Drawing of a Fiddler

I did this drawing from an old photograph, adding the pipe. Sometimes I add a pipe, sometimes a bird perched on the top of the person's head.

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.

The Art of the Menu

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

Household Planets

This is how it feels sometimes. Each of us moving in our own orbits, concentric and eccentric, occasionally colliding.

The Loafer

I notice that Lisa Birnbach and Chip Kidd are reviving a very useful anthropological study of Waspus Preppicus. Until I read it back in the 1980s I only knew chinos and loafers as my native costume, not understanding the class implications. I'd never visited the holy sites on Martha's Vineyard or in Westchester. I had gone to summer camp with children from Lake Forest and Winnetka but didn't at the time understand the sound basis for their scorn. I was like Nick Carraway. (As I've noted elsewhere, I went to the same college as the arriviste's arriviste, Jay Gatsby, though we never met, being from different decades.) Anyway, the Preppie Handbook opened my eyes. I still prefer chinos and I wear only loafers, always without socks. I have not worn socks with loafers since the late 1970s.

Alphabetismo

Much of illustration is making one thing look like something else. I see resemblances everywhere, and letterforms are so deeply imprinted it's no surprise that I see them in everyday things. To make a lettered title more interesting I'll sometimes substitute a thing for a letter, a palm tree for a T, a teepee for an A, in rebus-fashion. Turning men into semaphores is a challenge.

Grand Dames

A couple of blue-blooded dowagers as seen in the tabloids and Marx Brothers movies.

Begs For Animation

Something about the ephemeral line, the little smudge of fingerprint (or is it sweat?) around the edges of the drawing, suggests animation. Drawing is temporary to begin with. It's less permanent than paint. A scrap of paper, a pencil pulled from a pocket, something seen that won't be there in a moment. So why not animate the pencil drawing itself? Of course I didn't see this guy in his running shorts; I made him up. I gave him that serious expression, the average physique, the short socks and shorter shorts. I drew him and as a joke on him I put that chair in his way. He hadn't expected it, believe me. Someone will need to animate him for us to find out if he cleared it.

Man and Horn

There is something about pencil line. It seems to come right out of the imagination, without hesitation or thought or technique.

Valentine's Day

There are a couple of days a year when you are allowed to be this sentimental.

Small Banker

I drew this little man last year, and I thought to myself "He looks like he might be a banker." Expressionless, unmuscular, dressed in the proper uniform for denying credit to someone. A cold eye. Granted there are bankers out there who are wonderful human beings. Not him. This guy seemed to distill the essence of bankerness. I did a set of variations on him, in miniature, in a variety of poses and changes of costume, but always the same blank expression, like the face on an envelope containing a bill. I sent them to the magazine I usually send these small serial spots to, but answer came there none. So I sent them to Andrew at the Believer, who has always believed in me. And that's where they will appear next month. Watch for them.

The Heroic Bust

The Orientalist is an obsolete idea. Picture a dilettante collecting bits of the mysterious East and putting them around his house, under glass and on shelves, bound in books. It's easier to contemplate people when you convert them into objects first. Which, I guess, is the process I used here. I've never thought of myself as a realist illustrator. It's been useful to come up with devices for getting around life drawing, drawing from life. One of my favorites is to imagine the person or persons in a scenario as toys or bits of Staffordshire pottery. This justifies the stiffness of the pose and the unreality of the situation I've put them into, and lets me get on with the metaphor or the meaning. Is this any different than Hitchcock treating actors as cattle? I can't remember whose portrait I drew this from, but it may have been Horace Walpole. The turban makes me think of Oliver Goldsmith.

A Bit Whimsical

It's not a bad description of this kind of illustration. I don't know why, but I sometimes felt it was a bit of a slur. Whimsical. Made me sound less serious. Not that I am serious, but you know what I mean. If I remember, this was drawn for a Japanese client. Used to get lots of calls for character illustration from Japan. I called this character Mr. Leaf. The thing about this pencil technique, it suggests more than it explains. Sometimes it's hard to suggest something implausible with a concrete line, if you follow me. But the eye takes a pencil line on faith. I guess that's what makes it whimsical.

Man in the Rain

This is what October looks like this year in Minneapolis. Another of a series of characters that appeared in The Believer.

Man and umbrella

Another in that series that appeared in the Believer. You hardly ever see people like this outside of New York's Upper East Side. If I saw him walking on a sidewalk in Linden Hills I might phone the police. I especially like how his feet are placed. Drawings like this start at the feet.

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.

Skier With Accordian

I found this accordianist in a book of photographs from prewar Germany and Austria. I put her on skis, but most of the images in the book are of skiers and apres-skiers. I have a library of old books on skiing, a useful archive of images for my book Winter Playgrounds.