An Old Map of a New City

Well, new-ish. People don't realize that L.A. was a few orange groves and unpaved streets a hundred years ago. Fewer realize the discovery of oil made it into a city. Movies were incidental. I did this map years ago when I was doing regular maps for Rolling Stone. I've come back around to this kind of linework, but now do it in pencil, mostly. There is something wonderful about pictorial shorthand. It's almost hieroglyphic.

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.

Eccentric Architecture

I posted the pencil drawing of this old mansion a few months ago and just recently added color. Like a Ben Shahn drawing of an old man or David Stone Martin's jazz musicians, or jazz itself, the trick is in the slight distortions, the imperfect details, the odd angles. An interesting drawing isn't necessarily a direct quotation from life. Same with the color. Picking orange gave the image more life. Leaving the other colors in more subdued hues make the orange brighter. There is a "thingness" about architecture, about individual buildings, that's harder to capture with a camera. Painted portraits are looking for something the lens doesn't see.

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.

Method and Simplicity

Marshall McCluhan said something about media and messages which sounded simple, but it took him a whole book to explain it. Here is a picture that does it more simply. McCluhan's book wasn't really a set of instructions anyway.

Birdy with a yellow bill

I was reading a piece Roy Blount wrote for the Times about E. B. White. He was remembering an essay White wrote about robins, which made me think of this painting I did a few years ago, thinking it would look nice on a magazine cover in April. I associate robins with the New Yorker. Abe Birnbaum did a perfect cover painting of a robin once. Maira Kalman did a wonderful robin too. There is something about the orange and the dark gray just lighter than black, the yellow bill, the spindly yellow legs. I identify with them, apart from the bill, and the orange and dark gray. The way they listen by cocking their heads. The spindly legs I do have.

Schoolbuses

If there is a brand icon for public education it would be the yellow schoolbus. Funny they never sued the private and charter schools for brand infringement. Anyway, this is a drawing I did for the New York Times op-ed page (ably art directed by Aviva Michaelov). Sometimes when they choose another drawing from the assortment I present I go back and finish the ones not picked, just for my files, and for my own pleasure. The op-ed pages are black and white, after all, and what is a schoolbus not painted yellow?

Fish Photography

I got a call from the New Yorker a few years ago. They wanted a spot illustration on the subject of fish photography. I bet you visualized fish with cameras just as I did.

Countryside

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

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.

Travelers

I did this illustration for Condé Nast Traveler for the editorial opener. There is a trick to doing character drawings as small as this. Differences in personality are as much a matter of posture and hair and less about faces at this size. I was working on a set of dishes for Pottery Barn at around this same time and pitched the idea of doing the figures small and quirky like this. Quirky didn't fly. Not for tabletop. But I think this kind of drawing would function perfectly online these days. Did I mention that all of these characters are copyrighted? They are. They await your call.

Mixing Metaphors

Some years ago I came up with this idea for a story about Japan's reaction to American competition. There has always been a kabuki element to business competition, wherever it is. The toy drummer functioned well as the American competitor. The illustration generated concerns about stereotyping and we went with a different concept, but it's this one I remember. Stereotypes are easier to remember, which is why we use them. The painted faces of kabuki and geisha tradition are stereotypes themselves. They aren't my tradition though. Do I have any business using them? They should be handled carefully in any case. Even though the American is the clown, and the geisha was drawn directly from an old Japanese print, I wonder if this painting was disrespectful of both nationalities.

Kid Suburbia

This is a drawing I did for one version of a children's story I wrote a few years ago. I don't usually depict the landscape with deep perspective like this. My compositions tend to be flat––all subject, no background, no context––so this was a departure. Even when I am in a realistic mode, with perspective and everything, I tend to imagine the drawing rather than working from reference. This filtering subtracts extraneous material and adds the quirks and oddities that make the art personal. This is probably as photographic as I get, but the light is flat and the background is blank. It's the suburbia I remember from years ago, a bit like the world Charles Schulz depicted.

The Art of the Menu

A painting for my local alternative paper, City Pages. (Art directors Nick Vicek and Emily Utne)

Staying Cool

I remember spending the hottest days of the summer in a friend's basement reading the Ski and Skiing magazines from the previous winter. Later, this was the time of year I wrote my articles for Skiing, about Squaw Valley or Big Mountain or Deer Valley. It's not a bad way to stay cool. I did this illustration for the opening spread of Snow magazine. The issue also contained a feature I wrote about the evolution of ski fashion.

