What We Talk About When We Talk About Cities (And Love)

First off: a lovely title and an interesting book by Andy Merrifield.

 

I love how this cover turned out, with the quickly drawn figures in their isolation, except for the couple in the center, embracing in the middle of Times Square. I also thought two detached figures on bicycles added a subtle note of possibility.

 

ORbooks' Colin Robinson asked me to do this a few months ago, and, as happens with book publishing, I had forgotten the project until it arrived in the mail. Nothing is as thrilling as a book in the mail... Well almost nothing. It's especially exciting when it turns out to be something which I've had a part in. 

Next possible moment of pleasure: when I see someone reading it in a café somewhere.

Media: ballpoint pen and paper + Photoshop. Simple materials. Portable in the first and second instance and nimble in the third.

Primrose Hill, London

When I was illustrating the covers for NYRB's Kingsley Amis titles I drew a lot more than what ended up being used. This, I believe, was for the collection of stories, but it might just as well have been meant for his novel Ending Up, because this is where Amis ended up: writing in the back garden of the house where he lived in Primrose Hill, London. A house belonging to his ex-wife (Elizabeth Jane Howard) and her new husband, a surprisingly congenial ending for a somewhat irascible character. Note the gin bottle and siphon placed next to his chair. Sara Kramer art directed this series.

This is the sort of drawing which I could imagine working very nicely as a print. I wouldn't mind having it on my own wall (if my own walls weren't so filled with bookcases.) I wouldn't mind writing my late novels in such a setting.

I Drew My Way Through School

This is a drawing I did for an education magazine a year or two ago, and looking at it again reminded me how I experienced school. I did not take to it at first. Finally a teacher found she could get me to sit still and shut up by letting me draw. She asked me to draw portraits of the presidents while she taught the other students.* My parents were dubious about this but I accepted the deal with huge relief. We were all relieved. I was the kind of student that made teachers look like this teacher in the drawing. (By the way, I am working on a book about the presidents now. It was fated.)

*By the way, by focusing on drawing I actually listened better. My test scores improved. My grades climbed up into the A and B range. I suspect everybody's grades improved. I think it may have restored a few years to Mrs. Maggard's life.

Pet Health (art for Family Circle

Art directed by Lisa Kelsey and Alison Fedele.

Gun Crazy

I've been slowly writing a memoir about my unremarkable childhood. The writing has gone on for quite a few years, not because it's painful or because I can't remember. I remember everything. It's not as if I have any buried monsters to exorcise in a rush of creativity. I've complained to my parents over the years about my upbringing. How, if they'd been more horrible to me, I might be a successful author today. But unlike Kipling's parents and Dickens's, my mom and dad were very nice people, tolerant, forgiving, pleasant to be around, encouraging, attentive. A person works with what they're given and if they are given a pleasant childhood, I guess they move naturally into a pleasant adulthood drawing pictures. The only thing violent about my youth is the contrast with the violence I saw and we still see on television and in movies, and wherever folks now walk fully armed like western hombres. One of the chapters of this memoir, published today by the Paris Review, was written a few years ago in a fond reverie but the story seems ironically, and sadly apt in the wake of each new outburst of mass gun killing. Looking back I can barely recognize my nine year-old self.

Sometimes I Feel Like A Hamburger

I did this illustration about ten years ago for the Philadelphia Inquirer's Sunday Magazine, for an article about eating habits. I probably went out and had a bar hamburger, just for research purposes. It's interesting for me to look at how much my line varies from image to image. Sometimes it's careful and controlled, almost quiet, other times (like here) the outline darts in quick parabolas. The arms are rubber and the physique is joyously oddball. This is not a careful drawing but it isn't sloppy; I like to say it's offhand. Like something drawn by Bemelmans. It was Bemelmans who gave me permission to quit worrying about all the live figure drawing I never got around to.

Road Rage

A friend of mine wrote about road rage in my paper this morning. I have a few stories about that; we all do. Everybody's stressed, anxious and easily pissed off. I did this illustration for Plan Sponsor magazine a couple of years ago, under the excellent art direction of Soojin Buzelli. Looking at it again, the guy on the left reminds me a little bit of the bull in Picasso's Guernica.

Eat Your Veg

I did this for ELDR, a magazine for seniors. Why is it so easy to avoid fruits and vegetables even when they taste good? A relic of teenage rebelliousness? I put healthy things into their own category, and because I'm not a Calvinist I tend to avoid them. When the doctor asks I lie: "Yes, I eat vegetables every day." I categorize chocolate as a vegetable.

