Tim Leigh: First time I saw Warren Eakins was in the back conference room of our ad agency, Denny-Wagoner-Wright. He and Ann Marra, partners in a Corbett Street design studio at the time, were there to show their portfolios. I had recently become creative director for the firm and was interested in increasing my awareness of local talent.
Both Warren and Ann had come to Portland from Eastern Washington – Warren from Spokane, where he’d attended Spokane Falls Community College, and Ann from Pullman, where she’d studied design at WSU. Warren seemed reticent, almost shy. He spoke with a measured tempo that added a considered aspect to his repartee. He wanted to be taken seriously. He churned with wonderful ideas, though, that peeked through his laconic façade, and when he described executing some of them in the form of comprehensives (remember those?), he became positively animated. For Warren, the creation of comprehensives was where art lived in the design business. He’d laboriously paint thin tissue sheets with intense gouache colors (the outermost one was always black), paste them on top of each other, and fashion his visuals by cutting away pieces of the layers. The effect was electric, and Warren became famous for the technique.
Once, at a Designer’s Roundtable show-and-tell, he demonstrated his comping style. For a door prize, his full-size khaki (plus many other paint colors) work apron, mounted and framed, was offered. Thing was, while a lot of people admired the dramatic results Warren achieved, not many wanted to spend the time or effort to duplicate them. So he pretty much remained an original.
Over the years, Warren’s profile grew regionally, he executed the identity and design suite for the Designers’ Roundtable’s first piece of mind gallery show (the original concept for which he sketched on a restaurant napkin, for Pete’s sake!), and ended up catching the eye of up-and-coming Portland ad agency Wieden & Kennedy.
Margaret Twelves: Pete and I first met Warren when he was with Ann Marra (the king and queen of design) up on NW Thurman Street. We worked with him and Lucy for several years before they moved to Amsterdam (where he lived on a canal barge), and loved the guy. He enjoyed telling stories, always starting with “I remember a time…” Not only was he enormously talented, he was reasonable to deal with – a rare combination. Never full of himself, he was one of those people who blurred the line between art and advertising, and his work was wonderfully stylish and sophisticated as a result.
As far as we know, he and Lucy ended up in LA and he had a really successful career.
Ann Marra: I didn't see much of Warren after he left our new studio on Thurman, although I heard that he was in California working on movies and built a house in a canyon around LA.
Thom Smith: Warren and I found each other just after I arrived in Portland in 1979. I was hired as an art director at Young & Roehr and Jerry Young arranged our meeting. I had just come up from the Bay Area and didn't know anyone in Portland at the time. Warren had done a short stint with a San Francisco designer and Jerry thought we should meet.
My initial feeling about Warren was that he was a regular guy, which appealed to my Midwestern sensibilities. He told me he was helping to raise his girlfriend's (Lucy) daughter, and I could tell this meant the world to him. He had done some international travel (as I had), and we discussed our mutual love of Amsterdam.
In the egocentric and ephemeral world of advertising design, Warren impressed me as someone you’d want as a friend. And talented as he was, I think the quality that most contributed to his success was his ability to connect with people, and put them at ease. Not to say that he wasn't driven and methodical, but he also had a laid-back nature which made him approachable.
Whomever he teamed with, the resulting work always provoked a smile, often ranked as Portland’s best, and made the players proud to be a part of the creative community here.
The tone of this post notwithstanding: to the best of our knowledge, Mr. Eakins is still alive and working at McGarry Bowen in New York. He is not dead. —Ed.
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