The World is your... Apple?

Another globe metaphor from my sketchbook. He's taken a bite out of northern Europe.

Targeting the Globe

Here's a recent image from my sketchbook. Sometimes when I'm doodling I don't know what the drawing is about until I'm done. I can imagine several topics this image could be attached to. The "globe as a plaything" idea turns a bit sinister when you put a gun in the man's hand.

Performance Art

My wife, Faith (the impresario) put this show together to help fund the theatre program at Minneapolis Southwest High School (where our son Evan is in nearly every show, it seems). It was on Sunday night, right on the heels of the Vikings Packer game––which luckily didn't go into overtime. We raised some serious money. I did the art for the posters and the tickets, which Kristi Anderson designed. As always, it was the design that made the art look cool. The show was pretty fabulous, by the way.

Earth As Metaphor

A metaphor for what, you ask. What could Earth be a metaphor for. Earth is more metaphored against than metaphoring, if I can put it that way. It turns up in my drawings a lot. A person, serviceable enough in his or her own right, but standing there to no extended purpose; put a globe in her hand and she is worldly or he is Atlas, or vice versa. I can draw a circle and loop a few shapes inside it, and voila! they are continents and it is Earth. Here is one I did for the Christian Science Monitor and always liked. Especially the fish. I should try to find some other globe images from my files and put them up.

Gulliver

I was writing a story about a boy who grows suddenly large and the problems he encounters. Problem One is something Clifford (the big red dog) doesn't have to deal with. Clothes. This kid has outgrown everything and is very hard to shop for. The style is more dry brush than most of my work, and a rare excursion into nightscape. Most of my art places figures against a white background, so this was a fun departure. One of a series.

Birds Out of Thin Air

Is he a magician producing doves out of his sleeves? I don't know. The sketchbook functions like a dream sometimes, conjuring odd, hard-to-explain imagery.

Large hand, small shoe

The way I remember it, tying his shoes was like tying on a sparse gray hackle. He is now 6'3". Next week he turns 18. He tells me he is excited about being able to smoke while he votes. (Joking.)

Like Fish in a Barrel

Before and during our invasion of Iraq some of the expert commentators on various news programs compared the operation to shooting fish in a barrel. I was more skeptical and did this drawing to describe how it might turn out.

A Useful Metaphor

Ideas enter the political conversation via radio waves and newsprint, usually shaped by the persons and groups who own the airwaves and the presses. And the rest of us ordinary folks nod our heads in agreement, because opinion shapers are clever. A few years ago the idea of the moment was a flat tax that would have shifted even more of the tax burden off rich people––who already pay at a lower rate than most of us do. I heard working class people applauding the idea. It sounded fair, but if you thought about it for a few minutes it made no sense at all. It required an analogy, a visualization that described why unequal size justifies unequal sharing of a burden, putting more burden on those capable of carrying it. The same could be said about health care. Why do we pile punishing costs and restrictions on people already burdened with illness and physical hardships?

Man in the Rain

This is what October looks like this year in Minneapolis. Another of a series of characters that appeared in The Believer.

Man and umbrella

Another in that series that appeared in the Believer. You hardly ever see people like this outside of New York's Upper East Side. If I saw him walking on a sidewalk in Linden Hills I might phone the police. I especially like how his feet are placed. Drawings like this start at the feet.

Palm Beach

Another one of those kitchen table portraits I did for The Believer a few years ago. I know these people exist, but I don't see them in my neighborhood. How does she spend her days? And her money?

inventing people

I remember drawing this. Interesting how the mind works. I can remember what I was listening to (Bill Evans), and that it was a cold evening. I was working at the kitchen table supervising the kids' homework. I had torn some paper into small squares and had some ivory black on a salad plate, a pencil, a brush. I did eight characters that evening. All of them appeared in the Believer a month or two later. They seem real but they are completely invented. They might have appeared in a story. Maybe I should write one about each of them. I could title it Winesburg, Minnesota.

The Gourmet Wine Column

I did a lot of wine columns for Gourmet. Then, when they were republished in Japan, I got to do them again. I always made a point of purchasing the wines being written up. Gerald Asher taught me what I know about wine. I drink a glass with lunch and dinner; it's now cheaper than milk. For this article comparing California and French wines I turned the Eiffel Tower into a scale. Something a photographer has a harder time doing. I love doing the Eiffel Tower. Icons are so familiar you can stretch them, simplify them, stylize them and they're still themselves.

