Two Views, One Building

Elaborate architecture has always fascinated me, but it can be intimidating to draw it. All those elements. All that arrangement of detail. It was the relationship of one detail to another that made the building stand up, in every sense, or fall down. Drawing quickly helped. Simplifying. Sometimes I begin at the ground, as if I'm obeying gravity. Sometimes I start in midair. Sometimes I abandon perspective and lay the building flat. Different approaches make it a new building every time. I did the image of the tower years ago working on a Williams Sonoma project that never reached the retail stage. The quick view of the Houses of Parliament was done for an insurance association magazine. I like reminding art directors how much more interesting a page looks with a drawing on it.

A Drawing About Work

First of all, this is not me. I haven't the muscle to model this kind of drawing. I did this drawing earlier in the week. Typically, I was working on Labor Day. (My European client celebrated labor day on the first of May the way the rest of the world does.) There's a bit of homage here to Ben Shahn, but also to Studs Terkel and Woody Guthrie and Springsteen and to the real working men and women all over, lifting and hauling things I don't have the muscles for. Work is why we get up in the morning.

From Sunday's New York Times

For those of you who don't spend their Sunday relaxing with the New York Times, or in case you skip the Week in Review section to get to the Style section, here's the art I did Friday afternoon. The subject was The Return of Congress, and it had three topics up for debate, so the idea wasn't to illustrate any one of those topics but the return of the members. My idea was to show them herding back into the chamber. The horizontal format worked well for this. Initially I couldn't help but visualize elephants entering a circus with the trunk of each one holding the tail of the elephant in front, but this seemed too easy and too derisory. Better to show them entering in long frat-house conga lines, hands on shoulders, blindly following the guy in front of them. Although, to be fair, the teamwork on the right is more uniform and better drilled. The quick pencil does a good job of capturing the comic elements, I think.

A Drawing for Labor Day 2011

(I'm observing Labor Day by working. I don't know how else to do it.)

Quality Education

I did this illustration for the Oregon Education Association magazine, art directed by Deb Pang Davis. The story was about the effect environmental conditions in schools has on the learning success of the kids attending them.

Tasting Menu

This was the last illustration I did for Gourmet magazine. The article was about tasting menus at restaurants. The magazine had changed since I'd started doing art for it twenty years earlier. Looking back on it, most of the art I did was cartography, fun illustrated maps, because Gourmet was as much about places as it was about the food. But I'd also been a great fan of Marvin Friedman, a longtime contributor whose wonderful line illustrations captured the interior spaces where food was prepared and eaten. This image is very unlike his, more like Bemelmans, really, but it's an homage of a kind, a celebration of the kinds of places we like to spend time in.

Deck O' Cards

Earlier this year I did a set of 52 playing cards illustrated with reasons people should still have a checkbook for everyday emergencies. A really fun project. Lots of art, lots of great ideas to illustrate. The client was Deluxe Corporation; the agency was Modern Climate; the creatives were Matt Maly and Johnny Slocum.

Wired-Part Two

Another drawing from yesterday. Reading postcards from friends at the beach puts me in mind of jellyfish. Jellyfish, vases, lampshades and women's skirts are all designed around a central axis.

Wire

I did this sketchbook drawing today. One of a series.

Choices

Illustration is a superior tool for describing a thought process, a choice in this instance. How do we choose to live? How do we travel? Do we travel light, or heavy like a princely household? For this illustration, painted for the back page column in the Macalester College magazine, I played with proportions and reality a bit. Most people's cars aren't small enough they can throw a leg up on them. And sure, the new bikes are pretty light, but I needed to equalize the two vehicles a little to clarify the issue. I kept the palette minimal but bright. A nice image, I think. Brian Donahue art directed.

Clean Slate

A brand new client opens up new doors, new subject matter. New eyes get to see your art. A clean slate. A new continent. What will I write on it? What are the possibilities?

