Physician, Take a Hike

Kind of creepy, eh? This showed up in The New York Times Book Review for May 12, 2002, and illustrated Natalie Angier’s review of Michael Gearin-Tosh’s memoir, Living Proof: A Medical Mutiny.

As Angier said, Gearin-Tosh, who had been diagnosed with incurable bone marrow cancer, took “his body, his health, his life into his own cautious, obstinate hands. Gearin-Tosh refused the chemotherapy - hence the subtitle of ‘Living Proof’: ‘A Medical Mutiny’ - and chose instead to put together a semipersonalized program of Chinese breathing exercises, acupuncture, coffee and castor oil enemas, megadoses of vitamins and a diet rich in raw vegetables and fresh juices and stripped of salt, sugar and cooked fat.”

So, in lieu of any better ideas, I drew a kind of “universe” of Gearin-Tosh’s alternative medical regimen: the human head functioning as a kind of a sun, with acupuncture needle-rays, orbited by vitamin-stars, garlic- and turnip-asteroids, apple- and orange-planets, carrot- and onion-comets, banana- and pea pod-moons, and ...an enema-bag space-station? Sounds like the worst bowl of Lucky Charms ever.

The Turtle on the Fence Post

A cropped version of this illustration appeared in The New York Times Book Review for March 24, 2002. I made it for William Kennedy’s review of Joe Klein’s book, The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton.

The Book Review gave out a particular photo of Bill Clinton to a number of artists, including Barry Blitt, Henrik Drescher, Peter Blegvad, Philip Burke, Robert Grossman, Thomas Fuchs - maybe others - and me. Each of us was supposed to re-imagine the picture and then our results would be ganged-up on the cover and, it was hoped, evoke what Kennedy described as “the duality, triality, quadrality of Bill Clinton's nature and outlook.”

But I (and maybe some of the others) misunderstood the directive. I think I should have shown Clinton’s whole head and shoulders instead of just a fragment of him. So I wound up making the above piece, but while it missed getting on the cover, it was used inside with the review itself.

My mixed-up medium was colored ink on scratchboard, glued to a scrap of Color-Aid paper.

See my other take on Bill Clinton, here.

They Really Are A Scream

Sometimes a better idea comes after I’ve turned in the final art. Other times the best idea arrives in the nick of time.

Take the Adams family. (No, not them.) My assignment for the New York Times Book Review (given on a Friday afternoon, I think, and due before noon Monday) was to illustrate Jeff Shesol's review of America's First Dynasty: The Adamses, 1735-1918 by Richard Brookhiser, in which “his subject is not one life but four - the favorite sons of successive generations of the Adams family” - i.e. John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Charles Francis Adams and Henry Adams.

For better or worse, I’m drawn to American historical subjects: I love to research them, but often I get too caught up in all the details which, in turn, can get in the way of making an interesting picture. Editorial work, though, is (to me) less about making a well-researched or historically accurate depiction of a particular time, place, or person, and more about making something that catches the essence of the piece it illustrates - or, at least, catches the eye.

Despite my immediate attraction to the subject, I didn’t know how to handle it pictorially. One page of notes shows that I considered parodying (or parroting) The Flying Wallendas and The Brady Bunch...

“Clever” - but not very interesting. Nor was the “family gallery” approach I tried, or my half-baked variant of Norman Rockwell’s The Gossips...

Finally, while vainly attempting to capture the features of Charles Francis Adams, it dawned on me that most people probably wouldn’t pick be able to pick Charles Francis Adams (or even Henry Adams) out of a line up, so why bother with straightforward portraits? Why not focus on things they had in common besides their surname: their eyes, their ears, their bald heads? And why not take a more abstract, or less literal approach, which might be more effective in the end?

Maybe I pushed the similarities more than what was “true,” but I felt like I was on to something. And maybe I was paying unconscious homage to one early-to-mid-1960s album cover or another - was it Meet the Beatles!? I don’t know.

And since David McCullough’s John Adams came out not long before this review appeared, I figured the Times-reading masses would probably recognize the Adams on the jacket:



So I replaced John Adams’ understated hairstyle with the bushier variety. But that obscured the face of his son, John Quincy Adams, so I switched the order, tracing and cutting and pasting (with real-live scissors and tape)...

And then I made the final art in ink on scratchboard:

My chief reservation about this is that my pen and “scratching” work should have been less delicate: it gets fuzzy when reduced, or printed on newsprint. Even so, I still like this Adams Family. Neat, sweet, petite.

Trompe L’Oeil Gevalt

WANTED! Another fake jacket from the olden days, this time for the very real Howard Zinn classic, A People's History of the United States.
The type treatment is Charles Nix’s, the vague attempt at trompe l’oeil painting is mine. Later I salvaged the piece by adding a mouse clinging to the lower edge of the poster, but I can’t find the critter now.

May It Please the Court: The First Amendment

A jacket for May It Please the Court: The First Amendment: Live Recordings and Transcripts of the Oral Arguments Made Before the Supreme Court in Sixteen Key First Amendment Cases.

This box set was published by The New Press in 1997. As I recall, Charles Nix, who had designed the first volume - May It Please the Court: The Most Significant Oral Arguments Made Before the Supreme Court Since 1955- used the only known photo of the court in session, so we had to come up with an apt image ourselves. My resultant painting of the scales of justice, below, was not a particularly novel idea. It came at a time when I was tentatively trying to emulate the wonderful still-lifes of Walter Murch, but I could have/should have been more painterly about it.

Enemy Women for the New York Times

Sometimes my first ideas are stronger than those that go into print. This might be a case in point: my New York Times Book Review cover highlighting John Vernon’s review of Paulette Jiles’ Enemy Women: A Novel.

