Drawing Like I Used To
Back in late high school, and then in college, I suddenly found I was drawing a certain way (I guess some would say it was a style of drawing; I’ve never been comfortable with “style” — it seems limiting).
This way of drawing ended up in two self-published collections, Somewhere Above The Jugglers And Dogs (1975), and 115 Drawings (1977). Although it may not be as obvious to others as it is to me, I was heavily influenced by James Thurber’s work by then, having just discovered it a few years earlier. Up til then, my work was heavy-lined and intricate…burdensome in many ways. It was a relief to just let it go. And so I consciously went from too many lines, to drawing few lines, such as The Daily Thrill, from 115 Drawings. Even though I’d let go, there was still a stiffness to the drawings, a studied carefulness trying to appear casual.
By the time I got into The New Yorker (within the year of 115 Drawings), some more lines had crept back onto the blank pages. Influences from other New Yorker cartoonists played a big part in that. For a while I wanted to draw just like George Booth, and Charles Addams. Neither of those artists drew Thurber-like, with Addams, graphically speaking, nearly the opposite of Thurber. And so the self conscious drawing continued. That’s the way one moves along I suppose: trying on different influences, whipping up ingredients, until you finally end up with some other thing. I like to think that what I’ve ended up with is still in transition. The one constant over the years since I found some other thing — and what I enjoy most about drawing — is how the pen line moves freely, before I even have time to think much about what it’s doing; my (Rapidograph) pen often does what it wants to do (Ouija Board-ish), not what I might suppose it will do. And so it was funny to me yesterday while drawing, that I drew this:
“Funny” because I realized as I was drawing that I was, just for a few moments, returning to the slow controlled self conscious way I drew in the 1970s, just around the time I was learning to let go of the dense stuff I’d been doing. There’s that uncomfortable stiffness to the lines that I left long ago: that studied casualness. It didn’t occur to me til after I finished the drawing, that the drawing actually had a silly connection: the woman is walking her yippy dog, and the man’s yoyo is walking the dog.
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The Tilley Watch Online, June 10-14, 2024
An end of the week listing of New Yorker artists whose work has appeared on newyorker.com features
The Daily Cartoon: Amanda Chung (a dual effort, with Vin Coca), Brendan Loper (twice this week), Jason Chatfield (a dual effort, with Scott Dooley), Ivan Ehlers, Adam Douglas Thompson.
Culture Desk: “Lying To My Dad” — illustrated by Navied Mahdavian (written by Bryn Durgin).
Barry Blitt’s Kvetchbook: “Alito, Roberts, And Thomas See The Sea”
Cartoon Gallery: “Dearly Beloved”
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