I did this for Kiplinger's, an old client of mine. Art directed by Cynthia Currie. I love doing art for business magazines because illustration evokes the creative dimension of money matters, the individuality of the issues. There's a thoughtfulness to the painted image that a photography seldom touches. (Much as I love photography.)

The Magic Hand of the Market

I studied economics in college, not only in Econ classes but in History classes, where economic forces play themselves out in the rise and fall of individuals and of empires. I read Adam Smith, whose elegant explanations made a young idealist almost believe there was a kind of magic guiding our lives. I've never stopped reading, and because I'm an illustrator the reading conjures pictures, diagrams, visual analogies. This is one of those. It appears in the September issue of the Atlantic, art directed by Jason Treat.

My point in this simple drawing is that the so-called "Magic Hand of the Markets" does indeed direct and correct the forces that determine our fates. What should be obvious, though, is that the magic hand of an unregulated market corrects some fates more than others, protects some more than others, favors some fortunes more than others. Larger fortunes are more buoyant already but the market tends to nurture and support them. The fortunes of little people have less juice in them, less upward trajectory, they're buffeted more, given less favor, fewer advantages. We see it every day, every year, but we are taught not to believe it because in America everyone is supposed to have an equal chance. It's our national religion, even if we can see it isn't true.

Beasts of Burden

I did this illustration for Milwaukee magazine about ten years ago, for a story explaining how upper employee costs are shifted to justify lower wages and benefits further down the pay scale. This described it pretty well, I think. I doubt the practice has gone away.

Aubergine, Tomato and Herbs

I did this art for a Ginger cookbook I illustrated for Chronicle some years ago. A fun project, a lovely book, with illustrations on just about every page. Makes me hungry. You? I used to do a lot more food illustrations. I miss it.

An Anniversary Rose

Yesterday was our 25th anniversary. We had a nice day.

Handmade Covers

When a book I want to read has a cover I dislike I wind up disliking the book, not wanting to read it. Does this make me superficial? Am I fussy? Reading is a sensual experience, which means it's visual too. What are eyes for? When I hate a cover I redo it. I cover it up and do a cover design of my own. The manila envelope is a bit primitive, but I like the feel of the paper, and the color reminds me of all the SASE's that went out and came back with short stories I'd written. I've used some of these. I don't get elaborate. Usually it's simple penmanship––or pencilmanship. This cover obscures an ugly cheap paperback edition from the 1980s. I decided Nancy Mitford deserved better.

Happy Bastille Day

This is one of the many wine column illustrations I did for the late and much-lamented Gourmet magazine. It was a delightful gig over many years. But magazines never send illustrators to France. This column was about the rivalry between French and American wines. Art directed by the suave and avuncular Irwin Glusker.

3-D Chrome-Plated Lettering

There is a series of paintings in a tin box in my studio (recovered with much effort after the bankruptcy of the gallery that represented me here in Minneapolis), line variations drawn in gouache on 10" square Arches paper. I've shown them here before. It's surprising to me how abstract lines can conjure so many different kinds of complexity, botanical, metallic, fleshy, nubile, kinetic. Two adjacent lines suggest two dimensions, three lines in concert conjure space. The fun is in avoiding what common perspective wants the lines to represent.

By attaching a visible side to both edges of a letterform, which is something more concrete, and giving the whole thing a twist, you are using Picasso's tricks, which are the same tricks Frank Gehry uses with architecture. This may be why this particular lettering exercise makes me think of Bilbao. I was never very good at perfect lettering. Inability makes an artist better at breaking rules. So I like breaking letterforms apart, twisting them, stretching them. Put on your 3D glasses and tell me how this looks. (I'm accepting gallery queries for my tin box of paintings. Suitable for framing.)

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.

Sometimes I pick up a pencil differently, with two fingers instead of three opposing the thumb. The hand draws less well without the full group I'm used to using. When you look at the hand it doesn't seem like all the fingers even have a job to do. A couple of them appear to be doing nothing, but if you remove one the line looks odd; interesting but looser, less clear, a bit drunken. The pinky finger never does anything, but I've never considered lopping it off. If all four fingers and thumb are used to write or draw they form a fist and fists have no fluidity of motion.