The book is set during the Civil War and centers on an 18-year-old woman from the Missouri Ozarks, who is arrested on suspicion of being a Confederate spy and is thrown into a St. Louis prison. There, the prison commandant (a Union major) interrogates - but soon falls in love with - his captive, and ultimately helps her escape.

But how to illustrate that, or, rather, how to illustrate a review that has no physical descriptions of the characters, etc.? (Book Review illustrators are - or were - only provided the text of the review, not the book itself.)

Above is an early, more “realized” sketch: no facial features, but, I hoped, their hands and clothing and setting would hint enough at what the book was about. And here is a page of pencil notes for it - as well as another concept: a crazy-quilt map of Missouri that, I realized, would be better to stitch together with real bits of cloth, rather than to paint (something I wasn’t equipped to risk trying).

My “hand holding” design was turned down, though. So I ran out and got the novel and searched for descriptions of the two main characters. I wound up settling on an “ambrotype” idea, with a “magic realism” slant, with the major desperately - maybe too desperately - reaching out toward his love. For the major’s pose - and in the interest of time - I adapted one of my favorite Sidney Paget pictures of Sherlock Holmes, illustrating one of my favorite lines in one of my favorite stories, “The Adventure of the Reigate Squire“ (or “Squires” or “Puzzle”): “You’ve done it now, Watson,” said he, coolly. “A pretty mess you've made of the carpet.”

And so this color sketch was born - as was this poor Photoshop tweak where I raised the major’s arm and closed the ambrotype case a little:

Tthe major “breaking through the frame” idea was nixed, however. I had to keep him under glass, and the end result, below, is much more staid and, I think, less intriguing. That orange surface is supposed to be wood, but it looks like the ambrotype case is precariously balanced on it or suspended from it: looking at it now, I should have placed the case on top of a table or the like. But sometimes the better ideas come too late - or too early.

And here is the image as published....

“Unbelievibly Crazy” Book Jacket

My jacket art for The Breaking of the American Social Compact by the recently vilified Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward and published by The New Press.

Recently, one Amazon reviewer called the book “unbelievibly crazy,” and warned, “I can't believe how some people actually believe this stuff. This is not for Americans. It's for socialists. Lord help us all!”

For me, though, it was a chance to experiment in low-tech 3D. My friend and then-business partner, Charles Nix, did the type design which I then “interpreted” in ink and acrylic by “cleverly” adding the “crack” through the “chiseled stone” letters. As with Getting Near to Baby, my black and white original (below, uncropped) was colorized in printed form.

Sherlock Holmes

The Enchanted Inkpot: Mapping Fantasy

Over at The Enchanted Inkpot - a community for writers and readers of middle grade and young adult fantasy - Ellen Booraem, author of The Unnameables, has posted Topic of the Week: Mapping Fantasy. Many thanks to Ellen for asking me to talk about about maps and mapmaking for her article!

You can see some of the maps I made for T. A. Barron's The Lost Years of Merlin epic here. And a while back I posted a map-esque illustration I made for The New York Times Book Review as well as a bookplate that's basically a map of Delaware. Also, a cartographer friend of mine pointed out that this picture could be considered a map, so I'll take her word for it. And here's yet another odd one I made which was never published...

Republic of Dreams

My illustration for Morris Dickstein's review of Ross Wetzsteon's Republic of Dreams: Greenwich Village: The American Bohemia,1910-1960 in the New York Times Book Review. Can you connect the names with the faces?

Emma Goldman
Big Bill Haywood
Willa Cather
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Theodore Dreiser
E. E. Cummings
Dylan Thomas
Lincoln Steffens
Mabel Dodge
John Reed
Max Eastman
Walter Lippmann
Eugene O'Neill
John Sloan
Crystal Eastman
Floyd Dell

Moomento Mori

An ink on scratchboard illustration I made for Sam Sifton's review of Portrait of a Burger as a Young Calf by Peter Lovenheim in the New York Times Book Review. For an explanation of this post's sorry title, look here.

My Mark Twain

Today is Mark Twain's 174th birthday, so behold my painting of him - well, my painting of a part of him, which, in turn, was part of an experimental series where I tried to make recognizable pictures of certain notable people while only showing small portions of said people...if that makes any sense. As Twain himself said: "...language is a treacherous thing, a most unsure vehicle..." But maybe I'm just a bad driver.

Duke of Egypt

A deceptively whimsical ink on scratchboard illustration I made for Michael Pye's review of Duke of Egypt, A Novel by Margriet de Moor, printed in the New York Times Book Review. For want of any other leads, I threw into my picture as many of the details mentioned in the review as possible.

Bubba and the Bear

I made this for Bill Keller's piece on The Russia Hand by Strobe Talbott. I'm not sure if I captured (or understood) the gist of the review or of the book...but I like the bear.

Grudge Match

And now a delightful trip down memory lane, when politicians treated one another with grace and civility. In this corner, wielding the Constitution, is John Marshall, first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. And, in that corner, armed with the Declaration of Independence, is Thomas Jefferson, third President of the United States. Who will win? This adorned Joseph J. Ellis' review of What Kind of Nation by James F. Simon, titled "Clash of the Titans" which appeared in the New York Times Book Review (March 10, 2002). Be sure to count the stars. Clever, no? Not really.

Politics As Unusual

In honor of Election Day minus 2, I'm posting one of my rare forays into "political" illustration. In this case, a piece I did in ink on scratchboard for the New York Times Book Review (July 7, 2002), illustrating a roundup review of the books Where We Stand by Roger Rosenblatt, Why We Fight by William J. Bennett, and What's So Great About America by Dinesh D'Souza. The review itself was "Their Country 'Tis of Them" by Michael Lind.