Art's Place
3 min readJan 25, 2022

REMEMBERING ARTISTS “SWIPE FILES” IN THE OLDEN DAYS?

Originally published by Art MacKay March 2007, Updated January 2022

Believe or don’t believe it, my art career began in the 1950s. I know it is really hard for the new guard to believe, but there really wasn’t any internet, Google image search, Pinterest, Wikimedia Commons or any of the multitude of image sites that exist today.

Heck, it was really a pure time that you missed! Back then something called “Deviant Art” would have been sold from under the counter!

When we needed a visual reference “back in the day”, we went to the library if we could, but almost always to our “swipe files” … file folders cataloged and filled with images that we ripped directly or surreptitiously from any magazine we could get our hands on. I mean a trip to the dentist could be very profitable and barbers that liked hunting and fishing always had Field & Stream, Outdoor Life and similar mags filled with great animal illustrations. There were photographs of course, but they were …well … really not great. But anything that would help with layout — the anatomy of a creature, plants, people and objects — was clipped, filed and brought out when references were needed for an illustration or painting.

Our swipe files and library gave us visual references and ideas from some of the finest artists … Ben

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Art MacKay - Marine biologist, artist, writer, webmaster