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.

Back to School––Client: Blue Cross/Blue Shield

Art directed by Thea Nelson of Thebe Street Design. This image is one of five panels I illustrated for a wall at Blue Cross's offices here in the Twin Cities.

Grade Inflation

I did this illustration for a Time magazine article about grade inflation, a fashionable topic at the time. What's interesting to me, and I don't hear it discussed at all, is how much smarter our kids are than we were. Since business metrics were applied to public schools during the Reagan years, and we began requiring test scores to climb by X amount per year, and Y amount per dollar expended, I calculate that our children's brains have grown to around 2 1/2 times larger and 5 or 6 times faster than ours were at their ages. So maybe grades haven't inflated enough.

Schoolbuses

If there is a brand icon for public education it would be the yellow schoolbus. Funny they never sued the private and charter schools for brand infringement. Anyway, this is a drawing I did for the New York Times op-ed page (ably art directed by Aviva Michaelov). Sometimes when they choose another drawing from the assortment I present I go back and finish the ones not picked, just for my files, and for my own pleasure. The op-ed pages are black and white, after all, and what is a schoolbus not painted yellow?

A Campus Map

Maps are usually contained inside rectangles, and over the years I've become adept at decorating those rectangles, but once in a while a map is needed for an odd shape. It's fun when this happens. It's especially challenging when the shape doesn't match the landscape being set into it. Distortion is a useful tool, one mapmakers use all the time; after all our continents are inscribed on a globe, not a flat sheet. Catalone Design needed a map to go on the inside of a fold-out box designed to contain Q&A cards. I thought it was interesting that the shape is cruciform; the client was a Jesuit school. There is a bit of Ludwig Bemelmans and Abe Birnbaum in the handling of the buildings and the patterning in the trees. A nice piece altogether, thanks to the art direction of Lisa Catalone.

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.

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.

Support for Education

I did this illustration for the New York Times. The op-ed was about education funding, or lack thereof.

Back to School Shopping

The ads for pencils, erasers and school clothes have started appearing in newspapers already. You're reading the paper in the morning and out come these vilely colorful reminders of servitude. It is still July forgodssake. I am compounding the felony by inserting this art. Think of them not as tools of a dimly remembered punishment but as objects d'art. There is a certain "thingness" about a pencil sharpener drawn simply, and a pencil is just a hexagonal stick sharpened to a point with a bit of rubber at the other end.

An Old School, A New Map

Well, not exactly new. Newish. I was sorting through some old material and came across this. Maps have always been a specialty of mine. Partly because I insist on having a map whenever I'm reading about a place. If a map isn't provided I'll draw one. This was for a rather deluxe booklet Rutka Weadock did for Miss Porter's School. Tony Rutka did the wonderful color treatment and art directed.