Sorcerer's Apprentice No More
Romanoski Makes His Mark

BY SEAN RAMSDEN

It’s December 31, 2000, and an estimated 500,000 wide-eyed revelers have descended upon New York City’s Times Square, eager to be among the first to drink up the renewed buoyancy and hope of a new year. A million watts of incandescent allure illuminate the square below as an entire nation turns its attention to this carnival of color. Warding off the winter chill, Romanoski is inside The World, a restaurant and retail store at 43rd and Broadway dedicated to World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), the entity once known as the World Wrestling Federation. Nearby is a 20-foot high promotional poster that he created for the upcoming WWE World Rumble featuring 16 wrestling luminaries portrayed in a series of menacing postures. Romanoski lurks anonymously, watching fans flock toward the ominous images of Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock, among others. Over the course of 20 minutes, more than 100 people delight in having their photos taken in front of the poster. To Romanoski, this public response to his artwork represents the validation he says every artist seeks, yet rarely has the chance to experience for himself. "You never really see the response of people for whom the painting is targeted," he said. "It really made me realize that all the hard work and frustration I had endured was worth it. Well worth it." But in truth, Romanoski isn’t even as awed by this scene as the one outside, where the same image reaches four stories high atop The World, which is exactly where the artist feels he is at this very moment.

Pablo Picasso said that every child is an artist, but that it is a matter of remaining one as he or she matures. The ability to retain a mind open to all possibilities, and not just the conventional ones, is one of the most critical things separating artists from everyone else. Convention is perhaps the greatest foe of creativity, and the creative mind will have a much greater chance to develop if given the opportunity to breathe. "My parents never told me I wasn’t good enough. If I drew a square sun, they told me it looked great," Romanoski explains. "However unintentionally, I think a lot of well-meaning parents kill artists in what they feel is the kids’ best interest, as if they’re protecting them from imminent failure."

Romanoski, like many children, spent much of his time with pencil in hand, emptying his jumbled and frenzied pre-adolescent thoughts onto paper. Though his drawings at the time were primarily the manifestation of a young boy’s imagination, he was somewhat aware even then that they served a higher purpose. "Art was a way to get approval and praise, a little world for me to get lost in," he recalled of his early artistic ventures. "Even now, though, I’m still like a kid when it comes to my work. I’m still insecure about showing my art."

Unlike a great many people who happen into careers somewhat by chance, Romanoski recalls the precise moment when the significance of his doodling occurred to him. "There was an art store in Plainfield, N.J., near where I grew up, and in the back, they had an amazing poster of a dragon signed by the artist," he recalled. "It was by Tim Hildebrandt for a Dungeons & Dragons calendar cover and it completely knocked me over, this piece of fantasy art. I was just 12, yet, I knew at that instant what I wanted to do."

With this goal in mind, the young Romanoski began to prepare for a career in art. What he did not realize at the time, however, was that the transformation would be awkward. Art suddenly shifted into a much larger perspective, while at the same time, he was abandoned by his youthful innocence, yielding way to the self-consciousness so poisonous to a budding artist. "When we are young, we actually believe that our drawings look just like the real thing," he said. "But once we reach the age of 10 or so, we experience the birth of the internal critic and begin to realize that what we are depicting is nowhere near accurate, and we become conscious of our own flaws as well. It makes the honesty required of an artist that much more difficult, because we become rather insecure and guarded."
Nevertheless, Romanoski felt he had a calling and doggedly pursued it. After beginning his college career at St. John’s University in Queens, N.Y., he transferred to Kean University in the spring of 1989 as a fine arts major; and, like so many other members of the art community, soon found himself at the mercy of his own self-doubt. "Early in college, I was just like everybody else," he said. "I’d look around and think that everyone else’s art was better than mine." It wasn’t long, however, before he grew comfortable with his surroundings and his place in the world. "I was an average student, at best – art is definitely not something that I always excelled at," Romanoski explained. He sought help to make his dream come true and looked toward college as preparation for his career, not for high-minded artistic elitism. "The faculty at Kean, particularly professors Johann Jochnowitz and Rose Gonnella, never preached about fine art versus commercial art. They let me make my own decisions and never tried to steer me away from something that was considered ‘less than’ art."

