At some point or another, you have experienced a sensation known as the pilometer reflex. It’s when your hair stood on end listening to a chilling vocal performance or an eerie story, a vestigial ‘fight or flight’ response to being emotionally disarmed. Although it’s not as standard a measure of success as the 35 industry awards OCAD U Illustration students have collected this year from American Illustration, the New York Society of Illustrators, 3×3, CQ, CMYK, Nobrow, Illustrators Unlimited, and Applied Arts, the times that I have felt this way discussing a student’s work were for me undeniable evidence of being confronted with something stirring and new.

And that’s the point of our thesis program. It’s the final stage of a 4-year transformative process where students shed their woolly thinking for that of a dyed-in-the-wool illustrator. Picture-making, once hackneyed and anodyne gives way to the development of original imagery, and in turn, to a personal, creative voice.

And then, to be heard, that voice grows louder.

Emerging illustrators are facing a world of revolutionary technological change coupled with geopolitical and economic unrest. Culture in contrast, seems to have taken comfort in nostalgia, monotonously repeating itself like a skipping record. Algorithmic calculations, a by-product of that same technology, are determining our tastes to the extent that for any progress to occur, artists have to fight even harder to establish themselves. Ironically, it’s those very differences that separate artists, the unconventional techniques and idiosyncratic thought processes, that once accepted push the needle forward.

The 2012 graduates of OCAD University’s Illustration Program represent this spirit of distinctive, innovative image-making. Their work, covering a wide array of media, with broad application to design and art, will soon be joining that of recent alumni, shaping the way we see things, and setting a new tone for culture. The next time you open a newspaper, magazine or book, walk into a gallery, play a computer game, or watch a movie, there is a good chance that if it stirs something inside you, you are viewing the work of one of our graduates.

Paul Dallas
Chair, Illustration
OCAD University