Today we’d like to introduce you to Mary Hawkins

Hi Mary, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?

Sure! Thank you so much for inviting me. I’m an art director, animator and designer based in New York City and I love working with type, using bright colors and giving my work unexpected and rich textures by using collage or handmade elements.

I was born in Kentucky and then went to high school in Massachusetts, where I was an artsy theater kid. (At one point, I realized that pretty much all of my clothes either had paint on them or were black.) I came to New York on August 25th, 1996 – so many people asked me for the date before I left that I memorized it – and I lived in the East Village for 25 years before moving to Jackson Heights, Queens during lockdown. I went to a specialized conservatory at NYU/Tisch where I was one of only a few undergrads in their Grad Design Department. I worked in indie film for a year and then went back to school to learn animation. I’ve been working in motion graphics and as an art director for the last two decades and it’s really been a wonderful career for me. It just syncs up with something about the way my brain operates and scratches just the right itch for the part of my head that loves fun visual puzzles, so it’s been a really good fit.

Other than that? I’m a dancer and perform a few times a year with the Gotham Roller Derby Jeerleaders. I’m an omnivorous reader (Storygraph tells me that I’ve read 139 books so far this year). There’s always a craft project or two hanging out in my office studio, along with my two cats, Smidge and Smudge. I try to volunteer a few nights a week, especially for groups that help get people registered to vote, like Postcards to Voters, Markers for Democracy and HeadCount. I love making things and I love learning. J’ai commencer a apprendre français quand j’avais six ans, y ahora mismo estoy tomando clases porque todo el chisme interesante en mi vecindario está en español. When I was a little kid, my mom went back to college and would take me to class with her. I’d sit in the back with a coloring book and paid just enough attention that I was ahead in math for years and had all sorts of odd trivia floating around up there.

Having a mindset where I always want to learn more and try new things is really helpful as a freelancer. I’m often jumping into the deep end on my projects and have to get up to speed on quickly because our deadlines are so tight. In my personal life, my artwork and my career, I try to approach everything with openness and curiosity and see where things go.

You can visit maryhawkins.com to see more of my latest work and get in touch with me.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?

Ha! It definitely wasn’t a smooth path! When I started grad school for 3D animation, I told my teachers that I wanted to do work that combined animation and design, and they didn’t quite get it, so that felt a little lonely. We didn’t really even have a name for that combination yet. Now, everyone talks about motion graphics and we’re surrounded by animated work that is abstract or highly designed. Two decades ago, a lot of my training was centered around how to make something look photorealistic. It’s been helpful in a lot of ways to have that grounding, but at the same time I didn’t feel like I had a clear path. Instead, I had this nebulous idea about what type of work I wanted to make and what type of clients I wanted to work for. Luckily, one of my teachers pointed me towards broadcast design, and some of my earliest jobs were making promos for shows on Sundance Channel and MTV.

Right now I’m at a point in my career where while I have decades of work under my belt, my clients are more interested in my personal projects and my creative voice. When I talk to new clients, they want to talk about my short films more than my commercial work, so I get to show off Love Letters for the Subway or Skate Fast, Turn Left instead of walking them through more branded projects. It’s a good place to be in!

For years, I tried to make personal work by carving out time on the weekends or before work and that’s a recipe for burnout. My personal projects are a form of professional development – I’m developing my voice as an artist and leveling up. I’ve set up my schedule so that I have time in my year to not only work on those projects, but also learn any new skills I need and have a proper amount of time to get a good finished film. It took a lot of internal work for me to realize that I had to consider my own projects to have the same level of importance as my client work. Sometimes personal work can feel like just playing around, or you’ll hit that first roadblock and never quite work past it. My early projects for myself would have sloppy deadlines and just-okay paperwork or planning, but the key to getting my short films done was treating them with the same respect as any other project for a paying client.

I feel like every couple of years, I’ve had some major change-up in my career as either the industry or technology or styles shift. In the last year, a lot of my work has been title design and art direction for documentaries, including Kokomo City, which won awards at Sundance, and two upcoming features, “Igniting the Spark: The Story of Magic the Gathering” and “A Future on Stage: The Making of a Broadway Musical” with my husband, Brian Stillman. A lot of my ad work was ephemeral, so I’ve enjoyed working on projects that will last for decades. A lot of the visual styles that I developed in my short films have shown up in these other projects.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?