Gourmet Took Us To Italy For Lunch

Not literally, of course. But that is the beauty of a food magazine. The pleasure (some of it anyway) without the calories or the expense. Or, for that matter, the effort of cooking. I can't remember the article this illustrated, but I do remember not being sent to Pisa to work up sketches. Photographers are always being flown places and housed and fed. My schedule is more relaxing and my overhead is less onerous, but I doubt photographers envy me much. After working for Gourmet for many years I began to get calls from Bon Appetit, which was nice because the look at Gourmet was shifting away from illustration and Bon Appetit was very hip and West Coast. Both were published by Condé Nast, so I didn't worry about a conflict. Then I got a call from my person at Bon App, shocked and hurt that I'd done an illustration for Gourmet. Which reminds me of an anecdote about Anais Nin. In her fifties she had husbands on both coasts, who didn't know about each other. Life is full of innocent complications.

Gourmet Magazine

I just found out Gourmet magazine is being closed down. Gourmet was my first national magazine client. I remember being in New York one rainy day in 1989. I always traveled with a portfolio. In those days it was mostly original art, no xeroxes, and my art is watercolor. I had to keep the book dry. I phoned their offices from a phone booth on Madison, asking if I could drop by. Irwin Glusker got on the line and assigned me a feature illustration over the phone. I never did visit their offices, when they were on Lex or later when they moved. But that's typical. Most of my clients have never met me. But I did dozens of illustrations for them in the years following, mostly maps of wine regions, also maps of cities visited by their writers. I learned a lot about food in the process. I also made a point of drinking the wines from the regions and vineyards I was mapping. Gourmet was always wonderfully written, wonderfully evocative. Delicious.

A Campus Map

I did this map of a "typical college campus" for the people at FISH. I had to ask myself What comprises a typical college campus? There'll be a stadium, a science building, the student union, but what else? What makes frat row look Greek? It has nothing to do with Ionian columns or classical sculpture. I once described our local university as a museum of relegated architectural forms (I cribbed the analogy from F. Scott Fitzgerald) and therein lies its charm. Its heterogeneity demonstrates the importance of liberal education, of not settling for one form. Perhaps uniformity shows lack of imagination.

Department Store

I used to visit Marshall Field's State Street store when I was a kid. Not unattended, mind you. The first time I was ever mislaid was at Marshall Field's; luckily I was discovered and raised by a kind family of gypsies who made me what I am today, but I'm digressing. The point is, the Department Store of my imagination is always that store. The enormous first floor ceiling upheld by white Greek columns, the islands of curved counters, the staircases, the Walnut Room for lunch. Never mind that the store no longer exists––by that name, I mean. It was a singular pleasure to design a shopping card for them several years ago, before Macy's acquired them. I'd done a similar cutaway illustration of a department store Christmas, published by Graphique de France a few years earlier, and subsequently published in a calendar in Japan. This was a miniature version to be carried in your pocket but the store in my imagination is still enormous and full of wonder.

Red Hat, Old Cat

The guy in the hat was a sketchbook piece, the old gardener was a character in a children's book I was writing. Sharon Werner put them together into this promo, wrote the rhyming copy, inserted the commas, and voila. Good design makes interesting art more clever. The old guy isn't glamorous, but the color and texture are, and the context is sophisticated. The children's book remains unpublished, but I got some nice jobs out of this promo, some of them pretty glamorous.

The Fan

Fans are like bicycles, simple but complicated to draw, and perfectly iconic, suitable for the metaphorists bag of tricks. What can a fan represent? What can't it represent? I was always afraid of fans, especially ones like the one depicted here which practically came with instructions on where to insert fingers to have them lopped off. Thousands of dolls, toy soldiers and small insects have met grisly ends in fans like this. I never harmed anyone or anything; I didn't need to. I could picture what would happen. A fan is a strangely violent instrument for cooling you off.

Stick Insect with Cello

I did this for a concert poster for my son and daughter's school. Musical instruments are difficult enough to depict, with all those knobs and curves. Add in the instrumentalist and it becomes even more complicated. The cello has such a voluptuous shape, it seemed amusing to wrap someone thin and angular around it.

