Ravel's Birthday

I listen to music while I draw. A lot of Bill Evans and quieter, subtler jazz music like that, but also classical music. Among my favorite classical composers I put Maurice Ravel very near the top. Art requires nuance and Ravel is all nuance, subtle variations, nothing obvious or insistent or clichéd or overly sentimental. I've spent years removing these things from my art and listening to Ravel and others like him has helped. Here is a drawing I did from a photograph of Ravel.

The Original Immigrants

I did this image for the remarkable Patrick J. B. Flynn, for an education magazine article about how to rethink our teaching of Thanksgiving to America's schoolchildren. The natives who greeted and helped the early settlers were a trusting and generous people, and we Europeans didn't repay them very well. Something to think about on Columbus Day. Of course, till the day he died, Columbus thought he was stealing land and gold from the Chinese.

Today's Art in the New York Times

I got a call from Alexandra Zsigmond yesterday. She art directs the New York Times op-ed page, and wanted me to do a drawing for the letters column. David Brooks had written about the Republican alternative to Obama's Affordable Care Act, which had just been upheld by the Supreme Court, and people had written responses to the column. It's hard to do a drawing of nothing, but I had the idea of drawing an elephant holding an empty box. I put a red cross on it to indicate it was a first aid kit, an apt enough analogy.

To make the elephant look more "congressional" I also put him in a suit.

The editors at the Times like to steer away from the hackneyed symbols when they can––the elephants and donkeys and Uncle Sams––so I also drew a senatorial-looking figure holding an empty box. To emphasize the emptiness of the box, I added a moth.

Word came back that they preferred the non-elephantine drawing and wanted it without the moth, which looked too much like a butterfly to them. They also thought it would be better to have the first aid kit covering more of the man's face, to make it more about the box. Adjustments made, drawing rescanned and sent, and this is the one that ran in the New York Times this morning. I like how it turned out.

While we're on the subject of elephants, I sometimes wonder if there aren't millions of Americans who vote Republican not because they like their policies but because they like elephants and perhaps hold a negative opinion of donkeys. I wouldn't be surprised.

Bagatelle Story-frame 7

...and finally the culmination of what we'd been hoping for.
What had been hinted at, which is what prophets do in a vague sort of way...
Merry Christmas.

Bagatelle Story-frame 6

...which becomes something surreal. This is what is called the transformation scene in the world of pantomime...

Bagatelle Story-frame 5

...a tree becomes a fountain surrounded by figures...

Bagatelle Story-frame 4

...A man becomes a beast, a vase becomes a tree...

Bagatelle Story-frame 3

...a curved line becomes a world, a puppet theatre, a bearded face becomes a boot and a boot becomes a peninsula in the Mediterranean.

Bagatelle Story-frame 2

It's interesting how the shapes grow out of the painted line, almost like flowers growing out of the stem growing out of the ground, and how similar in silhouette a figure is to a flower or a leaf or a gondola to a continent.

Bagatelle Story-frame 1

I like to paint these small silhouetted stories during December, which is a time of stories. I've been doing a few this week. These are from a few years ago and comprise a story, a kind of ballet, no dialogue, just shadows. This is frame one.

Life is a Road

I drew this for our Christmas card a few years ago. A brush and mars black on paper.

What I Don't Carry to the Office

I have briefcase envy. Because my commute is between rooms in my house I don't get to outfit myself with a briefcase, so I tend to invest them with a kind of supernatural charm. They represent the "manning up" I've never been able to do. Whenever I see someone carrying a classic attaché case I can't help wondering if it contains a million dollars in unmarked bills or government secrets or just a bag lunch, a sandwich and a bag of Fritos. Bond's briefcases had cunning weaponry in them, thanks to Q. I don't carry a briefcase but I still get to draw them. I can't recall who this was for, possibly one of my department store clients, but this drawing was never used.

Ghosts

I remember painting these several years ago. I was experimenting with negative imagery, painting the dark around a lit object, around a lit face or figure, landscapes at night, using a brush loaded up with Ivory Black. The subject inevitably came around to ghosts. Cutting the eyes out of a photograph does the same thing; we are suddenly looking at a dead thing.

















I can remember films using this simple idea to arresting effect, no commentary needed. When the eyes are gone, the person isn't there anymore, or that is the intent, as if the eyes are the repository of the soul. (I wrote a short story around this idea recently. I love ghost stories.) These images and several others were published in The Believer a couple of years ago. The story hasn't been published yet, although half of my published stories do have ghosts of one kind or another in them. Mostly the ones I've had published in Australia for some reason. Happy Halloween. Enjoy your parties.

A New Bagatelle

I began doing these silhouetted images several years ago, inspired by the cut-paper art of Hans Christian Andersen (the fairy tale guy). I did one for our family Christmas card that year. I did several small narrative series for the New Yorker. I kept revising and perfecting them and inventing new ones for my art directors there. They were never used. But the form continues to intrigue me. I think they'd make a wonderful endpaper or book cover. Or scarf or area rug or wallpaper or dress fabric. This one was painted for my wife's birthday. I have no idea what it means or what the vignettes are about. A story seems to emerge as I paint, and it's always better unrehearsed, like a Rorschach seen in the patterns of the foliage outside a window.

Wire

I did this sketchbook drawing today. One of a series.

My debut in Rolling Stone

Thirty years ago I sent an envelope full of xeroxes to the art department at Rolling Stone. They liked the art enough to publish quite a few of my little maps and squibs on the letters page in 1981 and 82. A nice gig, but I was never named gardening editor, never met Hunter Thompson. My style has evolved quite a lot since my salad days.

Mission Accomplished

I drew this cartoon eight years ago and sent it off to Bob Mankoff at my favorite magazine. Actually, I realize it was almost eight years ago today that I drew it. It was never published. America was immune to ironies at the time. I don't feel celebratory today either. It's all too somber. It's no time for hubris or cheers or feeling satisfied. We and the world deserve better. Luckily we have more serious leadership now.

Toy Pistols

On the 30th anniversary of the attempted assassination (and subsequent deification) of Ronald Reagan, it seemed fitting to put up some handgun art. It's also the anniversary of the terrible injuring of Reagan's press secretary James Brady. Brady never recovered, never got his job back, and then lost many of his friends when he and his wife began an organization opposing gun violence. He was demonized by some of the same people who deified his former boss. Irony is lost on some people. I did this drawing for a group that opposes handgun violence, but it was never used. And I see why. The guns I drew are simply too interesting, too fun, too iconic. They are like toys or playfully phallic little machines, perfectly sized to carry in one's pocket. I grew up playing with toy guns, so maybe some of this old fascination endures like a tattoo you forget you have, but I outgrew my boyhood gun fetish. It's fun to draw them and watch movies about them but I don't own one. They seem like relics of an interesting former age.

Follow the Money

I can't remember who I did this for, possibly for a magazine called Business Ethics, art directed by Mark Simonson. Nor can I remember what concept I was describing. But it could be a diagram of our moneyed lives. I see a lot of Brad Holland influence in the line. I used to do a lot of crosshatching. Also a bit of David Levine, and something of a Minneapolis artist I admired named Pete Bastianson. Wonder where he is today, possibly surfing daily off the coast of Baja. I can picture it.

Kids and Toys and Stereotypes

This illustration is one of a series I did for a book titled Rethinking Pop Culture. This chapter was about how stereotyping dictates the toys our kids play with, something majority children wouldn't notice. The art director was the excellent Patrick J B Flynn.