Spring 2008
Vol. 5, No.2
For a guy who doesn't even watch football, this year's Super Bowl Sunday turned out to be pretty significant for cartoonist/illustrator Tom Chalkley, a longtime instructor in the Homewood Art Workshops.
He's not a Giants fan, and it wasn't the game itself that thrust him into the national spotlight, but rather the appearance of his work in one of this year's highly anticipated, much-talked-about Super Bowl commercials.
Chalkley's caricature of Democratic political strategist James Carville and former Republican Sen. Bill Frist in the Coca-Cola ad called "Jinx"— as in, "Jinx, buy me a Coke"— was on screen for all of three seconds, but that was long enough. "It got more exposure than anything else I've ever done," says Chalkley, who was pleasantly surprised and a little embarrassed by all the attention he has gotten over it.
"It didn't quite measure up to having something in The New Yorker [which he has done twice], but hey, I'll take it," he says.
It was an unlikely assignment for Chalkley, who teaches cartooning at Hopkins and does a lot of work for Baltimore's City Paper, and he didn't even know the assignment was for a Super Bowl ad until he was sent a preview of the ad. "Had I known, I would have named a much higher price!" he says.
As for the drawing itself, Chalkley worked from photos of Carville ("he's a walking, talking caricature") and Frist ("there's more character to his face on TV than in photos, where he looks pretty plank-like"), and he produced several versions for Coke to choose from. The production company bought the rights to all those drawings, but he penned this one just for Arts & Sciences Magazine, a tongue-in-cheek reflection on his experience.