Armed with their affirmation of his career choice, Romanoski graduated from Kean in 1992 and began to supplement his education by reading fanatically about fantasy art. That summer, he happened upon a text entitled Fantasy Art Techniques of Tim Hildebrandt, by one half of the celebrated Brothers Hildebrandt fantasy-art duo known the world over for such illustrations as the original Star Wars movie posters, as well as for calendars featuring J.R.R. Tolkien characters. The book was filled with images and featured a practical guide to creating them. Romanoski had long been a fan of their work, but this was the first he would actually read of their methods and practices. Enthralled, he returned to that same art shop in Plainfield to inquire about how he could contact Tim Hildebrandt. The influential illustrator agreed to meet with the budding artist, and after seeing some of his work, offered him some sage advice. "He told me that I had a lot to learn and that it wouldn’t be easy," he said.

Not long after, Romanoski met Joe DeVito, another artist who sat Romanoski down and gave it to him straight. "He was very honest about my work," recalled Romanoski. "He told me I had the potential to be very good, but that like any craft, it would have to be properly honed." The two made a deal that DeVito would tutor Romanoski for 30 minutes a week to get him on his way. "Once we got into it, it became more like eight hours a week," he said. "He taught me about the academic approach to art and convinced me to enroll in the Art Students League (ASL)."

There, Romanoski studied the drawing and painting techniques of Frank Reilly, the man credited with formalizing the academic philosophies of illustration in the 1930s and 1940s. When he felt he had absorbed all he could from the ASL, he moved on to The duCret School of the Arts in Plainfield to study illustration, composition and anatomy under Peter Caras, a well-known artist in his own right and a protégé of both the legendary Norman Rockwell and Jim Bama, illustrator of the Doc Savage, Man of Bronze series between 1933 and 1949. With Tim Hildebrandt’s words echoing in his mind, Romanoski was eager to learn as much as he could from Caras. "I knew that I had to have a better understanding of anatomy to create lifelike images, and Bama’s human forms were so incredibly realistic," he explained. "And Rockwell was such a master of detail. You have to see yourself as a film director with one frame to tell the story. You have to set the mood, and create the right lighting and costume, all without the benefit of any dialogue. There is nothing in the work that doesn’t serve a purpose."

While at duCret, Romanoski made the acquaintance of Chuck Wren, a fellow artist who referred him back to Tim and Greg Hildebrandt. "Chuck saw how my style was developing, and he thought I could benefit from knowing them better," he said. "On a whim, I took some transparencies I had drawn with me to their studio in Morristown, N.J., and Greg, whom I was meeting for the first time, was pretty impressed by them." Greg Hildebrandt immediately placed a call to his agent, Jean Scrocco, curator of Spiderwebart Gallery, who had Romanoski exhibit two of his paintings at an opening. "There were more than two dozen other artists displaying their work at the opening, all of them very established," he recalled. "It was a very prestigious thing for me to be associated with, and I was one of only three artists to sell any paintings on the day it opened."

This flurry of success led Romanoski to the break every artist or performer seeks. In 1998, the Hildebrandts, swamped in projects, offered Romanoski a position as an assistant in their studio. The offer, ironically, was based on the idea that his style was extraordinarily similar to that of the brothers. "Growing up, their stuff was what I was drawn to, so I was bound to mimic it to some extent," he explained. Under the Hildebrandts, Romanoski assisted on a variety of illustration projects, typically working 14- to 16-hour days, seven days a week. While the hours were intense, those long days did more to shape Romanoski’s career than anything else.

When this spate of work ended, the brothers invited him to stay on in their studio to do his own illustrations and paintings in 2000, with Scrocco managing his career. To Romanoski, the invitation represented the realization of something he once thought was impossible. "I wasn’t sure exactly where my career would take me, but fortunately, everything kept falling into place," he recalled. It was here that Romanoski completed the World Rumble poster for the WWE, a job of which he remains most proud. "Seeing my painting standing more than four stories tall in Times Square was something I can’t describe," he said. "The wave of emotions was incredible, because as excited as I was, I still felt insecure about being exposed before 10 million art critics, even though I felt as if I had done a very good job, and was very proud of what I had achieved. The Hildebrandts taught me that artistic talent is an acquired skill, and that the only God-given talent was the ability to persevere. That knowledge more or less saved my life."

