Artist Earl Newman

Listen to an interview with Earl while you peruse this page.

Earl Newman does the cover art work for all my books. He lives in the small mountain community of Summit in Oregon, the same beautiful town our assistant, Tommy, lives in. He has been drawing and silk screening for 50 years. His posters have appeared at Jazz Festivals and Art Shows all over the US. A short history of Earl is at the bottom of this page.

Here Earl is hard at work at my kitchen table on my book 'Tis the Season. I watched him start with a blank piece of paper and turn it into a beautiful drawing including a wreath, pinecones, ice, snow, stars, ribbons and holly and ivy greenery. Oh, and of course, there's a harp in the drawing too. This was all in a matter of 20 minutes! We grabbed the wreath equipped with pinecones and ribbon off the porch and hung it on the chair as a model, I cut some holly and ivy off the bushes from the side of the house, (lucky for me we have them growing there) and I gave him a photo of one of our harps which he's holding in his hand in the photo on the left. On the right he is working on my new book coming out later this year (2009). It's called Waltz Upon a Time and is a collection of 3/4 time tunes.

Here's Earl working on "Shalom" (on the left) and Waltz Upon a Time (on the right)

Mt. Hood, Artwork and Silk Screen by Earl Newman

I have had this Earl Newman print for more than 20 years. It is Mt. Hood, near Portland, and was used as a poster for a Festival at Oregon State University in 1984. I was fortunate enough to snatch it up.

Earl's beautiful drawings for the covers of my books:

The Original books

Holiday books

Traditional Tunes books

A little more about Earl:

In 1960, Earl came to Venice California with a wife and two kids in a '55 Chevy station wagon, in a quest of a future. It was the right place at the right time. In 1972, he and his family moved to Summit, Oregon, and thirty-five years later, he is still a self-employed artist.

Through a medium of silk-screen, known as serigraphy, he reproduces his designs about 100 at a time. He says it's like having 100 canvases on which to experiment, using different colors of papers and inks, and blending the colors as he goes. No two prints are alike.

He makes posters for the Monterey Jazz Festival in California, the Abbot Kinney Street Fair in Venice, the Oregon Shakespeare Theater in Ashland and for Oregon State University in Corvallis. He also has a booth at the Oregon Country Faire in Venita, Oregon every July (second week).

The Smithsonian's Division of Musical History in Washinton, DC has recently acquired a complete collection of his numbered/signed edition of Monterey Jazz Festival posters dating back to 1963.

Earl's website

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