Art Installation

Art museums butter their bread with "art installations", rooms filled with art that looks like plain ordinary stuff artfully arranged. (I collaborated on a screenplay years ago about an art detective. The funniest line from it was written by somebody else. The detective enters a museum gallery which is filled waist-high with mud and says: "I can't believe this is a forgery.") This is an illustrator's version of installed art. We all collect things. I collect old toys, and they turn up in my art. The arrangement here is influenced a bit by Saul Steinberg, but also (in the styling) by Elwood Smith and Steven Guarnaccia and Seymour Chwast. Our minds are all shadowboxes full of items glued together by Joseph Cornell. The art director on this was Rick Besser, but the art was never used.

Guy and Flower

This illustrated an article about how guys sometimes have a soft, sentimental side. Implausible as that is, this turned into a fairly charming illustration. Sometimes I like leaving the background landscape in black and white. In this case it creates a separate dreamlike dimension. But often a client will ask if I've forgotten to paint in some of the colors.

Down Boy

For several years I illustrated a monthly pet column for a west coast magazine. This particular column was about dogs chewing furniture. An illustrator has a license to exaggerate things a little, imagine things out to their sillier extremes. I doubt a photographer could get a dog to do this in a photo shoot.

A Beautiful Day

Another one of those dry, pleasant, quiet Minnesota days.

Pop Gothic

I drew this for a wine box for Pottery Barn, but the product never appeared. Still, a fun drawing, turning a gothic pile into a hip bit of filigree. It's like building something elaborate out of tinker toys. Trying to use minimalism to depict the baroque.

Kids Grow Up

I've just realized that our youngest starts high school on Tuesday. What exactly happened and why wasn't I paying attention?

Movie Queue

I spent more time this summer driving kids to and from multiplexes than I spent in an actual theater. This isn't to say there weren't movies I wanted to see. To paraphrase Dorothy "Movies come and go so quickly here!" At least movies I like. Now that my kids are the age when we like the same things they, of course, would rather not be seen with me. I did this illustration for my usual entertainment slot in the LA Times. You can tell by the marquee when it ran, and see the audience for each film in the line. Sophisticated African Americans and knuckle-dragging twenty-somethings still go to the movies.

Woof

They're cutest when they're asleep, but when we're asleep they tend to be noisy. I did this Jack Russell's portrait for an art director friend who walks and feeds him.

Working Small

Business cards are a cool item. I did these drawings for a restaurant web directory founded by some friends of mine. The friends had the taste and judgment to hire SPUNK do do the design, and the design is the hero of the piece. Good design always makes art look exponentially better. Good design makes me seem like the kind of artist who works in a cool studio suite of 50s modern design with refurbished steelcase and Swedish furniture in a hip warehousy neighborhood. I actually do most of my work at an old kitchen table looking out at a leafy neighborhood view, resisting the urge to walk down to the lake. My inspiration for this art came from watching too many Tex Avery cartoons.

Roma

When I've spent time in a city it can be harder to illustrate a map of it. The things I remember, the places I liked, the cafés and piazzas I hung around in, insist on being included. Like the best stories, it's all about selection. And Rome is like a wonderful overstuffed museum, you step back to get a photo of a Baroque church and you stumble over a statue by Bernini. I walked Rome with a 1912 Baedeker in hand. A modern street map can tell you where you are but it doesn't capture the atmosphere of a place; it reduces the fabric of an ancient city to a soulless calculation.

Health Care Surprises

I don't remember what the article was about, but this drawing captures the feeling we all get these days shopping for healthcare. It's like being run down by an ambulance. And billed for it.

Support for Education

I did this illustration for the New York Times. The op-ed was about education funding, or lack thereof.

Lotus, Lotuses...Loti?

Not the sports car... These were a few of several done for Landor. Somewhere I have several others more abstract, and in a way more interesting.

L O V E

I painted this for my wife for our anniversary last week. Sometimes instead of a clever or disarming metaphor it's nice to just spell it out. (Illustrated lettering is an interesting solution for book titles and for magazine articles too.)

