Orientation (a book of stories)

This is an instance of a sketchbook drawing finding a life in print. The pencil drawing has become a whole new metier, a new style for me since the cover of the John Waters book, which is nice because I think in pencil. So I can take a thought, darken the line a little or a lot, add color, shift color, create variations. I sent this pencil drawing to the art people at Farrar Straus and Charlotte Strick replied saying she had just the book for it. A book of stories by Daniel Orozco (Faber, 2011). (Faber and Faber is another imprint they publish.) I added the color to the faces, inserted a couple of women's faces (it had originally been just odd looking men), devised the colored type, did an FF colophon in pencil and a scribbled edge for the back and flap.

Now available in a store near you. (And, as one short story writer to another, the stories are pretty great.)

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.

A Window in the City

I painted this for a calendar back in the '90s, one of several I did for a Japanese cellphone company. It's fun to imagine what it's like to look out at a city scene like this, each window framing another private life. My window looks out on treetops, kids on the sidewalk, the cottages across the street and the lake two blocks away.

Portrait of a Crowd

People in an elevator? It looks like that. Actually it's a thumbnail from a drawing I did depicting America's suspicion of otherness. Our suspicion of immigrants and other ethnicities and other religions. When it comes right down to it, we are not very tolerant here, despite being a nation made up of others and immigrants, a nation founded by free thinkers, founded to welcome other religions. Divide and conquer is an ugly strategy, except it works very well. Especially when there is money behind it.

Mr. Park Ranger

When I think of park rangers I think of Yogi Bear and a song starts going through my head. It's going through my head now and will continue to for most of the afternoon. Cartoons are a constant influence. Mostly Bullwinkle, but also Quickdraw and Yogi and Babalooey. I've always worked with brush on paper. Adding digital color to a brushed line, as I did in this piece for the Sunday LA Times, brings me closer to the look of flat paint on cartoon cels. It's a bright, interesting look, and a new variation for me. I've always admired people like Seymour Chwast and Steve Guarnaccia for their pure colors, without drying lines. This brings me closer to that too. But I still use a brush and a pencil.

What's Inside Our Heads

There are things we can only understand by comparing them to something else, something different but similar in some way. We understand by analogy and metaphor. Science couldn't understand the mechanics of the human heart until the steam engine was invented. The mind is a persistent puzzle because its workings are invisible, but we understand it a bit better because we've created artificial intelligence. The brain works a bit like the internet, with all its imperfections and unreliability. Firing off thoughts, collating them, making judgments, balancing belief and disbelief. I guess that's what this drawing is about. It's a sketch of a floating metaphor. The guy contemplating it from above makes me think of Rembrandt's painting of Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer. I always think of that painting when I pull down our Julia Child cookbook with its photograph of Julia contemplating a lump of bread dough.

Funny and Mean

I have always had a hard time making fun of people, by that I mean drawing them funny, making them look ridiculous. What does that say about me? Am I a coward or just a nice guy? I don't have the same hesitation in my stories; meanness is the soul of satire. And in my drawings I have less of a problem making fun of men, but I am always kinder to women. I feel bad when I satirize them. I guess this follows the first rule of humor: that it's always funnier to make fun of yourself or your own kind. I did this illustration for Bon Appetit a few years ago. The article was about wine; I drink wine, and the art is fairly merciless. And amusing.

An Interesting Face

I painted this for an African American magazine some years ago. An interesting assignment, but I remember having to repaint it because I'd gotten the skin color wrong, which surprised me. I don't know whether this was the acceptable version or not. It shows how sensitive we are to shades of difference. I did art for a Japanese liquor ad once. I remember being very careful to get the Japanese face just right, clearly Japanese but short of stereotype. The client kept having me adjust features: the nose, the skin color, the eyes. Finally they instructed me to make the hair blond. I told them I was confused; didn't they want the person to appear Japanese? No, they didn't. But instead of telling me so outright, they'd had me remove the ethnic distinctions one by one, and I'd carefully done so.

Assorted Items

I've been drawing still lifes lately. Arranging items in a certain way says something. It implies a message even if there isn't one, a relationship or a causation you never intended. Why else are these things together? My book uses this same trick. Setting anecdotes and people next to each other strikes up a conversation between them.

This arrangement of toys and people was done for a paper promotion designed by Besser Joseph years ago. The items have a loose connection having to do with the initial letter L, and some other tropes I can't remember. As I look at it now I can almost make sense of it, but it's probably not the sense I intended when I painted it.

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.

Faces

Because I never went to art school and never drew live models, I learned how to draw people by looking at art, seeing what I liked and how it was done. Which may explain why my style is as various as it is. Sometimes borrowing a cast of eye or a gesture from Max Beckman, organizing a landscape like Edward Bawden, setting the feet or rendering brickwork the way Ronald Searle did. These faces remind me a little bit of Graham Laidler (Pont), who drew English characters for Punch: the dotted eyes especially. A roomful of people like this becomes an exercise in repeat colors as much as anything, trying to create a balance of pattern and palette, and an even mixture of races, classes and genders. The art director was Mike Schacherer, then of Little + Co.