Here are some of the cover illustrations that Dennis Preston has done for the

COVER STORY - JANUARY 5, 2005
Days of Preston Past
By LAWRENCE COSENTINO

     All those with a secret desire to ditch their straight jobs — in other words, anyone with a pulse — ought to take heart from this story. Thirty-five years and several thousand drawings ago, local caricaturist and commercial art avatar Dennis Preston was assigned to write a report on Karl Marx for his social studies class at Lansing’s Eastern High School. He came to school the next day carrying a handmade likeness of the philosopher, equipped with cutout eyes and manually sliding eyeballs.
"When I held the poster up and said, ‘This here’s Karl Marx,’ the eyes looked at me," Preston grins as he tells the story. "There were screams. "Even then, a twisted talent boosted Preston over the poor saps around him who stuck to the plan and ended up in office cubicles or loading docks. Instead of filling his head with arcane Marxist doctrine, Preston wowed ‘em with a life-sized, shifty-eyed specter of communism that said nothing and everything. "I wasn’t the kind of person who was into math and all that other stuff where you had to think a lot," he deadpans. "I didn’t know a lot about Karl Marx, but the student teacher from Cuba we had that day was really into Karl. He took my report from there." And when it was done," Preston added with a grin, "he bought the poster."                                                                                                  It's About time Lansing's most ubiquitous artist got an official celebration in his home town, as Dennis Preston will from Jan. 9 to Feb. 27 (2005) in a one-man exhibit at Old Town’s Creole Gallery. Anyone who can make a living kneading human noses, eyes and earlobes like bread dough deserves a tip of the hat. Just don’t expect Preston to hand you some brie when you arrive. He has hardly lifted pen from paper since first grade, and shows no sign of slacking off. When we met at a local Chinese restaurant to discuss the Creole show, he was already hunched over the table, drawing a pair of psychotic eyes on the back of his Year of the Hen place mat.
"If I’m doodling, it’s usually animals or old guys," he explained. Preston’s work is scattered, like a squirrel’s lifetime stash of nuts, in a thousand Lansing homes and businesses. It has become a rite of passage in the capital area to be rolled into one of his trademark egg-noodle caricatures. Over the years, Preston has created hundreds of logos, public service posters, advertisements, newspaper and magazine covers and much more.
     The Creole show is a wild plunge into the psychedelic cauldron from whence Preston sprang — agenerous sampling of rock, blues and jazz concert posters from the ‘60s and ‘70s. "People don’t really know me for my artwork other than caricatures," he said, "but back in the ‘60s and ‘70s it was my concert posters people saw." Oil-slick colors, trippy imagery and mad-spaghetti lettering ruled the world of concert poster art when Preston made the Michigan art scene in the late ‘60s. He created hundreds of striking images for local music shrines like East Lansing’s Stables, the Melody Ballroom in Inkster and any number of MSU venues. Poster subjects included Detroit-bred acts like Bob Seger and Commander Cody, along with visitors such as Three Dog Night, Ravi Shankar, Charles Mingus and Alice Cooper. In the wide-open heyday of the ‘60s rock poster, it was common to blend seemingly incompatible sensibilities. Artists like Preston were equally at home with sweet tendrils of Art Nouveau and Mad Magazine-style cartoons in which a half-ton safe falls on a gorilla. As the Creole exhibit shows, Preston’s own style evolved from a primordial soup of mouse and crumb — Stanley Mouse and R. Crumb, to be exact. Mouse, creator of the Grateful Dead’s skeletons-and-roses icon, started his career in Detroit, then moved to San Francisco to preside over the High Baroque era of elaborate concert posters. Crumb, on the other hand, pioneered the earthy, bigfoot style of early underground comics. Both stylistic approaches — the lyrical flower trip and the kitchen-sink-complete with-hair — will be in evidence at the Creole show.
     Picking out posters for the show has enabled Preston to revisit a wild and wonderful era of bygone music and art. (OK, the music is still playing out of every speaker in every boomer-owned business and restaurant in the country, but the poster art is bygone.) "I wish I’d gone to more of those shows," he said. "I had passes for a lot of them, and could have hung out with the bands. But I was kind of shy, and didn’t put these people on a pedestal. They just have a different job." Preston can afford to be blase, having held down a "different job" himself ever since his school days. He got interested in drawing when a first-grade classmate brought a how-to-draw book (with Woody Woodpecker) to class. "I thought ‘I can draw that,’ so I started drawing other characters that were popular at the time, like Popeye." At 14, Preston began to draw drumheads for local bands, and before long he was deep into poster work. His formal training consisted of being let loose in high school by teachers who knew a natural talent when they saw one. "After I’d taken all the art classes they had, they just put me in this room by myself," he recalled. "Three art teachers gave me stuff to do. There was a record player in the room and pop in the closet. It was different." While still in high school, Preston began to paint posters of bands, working in acrylics. "There used to be a Laundromat in Frandor," he recalled. "They started putting them up over there and selling them."
     Preston created many of his rock posters under tight deadline pressures. "There was a guy in Detroit who would call me between 12 a.m. and 2 a.m. and say, ‘This is the band that’s playing,’ and I would have to whip out a poster and get it out in the mail by 6 a.m. or so." After the concerts they advertised were over, many of the posters were ripped down by fans of the bands, or simply lost. The Creole show will offer a rare glimpse of those that have survived the long, strange trip.
     After the mid-‘70s, Preston put his off-center muse to work in a variety of contexts, including corporate logos (among them Impact radio and the Michigan Department of Labor) and public service campaigns. Recently, Preston completed a series of horrific brochures and screen savers for the Michigan Safety Council and the Michigan State Police, the latter instructing kids on how to avoid Internet stalkers. The subject matter brought a whole new series of Preston grotesqueries into being. The old lady from "Hansel and Gretel" with the oven knob set on "children" has never looked more terrifying.                                                                            Although  Preston’s career has taken many turns, almost all of his work, from rock posters to public service cartoons, draws heavily upon his bread-and-butter caricaturing skills. "I thought at one time that if I wasn’t going to do artwork, I ‘d do makeup for movies," he said. As a teen, Preston was fascinated by makeup effects in such films as "Planet of the Apes" and "2001: A Space Odyssey." In a way, he does the very same thing with pen and ink, turning his subjects into the most loved and feared monster of all: the magnified self. "Sometimes you get someone who’s almost featureless, like in ‘I, Robot,’" said Preston, "but that doesn’t happen very often." Most people are good sports about the procedure, but on occasion Preston has gotten under his subject’s skin. He once persuaded a friend to grow a moustache by drawing a caricature of him with the desired feature in place. Every time he sets out to capture a face, Preston plays with the most explosive substance known :uncut human ego. "There used to be a store downtown called Sounds and Diversions, a combination head shop, music shop, poster shop," he recalled. "In one of their ads, I drew a lady who worked there, flying through the air and landing on a waterbed. "I drew her really large," Preston grinned. "She lost some weight after I did that." Such is the power of the artist’s mirror, especially a fisheye lens like Preston’s. Who knows — if the whole world had seen Karl Marx’s shifty eyes as Preston saw them 30-odd years ago, a whole lot of unpleasantness might have been avoided.