Choices

Illustration is a superior tool for describing a thought process, a choice in this instance. How do we choose to live? How do we travel? Do we travel light, or heavy like a princely household? For this illustration, painted for the back page column in the Macalester College magazine, I played with proportions and reality a bit. Most people's cars aren't small enough they can throw a leg up on them. And sure, the new bikes are pretty light, but I needed to equalize the two vehicles a little to clarify the issue. I kept the palette minimal but bright. A nice image, I think. Brian Donahue art directed.

Suburbia A to Z

I've been working on textile designs for the past several weeks. This was just one of the ideas I worked up. Fabric has always made me think of the domestic landscape; the way patterns and shapes are repeated, the harmony of colors. I've been working on a book following the long unfolding story of a road in a more linear fashion. This image is a variation on that. A short excerpt from a remembered suburbia.

Road Rage

A friend of mine wrote about road rage in my paper this morning. I have a few stories about that; we all do. Everybody's stressed, anxious and easily pissed off. I did this illustration for Plan Sponsor magazine a couple of years ago, under the excellent art direction of Soojin Buzelli. Looking at it again, the guy on the left reminds me a little bit of the bull in Picasso's Guernica.

Baby You Can Drive My Car

I love toys. Not only are they a fun timewaster in the studio, they offer a useful metaphorical tool. Things not plausible in real life often make sense as a toy. This pencil style I've been playing around with has a different effect: pencil gives things a documentary feel, as if they've been seen and recorded. Pencils also come directly out of the artist's head, with none of the smoothing-out that a more finished medium adds. It's more off-the-cuff, more sincere, more suggestive. What does this drawing suggest? We use the phrase "remote control" in a disparaging way, so maybe it could add an ironic commentary to a story about a pol who's controlled by others. Just off the top of my head.

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.

It's About the Bike

I illustrate a column in the Macalester College magazine, designed by Brian Donahue. This column was about choosing between the car and the bike, an easier choice in places where it doesn't snow six months of the year.

Highway Architecture

I didn't draw these while driving to Chicago yesterday, but I could have. Ever since I was a boy I've been looking with a strange fixity at the elements of the landscape seen from the road: pylons, farmsteads, fields, roadside architecture, signage. Each element is a kind of milepost, a punctuation mark. Each diverging road leads off in another direction, vanishing at a horizon that seems more interesting than the one I am driving towards. I have written stories, essays, film-scripts and part of a novel around this lifelong habit of observation. But the pictures contain stories in themselves. Someday I'd like to publish a book with these pictures and no words at all. Interested publishers should feel free to call me.