Back to School Shopping

The ads for pencils, erasers and school clothes have started appearing in newspapers already. You're reading the paper in the morning and out come these vilely colorful reminders of servitude. It is still July forgodssake. I am compounding the felony by inserting this art. Think of them not as tools of a dimly remembered punishment but as objects d'art. There is a certain "thingness" about a pencil sharpener drawn simply, and a pencil is just a hexagonal stick sharpened to a point with a bit of rubber at the other end.

Keys and Frets

A kind of still life I did for an alternative weekly. I honestly can't remember which one.

Invasion of the Moneylenders

When I did this illustration in 2002, articles were already being written about mischief in the banking industry. A cartoon machine seemed like the right metaphor at the time. I had no idea this drawing would become a business model.

The American Conversation

The topic was The American Conversation, a cross-disciplinary course about American thought and American thinkers and innovators. A fun project all around and a chance to do likenesses, not one of my usual categories. It was my idea to write the famous quotes on voice balloons cut from yellow legal paper––which I used then and still use when I write.

When it appeared in the magazine my art was superimposed on some stock imagery of stars and stripes, which took me by surprise. Illustrators and designers work best within an approval process, but stuff does happen. Did an editor or an editorial committee think the art was too drab as it was? Did someone think it required flags, and were they hesitant to ask me to paint an extra element? (I would have.) I recall giving the designer the license to move the elements around as needed; was this interpreted as license to collage my collage with someone else's stock art? I expect a deadline led to improvisation. I got several emails from people who loved what they saw in the magazine, but I was a bit embarrassed by it. I'll be happy to work with them again. The tricky part will be how I diplomatically suggest we not repeat what happened the last time. Next time the same designer will probably make my art look better than I expected. That's what usually happens.

Friday

It's Friday. Everybody dance.

Crystal Ball

I did this for an indie rock magazine called Death + Taxes, published out of Miami. Creative Director Joey Parlett. Story about a guy contemplating trends and other metaphysical shit. Sorry, I meant to say stuff. If you lie down with rock journalists, you wake up with a more colorful vocabulary. This reminds me of that Philip Guston painting of the eye staring at the whiskey bottle. It also reminds me of my short sweet gig doing biweekly illustrations for Rolling Stone. It was thirty years ago and Jann and I were much younger. This is a revisiting of the style I used then. Loopy, offhand, with the occasional disembodied head.

Tea Anyone?

I did this illustration for a children's story I wrote quite a few years ago. Quite a few cups of tea have been consumed since and still no sign the story will ever be published. Thing is––everybody has stories. I'd be happy to illustrate somebody else's too.

Blue Sky Day

This is the kind of day it is in Minnesota. Can't get much nicer.

Paris Café Life

I did this illustration for the cover of a corporate magazine but I don't think anything in the magazine was about Paris or cafés or boulevardiers. But today is Bastille Day, so I thought it seemed an apt image. And who knows––maybe civilization will return to this side of the Atlantic. Maybe it already has, though not very many of us have the luxury of long afternoons spent discussing literature and culture.

Healthcare Treadmill

Even though most of the attention in Washington is focused on white male senators explaining why white men make better justices, and what's left is devoted to rich bankers insisting that rich bankers are the best ones to handle the stimulus money, health care is still the big issue. Bigger than Michael Jackson. This illustration is a metaphor for how our health-care system is set up now.

Music Hath Charms, etc.

This LA Times story was about how piped in classical music curbed crime on the London Underground. The composer in police attire is Georg Friederic Handel.

Twin Towns

Now that we've finally chosen a senator, we can go back to the age-old rivalry between the two cities.

Cat Massage

For several years I did a monthly pet illustration for Safeway Foods' magazine, art directed by David Armario. Cats, dogs, fish, birds, turtles probably too. The feeding of, chewing of furniture by, buying presents for. It was almost like having a pet. Over time I became a little envious of the lifestyle I was being asked to depict. It's been years since I've had a good massage.

Tintoy Metaphors

I found this in one of the boxes I keep art in. I collect old toys, and toys have often provided a medium for metaphor. This toy doesn't exist, but I constructed it out of bits and pieces of tintoys with their brightly printed surfaces and screws and flanges and seams.

What does it mean? The original drawing popped into my head at the time when aggressive CEOs were getting the legal go-ahead to seize worker pension funds. Sometimes the metaphor works better when it is suggestive rather than explicit. Although the fallout I'm suggesting is pretty explicit. And it's all come true.