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.

Roma

When I've spent time in a city it can be harder to illustrate a map of it. The things I remember, the places I liked, the cafés and piazzas I hung around in, insist on being included. Like the best stories, it's all about selection. And Rome is like a wonderful overstuffed museum, you step back to get a photo of a Baroque church and you stumble over a statue by Bernini. I walked Rome with a 1912 Baedeker in hand. A modern street map can tell you where you are but it doesn't capture the atmosphere of a place; it reduces the fabric of an ancient city to a soulless calculation.

Cat Massage

For several years I did a monthly pet illustration for Safeway Foods' magazine, art directed by David Armario. Cats, dogs, fish, birds, turtles probably too. The feeding of, chewing of furniture by, buying presents for. It was almost like having a pet. Over time I became a little envious of the lifestyle I was being asked to depict. It's been years since I've had a good massage.

Tintoy Metaphors

I found this in one of the boxes I keep art in. I collect old toys, and toys have often provided a medium for metaphor. This toy doesn't exist, but I constructed it out of bits and pieces of tintoys with their brightly printed surfaces and screws and flanges and seams.

What does it mean? The original drawing popped into my head at the time when aggressive CEOs were getting the legal go-ahead to seize worker pension funds. Sometimes the metaphor works better when it is suggestive rather than explicit. Although the fallout I'm suggesting is pretty explicit. And it's all come true.

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.

Bookish

This might be a self portrait. I have a lot of books and when the kids were small they played havoc with them, tearing valuable pages, spilling words and letters all over the floor and refusing to clean up the mess. Two year-olds never do, do they? This drawing appeared in the Atlantic among the book reviews. The art director was the estimable Mary Parsons.

I Can't Dance

Most people think they can dance, but I know better. I watch dancers with an awe just this side of worship. The way the hand moves, the way the arm balances what's going on with the leg, the tilt of the head, the arch of the back. Watching Gene Kelly always made me want to draw. I remember this flip book of Fred and Ginger that I used to sketch from. Anyway, here are a few from my dance sketchbook of a few years ago. Never published, but fun to draw and still fun to look at.

Statuary

The sketchbook has a way of turning up peculiar ideas. I think it's because there is no criterion, no subject. The hand draws what you are daydreaming, and the meaning is accidental.

Sportsman's Map of Manhattan

Illustrator John Held Jr. was famous for his 1920s depictions of flappers and their round-headed consorts. Less famously, he was the favorite social geographer of various top American magazines. He invented the mock-heroic phraseology I play with here. The "here there be monsters" legending that Columbus's mapmaker used to decorate the empty portions of the charts is replaced with sly japes. Instead of sea monsters and mermaids, I filled the waters off Manhattan with lox and sturgeon, and the woodlands of Midtown with wayward sporting types and their shooting boxes. There is (or used to be) a flytier's premises in or near Grand Central. All the clubs shown are real. The St. Moritz shown isn't the resort but a hotel. And Saks actually did have a ski school once. Ernie Blake, who founded Taos Ski Valley, worked there as a youth. I got my first (and only) Vanity Fair writing assignment after sending this map to Graydon Carter. I have done maps for the magazine since, as I also did for Spy, which Mr. Carter edited in a bygone decade.

Moon in Hand

I like spending time in antiquarian bookstores. I seldom find what I am looking for, which is exactly the point. Finding what you didn't know you wanted or needed is more fun. It adds something to the work, whether I'm writing or illustrating. I think it's called "cross-bred vigor." Uniformity is boring. So, I wasn't looking for it but I found a book filled with Renaissance and Baroque imagery: moons, suns, heaven, hell, planetary machinery, angels and demons, a catalog of supernatural rigamarole. I'd forgotten how to crosshatch, but it was fun relearning it. Dead masters can teach you a lot.

Smoke

The cigar has fallen on hard times. Once the sly device of witty men who used it to make you wait for a punch line––think Groucho and Churchill, Ernie Kovacs and George Burns; Bugs Bunny substituted a carrot––it's now the thing lobbyists light up. It's the only item certain oversized, overpaid men can still hold at a jaunty angle. It remains a useful device for metaphor. Cigars signify money and power even if they no longer imply wit or polish. This drawing appeared in my sketchbook in the week when Bush did something especially sneaky to the Clean Air Act.

Plain Ordinary

I had a few minutes and a bit of paper and this is the result. I like it. It isn't about anything. He's nobody in particular. It's not a self portrait.