I like how the line looks close up.


















And closer up

My Son's Left Shoe

How does a drawing make an ordinary shoe look interesting?

Office Tools

One of my limbering up exercises is to draw something nearby. Preferably something with a little elaboration to it. It's as much to limber the eye and the mind as the hand. Drawing something real teaches you not to fake or anticipate or invent, and often as not the seen is intriguing enough in its native lines and construction.

















The imperfection of the drawing is part of its interest. Why did I make this mistake here or misconstrue that attachment? Made things have shapes and curves that are just as sexy as the human body, or almost, or perhaps we see allusions from one to the other. Maybe designers gravitate toward the sexual when shaping things. Sometimes, though, a hole punch is only a hole punch.

Untranslatable (Verbal vs. Visual)

Over the weekend I illustrated another Untranslatable feature for wwword.com. (Edited by my friends Lucy Sisman and Tamara Glenny.) Always fun; always educational, the column discusses words and phrases that don't travel well from one culture to another. Translating words into images is difficult enough in one language. Luckily the job of explaining is left to the writer. My job is to make the adjacent text look interesting, to highlight the culture it's from, write out the word and hint at the meaning. Overexplaining is a sin among illustrators, which is why we use shorthand. Gestures, icons, puns, allusions. These tricks go back to the ecclesiastic art stuck up on church walls to occupy the faithful who couldn't read and didn't comprehend the Latin liturgy anyway. This drawing is a lot like these medieval puzzle pictures, although it's more playful than complex. The smug face (are any people as smug as the Swiss?), the protective hand, the national flag, the iconic Matterhorn, the word in question, layered in colors the way language is layered with meanings.

Little Drawing, Big Topic

I did some art yesterday for the New York Times op-ed page. The topic, while not as important as the sexual foolishness of a congressman, is pretty important: congressional gridlock, two political parties unable to compromise. Not a sexy issue. Given such a small space the key is to convey the essence in as few lines as possible, so I drew two angry men face to face. I drew them several ways.



















































To underline the nature of the confrontation I thought of overlaying the word NO in a gray tone.



















































I liked the look, but wondered whether it added nuance or unhelpful complexity. Did it distract? The point of this small illustration in the letters column isn't to make readers stop and make sense of it but to make them read the adjacent letters. We left the word NO out.

The word NO also conveyed a false equivalency. It implied that both parties were saying NO with equal force, which I don't think is true. One of the two parties has shown a greater flexibility over the past decade. Yes, they are both angry, but I think the one party (the one on the left) is angry because it's tired of always giving in.

I'm saying this very carefully because the illustrator's job isn't to shape the meaning but to convey it, which is also the job of journalists. I think False Equivalency is a big problem. If there are two sides to an argument a journalist is supposed to impart both of them in a fair manner. This sometimes puts the writer in the uncomfortable position of treating foolishness and intelligence the same, or fairness and bigotry, or greed and generosity. If you equate moderation and extremism equally and without any negative weight on one side, after a while the more extreme position is rewarded and encouraged.

Is it a cop-out for an artist to go only as far as the text goes and no further? Or is that his job? A lot of thought and worry goes into a small drawing.

June Sky

It's one of those perfect days in June and I moved my studio onto the screen porch for the morning. There have been some strange gyres and bumps this past week but today is quiet and pleasant and the clouds in the sky are the kind that don't worry anyone. Today is plain all right. I am busy drawing, waiting for the next big project, working on some writing I'd set aside, doing what I do well.

The Corporate Ladder

Sometimes metaphors invent themselves. You dream them, or daydream them, putting them together out of puns and wordplay. I did a series of drawings beginning with the little walk we do with our fingers. This drawing grew out of that. I'm not sure what it means. Is it the corporate ladder? Or is it life's ladder, a kind of Jacob's ladder that ends who knows where? Tops of ladders always seem dangerous to me.

