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.

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.

Suburbia Illustrated

I grew up in suburbia. (Pause to allow murmur of shock and opprobrium to subside.) I hasten to add that it was different then. Less privileged, more innocent, and considerably smaller. My sketchbooks since then contain suburban imagery as a kind of leitmotif, a journey with destination, the destination being either the countryside or the city. The city neighborhood I live in today resembles a suburb of two or three generations ago, which may be why I love it. Houses midcentury and older. (Ours is circa 1900 and was built as a lake cottage.) This drawing is part of a series I've been working on for some time for an editor of children's books at Farrar Straus. Maybe I'm trying to rediscover my childhood. It's what we all do. If I can I'd like to describe those remembered voyages by car, preferably without text because the drawings are the story. One page will leave off where the next one picks up and the child will follow along with his finger, scrutinizing, as I did, the variety of domestic landscapes along the way.

Suburbia: Winter

This time of year I cast my mind back over places like this. The places where I grew up. When I was living in those suburbias of low-slung ranch and split level houses I wished I lived in better surroundings. I preferred elm-lined streets of alternating colonial and Georgian and Tudor houses. Usually these neighborhoods were adjacent to country clubs. We were not country club people. Now I look at the suburban cul-de-sac aesthetic with more nostalgia. It is, after all, the world inhabited by Charlie Brown, who is about my own age. Charles Schulz created the Peanuts characters about a mile from here, in a Spanish Colonial along Minnehaha Parkway.