An Unused Illustration

I get a lot of work from college magazines. Good ground for me to cover: books, areas of study, ideas, knowledge; my head is full of visual analogies for these abstractions. I generally draw a lot more than is used. This is one drawing I especially liked but the art director preferred another version I did. This one was more minimal, less colorful. They also thought the figure seemed too old. Dressed too old, I think, although when I was that age I remember trying to dress a bit older. A kind of disguise.

Lucky Jim

I never wanted to leave college. I'd found a place where your job was reading books. I liked the gothic architecture, the ivy, the rumpledness, the quiet. I did leave, but I still go back occasionally, usually by reading novels about college life, the best one being Lucky Jim, which I've reread every ten years or so with increasing admiration and relish. When NYRB asked me to illustrate the covers of Amis's novels for them I quickly began rereading them all, starting with Lucky Jim, which I found as richly amusing as ever.

I did several dozen drawings of Jim Dixon to start. I drew him with a pint in his hand, with a book, wearing a jaundiced expression, a bilious expression, a world-weary expression. Then I decided to do the reader a favor and let them visualize Lucky Jim how they liked. I turned him volte face, striding up a long sidewalk toward the college.

What college? He's a minor instructor at a minor redbrick college, not Oxford or Cambridge. Amis's biographers think he might have been visualizing Swansea (where he was teaching) or Lancaster or Leicester, but he doesn't say. I looked for appropriate examples of Midlands collegiate architecture and started drawing them. The final image is adapted from a wing at Liverpool University. I removed some of the soot and made the brick redder. Still, it looks appropriately prisonlike, because Jim Dixon doesn't like where he is. Unlike myself at his age, he longs for escape; the novel is escapist in that sense. Our hero is a boozer, a slacker, a mocker of authority, but in all things a colossal fuck-up, and his story is a masterpiece of slow-motion catastrophe. I hope I've done it justice.

I am not a Camera

There is a stairway up to a public balcony on a church opposite the Radcliffe Camera, giving you the best view there is of Oxford. The sweep of the High, the spires of All Souls, the narrow streets, glimpses of grass-carpeted quadrangles hidden away from the foot traffic. But it is the Camera that holds the attention. A baroque church dome divorced from its boring liturgical parts, or maybe a church built for one person. I've never been inside, but a photograph taken from this ground level perspective greets my eye when I wake every morning. It is my favorite building in Europe, but most people I tell about it think it is a one-hour photo shop somewhere in Boston.

A Campus Map

I did this map of a "typical college campus" for the people at FISH. I had to ask myself What comprises a typical college campus? There'll be a stadium, a science building, the student union, but what else? What makes frat row look Greek? It has nothing to do with Ionian columns or classical sculpture. I once described our local university as a museum of relegated architectural forms (I cribbed the analogy from F. Scott Fitzgerald) and therein lies its charm. Its heterogeneity demonstrates the importance of liberal education, of not settling for one form. Perhaps uniformity shows lack of imagination.

The American Conversation

The topic was The American Conversation, a cross-disciplinary course about American thought and American thinkers and innovators. A fun project all around and a chance to do likenesses, not one of my usual categories. It was my idea to write the famous quotes on voice balloons cut from yellow legal paper––which I used then and still use when I write.

When it appeared in the magazine my art was superimposed on some stock imagery of stars and stripes, which took me by surprise. Illustrators and designers work best within an approval process, but stuff does happen. Did an editor or an editorial committee think the art was too drab as it was? Did someone think it required flags, and were they hesitant to ask me to paint an extra element? (I would have.) I recall giving the designer the license to move the elements around as needed; was this interpreted as license to collage my collage with someone else's stock art? I expect a deadline led to improvisation. I got several emails from people who loved what they saw in the magazine, but I was a bit embarrassed by it. I'll be happy to work with them again. The tricky part will be how I diplomatically suggest we not repeat what happened the last time. Next time the same designer will probably make my art look better than I expected. That's what usually happens.

It's About the Bike

I illustrate a column in the Macalester College magazine, designed by Brian Donahue. This column was about choosing between the car and the bike, an easier choice in places where it doesn't snow six months of the year.