivid colors. He also liked to use Pelican Plaka casein emulsion paints from Germany and Dr. Ph. Martin’s dyes and acrylics. Robert and Joseph Switzer, who created fluorescent paints (like DayGlo) in 1934 couldn’t have hoped for an artist more eager to use them than Mike, who probably would have liked to have had DayGlo-colored blood.

Mike lived with my wife and I for about 14 months and in return he offered to paint our house – if he could pick the colors. Think of a staid suburban street with one incandescent painted lady of a house on it! We said no, but gently.

Mike liked to work large; the poster was a natural size for him. Also, his big preliminary sketches were as tight and as near completion as some other artist’s final versions. One of his works lost in various moves was a room-sized mural with a historical New Zealand theme that included a lot of Maori art motifs.

Yes, let’s talk of lost art and lost opportunities. Mike told us once that he had decided not to marry because he could never be sure of being able to support a family. He never seemed to have considered the possibility of finding and marrying a woman who worked outside of the home and who might have been capable of providing some cash as well as company during those lean times when art jobs are far apart. Marriage to a creative person can be a rocky road and the Mike I knew would have made a difficult husband, but marriage to the Mike I never knew, the one married to a women who made him happy and could have steered him in the right direction when he needed it – well, that would have been another story. How many covers for ANALOG and TIME might he have done then?

Had Mike been a more famous artist, less of his work would have been lost in moves or dumped when he couldn’t pay storage bills. To pay his taxes and convert some of his belongings to cash for his brother, we filled a van with his paintings and some of his commercial work and sent them off to be auctioned. We were told what not to include. Not his kinetic sculpture, no Parsec City posters, rough sketches, doodles, stats or machine copies of works, nothing of the type of thing that would have had auction value if Mike had been as famous at his death as, say, Jack Kirby. Local friends and fans and I saved some of that unwanted stuff from going into the recycle bin. A lot of that appears on this blog thanks to Ivan. And there is still more out there, so don’t give up, Friends of Mike (FOMs) and inhabitants of Parsec City. Maybe today someone will open a dusty box in an attic that their uncle was holding for some guy named Mike and find it is full of fluorescent wonders.


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Aside 1: Copy of an email I received from Sandy Meschkow and a Mike Hinge inspired story:
A Friend of Max.

Dear Ivan,

   I thought the fans of your site might enjoy another bit of fan fiction inspired by Mike Hinge. Mike was no mad scientist, although his electronic sculptures were really something! And he could have made more money during his later years if he were socially adept enough to work with art galleries and smooze more. But he was pretty much a loner and both essentially shy and uncompromising – a bad combination in a field where self-promotion is essential. Mike’s actual apartment is well-described in this story and Mike did have a few friends that kept him going in his later years when the number of science fiction magazines dwindled and the rise of computer graphics cut the ground out from under many established illustrators working in the commercial art field. And if Mike had invented a time machine, it surely would have turned out to have something wrong with it, because he seemed plagued by bad luck.

                                                                                                                                                Sandy Meschkow

Read Sandy's story here: http://onyxcube.weebly.com/

Aside 2: A contribution by Sandy Meschkow regarding Mike's actual birth date.

Mike’s date of birth actually was August 9, 1931. The exact date of his death is uncertain, but it was probably only a few days or two from his birthday in 2003. I still have a big file of letters and stuff about Mike, so it will be no problem to come up with something interesting to say.

Here’s one thing; some sources may say that Mike was born in 1937, and here’s why. When Mike went through the U.S. immigration process, he presented adequate paperwork to establish his date of birth, but in the English (or Continental?) fashion the “1”  at the end of his year of birth had a slash through it, so the clerk read it as a “7”. Mike never bothered to go through the hassle of changing it when he was young. But in his last few years he could have really used those extra years of Social Security that he had been cheated out of by a clerical error. We were furious with him when we found out that he had not taken care of that!! Here was a guy who was known as Captain Copyright for enlightening other artists about their rights and got into hot water with some sleazy publishers by not allowing them to swipe his rights and artwork, but was so intimidated by the U.S. Immigration Service and Social Security Administration that he didn’t dare try to get his date of birth corrected. It’s really sad! We helped him sign up for Social Security and you could tell he was sweating bullets through the whole process. 

                                                                                                                                             Sandy Meschkow   

Mike Hinge 120

This is an email I received from Sandy Meschkow, one of Mike Hinge's close friends, clarifying about where Mike lived before he died.

Dear Ivan,

   I think Mike fell out of direct communication with a lot of his New York contacts while he was in Philadelphia, so there is some confusion about where he was living after he left New York for Philadelphia. While he did spend the last few years of his life in a rented room just over the Philadelphia city line in Upper Darby, PA, he lived there alone. For about two years previous to that he lived with my wife, Marian, and I about ten miles west of Philadelphia in a little town called Havertown. In fact, the cover painting for George Allen Effinger’s novel, When Gravity Fails, was done in our back bedroom.

                                                                                                                                             Sandy Meschkow

 A3 photocopy of a prelim for the cover of George Allen Effinger’s novel, When Gravity Fails