Life in Pictures: Graphic Artist & AC Professor Fred Sebastian Looks Back

Posted on Tuesday, January 18th, 2022

Graphic artist and Algonquin College Professor Fred Sebastian acknowledges having mixed feelings as he watched some of his life’s work – editorial cartoons and illustrations produced for dozens of newspapers and magazines – be taken away recently to join the national collections of Library and Archives Canada (LAC).

“It’s a huge honour to have your work properly taken care of in this way,” Sebastian says, “and it makes you feel humble to have it archived alongside the life’s work of so many people I admire. It’s also sad to see it go.”

LAC has been collecting Sebastian’s artwork for its permanent collection for years. Its first acquisition was in the 1990s; a second instalment went to the Archives three years ago, with notice that the archivists would be back for more. The latest haul should occupy them for some time – matching artworks to publications and publication dates, photographing newspaper or magazine pages or going through USB sticks to cull Sebastian’s copies of his work or digital originals.

Sebastian’s editorial cartoons and illustrations have appeared over decades in outlets as diverse as the long-defunct Ottawa Sunday Herald (which became the Ottawa Sun in 1988), the Ottawa Citizen, Toronto Star, New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times and a long list of other print and digital media.

Looking over some of the items in his collection before they were taken away was a “bittersweet” experience, he says. “On the one hand, there was quite a lot of clutter in the house,” he chuckles. “But on the other, going through it all brings back all kinds of memories. Some of these pieces were created years ago, yet when I pick them up I recall where I was, which one was a devil to finish, and all kinds of other details.”

When Sebastian was poring over one box he came across an old illustration he had created for Legion magazine, a publication devoted to Canadian military veterans. He was transported instantly to the moment he was drawing and listening to local radio programming that was interrupted to announce the 1991 death of Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury. “That’s what I meant by bittersweet,” he says. “It reminds you that those efforts and those years are far behind you.”

Sebastian began drawing as a child. His parents had presented him with some crayons and some paper – “I think more than anything else they just needed a little peace.” Sometime later, they found him completely redrawing an image in a colouring book. It was becoming clear to everyone that this would be something more than a pastime for him. Young Fred had a talent, and as he grew older it set him apart.

“When you’re young, this can be a difficult thing,” he says. “You’re trying to sort yourself and your relationships with your friends, and here was something I could do that seemed to create a sort of buzz and wow factor. My friends would ask me to draw their favourite hockey players and so on. It was really gratifying, and clearly by the time I was ready to look beyond high school, my future was going to be art, art and art!”

Sebastian, a faculty member at Algonquin College for the best part of two decades, is also a proud graduate of the College. Algonquin was amazing, he says. It gave him the tools he needed to transition into the industry after graduation. “My parents worried that I would end up starving in some kind of artsy dead end. Algonquin taught me that this is a career and showed me the avenues” – cartoon art was only one of them – “to take to make it a lucrative one.”

Sebastian graduated from the two-year Commercial Art-Graphic Design program in 1985, and it wasn’t long before the Sunday Herald was snapping up his editorial cartoons.

Simultaneously, Sebastian was furthering his education through its pages. The newspaper featured columns written by some of the most knowledgeable people in government – senior civil servants, advisors to cabinet ministers and the prime minister of the day– and he read them and the news pages religiously. “As an editorial cartoonist, I needed to know about the events and ideas of the day in order to translate them into images. It’s so much more than just drawing cute characters. Reading about these things made me a more understanding individual.”

As such, he became an artist in demand. The Ottawa Citizen came calling for cartoons and illustrations, then the Star and other Toronto publications, and eventually American newspapers and magazines. One of the advantages of the computer age that he graduated into was being able to transmit your work digitally.

Art directors once preferred to work with illustrators or cartoonists who were in the same city; if any changes to a piece were required, the artist and art director could meet and brainstorm until the work was done to everyone’s satisfaction. But once the Internet was functioning, editors and art directors became increasingly comfortable working with artists at a distance.

“It created a level playing field for those of us who weren’t in New York, say, but whose work was of a standard that caught the interest of the New York Times.”

Sebastian is a great storyteller, and he has no end of tales to tell about getting to know the likes of Terry Mosher (the Montreal-based editorial cartoonist better known to fans as ‘Aislin’), the ups and downs of freelancing, and the joys of continuous learning. While building his career and winning awards for his work, he completed a degree in art history from Carleton University and a Teachers College baccalaureate in education.

He joined the faculty of the College in 2002, first in the Graphic Design program, then in Interior Design. Today he teaches the Bachelor of Information Technology Program, a joint program delivered between Carleton University and Algonquin College, and the Illustration and Concept Art program, which he created. He takes pride in his students and hopes he can help them on their career path in much the same way his teachers aided him.

“You try to plant a seed,” he says. “I always think back to when I was a student and to my shortcomings at the time, and how much my teachers tried to give me information that met my immediate needs but would also nourish me in the future. I hope I can do the same for my students. It might take five years, 10 years, but suddenly the light will come on and they’ll say, ‘Ah! That’s what he was banging on about!’”


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