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.

Barber Shop

The sort of place I went as a kid to read Field & Stream. I'd think about looking at Esquire or Playboy but never did.

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.

Kids and Toys and Stereotypes

This illustration is one of a series I did for a book titled Rethinking Pop Culture. This chapter was about how stereotyping dictates the toys our kids play with, something majority children wouldn't notice. The art director was the excellent Patrick J B Flynn.

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.

Valentine Art

I drew this yesterday, in pencil, and put it in an envelope. But not before scanning it and converting it into color.

Genuine Mustard

There is a thingness about familiar products. Their printed labels say "genuine" but any certainty is conferred by our own eye that recognizes the brand elements. We know at a glance that it is what it says it is. There's also the guarantee from context. Powdered mustard is less likely to be counterfeited which is why you can seldom purchase it out of the trunk of a car or from a furtive gentleman in a trenchcoat. You have to go to a grocery store, and who is more trustworthy than a grocer? It doesn't hurt to know the royal family likes it too.

The Puzzle of Egypt

I did this illustration for a feature article in the Atlantic, probably something by P. J. O'Rourke, whose pieces called for an ironic edge. Despite everything, Egypt is still there, still sweeping its problems under the pyramid, so to speak. Rioting erupted this week, in reaction to events in nearby Tunisia, and the riot police were called out. The Nile and the adjacent desert appear to be unaffected.

Kids & Science

I did this a week ago for Children's Advocate, a magazine published out of Berkeley, but art directed by my old friend Patrick JB Flynn out of Madison, Wisconsin. (Isn't web commerce marvelous?) It was a fun project, especially since I'd just converted some of our old family videos to DVD and we'd been watching our kids toddling around at this young age. (They are now taller than their parents.) The tilted overhead perspective is something I used to do more often. I think I probably learned it by studying Steven Guarnaccia's illustrations years ago, who probably learned it from Japanese prints. I learned from the same sources that narrowing my palette made the composition more coherent, and that gray and black made the other colors brighter.

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.

Lightbulb Earth

I did this illustration for Technology Review (M.I.T., art directed by Lee Caulfield). Another metaphor for a technologically advanced planet, but consider the fragile filament, and the fact that the large hand (of fate? of God?) is about to turn it off.

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.

The Politics of Tea

I wrote a little bit about the original Boston Tea Party in my book. Those hooligans were as ragtag as the current ones. They too were worked up about politics outside their control; then it was about overseas trade more than taxes to fund social programs. (There were no social programs then.) Today's tea partiers have legitimate fears, fears that many of us share. It's the way those fears are being channeled that should worry us. Also in my book is the story about John Adams, a young lawyer, who in the aftermath of the Boston Massacre, undertook the legal defense of the British soldiers charged with murder. Today he would be hung in effigy. Our early democracy was more complex and open-minded than many of today's so-called "patriots" would like to believe.

A New Olympic Event in 2014

(from my sketchbook)

Christmas in Minneapolis

I did this drawing almost thirty years ago. My dad started me out in the Christmas card business when I was twelve. I sold them door to door around the neighborhood, using the money to buy ski equipment. By the time I drew this one I was selling in department stores and card shops around the cities. My parents tell me they prefer this style to the stuff I do now. It's hard to believe the same person drew them. Does anyone recognize the house in the picture? It's famous.

Department Store Christmas

I spent my early childhood in suburban Chicago, which meant every Christmas we made a trip downtown on the train to see the decorated windows at Marshall Fields, visit the toy department and Santa, and stand in line to eat lunch in the Walnut Room beside the enormous Christmas tree. That's what I'm remembering when I hear Christmas music today and what I was picturing when I painted this Christmas card for Graphique de France several years ago.

Santa

I must have drawn hundreds of Santas in my life. Fat, thin, jolly, grouchy, sly, businesslike, none particularly saintly. It's hard to associate him with the modern day celibate, scolding priests. Let's face it, the Santa we know was invented jointly by Coca Cola, Macy's, Norman Rockwell and television writers. Nothing I can draw can undermine that. My favorite anecdote from my book is about Shirley Temple, age 7, losing her belief in Santa when he asked her for her autograph.