I’m an art director, animator and designer and I’ve worked in my industry for two decades for all sorts of clients. For people who are new to the term, “Art Director” is a broad and sometimes slippery job description. In the stack of people who are working on a creative project, I sit between the creative director’s vision and guidance and the work to be done. I take the notes and direction of the creative director, plus the feedback and strategy from clients and interpret it visually. On larger projects I’m directing other commercial artists and leading them so they can create pieces that flow into the final project. On others, I can sweep up the whole project and cover all of those steps by myself.

Visually, while commercial artists always need to work within the brief, I’m usually placed on projects that play to my strengths. I use a lot of bold colors and typography, and I love hand-drawn and expressive type. I love playing with scale and finding the unexpected. I find using collage with drawn elements to be really satisfying. I like visual research, so collage lets me scratch that itch. I prefer texture, roughness and even a little punkiness over creating something slick and smooth. For a long time, I felt like I was mostly being asked to use my software tools well and that was all any of my clients needed. When things started changing up for me it felt like a big relief. It’s always such a big compliment to have people come to me with projects that fit my interests and personal style.

My last two short films, Love Letters for the Subway and Skate Fast, Turn Left are two branches of my style. Love Letters for the Subway is just what the title says – a series of animated, hand-drawn letters that feature textures and local landmarks from the subway and around New York City. I used really punchy colors and let myself be a little more abstract and loose than my normal drawing style. I drew parts of it on the subway during my commute, so other New Yorkers would watch me work and ask about the project. NYC is often portrayed as being a shiny place with all those big famous tourist sites, but I live here, I’m pretty-much-never in a taxi, and my film is about my connection to the city as a local. It’s been at film festivals around the city and around the world, and it’s really cool for me to talk to people after screenings and hear their own stories about their communities, where they like to go and how they like to get there.

Skate Fast, Turn Left is a project that my friend Erin Knitis/Fifi Fleshwound and I made for Things Took a Turn, an online anthology. When Fifi and I would meet up to talk about what we were going to do for the project, we’d start by being in Serious Artist mode and then quickly veer off into talking about our lives. We met at roller derby – we were in the same rookie class – and like many other in-person events, things have indeed taken a turn for roller derby post-lockdown. Fifi is a writer, so she packed a lot of the issues we were talking about into the dialogue and then we brainstormed shapes and forms that we could use for the different scenes. I was lucky that a lot of roller derby photographers donated their photos for me to use in the film, and sequencing the shots so that photos from different photographers and different skaters and different countries matched up was really satisfying. It goes by quickly, but so does the game, and like Love Letters, I like how people find the different threads in the dialogue and images and react to the film.

In my commercial work, I’ve been really lucky to work with a bunch of lovely, brilliant people on interesting (and sometimes intense!) projects over the course of my career. My first big project was working on the MTV Upfronts in 2004. I’ve worked as a freelancer at Paramount and NBC, among other broadcast networks, and with major brands like L’Oréal. During lockdown, I realized I really wanted to shake things up and started working with my friend Kathryn Velvel-Jones on livestreams for nonprofit and social good clients. Our work on Vote With Us, a livestream from March On/future coalition, was nominated for a Webby in Virtual & Remote Public Service & Activism in 2020.

Do you any memories from childhood that you can share with us?

My earliest childhood memory is one where my parents took me to the lake near our house. I remember being lifted into the boat and I was wearing this little bonnet. When I looked down into the water, it was the same green as the color of the boat – this kind of dusty dark green – and then I remembered that the last time I’d been to the lake, I’d had the same thought. I tried to place the memory years later and I realized that I would have been about two and a half years old at the time because my sister hadn’t been born yet.

Color has always been a big thing for me, even when I was a kid. I know everyone loves getting a big box of crayons, but I’d sort them carefully by color and then spend time trying to figure out new ways to organize them. I did the same thing with beads and marbles and would spend a lot of time pairing things up. It was really relaxing for me, and looking back on it, I was essentially trying to find new visual connections. My sister and I were big into crafts and my mom was happy to buy us art supplies. I thought I was just playing around, but as an adult, I spend a lot of time doing the same thing with swatches, fonts, textures and abstract shapes to try to set a visual mood or get a specific feeling.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://maryhawkins.com
• Instagram: martylikespostcards.com
• Other: https://imdb.me/maryhawkins

Image Credits

Photo by Alex Palombo, palombophotography.com

“Love Letters for the Subway” Directed and animated by Mary Hawkins. Original music by Carlos Dengler.

“Skate Fast, Turn Left” Directed by by Mary Hawkins and Erin Knitis. Animated by Mary Hawkins, Written by Erin Knitis.