A Globe and Not a Globe

The nice thing about pencil line is it's unrehearsed. The thought comes right off the top of my head onto the paper. The roughness allows one thing to be another thing without making the viewer stretch too much. More simile than metaphor, maybe. Stories are written first in pencil.

Global Warming: the snow shovel's perspective

With all of the snow falling back east I'm guessing millions of people think global warming was a figment of Al Gore's imagination. The scientific explanation takes too long for people to digest, but it sometimes helps to invent a visual that puts it in a nutshell. There's the snow-shovel, and the earth on it is melting. I did this drawing yesterday for the New York Times letters page; it appears there today.

As I understand it, the snow is a downwind effect of climate change. If it sounds illogical think of how Arabs drink hot coffee to cool off. Any massive shift in climatic conditions is bound to spin off contradictory effects in different places: droughts, floods, locusts, hurricanes. Which may explain why apocalyptic Christians are so delighted.

I started playing around with this pencil style about a week ago. This is its first appearance in print. Aviva Michaelov is the art director.

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.