About the Artist/Writer

David was born into an Upper Michigan family where even the cat spoke perfect English and the Hoornstra kids spent summer Saturdays at the public library. He devoured Sherlock Holmes complete at 12 and then took on War and Peace. But the first hardcover he owned set the tone of his whole career.

  Howard Pyle, 1911

"Robin Hood" was both written and illustrated by one man: Howard Pyle. The high chivalric tone won his heart and the lively pen-and-ink renderings inspired his art. He began by writing and illustrating cartoon-stories with his teddy bear as main character, and advanced to pen-and-ink by age 10.

To this day it is hard to say he is more artist than writer or vice versa.

Artist

As a child, David absorbed Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott, often illustrated by N.C. Wyeth, who became David's painter- hero. Now best known for being Andrew's father, N.C. turns out to have been Howard Pyle's student.

David's first exposure to fine art was a print catalogue in which black-and-white thumbnails from Giotto to Dali taught him composition before color. The extreme simplicity of his early paintings recalls the small amount of information a thumbnail could provide.

A Sault Ste. Marie grade-school art teacher nurtured his talent and even saved his cast-off work, but the other teachers said "you can't make a living in art." They didn't mean it personally; they simply didn't regard it as a career choice. Commercial art? Nobody there knew anything about it; there were no books on it in the library.

Journalist

Being brought up "poor," David took no chances with the starving-artist idea. At Sault High, David called himself a Journalism Major but kept doing visual things like photography — mastering a Graflex press camera — and advertising. He also took three years of Art from excellent teachers. But because there was no funding for oil painting in school, his mother bought oils and he began doing landscapes at home.

Hard work on the high school paper won him a trip to Ann Arbor and a share of the Journalism Trophy, but no college money. When he graduated, the Vietnam War and the draft were waiting. A new scholarship program got him into the only college he could afford — the local 2-year branch of Michigan Tech.

Like the local high school, the college had gifted teachers who expected great things of the Hoornstra kids. "Work-Study" programs did not exist then, but in his first week as a freshman, David was hired by department chairman Dr. Ward to mark up and letter-grade his sophomores' English essays for the whole year. An English professor, meanwhile, marked David's essays with As and rave reviews.

The college paper being totally non-serious, he spent hundreds of hours shooting pictures and learning darkroom work for the yearbook. Portraying his fencing master in oils won him a few freelance assignments including restaurant designs for two clients. And as Montgomery Ward local store display manager for a summer, he learned much about retail signage: commercial art at its lowest.

Recognition, hard work, success

The Baby Boomers were hitting college and the "Soo" Branch was about to become a four-year institution. David was asked by the new, hands-on college president to take over the college paper and turn it into something professional and image-supportive. It was the opportunity he was hoping for. David stipulated a salary, a serious printing budget and offices, all granted on the spot. But he also insisted that a journalism course be created to recruit and train staff, and offered to teach it. This too was arranged in a matter of weeks.

The Compass was reborn to David's design and partly paid for by local advertising. It all worked to everyone's satisfaction, including the local printer where David spent hundreds of fascinated hours, pushing the envelope, asking questions, even supervising the first full-color work ever done there. At year's end, the print shop manager offered him a summer's apprenticeship in which he did everything from handsetting to press to bindery in both offset and letterpress.

The year-long effort also won him a prestigious scholarship to the University of Michigan Journalism School as a junior. His high-school journalism idol became his adviser and every story he wrote for the Michigan Daily was printed with a by-line. It was also a year of discovery and disillusionment. He enjoyed the classes and the mind-opening atmosphere of Ann Arbor in 1967, but the Publication Design specialty he had hoped for did not materialize and the offered internship at the Ann Arbor News had no appeal. The great realization was that he no longer wished to be a mere reporter of others' doings. He wanted to be a do-er; a creator.

Creativity and enterprise

A summer job designing a new tourist mall, "Oldtown," pulled him back to Sault Ste. Marie. His old college now offered a B.A. program in English. He enrolled in it and enjoyed it well enough, but devoted most of his time to the new theatre department, doing acting, set design and lighting for Antigone, Our Town and Twelfth Night. He also participated in the college's transformation into Lake Superior State College, helping name it and winning the logo design contest. As "editor emeritus," he was given a column in The Compass and introduced Dan Rather when he spoke there in 1968.