Les belle dames sans merci

I remember the line from Tennyson, but I can't remember if it is the beautiful woman without mercy or the beautiful woman who always says "No, thank you." Don't blame me for the mercilessness of these faces. I drew them after leafing through a copy of Vogue.

Eyeglasses Times Six

A few drawings of eyeglasses make an interesting pattern.

Spark Plug

Small familiar things are fun to draw. This image is very low res, but pencil takes on an interesting texture when it's blown up at high resolution and colored. You begin to see the rough energy where graphite and paper meet.

Spring finally arrived and left again

I waited to post this till it had stopped snowing, but today it's predicted to hit 85. Summer already.

Aristocrats

I did this pair for ZEIT magazine, published in Berlin. The art director was Michael Biedowicz. I had a hand in some of the captions. The English aristocracy has been a lifelong fascination of mine. The story appeared the week of the royal wedding.

My debut in Rolling Stone

Thirty years ago I sent an envelope full of xeroxes to the art department at Rolling Stone. They liked the art enough to publish quite a few of my little maps and squibs on the letters page in 1981 and 82. A nice gig, but I was never named gardening editor, never met Hunter Thompson. My style has evolved quite a lot since my salad days.

Mission Accomplished

I drew this cartoon eight years ago and sent it off to Bob Mankoff at my favorite magazine. Actually, I realize it was almost eight years ago today that I drew it. It was never published. America was immune to ironies at the time. I don't feel celebratory today either. It's all too somber. It's no time for hubris or cheers or feeling satisfied. We and the world deserve better. Luckily we have more serious leadership now.

Pretty Nice Company

It's flattering to be included with all these book cover heroes in this new collection from AltitudeSF. I owe much to the art direction of Susan Mitchell and Mr. Waters.

Orientation (a book of stories)

This is an instance of a sketchbook drawing finding a life in print. The pencil drawing has become a whole new metier, a new style for me since the cover of the John Waters book, which is nice because I think in pencil. So I can take a thought, darken the line a little or a lot, add color, shift color, create variations. I sent this pencil drawing to the art people at Farrar Straus and Charlotte Strick replied saying she had just the book for it. A book of stories by Daniel Orozco (Faber, 2011). (Faber and Faber is another imprint they publish.) I added the color to the faces, inserted a couple of women's faces (it had originally been just odd looking men), devised the colored type, did an FF colophon in pencil and a scribbled edge for the back and flap.

Now available in a store near you. (And, as one short story writer to another, the stories are pretty great.)

The Malling of America

When the Mall of America opened a few miles from here I made careful plans never to set foot in it. (I'm a neighborhood shopper.) Then I got a call to illustrate Ian Frazier's piece in the Atlantic. I did eventually visit MOA, and wasn't surprised that I hated the place. Big isn't better, it's just bigger. This illustration was art directed by Mary Parsons in 2002.

Home on the Range

I did this art for Bon Appetit a few years ago, and since then have written a couple of things for David Leite's blog, Leite's Culinaria. We have this same Viking in our kitchen, so I suppose the art is a bit of a self portrait. Ours was not carried in sherpa fashion.

The Zen of Snorkeling

This is one of four illustrations I just finished for Shambhala Sun magazine, art directed by Liza Matthews. It makes me want to explore the underwater mysteries of Lake Harriet, which I can see from my studio window. Might be a bit cold; the ice just melted this past week. No exotic fish, mostly sunnies and northerns. Someone snagged a six foot sturgeon in the lake a few years ago. It was older than I am.

The End of the Book

I am writing about books these days, working on a book about books and bookstores as endangered species. About the book as something on paper you can (or used to be able to) hold in your hand. As something that doesn't require electricity, except after dark. I did this illustration a few years ago for Mary Parsons at the Atlantic. Looking at it again it could work as a depiction of the virtual library in which fonts and words are divorced from their protective covers. Once all the books are virtual they can all be burned with a flick of a switch. It makes me shudder. Booksellers and librarians are the curators of our culture. We need them.