Briggs’s sense of humor, as well as her wit and vitality, are apparent in the card just below—and in the other cards that illustrate this article.

Today, unfortunately, due to various circumstances noted in the following conversation, the business no longer thrives. Thus, during the past few years, she has turned some of her talents towards watercolor painting. But with the current politically untenable situation in the United States—with effects that reverberate around the world—she has felt impelled to concentrate on creating protest art to be used in demonstrations.

In the following conversation, Briggs and I discuss her unusual career:

Greta Berman: How did you get into the greeting card business?

What has been your path?

Alice Briggs: I was student teaching, training to be an art teacher at Wellesley, and this wonderful artist for whom I was student teaching asked one day,” Do you ever do cards?” And, as a matter of fact, I’ve made my own cards since I was a child. We were going to start a business together, but he didn’t really have time. But I kept going, and it just took off! I got a sales rep and started with one store. Then the rep helped me build a business; she told me how to go about it. I started showing at trade shows at the Javits Center [in New York City], and I made a big hit! It was wonderful: downstairs small companies like mine had booths, and business just boomed! And then I got more reps; you just find out what you need to do.

GB: How long would you say it took before it became a thriving business?

AB: Not very long. After I first got a rep, it only took a few months.

GB: Amazing! So, when was that?

AB About 35 years ago.

GB: So that would be about 1990?

AB: Thereabouts, yes. Things were different then. There was no internet. The Internet killed the greeting card industry!

GB: That’s surprising. You would have thought that having your own website would have increased sales.

AB: No. I started the website because I was losing sales—because the business was becoming very different. Before, it was all in-person and hands-on. Store buyers came to stationery shows and placed orders. I would come home to a stack of orders. At first, I was hand-painting each of the cards. But then printers started trailing me until I gave in. I couldn’t afford printing, but then I got a contract from Microsoft. Their representatives came to a show, and their offer proved to be legitimate. Microsoft licensed 50 to 100 images and paid a lot for each one. With that money, I was able to start printing my cards—and I was still able to sell them on my own as well. So you see, I never had to work very hard to get started.

GB: You tend to be so modest whenever we talk, but the reason you were successful is that your work is so good!

AB: Oh, thank you. I do have an art background; I went to art school. Also, I always drew. I have a framed picture that I did of a Madonna when I was seven. The school liked it so much that it hung in the superintendent’s office.

I always did both art and music. I was a music major, but I also took art courses in the wonderful art department at Bennington, and before that at Putney. At Bennington we had teachers like Jules Olitski and Anthony Caro. So I decided after college that art came more easily to me, and I wouldn’t have to practice [music] all the time. I went to the [Boston] Museum School where it was very freewheeling. You just had to show up for your final critique. There I was going to do lithography, but the line to sign up was long, so I went upstairs to the silk screen room, where there wasn’t any line. The teacher, Jack Clift, was an illustrator.  He encouraged me, and I created silk screens, which I just loved. I loved the color, and I had this technique—drawing with glue—which gave me a kind of thick and thin line that was a significant factor in determining my style.

And of course I was, and still am, influenced by other artist-illustrators. I really admire Quentin Blake, who is a children’s book illustrator.

And Ludwig Bemelmans.

Illustration by Quentin Blake

Illustration by Ludwig Bemelmans, 1938

GB: Despite some of the elements of your work, you don’t consider yourself a cartoonist?

AB: No, I am an illustrator; I don’t really follow cartoonists. I never wanted to be a cartoonist. I just get pegged because people can’t think of what else. . . .

GB: Do you like Maurice Sendak?

AB: Yes, but he has a very tight style—very different from mine.  After two and a half years at the Museum School, Jack Clift said “I think you’re ready to go show your portfolio.” Again, creating the portfolio—before the internet age—was a hands-on process. Mine mostly comprised silkscreens. In the beginning I showed it to educational publishers in Boston, and I just got jobs right away. It was so easy.

GB: What kind of jobs?

AB: Drawings for textbooks.

GB: Are any of those in print?

AB: Probably not. But I expanded from that and freelanced for a long time. In those days you could just go in and make an appointment with an art director; they would look at your portfolio and you could get feedback—you could just feel it. That was better than going to art school. I learned that I had to have a distinctive “style.” And that would get me jobs. But it’s not like that now.

GB: And you do have a style. But I have so many artist friends who have great difficulty getting their work shown. This gets into the whole issue of what it means to be an artist. Bottom line: How do you feel today about yourself as an artist? What would you like to do? What would be ideal? Would you like to go back to that period when you could just show your work and get it done?

AB: No! The stress was enormous ‘cause you’d have to have something yesterday.

GB: Do you intend to keep making greeting cards?

AB: I would like to, but the business has just fallen out, especially since Trump was elected. Plus, over the last five or so years, I started losing stores—stationery stores, bookstores, etc.—they started closing because of the pandemic. Those were my customers. So I started the website and got retail customers. But they only order 20 cards, not 2,000, like the stores. There’s also a kind of fatigue; people get tired of your look.

GB: But, as you said, a lot is probably due to the internet. People send emails instead of cards.

AB: I’ll just add that as to the greeting cards in the 1990s, there were a lot of people who, like me, had their own companies, and I feel like a survivor because they are all gone. Since my cards weren’t selling, I had to do something. So, I joined some art groups; I like watercolor since that suits my loose style—gestural.

GB: The whole issue—the fading of the greeting card market and having to reinvent yourself—is fascinating.

AB: Sad, really.

GB: Yes, but, on the other hand, there’s a sort of nostalgia for things that we’ve had and that we’ve loved, and don’t have any more.  But we are glad that we had them.

AB: Yes, that’s a good way to put it.

Alice Briggs Gallery

 
 
 

 
 
 

 
 
 

 
 
 

 
 
 

 
 
 

 
 
 

 
 
 

Where We Went Through

by Nancy Nowak

  Where We Went Through, a chapbook of poems by Nancy Nowak, traces a journey through landscapes physical and emotional. Two people, the poet and her artist husband, begin the journey together, but after his sudden illness and death, she remains to enter sorrow alone. As novelist Christopher Bram, author of Gods and Monsters, writes, the book is “an intimate memoir constructed of concise, finely detailed poems—like snapshots of the world by two people seeing the world together: some as delicate as watercolors, others as deep as X-rays. When one person [dies], it’s devastating. This is a stunning book—in all meanings of the word.” Poet Beatrix Gates (The Burning Key) describes Nowak’s book as “lit with beauty, and raw with the devastation of all her familiar loves.” Where We Went Through, according to Sharyn Wolf, author of Love Shrinks, “is a rich book, multilayered and textured, and I will go back to these poems again.”   Available from Finishing Line Press, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Bookshop.

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