Gift Season

Note to self: do not suddenly remember to buy gifts on the 24th this year. This is one of the images I did for Barneys a few years ago. Fun to imagine a businessman with butterfly wings.

Holiday Art

The holiday music began on Minnesota Public Radio the day after Thanksgiving. I like it. It seems early, but there's snow on the ground already. I notice the Hanukkah songs and the Christmas carols sound interchangeable, but then both events took place just a few miles apart.

I remember when I was a kid, I was allowed to bring out one Christmas record each day. It usually began with Perry Como. My kids have no idea who that was. When I was in the Christmas card business I'd be starting the art for the following year right about now; the music helped the inspiration. I did this drawing for the Wall Street Journal several years ago.

Still Life With Businessman

There is something wonderfully straightforward about still life. It asks the viewer to make sense of the adjacence of unrelated things. Because they are arranged like a place setting are they to eat? Should the head of a businessman be eaten with a salad fork or a garden trowel? What does Emily Post say? I used the same kind of principle to arrange the entries in A Book of Ages (Harmony,2008/Three Rivers Press,2010), without comment, without footnotes, hoping the reader would see the ironies that emerged. I may have been too subtle about it. (The book remains the perfect gift item for your hard-to-amuse brother-in-law and every bookish person on your list.)

Turkey

This is a drawing I did for the Wall Street Journal a few years ago, depicting how I find my turkey every year. Once again, there is a special charm in simple black line art.

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.

Thanksgiving USA

I got a fun asssignment from Family Circle last month. (A very smartly designed magazine; if you haven't looked recently, do.) The geography of Thanksgiving idea is reminiscent of a Geography of Christmas map I did for Graphique de France a while back, but it also reminded me of those elementary school murals we did of pilgrims and Indians and turkeys and the whole scene. Cut paper and paste. FC Creative Director Karmen Lizzul is one of my old friends from SPY magazine, where I did several maps for her.

Visualizing Words, Chapter 1

Illustration is harder than it looks. None of the effort is supposed to appear on the paper. And a lot of my work time is spent with my eyes closed or looking into space, trying to visualize a metaphor. This drawing is one of a series I did for WWWord, the new online magazine for word people: editors, writers, poets, teachers, readers, grammarians, crossword puzzlers, scrabble players.

Quick––bookmark 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.

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.

Tea Party Politics

This is one of three sketches I did for a New York Times editorial page assignment. The topic was the Tea Party. They went with the simpler one of the hand holding a ballot, but I liked this one best. I probably should have included a few dollar signs in the voice balloon, since the Tea Party was organized and funded by two secretive New York oil billionaires.

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.

Cool Cats

It's my son's birthday, which means a new bit of art from Dad. Here's the card I drew for him: three cool cats. This year he's got his own radio show on the college station, which means I get to listen to him every Tuesday evening at 7. The program's name Cats at a Tea Party is heavily ironic.

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.

A Window in the City

I painted this for a calendar back in the '90s, one of several I did for a Japanese cellphone company. It's fun to imagine what it's like to look out at a city scene like this, each window framing another private life. My window looks out on treetops, kids on the sidewalk, the cottages across the street and the lake two blocks away.

An Old Map of a New City

Well, new-ish. People don't realize that L.A. was a few orange groves and unpaved streets a hundred years ago. Fewer realize the discovery of oil made it into a city. Movies were incidental. I did this map years ago when I was doing regular maps for Rolling Stone. I've come back around to this kind of linework, but now do it in pencil, mostly. There is something wonderful about pictorial shorthand. It's almost hieroglyphic.

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.

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.

Mr. Park Ranger

When I think of park rangers I think of Yogi Bear and a song starts going through my head. It's going through my head now and will continue to for most of the afternoon. Cartoons are a constant influence. Mostly Bullwinkle, but also Quickdraw and Yogi and Babalooey. I've always worked with brush on paper. Adding digital color to a brushed line, as I did in this piece for the Sunday LA Times, brings me closer to the look of flat paint on cartoon cels. It's a bright, interesting look, and a new variation for me. I've always admired people like Seymour Chwast and Steve Guarnaccia for their pure colors, without drying lines. This brings me closer to that too. But I still use a brush and a pencil.

