Local Artist Wields Pencils and Paints to Create Magic

MOUNT KISCO, N.Y. - Alan Reingold started playing with crayons and scraps of paper at the age of three. When his fascination with art continued into his teen years, his parents grew concerned. “They encouraged interest in ‘the arts,’ and okay, art as a hobby, but definitely not art as a career -- because starvation was a definite possibility,” he said.

Even his high school guidance counselor discouraged his ambition. Nevertheless, at 16 he packed up his portfolio and went downtown to see the editor of The Chicago Tribune. Duly impressed, the editor referred him to the sports desk, where he was commissioned to do some portraits of the Chicago Bears.

His newspaper portraits were so successful that several members of the team commissioned individual portraits. When Reingold was accepted at the Rhode Island School of Design two years later, his parents were still opposed. But he was able to pay his own tuition with the Chicago Bears portrait money.

“RISD was the best illustration school in the country,” he said, “but it was a wake-up call to find out there were hundreds of other kids who could do what I could do. I still had that survival instinct, though, so I started bringing samples of my work to New York."

“When I went to Time Magazine they thought I’d fit right in. They gave me a choice of subjects for the upcoming presidential primary -- Hubert Humphrey or some peanut farmer from Georgia. I chose the peanut farmer. 

“I did a drawing in colored pencil. At 20 years old, I was the youngest artist in history to have a portrait on the cover of Time."

At 21, he was sent to the Oval Office to do another portrait. “Jimmy Carter said, ‘Why, we’d be thrilled to have Alan here.’ I’m still stunned,” he said. Since then, he has done 150 national magazine covers.

In the 1980s, Hollywood advertising posters were stuck in a groove of slick, superficial prettiness. But attitudes were changing. Producers wanted artwork with “more intensity and a piercing energy.” Enter Alan Reingold. 

He did posters for Clint Eastwood and James Bond films. He created the Tri-Star Flying Horse. He has worked on Batman and Harry Potter and Iron Man and on and on. “I had the knack of conceptualizing characters and places and costumes. I could take a manuscript and translate what the character looked like. I could visualize the bat cave, even before a director was involved.”

Reingold spent most of his youth in New Orleans. Then came Chicago, Rhode Island and finally New York. Around 1980 he was doing artwork for the movie, Ragtime, being filmed in Mt. Kisco at the 1860s Victorian mansion known as the Carpenter House. He ended up buying the house and has lived in Mount Kisco ever since, though no longer in that house.

For 23 years he has been on the faculty at Parsons School of Design. He has also taught at the Northern Westchester Center for the Arts and still has a “cult group” of students who have followed him into local classes after NWCA closed.

“It’s more than a drawing class, it’s group therapy. Some of them haven’t missed a single class in 13 years,” he said.

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