Cute Kid

Last year my state fair people were all over the MTC buses, which was a cool thing, although it made my driving a bit erratic whenever I spotted one.

One of my greatest pleasures is simply inventing people: odd, familiar, usually comic but sometimes surreal or sinister. This crowd was pure friendliness. I was watching some 50s Warner Brothers cartoons over the weekend and was reminded of where my line comes from when I'm in this comic/friendly mode. The brisk, bright colors overlapping the lines, the uncompleted textures and jotted in backgrounds. I could imagine living in that world, or creating such a place for an animated film sometime. Anybody got a story that needs visualizing? Anybody know anybody at Pixar?

Jacko (1959-2009)

I did these two illustrations for my semi-regular gig in the LA Times Weekend Calendar. The question being asked was "What will Jacko do next to revive his career?" I had several ideas, but the Country Western album and Vienna Choir Boys concert tour were the funniest––and not entirely implausible.

Can You Diagram Creativity?

The question came up while I was working on a project for Xerox, and this was the result. Is a diagram the same thing as a map? Maybe someone could do a Venn Diagram explaining this. The key with this drawing, as with all mobile and changeable things, was to work quickly rather than meticulously. The same logic applies to mapping cities: old cities can be drawn more slowly than modern cities, with baroque details and decorative borders, but modern cities' elaborations are more volatile and hurried. Modern creativity creates experiences and apps rather than permanent things, which isn't necessarily a positive change. Or so I think. What I think about I diagram or write about.

An Old School, A New Map

Well, not exactly new. Newish. I was sorting through some old material and came across this. Maps have always been a specialty of mine. Partly because I insist on having a map whenever I'm reading about a place. If a map isn't provided I'll draw one. This was for a rather deluxe booklet Rutka Weadock did for Miss Porter's School. Tony Rutka did the wonderful color treatment and art directed.

Bicycle and Crocodile

This is one of a series of illustrations I did for a corporate client several years ago. Illustration personalizes text in a way photography can't. Illustration is friendlier and more individual. Crocodiles riding bicycles is another thing it's easier to capture with a brush than a camera, though many have tried. The hard part was getting the crocodile to read the manual.

Hedges

I've spent a lot of time in the past year drawing metaphors for the economy. The word "hedge" often associated with the word "funds" conjures images that have nothing to do with what it is, what they are, other than the trimming that goes on.

The World Game

I'm watching soccer with my son. (He had orthopedic surgery yesterday, and it helps pass the time for him.) I used to play the game, coached it off and on for many years, and met a few of the top internationals when I wrote articles about it. It is a game of sublime patterns and elegant players, as well as high and low drama. I've done sketchbooks of baseball players but should do one of soccer sometime. Its metaphors are universal, but, unfortunately, they are lost on most Americans. I did this illustration for an insurance magazine designed by Ted Lopez and Eason Associates.

Earth hasn't anything to show more fair

This isn't exactly the view Wordsworth was writing about. Westminster Bridge looks on the buildings the other way round. But there is a grandeur here that is fun to draw. The trick is eliminating the extraneous elements and drawing quickly. Sometimes I work directly from the perspective lines, as here. More often I do not, and it is the imperfections that set it apart from photographic reality.

Flowery

Sometimes a simple flower is best. Words are nice, but a rose is nicer. Is this a rose? It's no botanical drawing. It has a certain "roseness." I gave this to my wife who loves red roses. (She gets real roses sometimes too.)

Kidlike

One occasionally does a very jolly friendly happy illustration. It's pleasant and I love it, but it does rather undermine my credentials as an ironist. A true sophisticate doesn't draw this way. It's exactly the sort of thing that made Dorothy Parker "frow up" and I hate to disappoint the ghost of Dorothy Parker. Still, it's a fun image, and for the use it was put to it did the trick. The art director was the estimable David Armario, so he should shoulder part of the blame.

Bookish

This might be a self portrait. I have a lot of books and when the kids were small they played havoc with them, tearing valuable pages, spilling words and letters all over the floor and refusing to clean up the mess. Two year-olds never do, do they? This drawing appeared in the Atlantic among the book reviews. The art director was the estimable Mary Parsons.