Meanwhile, the tourist mall design led to the creation of the Oldtown Sentinel-Gazette, an "Olde-tyme" newspaper/print shop in which, in the disastrous TriCentennial business year of 1968, David and his partners had a good old time but lost their shirts. David also did posters, lights and sound for visiting performers like Josh White, Jr. and Los Indios Tabajaras. He also kept on painting: his first one-man show, all oils, was just before graduation in 1969.

Sailor and artist

As with many young men that year, his choices were Canada, Conscientious Objector, or the military. He chose a four-year hitch in the U.S. Coast Guard, which had always been a welcome part of the northern lakes world in which David had grown up. Smaller than the Marine Corps, with an eightfold mission in which warmaking was only one, the "Guard" was still the real military, and it changed his life but not its direction. Duty on a slow boat to China — CG Cutter Kukui — expanded his horizons and inspired a love of the sea that has never left him.

He became ship's photographer and got the chance to photograph, design and edit a cruise book that earned him a Letter of Appreciation from the Pacific Fleet Admiral. The cruise was the ship's last of a twenty-five-year career building the LORAN stations of the West Pacific. She anchored off small islands, some famous, where WWII wreckage was quite visible, and took the last American crew off Iwo Jima in 1971. There will be a gallery of David's Coast Guard photography attached to this site when time and money permit.

Sea duty hath its rewards, and David rotated stateside to Sault Ste. Marie where he was again the "town artist:" when The Detroit Free Press called LSSC looking for local talent, he was tagged to illustrate the Big Two-Hearted River for their Sunday Magazine. Duty was light; even fun, but David turned down the $10,000 ship-over bonus for electricians and took an early out for art school.

Back to U-M and Ann Arbor

For purely sentimental reasons, he chose the University of Michigan rather than a commercial design school, entering the School of Art's BFA Program as a junior on the strength of his portfolio. An undergrad once again, he hugely enjoyed his classes, especially with Professors Davis (photography) and Castagnacci (painting), but no one there ever mentioned making a living. The GI Bill money ran out before the program did, but he vowed to work in art at no matter what level or how "commercial."

David's first job in 1974 was doing pasteup as an editorial assistant for a library publisher. He soon became Advertising Manager and set up a small printing plant before a business downturn got everyone laid off. He worked in camera and pasteup for printers, an ad agency and a typesetter until 1980.

Commercial Art

Then the fun began: Typographic Insight partner Larry Bell spun off a creative agency called TI Group, built around David's several capabilities. The company grew to 12 people or more, stealing Oldsmobile and GM work from "Goliaths" like Leo Burnett and J. Walter Thompson. As art director and lead writer, David hired designers and ran that side of the business, taking the title Creative Director in 1986.

With the agency, he developed his commercial photography skills, shooting accessories for GM and new cars for Oldsmobile, complete with locations and models. He designed and wrote the brochures and even retouched the transparencies. He also worked the fine art side on his own, making 1500 landscape images in Scotland in 1980 and working with models to blur the lines between figure, glamour and fashion photography.

TI Group was sold in1986 and changed radically. David left in 1989 and the business lasted one more year. Since then he has worked freelance, including in-house part-time stints with several local corporations. Two of them, Thetford and Electro Arc, are Ann Arbor-based companies with branches in the UK, which have involved David in multi-lingual work in owner/service manuals and packaging.

The artist today

A 2006 reunion of the crew of the Kukui, David's old ship in the Coast Guard, inspired a renewal of his painting career starting with the ship herself, his largest and technically best canvas to date.

In 2008, David created "David Classic Design" to better market his wide range of skills including fine art. While he loves the old Dutch Masters and the Pre-Raphaelites, he leans towards Turneresque landscape and to seascapes reminiscent of his time at sea and his favorite modern author, Patrick O'Brien. He will consider any commission including formal portraiture. In the meantime, watch the site for new maritime works now in progress.

Avocations

Other interests include swordplay and medieval studies. He started fencing in 1962 and still teaches at the Ann Arbor Sword Club, which he cofounded in 1977. From 1978 to 1989 he helped build the local chapter of the Society for Creative Anachronism, learning calligraphy, illumination and heraldic art as well as armored combat and some armor making. That led to more serious scholarship: he has translated medieval French charters, given papers at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, and is currently working on an article to be published in a book series on the Hundred Years' War. More on these interest areas can be accessed via the Arts Martial, Medieval & Renaissance tab.