To explain how to achieve the seemingly impossible, Romanoski invokes the lesson of the bus passing through the single sheet of paper. "There’s a way you can cut it in rows from the center, without ever breaking the outer edge, where you will create a hole large enough through which to drive that bus when they are extended," he said. "It’s not complicated at all, but you have to imagine the possibilities beyond the 8 1/2”-by-11” dimensions of the paper."

Thinking outside the box to achieve the seemingly impossible was already an essential professional concept to Romanoski in 2001, but when he was diagnosed with cancer that summer, he took on an opponent more fearsome and unknown than any fire-breathing dragon his mind had ever concocted. Why, when he had already defied the odds, would he be confronted with a trial for which his imagination had no remedy? "There have been several moments in my life that, for one reason or another, have seemed almost surreal, and this was definitely one of them," he recounted. "One day, your biggest decision is whether to have Corn Flakes or Cheerios for breakfast, and the next day, your own survival becomes an issue. I was 31 years old, and a doctor was telling me I had cancer."

Immediately, images of wizards and goblins were rudely evicted from Romanoski’s mind, forced out by thoughts of treatments, metastasizing cells and living wills. "It was touch-and-go for a while, but it began to look more and more that we caught it in time," he said of the malignancy. Determined to live rather than merely survive, Romanoski began to look at his illness as just another hurdle to overcome, and immersed himself in art to cope. "As artists, I think we sometimes create unnecessary drama in our lives. By its nature, art is very dramatic," he explained. "However, when life does go wrong, art also gives us a healthy place to release some of that drama. My work is my therapy, and focusing on it allowed me to do what needed to be done to get my body healthy again, without getting too lost in self-pity."

Romanoski has been completely cancer-free for more than a year now, and says he learned much about himself, his work, his friends and the boundaries of his imagination during the course of his battle. He draws a circle on a piece of paper and locates a dot well outside of it. "I used to believe that this dot represented what I was capable of, things beyond the limits of conventional thought," Romanoski explained while encircling the entire diagram and placing another dot outside the wider ring. "Since my cancer, my own expectations are much greater, like this circle, and this dot shows what I’m reaching for now."

A firm believer in synchronicity, the idea that a coincidence of events seems to be meaningfully related, Romanoski says that many doors have opened for him in a way that seems to transcend mere fate. He cites the repeated influences of Tim and Greg Hildebrandt in his life, some by choice and others more by chance, beginning when he was just a young boy. Even his recent illness steered him toward new professional directions in freelance art. He left the Hildebrandt’s studio in the fall of 2002 in order to pursue a new direction in his artwork, but, before he left, Romanoski was given the original artwork from that Dungeon & Dragons calendar by Tim Hildebrandt, and it remains one of his most treasured possessions. Today, he remains close to the legendary fantasy-art duo, but nevertheless feels compelled to add some new colors to his professional palate. Lately, Romanoski has ventured into young-adult literature book covers and has done a number of murals around New Jersey, as well as having completed a painting at a church in North Plainfield in memory of his father, the late J. Stephen Romanoski. He is also working on his own Web site, www.mark-romanoski.com, and continues to sell his paintings on spiderwebart.com. In addition, he created the artwork for Interim President Dr. Frank J. Esposito’s holiday card, as well as one from the Office of University Relations in 2002. The president’s card featured a white dove nesting in an evergreen tree in front of the Kean Hall tower, while the University Relations card captured a wintry snow scene on the Kean campus highlighted by a joyful-looking patriotic snowman.

Romanoski believes that his bout with cancer has taught him just how precious and beautiful life is, and to appreciate its smallest offerings. "It taught me to lighten up and accept things for what they are," he said. He realizes that he is but a small part of the world, but is delighted to know that he has touched others throughout it. "I’ve received fan mail from as far away as Portugal, Singapore, Germany and Sweden, and that is humbling," he said. "I was inspired by so many different artists, and when I get mail from faraway places, I feel like I might have inspired someone also.

"I take more risks now, too. I’m able to look more honestly at my life of where I am, where I want to be, and what is the best way to get there. And even though I often come up short, I think that when the end finally does come, we’ll regret the things we didn’t do more than the things we did. I never want to look back and have to ask ‘what if?’ I don’t want my tombstone to read ‘Mark Romanoski, born 1969, died 20??,’ I want it to say ‘born 1969, lived 20??’ That makes all the difference in the world to me."