Green Metaphors

I did some art a few years ago for a new think tank based in Chicago. The name was Greenhouse, so I set to work thinking of every green metaphor and every way I could incorporate greenness into illustrations of other things. Simplicity of line helps a lot. The simpler the drawing the more metaphor it can convey, because concrete art emphasizes the object and its qualities. Simpler art gets the viewers or readers to ask themselves: what else does this mean? Simple, unelaborated line can also suggest other things, other topics, other meanings. Is this simple to do?  Not really. A simple drawing often reaches that nice evocative simplicity after pages and pages of other versions have wound up on the floor.

Taking Chances

This is another illustration that the client didn't end up using. The subject they needed me to illustrate was "kids taking chances", not in the sense of risking life and limb but risking failure. I thought of those "leaps of faith" we have to persuade ourselves to make. I paired two figures in two tones, one male, one female, to keep the risk an individual thing but avoid gender bias. I am still very pleased with this drawing and hope to see it published some day.

My Museum Life

I spent a month at the Minneapolis Institute of Art last year as artist-in-residence, in their library. The idea man behind the residency was Jay Peterson, of Coffeehouse Press, someone I'd known several years as my neighborhood bookseller. (My favorite places are bookstores and libraries.) So I went to the museum and spent days in their library of old art books. Stealing, mostly. I get my best ideas looking at art, and what better place than a museum? I gave a lecture after the residency. A kind of show and tell. That was over a year ago. Now, suddenly, the museum is 100 years old, and I feel as if I'd grown up in it. (To celebrate the milestone my friends at Pentagram did a brand makeover. It's now Mia.)

When the museum decided to do a centenary book, Brian Donahue (who designs the Macalester College magazine) kindly asked me to draw something for the cover, and Jeff Johnson (my editor from when I was writing for Minnesota Monthly) asked me to write a chapter. Fun projects.  Brian used the cover art on the title page too.

Here’s the opening page of the essay. I illustrated a couple of my essay spreads with art I’d done during my time there, explaining the process of art, which is mostly osmosis. Illustrating this book was sort of like returning the art I stole from them, or the ideas I stole, transmuted into something strange and new, but old.

Enjoy, but don't touch.

The Lotus and the Projector

There is something Platonic about the concept of reality projected on a screen. The idea dates back to Plato, in fact, referring to how we perceive reality secondhand and need to trust that it's true. The idea of a film projector was a central metaphor to a story I illustrated for the current issue of Shambhala Sun magazine, art directed by Liza Matthews.

Life is a Quest

I did this illustration for Buddhadharma magazine, art directed by Seth Levinson. The article was about finding ones way among many options. Sometimes a metaphor, like this signpost, seems inanimate and I want to add some life to it. I often add birds. They add color too. It's an apt choice in this case, because birds are migratory, and have an admirable sense of direction. The last thing I added was the blue drop shadows, to give it a suggestion of sunshine.

Love-Hate

I did this illustration for Buddhadharma magazine. The concept of loving and hating the same person suggested the mirror image, and the same face expressing these opposite emotions. Art direction by Seth Levinson.

Wedgewood

I did this illustration for Shambhala Sun magazine, art directed by Liza Matthews and published out of Nova Scotia. (Who knew N.S. was a major center of Buddhism?) The story told how one man's peace and quiet was disturbed by a neighbor's rock music, and how he restored peace. The suburb he lived in happens to be called Wedgewood, which suggested the ceramic metaphor.

Deciderer, Part II

I did this drawing in the messy, expensive aftermath of Bush's "victory" in Iraq. It's jarring to make a comical drawing of someone who created so much harm and crisis.

Bush Jr. Returns

Junior is back on TV this week, touting a new book about how he grappled with decisionmaking. One can almost picture it. Anyway, I thought it might be worth trotting out this diagram I painted for the New Yorker. This is as accurate a picture of the Bush White House's decidering process as I've seen. Flow charts are a very useful form. A map of a thought process or a criminal transaction or, in this case, a muddled philosophy.

Leafy Thoughts

The leaves all blew off this week. The other night it sounded like a train was going past the front porch. Makes you wonder what's the point of all that foliage, all that wonderfully shaped and twined leafery.

Portrait of a Crowd

People in an elevator? It looks like that. Actually it's a thumbnail from a drawing I did depicting America's suspicion of otherness. Our suspicion of immigrants and other ethnicities and other religions. When it comes right down to it, we are not very tolerant here, despite being a nation made up of others and immigrants, a nation founded by free thinkers, founded to welcome other religions. Divide and conquer is an ugly strategy, except it works very well. Especially when there is money behind it.

What's Inside Our Heads

There are things we can only understand by comparing them to something else, something different but similar in some way. We understand by analogy and metaphor. Science couldn't understand the mechanics of the human heart until the steam engine was invented. The mind is a persistent puzzle because its workings are invisible, but we understand it a bit better because we've created artificial intelligence. The brain works a bit like the internet, with all its imperfections and unreliability. Firing off thoughts, collating them, making judgments, balancing belief and disbelief. I guess that's what this drawing is about. It's a sketch of a floating metaphor. The guy contemplating it from above makes me think of Rembrandt's painting of Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer. I always think of that painting when I pull down our Julia Child cookbook with its photograph of Julia contemplating a lump of bread dough.

Method and Simplicity

Marshall McCluhan said something about media and messages which sounded simple, but it took him a whole book to explain it. Here is a picture that does it more simply. McCluhan's book wasn't really a set of instructions anyway.

Love Thy Job

I think that was the subject described here. I love my job, even though it isn't set in an impressive office building.

Making the Grade

I did this illustration for a Time magazine article about grade inflation. The metaphor of the ladder works two ways because an A is also a ladder to success. But not all A's are created equal. Some teachers are kinder than others, some schools engineer grade points, and some students get a leg-up for very good reasons. I'm grateful for every leg-up I got. I know it was easier in my day. Competition for grades has become overheated. I can't remember if there was anything about learning in the article, but learning has become less important than the score. Things we learn under this kind of pressure tend to be forgotten quickly.

Another Choice Drawing

This is another drawing I did for the New York Times op-ed piece about school choice last week.

Which Way Forward?

My eighteen year-old son is at one of those crossroads. I'd be surprised if he ended up on Wall Street, but it is one of the signposts. I did this illustration for Macalester College's magazine. Brian Donahue art directed.

Household Planets

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

Global Dance

I did this sketch last week. We ended up going in a different direction but I rather liked this.

Vox India

This was one of the first op-ed images I did for the New York Times. The art director then was Nicholas Blechman. The piece, as I recall, was about the difficulty of picking a language to use to address the polyglot Indian public. The building depicted is the Red Fort in Delhi. (I'm a little preoccupied with India at the moment because I am reading The Siege of Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell.)