Political Geography-The Road to 2012

I did this illustration for Northwestern University to help them promote a panel discussion about the election. The event was titled "The Road to 2012". They'd seen the POETRY magazine cover I posted on my website and liked that look. I changed the houses from familiar suburban ramblers and moderns into 21st century mansionettes shaped like red and blue states (choosing states with recognizable outlines––there are a lot of rectangles.) In the final version we added signs with the electoral college count for each, but I like the basic version, which is more conceptual and interesting for being less concrete. Raul Torres art directed.

A Little Place in the Country

One of Winston Churchill's ancestors built this house to reward himself for winning a battle at a place called Blenheim. This was at a time when being a general could make you very rich. If you look at Eisenhower's modest house near Gettysburg you see that generaling has gotten less remunerative.

Blenheim Palace is larger than the house the Queen lives in. We visited Blenheim some years ago. The thing I remember is Winston's toy soldier collection which is displayed in a glass case in the hall. He was born there because his mother happened to be visiting at the time. Winston's people were poor relations. He wrote bestsellers for a living. He wasn't given huge sums or a palace for saving democracy. When he was P.M. he lived in a poky little house in a side street in Whitehall.

I classify people into two categories: cabin rich and cabin poor, depending on whether they have a place in the country. We do not have one, but I've been known to draw pictures in exchange for weekends. The Duke of Marlborough hasn't called to invite us yet.

POETRY magazine

My bird's eye view of a suburban streetscape was selected for the cover of the July/August issue of POETRY magazine. It was art directed by Alex Knowlton of Winterhouse Design.

I have always loved doing bird's eye views, and having grown up in a leafy suburb of winding drives and midcentury houses I have an affection for the variety of domestic architecture found there. It's funny, because as I was growing up among the ramblers and mock colonials I much preferred the clapboard architecture of small towns. I now live in a city neighborhood that feels like a small town, and my drives into the suburbs are visits into a past that used to feel too modern.

This drawing was the first in a series following a road into the city, each panel beginning where the previous one left off, describing the relation of the houses to the road and each other, with the road creating a continuous ribbon through diverse neighborhoods, rural, suburban and urban residential, retail, business, industrial. I hope to publish them all together as a book some day. But looking at this one on its own, I realize there is a kind of poetry in the way the houses and the lives contained in them attach to the ribbon of traffic, almost like words assembled to a frame, but not quite rhyming, free verse.

Playing with Real Estate

A few years ago I was asked to illustrate an article about a middle aged hippy dot.com millionaire who was dabbling in real estate. I decided to depict him this way, with a millionaire's top hat, Hawaiian shirt and sandals, playing with houses. Which just about describes it.

Suburbia A to Z

I've been working on textile designs for the past several weeks. This was just one of the ideas I worked up. Fabric has always made me think of the domestic landscape; the way patterns and shapes are repeated, the harmony of colors. I've been working on a book following the long unfolding story of a road in a more linear fashion. This image is a variation on that. A short excerpt from a remembered suburbia.

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.

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.

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.

Absolutely Meaningless

Just a drawing, nothing more. Sometimes the arrangement of shapes and details gives me an idea for another drawing. I did get an idea this morning from this but plan to let it sit for a while, look at it and think about it and come back to it later.

Houseness

There is a quality I call "houseness," part of the larger rubric called "thingness." I can remember drawing houses when I was four and all the other kindergarteners drew their chimneys at a right angle to the roof instead of vertical. I felt quietly superior. I also made a special point of always including garbage cans and shrubbery next to the house, and telephone poles. This additional detail made it hard to include my full signature and I began signing my work Er-H.

Iconography

This is one of my favorites from the dot series. I love it because it is so meaningless, which is another way of saying it could mean anything. I do no sketches and study no reference for this kind of painting. I carefully paint the dots, then quickly add the icons. I can't be thinking of anything or looking at anything or trying to say anything, which sounds kind of like bullshit. I suppose it is. I'm curious to see what comes out of the brush when I'm not trying to draw anything in particular. If something concrete comes into my head I make sure it's painted upside down. This is called method. It's a variation on the method I use to paint bagatelles, a way of tricking the subconscious into committing itself to paper.

Suburbia: Winter

This time of year I cast my mind back over places like this. The places where I grew up. When I was living in those suburbias of low-slung ranch and split level houses I wished I lived in better surroundings. I preferred elm-lined streets of alternating colonial and Georgian and Tudor houses. Usually these neighborhoods were adjacent to country clubs. We were not country club people. Now I look at the suburban cul-de-sac aesthetic with more nostalgia. It is, after all, the world inhabited by Charlie Brown, who is about my own age. Charles Schulz created the Peanuts characters about a mile from here, in a Spanish Colonial along Minnehaha Parkway.

Primrose Hill, London

We spent a wonderful week here a few years ago. I don't get to London often enough, except in books. I did this drawing for our hosts as a thank-you. I occasionally get asked to draw pictures of houses. All I need is a snapshot. There is something about a line drawing. My favorite artists of this sort of thing, far better than I am: Edward Bawden, Ronald Searle and Marvin Friedman who used to do those wonderful illustrations for Gourmet magazine.