Bicycles and Euro Style

I did this image for a poster show designer Andy Powell organized at The Bikery, a bake and bike shop in Stillwater. The show is on into next week with plans to continue at the Bikery's new location in Marine-on-St-Croix.

The Bikery
904 4th Street South
Stillwater, MN 55082

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.

Love Thy Job

I think that was the subject described here. I love my job, even though it isn't set in an impressive office building.

A Dog and His Servants

I found this in my box of drawings the other day and thought "what an odd drawing." A dog whose needs are met by a butler, a chef, a housekeeper? Probably not so unusual in some neighborhoods. I'm sure there's a funny children's book written along these lines.

A Kind of Cowboy

I went to see Iron Man 2 with my son and a nephew over the weekend and was reminded of this painting I did a few years ago. Superheroes are a form of compensation, filling in the male audience's inadequacies. The same is true of large motorcycles and large guns. Is this a purely American phenomenon? It was very European prior to 1945, and I suppose the Soviets were a kind of cartoon. This image was in Lurzer's Archive's 200 Best Illustrators Worldwide. You never know why Europeans pick what they pick.

Ball Games

Heading into another summer weekend, I am remembering the games played many years ago, chiefly whiffleball. Basketball was played earlier in the year in our neighborhood, soccer later, football in the fall, winter was spent at the ski hill down the street. Whiffleball was perfect because it didn't require full teams or large yards. Baseball was organized; there were coaches who yelled at you, and umpires who called you out. Whiffleball was played with a ball that was lighter than air. It was disorganized, freeform, games usually broke up over disputed plays, making it a perfect reflection of childhood's dynamics. I did this illustration for an article in the Atlantic about a serious grown-up whiffleball league in Florida. Grownups always find ways of killing the joy of the game. I did my best not to flatter the athletes. Note the cleavage on the player in the middle.

Saxophonic

Another card from that deck created by Lisa Catalone. Simple line + bold, slightly offset color. She typeset from a font she and I created. Wonderful, really. (If I were a designer I'd know how to scan the printed piece minus the strobe effect.)

Travel

I've been in the travel business all my professional life, as a mapmaker and travel writer, but also trading in the iconography of places. When you think of a place what do you see? What is the single piece of architecture or landscape that serves as a marker? When I am doing an illustrated map it's these items that I arrange on it, like furniture, or photographs set on a piano. India=the Taj Mahal. Paris=the Eiffel Tower. Egypt=Pyramids. Etc. Tourist shorthand, but useful. This card was designed by Lisa Catalone.

Celebrations

The household chore I enjoy most is that of resident artist. I am the one who draws cards for friends and family, cousins, in-laws, aunts, for birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, bar mitzvahs. I get to be my own art director––and tend to be pretty demanding. This was the second idea I painted for the occasion yesterday, and much better than the first one.

A Campus Map

Maps are usually contained inside rectangles, and over the years I've become adept at decorating those rectangles, but once in a while a map is needed for an odd shape. It's fun when this happens. It's especially challenging when the shape doesn't match the landscape being set into it. Distortion is a useful tool, one mapmakers use all the time; after all our continents are inscribed on a globe, not a flat sheet. Catalone Design needed a map to go on the inside of a fold-out box designed to contain Q&A cards. I thought it was interesting that the shape is cruciform; the client was a Jesuit school. There is a bit of Ludwig Bemelmans and Abe Birnbaum in the handling of the buildings and the patterning in the trees. A nice piece altogether, thanks to the art direction of Lisa Catalone.

Faces

A sketchbook piece. What does it mean? Maybe it's a diagram of Facebook.

Toscano

A drawing from my Italian sketchbook of a few years ago.

Mythic Athlete

A sketchbook drawing.

Cafe Society

Friday afternoons in the summer should be spent at a sidewalk table. I did this illustration several years ago for the Philadelphia Inquirer, art directed by Sue Syrnick. It was included in the American Illustration annual for that year.

A Father, A Son and a Boat

I did this illustration for one of Nickelodeon's magazines. I think the boy might be imagining himself as George Washington.

Big Hair

I did a series of drawings about hair for the New Yorker, never used. But the extravagances conjured up were a lot of fun. I also wrote a picture book along the same lines. Children love exaggeration. Unfortunately, very few of them are editors. This drawing appeared in American Illustration.

