POETRY magazine

My bird's eye view of a suburban streetscape was selected for the cover of the July/August issue of POETRY magazine. It was art directed by Alex Knowlton of Winterhouse Design.

I have always loved doing bird's eye views, and having grown up in a leafy suburb of winding drives and midcentury houses I have an affection for the variety of domestic architecture found there. It's funny, because as I was growing up among the ramblers and mock colonials I much preferred the clapboard architecture of small towns. I now live in a city neighborhood that feels like a small town, and my drives into the suburbs are visits into a past that used to feel too modern.

This drawing was the first in a series following a road into the city, each panel beginning where the previous one left off, describing the relation of the houses to the road and each other, with the road creating a continuous ribbon through diverse neighborhoods, rural, suburban and urban residential, retail, business, industrial. I hope to publish them all together as a book some day. But looking at this one on its own, I realize there is a kind of poetry in the way the houses and the lives contained in them attach to the ribbon of traffic, almost like words assembled to a frame, but not quite rhyming, free verse.

Countryside

One of my pencils of rural roads, with technicolor added.

A Story Following a Road

I began this story on a two lane blacktop road in the countryside and followed it through exurbia, varieties of suburbia, into the city. There is no narrative other than the path itself. There are digressions, side streets that rejoin the main thoroughfare. There are places where the road disappears momentarily around or over or down a hill or into a tunnel. Some of the neighborhoods traversed are warrens of interesting loops and cul de sacs. Some are grittier, some rather posh. Where it will wind up I am not entirely sure. Maybe that is the point of the best kinds of adventures. One editor friend suggested I add some written narrative. I wonder if that would undermine it. Maybe a commentary track? This is essentially a silent film, but one without gags, without title cards. So far, anyway, it hasn't needed them.

A Road Looking for a Story

Someday I'd like to publish a book without text. Just a car on a road going somewhere. Side roads branching off, towns on the edge of sight, farms and yards obscured by trees, houses lived in by invisible people you'll never know. When I was young I found the side roads intriguing, but rarely did we turn down one. Other people knew where we were going but I didn't and didn't have any control over any of it. Life looks like this to a child, so maybe a book like this would be too much like their life, confirming all their existential worries.

Rural Landscape

I did this for my favorite aunt yesterday. Since I was a kid I've been a deep observer of the rural landscape. I've depicted it with small penwork and fat brushstrokes, fine and loose black line and more recently with pencil. I am not immune to influences. Edward Bawden, Eric Ravillious, Thomas Hart Benton, Wanda Gag, Garth Williams, Andrew Wyeth and others. This one is a bit more Matisse than Currie or Grant Wood.

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.