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.

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.

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.

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 Cover I Did for New York Review Books

I got a box of beautiful books in the mail yesterday. (My favorite packages contain books.) I painted the cover of this one for NYRB last fall. A fun classic long out of print. Louise Fili art directed. When I'm having fun with a project sometimes I'll go ahead and paint the concepts we didn't pick. They were all fun to do. I posted a couple of them earlier this year, here and here. But I liked this one best. It's a very entertaining read. The sort of book I can imagine grandparents reading to their grandkids.

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.

Hard to Imagine

Illustrators are supposed to describe things. But the most important art we do is of things that are hard to imagine, much less describe. Things as they aren't, things as they would be if only. To get to that description I need to forget the rules I learned since age five. The probabilities and proportionalities. The first thing I jettison is perspective, because that absence immediately tells the eye we are in a different place, that anything could be true. I try to unremember style and fluid line and facility, to get back to how I drew before I learned how. That is where metaphor and satire become plausible. It's a subversive process. This is another illustration from a children's book I hope to find a publisher for someday, if I can find one as subversive as I am.

An Eager Student

I remember one kid who not only raised his hand and waved it; sometimes he'd start running down the aisle towards the teacher's desk. He didn't always have the answer, but he thought he did. Maybe I should write a story about him. I didn't raise my hand very often. Probably because I was too busy drawing airplanes and battleships. I still do airplanes once in a while, but I haven't been asked to draw a battleship in years.

Terrible Horrible Edie, take two

This cover illustration is very different from the one I posted yesterday. Same artist, same brushes, same drawing board, same colors even. Sometimes the line is less smooth, less liquid. It has to do with the brush I pick up, probably one that's been roughed up a bit, but occasionally the paint is simply different, as if it decides "today I'm going to clot and dry quickly on the brush." It might have something to do with the humidity. I've been doing this for thirty years and I can't explain it.

An artist wants predictability and uniformity. But art is better when the artist isn't on auto-pilot. I painted something the other day which came out very differently than I expected. The sky glopped up on me and overlapped the buildings, some of the lines looked like I'd painted them with a stick, some were as fine as a single sable filament. I hurried on, didn't slow down to force the medium to behave, hurried to finish it off as an experiment. The awkwardness infused something special into the picture. Now all I need to do is remember how it happened so I can go there again.

Terrible Horrible Edie, take one

I got a call from New York Review Books last fall. One of my favorite publishers. Not only for lovely intelligent books adults read but the neglected children's classics, like this one. I'd never read it before. Not that I avoided books with girls in them. One of my favorites was (and is) "Mistress Masham's Repose" by T. H. White. Anyway, it was pure pleasure to try to capture Edie. Not as terrible or horrible as you might think, at least not unless provoked. I liked the sketches so much that I painted them all. The book is supposed to appear some time in the fall, with another illustration I painted for it.

Kid's Books

Nice thing about a blog: you get the chance to show-and-tell stuff that you love, sometimes stuff that never materialized into a book or a product or an ad. This is one such. A fun concept, an idea pitched to me from someone's I-Phone in NY, drawn that evening, then we all went on to other ideas and forgot about it. My files are populated with orphans like this. Cute though.

When I'm Big

This is another image from my children's book WHEN I'M BIG. "When I'm big I won't need to use the bridge." The tunnel would probably present a problem too. Part of the distortion carries over into the perspective lines that don't match, the awkward modeling of the buildings. The paint application recalls when I was in elementary school and couldn't get enough paint on the brush to cover what I wanted to cover.

Grown-Ups (Redux)

Illustration for adult readers tends to call for attractive and classically proportioned people––evenly distributed among the usual races and genders. Children's books, meanwhile, are a chance to paint them odd, exaggerated, ugly, scary and funny-looking. Kids think adults are to laugh at, especially when they are depicted as monsters. Illustrating this book I found myself setting the figures at the edge of the frame, off-center, peering in or out. There's probably a deep psychological reason for this.

The Terrible Truth About Grown-Ups

This is another alarming but accurate image from my explosive exposé of the menaces and follies of adulthood. It's amazing a civilized society allows grown-ups to vote, much less drive cars and look after children.

Gulliver

I was writing a story about a boy who grows suddenly large and the problems he encounters. Problem One is something Clifford (the big red dog) doesn't have to deal with. Clothes. This kid has outgrown everything and is very hard to shop for. The style is more dry brush than most of my work, and a rare excursion into nightscape. Most of my art places figures against a white background, so this was a fun departure. One of a series.

Kidlike

One occasionally does a very jolly friendly happy illustration. It's pleasant and I love it, but it does rather undermine my credentials as an ironist. A true sophisticate doesn't draw this way. It's exactly the sort of thing that made Dorothy Parker "frow up" and I hate to disappoint the ghost of Dorothy Parker. Still, it's a fun image, and for the use it was put to it did the trick. The art director was the estimable David Armario, so he should shoulder part of the blame.

The Terrible Truth About Grown-Ups

Story time was improv. Every night I'd sit down and wing it.

One night I decided to riff on the things kids don't know about grown-ups. For instance, that we play with their toys when the kids are in school. Sometimes we even let friends of ours play with their toys. The worse the behavior the more she laughed. If it's preposterous it's funny... but maybe it's actually true. That uncertainty makes it funnier. The tradition goes back to Struwehlpeter and to Belloc's Cautionary Tales, but these tales don't warn kids to behave. The idea is to warn kids about grownup behavior. The bias probably shifted to the child's side with Roald Dahl. Like I said, I hope I'm able to get this published before my kids are grownups themselves. They might not think it's as funny then.