Questions

Questions for Fred Birchman

For thirty-five years, the top Microsoft designer has led a double life as a visual artist.

Photos by Kyle Johnson

You’re the art director for sales and marketing at America’s biggest news site, MSNBC. You’re also one of the most prolific Northwest artists. Do you work all night?
I get up at four and go to my studio, right outside my house, before I go to work. When you work late at night your brain is fried. I’m always energized to go back the next morning.

Who’s your main influence?
Jim Dine. And I love the approach of Robert Rauschenberg, going about art in a spirit of joy rather than despair.

For your latest show, you filled the Francine Seders Gallery with bewildering devices: bee boxes with madrona-branch handles, plumb bobs, rulers, bits of antique organs, filigreed wood. What are these gizmos?
I call them “vestigial tools,” because they really don’t do anything.

They remind me of Gary Larson’s most controversial cartoon, “Cow Tools,” which showed mysterious tools only cows could understand.
I remember that.

So these are Birchman tools. Why do you like them?
There’s an aesthetic about things that work. You go to Boeing Surplus – now it’s online – they had this whole area of very precise machine-type tools: gauges and things. I have no idea what any of them did, but they were beautiful: the etched lines, the cool numerals that have that little Roman serif.

This one, the Berkle 9000 – what’s a Berkle 9000?
A friend of ours is a carpenter, a lead carpenter, and when she comes to a vexing problem, she tells her intern, “Bring me the Berkle 9000,” and he runs off. But it’s an invented tool, an invention in her mind.

It’s a metaphor for a better idea. Which is what art should be.
I think so.

Do any of your tools actually work?
I made a claw-footed level out of acrylic tubing, which I bent and put mineral oil into and sealed with wax. It’s hard to get a level not to function. That bubble’s gonna be level. And Benito Box is a two-inch gauge that only measures between twenty and twenty-two inches. So if you need to know what the two inches between twenty and twenty-two inches are, you can use this.

You use computer tools all day, like Photoshop. Does it work?
It’s a powerful tool, but in terms of physicality, it’s so limiting. Rarely do I do anything gestural. It’s not a hand thing. It’s much freer in the studio.

Does your visual-art career goose your creativity in your day job?
A little bit. I feel like I approach things in a somewhat unconventional way. When I got to the Seattle Times [pre-Microsoft, in the ’80s], they were still putting captions on illustrations. “This picture you’re looking at is of the thing you’re reading about.” We got them to stop. But a lot of it is getting stuff done. I come from a Calvinist upbringing.

Your dad in Battle Creek, Washington, got up to milk the cows; you used to get up at all hours to make Flash illustrations tracking tsunamis and hurricanes on MSNBC.
Our strength is breaking news. It’s a 24/7 job. If I were still on the news side, we wouldn’t be having this conversation on a Sunday without me thinking someone was gonna call me.

Tsunamis won’t wait. But you’ve quit news for marketing.
In news, there’s always someone on your back. Marketing is much more hands on.  I do Web work, interior design, print work. I’ve done twenty-five-by-thirty-foot banners hanging on buildings. We’ve got a café at 30 Rock, Rockefeller Center. I did a lot of the signage, overseeing the look. We’ve done a huge remodel at Redmond.

You’re happily married to former Seattle Times art critic Robin Updike (now at Wine.com). Did this boost your career?
Worst move I ever made in my career. I sort of talked her into that job. She couldn’t review me.

What’s the difference between art and graphic design?
Graphics is always for some ulterior motive, rigidly defined. My motivation in doing art comes from me.

If you won the lotto and quit your later-in-the-day job, might you find that you were actually less inspired for art than now, when you’re bouncing back and forth?
It’s possible.

What was it like leaving the Times, inventing the look of Microsoft’s news site?
I was astounded at how many experts there were right away. “People use the site like this.” Pure hubris. The newspaper was this old traditional hierarchy. You kind of had to work your way up, you weren’t the grand pooh-bah right away.

Instant twenty-four-year-old pooh-bahs rule the tech world.
I would not tell an accountant how to do his job, or a programmer. People do that to me all the time. Everybody thinks they’re an artist, and have taste, and aren’t shy about telling you. They have a right. My job is pleasing myself and others as well. I don’t mind that. But when it comes to my own art, I’m interested in pleasing myself.

What is your art for?
Chuck Close said this neat thing:  the best hope he could have for a piece is that somebody will get a flash of the experience that he had making it. I like that. •