Illustrator's vision lets him see what's not yet built

Frank Costantino's rendering of a concert hall at Adelphi University earned him the Ferris prize from the American Society of Architectural Illustrators.

Frank Costantino is a distinguished Boston artist in a field most people don't know exists.

Costantino, 62, lives and works out of a modest house in Winthrop. He is a world-class figure in his specialty. He is one of the great architectural illustrators.

Illustrators are the ones who provide the "artist's rendering" you see when someone wants an image of a new building that hasn't been built yet. Often, the image is banal. But in the hands of someone like Costantino, it can become art.

The American Society of Architectural Illustrators includes members in 16 countries. It presents an annual award, the Ferris prize, for the best rendering of the year. The 2008 winner is a Costantino watercolor, a view of a concert hall interior

It took me a few minutes of looking at this astonishing image before I figured out that what makes it so great is that it isn't even trying to be realistic.

Where, for example, is that magical light coming from, the light that illuminates the four performers on the stage? From heaven, as far as you can tell. And the audience: much of it is merely a wavy brownish blur. It's been imagined as a hushed, collective listening mass, rather than as a number of separate individuals. Only the four performers on the stage are individuals.

Costantino says that almost none of the colors in his image are literally accurate. Instead he created his own palette of pale ochres and browns, a palette that brings out, more powerfully than any photograph, the essence of the musical moment. The bluish tint of the performers' tuxedos is set against the warm tones of the hall. Originally, the drawing was intended merely as a sketch for fund-raising. But Costantino liked it enough that, at his own expense, he developed it into the finished watercolor.

Like all his renderings, the Ferris winner was the result of a long process. The concert hall is at Adelphi University on Long Island, and the architect was the Boston office of Cannon Design. Costantino always collaborates closely with his client, usually an architect or building owner. They try out different points of view and media until everyone is satisfied. Costantino uses watercolor, pen and ink, colored pencil - whatever seems right for the task.

"I work toward a universal consensus," he says. There were many discussions over what kind of music to show, and what kind of audience. Choosing a male string quartet in evening dress, seen from behind, was a collective decision, not merely the artist's.

Costantino talks about how the computer has changed the life of illustrators. It's made many tasks easier. Artists can quickly lay out a building in perspective, testing many points of view in little time. They can scan zillions of images from the Web and incorporate or manipulate them. They can experiment with color. They can transmit their work instantly. Sometimes Costantino will do a nearly complete rendering on the computer, print it out, and only then add color and detail. But he has no doubt that, at least in his own work, it isn't possible to get the best results without the human hand.

The award is known as the Hugh Ferris Memorial Prize, named in honor of the most influential of all architectural illustrators. Ferris, who flourished in the 1920s, didn't stop at drawing buildings designed by architects. He sometimes dreamed up architectural ideas of his own. In the process of doing that, he more or less invented the so-called Art Deco style of American skyscrapers, the style of the Chrysler, the Empire State, the RCA, and other buildings of that period.

The Ferris prize winner is selected by an outside jury appointed each year by the Society of Illustrators. The society was founded in 1986, Costantino says, "so we could see ourselves as professionals rather than lone practitioners." He was one of the three founding members, yet the competition is so fierce and the talent level so high that his first Ferris arrived only this year. He figures he needed all that time. He says the Adelphi image is the product of a life's work, or what he calls "20 years of visualizing."

Costantino is an example of a kind of artist that doesn't get much respect these days, namely the commercial illustrator. Yet some great artists began their careers as illustrators. Winslow Homer in the 19th century and Andy Warhol in the 20th are only the first of many who come to mind. They knew they were good, and so does Costantino. Although 80 percent of his work is done for hire, he also paints on his own, mostly watercolors, which he sells in a gallery on the ground floor of his house.

"I'm moving toward a more gestural method," he says. He casually remarks that some day he'd like to be able to paint as freely, and as well, as Homer in his famous watercolors.

We admire many popular arts - jazz, rock, movies, even car and fashion design - but we pretty much ignore the commercial artist. It's too bad. Costantino reminds me of a place I admire, the National Museum of American Illustration, which stands on Bellevue Avenue in Newport, R.I., and which is, like Costantino, barely known.

It's crammed with the work of illustrators from an era the museum bills as "the golden age of illustration," roughly 1890-1950. Here are masters like Norman Rockwell, N.C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, Howard Pyle, James Montgomery Flagg, and many more. You'd have to be an incredible cultural snob not to be impressed.

I don't think Newport has any professional architectural illustrators on view, but there's no reason why they shouldn't. Maybe some day a Costantino?

Globe architecture critic Robert Campbell can be reached at camglobe@aol.com.

Correction: Because of a reporting error, the name of the Hugh Ferriss Memorial Prize for architectural illustration was misspelled in the Architecture column in Sunday's Arts & Entertainment section.