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.

Birdy with a yellow bill

I was reading a piece Roy Blount wrote for the Times about E. B. White. He was remembering an essay White wrote about robins, which made me think of this painting I did a few years ago, thinking it would look nice on a magazine cover in April. I associate robins with the New Yorker. Abe Birnbaum did a perfect cover painting of a robin once. Maira Kalman did a wonderful robin too. There is something about the orange and the dark gray just lighter than black, the yellow bill, the spindly yellow legs. I identify with them, apart from the bill, and the orange and dark gray. The way they listen by cocking their heads. The spindly legs I do have.

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?

Fish Photography

I got a call from the New Yorker a few years ago. They wanted a spot illustration on the subject of fish photography. I bet you visualized fish with cameras just as I did.

Countryside

One of my pencils of rural roads, with technicolor added.

Funny and Mean

I have always had a hard time making fun of people, by that I mean drawing them funny, making them look ridiculous. What does that say about me? Am I a coward or just a nice guy? I don't have the same hesitation in my stories; meanness is the soul of satire. And in my drawings I have less of a problem making fun of men, but I am always kinder to women. I feel bad when I satirize them. I guess this follows the first rule of humor: that it's always funnier to make fun of yourself or your own kind. I did this illustration for Bon Appetit a few years ago. The article was about wine; I drink wine, and the art is fairly merciless. And amusing.

Travelers

I did this illustration for Condé Nast Traveler for the editorial opener. There is a trick to doing character drawings as small as this. Differences in personality are as much a matter of posture and hair and less about faces at this size. I was working on a set of dishes for Pottery Barn at around this same time and pitched the idea of doing the figures small and quirky like this. Quirky didn't fly. Not for tabletop. But I think this kind of drawing would function perfectly online these days. Did I mention that all of these characters are copyrighted? They are. They await your call.

Mixing Metaphors

Some years ago I came up with this idea for a story about Japan's reaction to American competition. There has always been a kabuki element to business competition, wherever it is. The toy drummer functioned well as the American competitor. The illustration generated concerns about stereotyping and we went with a different concept, but it's this one I remember. Stereotypes are easier to remember, which is why we use them. The painted faces of kabuki and geisha tradition are stereotypes themselves. They aren't my tradition though. Do I have any business using them? They should be handled carefully in any case. Even though the American is the clown, and the geisha was drawn directly from an old Japanese print, I wonder if this painting was disrespectful of both nationalities.

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.

The Art of the Menu

A painting for my local alternative paper, City Pages. (Art directors Nick Vicek and Emily Utne)

Staying Cool

I remember spending the hottest days of the summer in a friend's basement reading the Ski and Skiing magazines from the previous winter. Later, this was the time of year I wrote my articles for Skiing, about Squaw Valley or Big Mountain or Deer Valley. It's not a bad way to stay cool. I did this illustration for the opening spread of Snow magazine. The issue also contained a feature I wrote about the evolution of ski fashion.

Bicycles and Euro Style

I did this image for a poster show designer Andy Powell organized at The Bikery, a bake and bike shop in Stillwater. The show is on into next week with plans to continue at the Bikery's new location in Marine-on-St-Croix.

The Bikery
904 4th Street South
Stillwater, MN 55082

An Interesting Face

I painted this for an African American magazine some years ago. An interesting assignment, but I remember having to repaint it because I'd gotten the skin color wrong, which surprised me. I don't know whether this was the acceptable version or not. It shows how sensitive we are to shades of difference. I did art for a Japanese liquor ad once. I remember being very careful to get the Japanese face just right, clearly Japanese but short of stereotype. The client kept having me adjust features: the nose, the skin color, the eyes. Finally they instructed me to make the hair blond. I told them I was confused; didn't they want the person to appear Japanese? No, they didn't. But instead of telling me so outright, they'd had me remove the ethnic distinctions one by one, and I'd carefully done so.