The Art and Illustrations of M. J. Herrick
M. J. Herrick
Mark Herrick was born in Lansing, Michigan (1950 ).
He has a strong family heritage in the fine arts.
His early influences include his grandfather, Ralph B. Herrick,
who was a prominent architect in the state of Michigan.
His grandfather designed many churches and public schools in the Lansing area.
He was the architect for several State Parks in Michigan including the original M.D.N.R. -
Michigan Department of Natural Resources - Hartwick Pines State Park.
Mark’s grandmother on his mother side of the family was a wildlife artist and ...
his mother is a portrait artist, who loves to play the piano as well as paint.
Mark’s father; James W. Herrick was a senior vice president and
commercial loan officer at American Bank & Trust in downtown Lansing.
His dad played the trumpet in the Sexton High School marching band.
His grandfather on his mother's side of the family was an engineer
who had an interest in higher mathematics.
He would frequently edit high level math books for publishers.
Mark excelled in art and music during his high school years.
Shortly after high school Mark worked for Glass and Foresberg Design;
a commercial art firm in Lansing. This business contracted work from the General Motors Corporation.
This was Mark's first apprentice job where he learned the basics about commercial art and advertising.
On evenings and weekends, Mark played music in a rock band and continued to paint oil paintings.
In 1974, Mark was hired to worked as the technical illustrator for the Chemistry Department
at Michigan State University. He made technical drawings and charts for the chemistry professors there.
One day while working in the chemistry department Mark ask himself ...
Why isn't there a music chart like the Periodic Table of Elements used in Chemistry?
From that day forward, Mark had a desire to illustrate the functional harmony system and applied music theory.
The curator of the Chemistry Department at that time was Dr. Jack Kinsinger.
Dr. Kinsinger also had an interest in Jazz music. He played Jazz B3 Organ.
Dr. Kinsinger introduced Mark to two music professors at the college;
Professors Bea Mangino and Owen Jorgensen.
Professor Mangino taught English as well as music.
Owen was a famous author who wrote textbooks on classical tuning throughout history.
He was also an international known pianist. ( In fond memory of Owen who just passed on ... fall 2009. )
These Professors encouraged Mark to continue working on applied music theory throughout the years.
Owen did a collaborative study with Mark on the frequencies of light and musical pitches.
They discovered that the colors in the light spectrum perfectly matched the pitches on the piano.
Owen called this study an inverse proportionate scaling of sound to light.
Here is kind of an interesting analogy about sound and light that Owen made ...
If you took fourteen pianos and placed them end to end and tuned them all up in sequential adjusted pitch
on the fourteenth piano and on twenty eighth octave is where light would occur.
This analogy made the two infinite worlds of sound and light physics seem a lot smaller!
A lot of time pasted in between working at Michigan State until now.
In 1984, Mark moved to Sarasota, Florida.
In Florida, Mark did oil paintings and continued to work on his applied music chart.
At the time there were no home computers to speak of so ... all his illustration work
had to be done by hand including hand lettering.
This was an enormous job to perform on some of the early prototype harmony charts.
After nine years of living in Florida Mark returned to Michigan and
began creating a cartoon character called; Buck Wilder®.
Mark spent a year working on this new outdoor sportsman character.
His goal was to produce a book that would teach kids all about the
common freshwater fish in Michigan lakes.
He called his very first book ... Buck Wilder's - Small Fry Fishing Guide!
After the first year of working on the book, Mark met ...
Tim Smith a former stained glass cabinet store owner in northern Michigan.
He and Smith partnered up to do the book as paperback. In four months they sold over
a hundred and twenty thousand books out of a small garage in Traverse City, Michigan.
The book became the state's number one best selling paperback book in 1995.
Due to the popularity of the Small Fry Fishing Guide, Mark and Tim created a second book;
Buck Wilder's - The Small Twig Hiking and Camping Guide.
This book won the 1997 Ben Franklin Gold Book Award for Outdoor Writing and Illustration.
This is the second highest book award given to authors and illustrators in the nation.
The Buck Wilder books eventually drew the attention from the State of Michigan Conservation Department.
The state licensed the character to represent a man made lake at the state fair ... Buck Wilder's Fishing Hole!
This small lake was shaped like the state of Michigan and was stocked with bluegills for the kids.
During this time Mark and Tim made friends with some retired teachers who wanted to
make a difference in the world and the Buck Wilder team became even bigger.