Happy Father's Day

World Football

There is something atavistic about football. I refer to the world game, what we call soccer, from a strange elision of the words "association football." Watched from high above as commentators do it seems sublime and geometric. Up close it is both more vicious and more elegant. When I was writing about it I disliked the detachment of the press box (free food and drinks notwithstanding) and always watched from ground level, where I could feel the atmosphere and hear the verbal abuse. Otherwise personable chaps became something different on the field, willing to destroy and (worse) embarrass their opponents. And afterwards they'd be chums again, ordinary blokes like someone you might see working in a bank.

The American Pasttime

This ballplayer appeared in my sketchbook a couple of years ago. He's a bygone figure (note the baggy knickers.) His muscles are the kind you get hauling ice or baling hay, not from a syringe. He is a Honus Wagner type. With all the imaginative names in baseball it's surprising there isn't anyone named Honus playing today. I am going to see the Twins play tonight in their new outdoor stadium. I attended the last game at the old Met Stadium; a very cold football game. My son wishes I had torn out my seat and taken it home.

The World Cup

Half a lifetime ago I spent a lot of my time contemplating the game the rest of the world knows as football. I was writing for an alternative weekly, covering the elderly World Cup players who were spending their retirement in the NASL, which is how I got to interview Pelé and Beckenbauer, along with some second-rate but very amusing English players. All of these players were infinitely better than anyone America could produce at the time. One thing I learned is that soccer, or football, is an endless source of explanations for how the world functions. Somebody wrote a recent book along those lines, something I never got around to. But the metaphors are just as useful to an illustrator. Politics and business and other forms of global conflict take their form from the original ball game. I did this illustration for an insurance magazine.

Turisto

A sketchbook piece from a year or two ago.

Real Baseball

I did this drawing for Harper's a few years ago. It's one of a series I drew of baseball players. (When I drew this I was visualizing Juan Marichal.) Sports belong to photographers, but I think a line drawing captures the essence better. Athletes are as elegant and interesting to draw as ballet, but except for horse racing Degas wasn't much of a sports fan and I don't think Rembrandt ever played or watched anything. I am thinking about doing a sketchbook of soccer players to celebrate the World Cup. Soccer was the game I played and wrote about for quite a few years.

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.

Swan, Champagne, Caviar

I did this illustration for the LA Times. The columnist was describing the kind of perfect Mother's Day he orchestrated in their house.

Small Package

A bit of Charles Schulz, but more like the figures in Rocky & Bullwinkle I think.

Call the Caterer

Between grad parties and wedding parties, this is the time of year to be a caterer. I've done a lot of food images over the years, for all of the food and shelter and city magazines. It isn't a matter of point and shoot; I have to re-imagine the food or the scenario. I re-imagined this pastry chef as a piece of Staffordshire pottery. Colorful, simple, sweet. I think I painted this for Town & Country.

An American Icon

I cropped this head of Paul Bunyan from a tourism brochure and drew the dog and his dinner underneath it. At the time it seemed humorously incongruous; now it seems apt. The newest shouts of individualism are being paid for by large corporate entities who'd rather have obedient people working for them. Some Americans behave in a way Pavlov would be able to explain.

Airplanes, etc.

My parents once expressed hopes that I'd find a job in the airline business, so they could fly for free. A very sensible idea. The closest I've come is doing art for airline advertising. Fifteen years ago I did a daily ad for one airline. This week I've been doing some paintings for another. As a mapmaker, it's a good fit. But illustrators seldom are flown anywhere on assignment. I get to go places more often as a travel writer. I used to fly all over to write about ski destinations, but since I no longer ski I am looking for a different gig. Beaches maybe, or cities with interesting cafés. I once introduced myself as the food and wine editor for Skiing magazine. I could do the same for another magazine if asked.

Idleness is Vice

It's obvious to me that this man is breaking the law. Where are the police?

Making the Grade

I did this illustration for a Time magazine article about grade inflation. The metaphor of the ladder works two ways because an A is also a ladder to success. But not all A's are created equal. Some teachers are kinder than others, some schools engineer grade points, and some students get a leg-up for very good reasons. I'm grateful for every leg-up I got. I know it was easier in my day. Competition for grades has become overheated. I can't remember if there was anything about learning in the article, but learning has become less important than the score. Things we learn under this kind of pressure tend to be forgotten quickly.

Another Choice Drawing

This is another drawing I did for the New York Times op-ed piece about school choice last week.

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.

A Nice House

I did this painting of a friend's house over the weekend.