When I contemplate Chris’ busy career today, it’s easy to forget how he struggled with what kind of artist to be.

Consider the morgue file episode. To learn how to be an illustrator, Chris read articles and how-to books. One thing that kept coming up over and over was the importance of the “morgue file”—a collection of photographic references of things like children, cats, families, buildings, trees, flowers, dogs, men shaking hands, women shaking hands and children holding hands.

For illustrators today, it’s all at anyone’s fingertips—there’s even a website called MorgueFile.com, a free photo archive with categories such as summer, sunlight, kids and nature but in 1987 there was no such thing. The homegrown picture file was the only way to go.

Historically, the morgue file was a collection of article clippings kept by news reporters for quick reference, or consisted of notes on a case compiled by criminal investigators. The morgue has always been an important tool for painters, illustrators and designers. Like the collage of materials, images and text created by designers on a “mood board,” the pictures may serve as inspiration but mostly it’s for anatomical, historical or technical guidance.

Unlike many aspects of an art career, the morgue was easy to establish. Chris bought a two-drawer file cabinet for our basement apartment in a converted church in Ann Arbor and began collecting images from newspapers and magazines. When we moved to New York City in 1989, we packed up our cat, dishes, clothes, camping gear--and of course the morgue file.

The morgue helped Chris feel he was doing all he could to be a proper artist. “I always felt slightly guilty if I saw a picture of something and didn’t cut it out,” he said. When he started a new category, such as “men in suits,” he pulled out a clean manila folder and labeled it neatly in black ink.

And yet whenever he pulled out a photo for reference it seemed to deaden his excitement for drawing. Still, he kept at it for several years. We lived in an illegal sublet in New York. I was teaching in a public school in Yonkers. Chris illustrated three small press books, did manuscript prep work for a friend and had a few odd jobs from people in the Midwest.

In the second or third year of our stay in NYC, he made an important decision: he threw out the morgue file. He emptied the contents of one manila folder at a time. We still have remnants of it—bent-edged manila folders with peeling white labels stuck over black ink titles, in which we file our family documents.

Chris finds it hard to describe the importance of this decision. “It was a huge thing,” he said. “Everything I’d ever read about being an illustrator said you needed a morgue file. I’d spent hours and hours and hours accumulating pictures over several years that I never, ever looked at. It was a revelation—‘Oh, I can be the kind of artist who doesn’t use a morgue!’. It’s kind of like when I thought, ‘I’d like to be a New York artist!’”

We have more control over work than we think we do. As a new teacher I too sought advice from experts and followed a script, but I only really connected with students when I tapped into my own genuine enthusiasm for a subject, be it whales or rivers or reading.

In any job we undertake, we seesaw between unconscious action and conscious choice, like a swimmer who swims under water rising to the surface only now and then to see where she is. Throwing out the morgue was a decision made on the surface.

“I was going my own way,” Chris said. “I was going to develop my own style.”