The head of the DNR was director; K. Cool! Cool was formally a fourth grade teacher.
He hit it off with the Wilder bunch and especially one teacher; Edna Stephens.
The fame of Buck Wilder started to go beyond the state of Michigan.
Books were being sold all over the country through State and National Parks.
Some how through the school presentations NASA got interested in Buck
and asked Mark to draw a picture of Buck and his sidekick Rascal Raccoon in spacesuits.
Mark drew a space shuttle in the background with a giant fishing poll coming out of the bay doors.
The funny Buck and Rascal characters were floating out in space like alien bait on a fishing line!
Jerry Linenger, a NASA astronaut from Michigan took the artwork with him up to the space station MIR.
Mark actually had an art show in space that lasted for four months viewed by the Russian astronauts.
When the artwork came back it had traveled over fifty million miles around the earth.
At school presentations Mark would tell kids to try hard and not to give up and they, too
could do something ... out of this world.
Later that year - 1999,
Mark became the cartoonist for the DNR and began working with Edna Stephens.
She was one of the retired teachers in the original Buck Wilder team.
Edna formed her own publishing company called EDCO in order to contract work from the state of Michigan.
She built a new company and employed several teachers and her family.
Mark formed a company called; North Star Productions, Inc.
Together, Mark and Edna produced a state wide newsletter to over fifty thousand kids called;
The Outdoor Explores Club which was sponsored by the state of Michigan - DNR.
Mark worked with the EDCO Publishing Company for ten years.
During the the millennial year 2000 EDCO and North Star built a
fourth grade curriculum on Michigan History starring Buck Wilder and
some new State of Michigan cartoons ... Forrest Trails - Sandy Dunes -
The Great Lakes Kids and ... the soon to be famous ... L.A.P.'s Ants!
This new Michigan history program was called the L.A.P.'s program.
Learn from the past - Appreciate the present and ... Preserve our natural heritage.
85% of the public schools in Michigan are still using the program. The teachers and kids love it!
Because of the popularity of the Buck books and the L.A.P.'s program
Mark made Buck Wilder® presentations in over 600 schools in Michigan.
Each school gym would be packed with little kids all dressing in their fishing outfits.
They all would wear a head bandanna with a funny raccoon face on it.
Mark presentation would teach the kids how to draw a funny Wilder Fish and
he would pop off a bunch of corny fish jokes during his presentation, too.
It was great Fun for all!
At home during the evenings and weekends, Mark continued to work on his music chart.
After thirty five years of drawing music charts, he finally discovered the Harmony Matrix® ...
While looking at a recently designed chart he had just made Mark looked down and said to himself ...
Gee! I think this major chord is making a pattern and sure enough the same pattern revealed all the
major chord sounds on the chart.
This discovery lead Mark to invent a whole new pattern language for music
which helps people learn the music formulas much faster and easier.
This new and advanced music chart shows the complete system of "integrated" functional harmony.
Harmony Integration shows how all the components of music connect together.
This new chart simplifies music theory by using colors and simple box patterns.
To make his new Visual Harmony™ theory fun for kids,
Mark added some cartoon characters and spent the next several years
developing animations for a new music course called ...
Major Harmony® - Supersonic Music Course 1
FREE ONLINE ANIMATED CARTOON MUSIC LESSONS!
For kids and musicians of all ages. ( See the link on the last page. )
2.5 Hrs. of ( 3 to 5 min. ) short animated cartoon music lessons that students can learn at their own pace.
This material is also useful to the pro-musician for mapping out chord progressions when composing.
Mark wrote a related music storybook for children which is unpublished at this time!
He also hopes to do an animated feature film based on his music storybook entitled ...
Muse - The End of the Hum Ming Dynasty!
This story is about the Quest for Harmony!
Funny music characters and names represent musical terms!
Mark hopes to interest one of the major animation companies like Disney,
Universal Studios or Sony Pictures to produce this story as a feature 3D film for the movie theaters.
"The world needs Harmony!
A 3D movie would do more than entertain, it would inspire kids to learn!
Major Harmony® and his band of cartoon music friends will make a big difference in the world! "
I know people will see the importance of harmony!"
Mark J. Herrick - 2009
Enjoy the art show ...
Please visit Mark J. Herrick other websites!
Use the website Links on the last page.
Thank you for your interest in ...
The Art and Illustrations of M. J. Herrick.
