Video Of Interest: Liza Donnelly & Ann Telnaes Walk You Through Their Exhibit
Here’s a short video of Liza Donnelly (on the left) and Ann Telnaes walking us through the exhibit of their work currently running in Morges, Switzerland.
Liza Donnelly is a long-time New Yorker contributor.
Ann Telnaes is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who until recently was an editorial cartoonist for The Washington Post.
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Latest Addition To The Spill Collection: Steig’s Pygmalion & Galatea
Way beyond thrilled to finally include a William Steig drawing in the Spill cartoon collection. Mr. Steig is one of The New Yorker‘s cartoon gods; his career at the magazine spanned seventy-three years, with well over a thousand drawings contributed.
I believe the drawing (on the left) was an alternate version considered for Steig’s four page spread, “Greek Mythology” in The New Yorker issue of November 14, 1964. The published Pygmalion is to the right above. The more casual signature, “Bill Steig” likely due to the drawing being gifted to Lee Lorenz, Mr. Steig’s editor at The New Yorker (from 1973 through 1997).
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William Steig’s A-Z Entry:
William Steig (photo above) Born in Brooklyn, NY, Nov. 14, 1907, died in Boston, Mass., Oct. 3, 2003. In a New Yorker career that lasted well over half a century and a publishing history that contains more than a cart load of books, both children’s and otherwise, it’s impossible to sum up Steig’s influence here on Ink Spill. He was among the giants of the New Yorker cartoon world, along with James Thurber, Saul Steinberg, Charles Addams, Helen Hokinson and Peter Arno. Lee Lorenz’s World of William Steig (Artisan, 1998) is an excellent way to begin exploring Steig’s life and work. New Yorker work: 1930 -2003.
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Mother’s Day
My mother’s favorite day of the year was Mother’s Day. She kept that to herself for much of her life, until one Mother’s Day in her later years (I was visiting her with my wife and our daughters at the time) she let it be known how important the day was to her. With that in mind, here’s a photo of her, taken in 1960, standing out front of our home in Bloomfield, New Jersey (for those familiar with Bloomfield, she crossed children at the intersection of Broad & Bay). We (“we” meaning myself, my two brothers, and my mother. My father flew the coop when I was 4) lived in an apartment on the second floor of that home for many years and then moved downstairs for many more years (the difference in apartments: the downstairs rooms did not have dormer windows cropping off the rooms, and we gained a picture window –but we lost a fire escape).
In the photo, my mother’s wearing her Bloomfield Police Department issued crossing guard uniform. I think she was happy in that job; she seemed happy the times I saw her marching in the town’s Memorial Day parade with her crossing guard colleagues. My sense of chronology of her various jobs is rusty, but I recall that she once worked in a store that primarily sold doughnuts, and she worked on an assembly line in an ancient red brick factory. She also worked in various mom & pop stores, making sandwiches, serving cokes and ice cream cones. Throughout all of these jobs, which I realize were not the best of times for her, she kept her sense of humor. She didn’t work at being funny, she just had a way about her.
I have so many things to thank her for, but for today I’ll keep it to this: she planted in my brain the idea that I might one day draw for a living. I was about nine years old when came into our living room and stood over me as I was lying on the floor, drawing. She said to me:
“If someone asked you to draw a person slipping on a banana peel, do you think you could do it?”