| Artistic future 
Photo by Jeff Watts
It was around 1973, and Alayne Trachewsky was a young mother and artist living in Montreal when an art instructor asked her a question. “There’s a new field emerging called graphic design. Have you heard of it?” She hadn’t. The field, he said, was sort of like layout, but more artistic. Ever since she’d left her premed studies for art school, she’d thought of herself as an illustrator.
But she was intrigued. She bought some magazines, cut them apart, and
rearranged them to suit her artist’s eye. Trachewsky was on her way to a new career. She would design and draw her way from Montreal to Chicago to Oklahoma City, designing magazines and publications and sketching whatever was needed: Buicks in Chicago, rodeo horses in Oklahoma City. (Horses weren’t the focus of her job as the designer of the daily newspaper’s Sunday magazine, but in Oklahoma, it helped to be a quick draw with a bucking bronco. ) She was comfortably settled in Oklahoma City, with a teenage daughter and a son off at Stanford, when her husband got an unexpected phone call. A medical researcher, he had gone to a conference in Washington, D.C., two years earlier and dropped a résumé by the Food and Drug Administration. The call brought a surprise job offer—and one week to decide. In another week, the moving truck arrived, and the family was off to the nation’s capital. Shortly afterwards Trachewsky brought her skills to AU’s alumni magazine and many other publications. Her design skills have been familiar to the AU community for 18 years, most recently in such publications as the science magazine Catalyst of the College of Arts and Sciences and in Getting Connected, a student’s guide to information technology at AU. Trachewsky was the designer for the award-winning team of that publication. Her work, says university publications director Kevin Grasty, has always been “thoughtfully conceived and deftly executed. I’ve always respected her love of art, her passion for illustration and typography, and her appreciation of great design.” With her retirement, he says, “we will be losing a very talented member of our professional family.” For her part, she says, she’ll miss her colleagues. “The very best thing has been the people in the department. The people here are the most broadly excellent graphic designers I’ve worked with.” Trachewsky may be retiring this year from AU, but she’s not retiring from art. In fact, her plans include advanced drawing and watercolor classes at Montgomery College. She and her husband joined students on an alternative spring break trip to Vietnam. An avid traveler, she has also traveled to Spain, Turkey, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, France, Italy, Scandinavia, and Switzerland, and the couple will head to China in August around their 40th wedding anniversary. There’s also something else that sparks her curiosity. She began taking online tutorials recently in computer photorealism, and plans to explore the topic further in seminars and workshops. It seems there’s a new profession emerging. It’s called “digital artist,” she says, and it seems intriguing. As she did in 1973, she’s looking toward the future. —SA |
