Philip Guston, The Studio, 1969. Guston is a major figure for many cartoonists and illustrators, myself included. As was widely reported, a major Guston retrospective planned for 2021 was shelved, with recriminations aplenty.

Note: This is a long post. Start here in the left column if you are reading on anything other than a phone. For very many years now, I have worked with students finding their way as makers: cartoonists, illustrators, designers. For a long time I worked exclusively with undergraduates in the Communication Design program in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at WashU in St. Louis. But in 2019, we launched a new graduate program, the MFA in Illustration and Visual Culture (IVC). The questions I asked advanced students in Communication Design have recently been retooled for a new audience with more mileage. For undergraduates back in the day, I spelled things out thusly:

“…In about six months, you will no longer be surrounded by people who are exactly your age, who hail mostly from the same social class, who are interested in all the same things you are. There will no longer be a group of professional experts who are paid to be interested in you. You will be on your own, and you will have to construct meaning from your own resources until you find or construct another community.

How will you sustain yourself? I asked. Where will you find nourishment? “

Francis Criss, Untitled (Cityscape), 1938. A precisionist who has received more attention in recent years. Captures a grand-but-crappy urban experience. Criss also illustrated, but less persuasively. (Unlike say N.C. Wyeth, whose paintings were mostly dusty, backward-looking things in contrast to his much more vital illustrations.)

In such moments I have routinely offered the chestnut, If you aspire to be a producer of culture, you must also be a passionate participant in it. To begin, culture is a big word. We plug into it selectively, in accordance with our own predilections. In the age of the interwebs, you can find digital encampments of many varieties. Some are productive places, others enthusiasm sinks.

Amid the scorchingly rapid half-lives of Twitter hot takes, 21st century tulip manias, and festivals of umbrage, I’m not really so sure anymore about passionate engagement. Sometimes a cool head serves one well. Keeping your own company and working quietly seems as good a stance as any, and better than some at least. (SEE: Guston, Philip reproduced above.)

Title Screen, Winky Dink and You, a television show aired on CBS from 1953 to 1957. The first interactive electronic experience, the show required children to draw with crayons on a plastic sheet placed over the screen to help Winky Dink conduct his adventures. Hosted by Jack Barry.

Back to the matter at hand: “At the heart of my question—how will you find nourishment?—lives something deeper. I am really asking: To whom will you turn?” 

As it happens, many of the people I turn to are dead. Meaning: Museums and libraries are sources of nourishment, too. And you can belong to a tradition, an approach, a certain variety of impatience, and be sustained by it. The fields we work in—illustration, for one, and cartooning, another—lack sophisticated histories, partially due to ubiquity and temporality: The stuff is everywhere, yet always being burned off and tossed out. In such circumstances: How do we assemble a useable past for ourselves?

Kayren Draper, Illustration from The Sunshine School, Ginn and Company, 1928. Detail under magnification.

I say: curiosity, cultural spelunking, attentiveness. We build a history of our own, or at least the makings of one, with the evidence of our affinities—confirmed by our responses to what we see contemporaneously—combined with our excavations and researches. That stray ad or modest illustration from a century ago that sets something off in your brain.

Stuart Davis, Pochade. 1956-58 I go back to the Stuart Davis well every so often, and I am never disappointed. Someday I want to write an essay and maybe edit a collection on his influence. A major figure for a wide variety of folks.

A dozen years ago and more, I sometimes asked the question another way. “What is your tribe?”

I no longer use the word tribe in this context; it’s disrespectful. Editorialists got used to using the adjective tribal to signal unhealthy, inflexible politics, a regrettable usage. Worse, the invocation of “tribe” amounts to an appropriation of the picturesque native, a la Mia, the Land of Lakes “Butter Maiden,” phased out in 2020, along with hundreds of different images of kids “playing Indian” in school primers from the 1920s into the 1950s. At once fetishizing and infantilizing.

For purposes of argument, I have also come to think that in many cases the identification isn’t so localized. Sure, if you draw superhero comics you can claim Jack Kirby and others who fit comfortably in that bucket. But for many, the range of people stretches across categories. It may be less a club than a sensibility. For that reason recently I have used the term constellation of influence. 

I do think a sense of belonging matters, especially for young people. Terms like illustrator, cartoonist, animator are important.

H. A. Rey, detail shot from Find the Constellations, 1954.

But a constellation of influence is more personal and intuitive, and more critical, than a job title. It’s sort of like picking a sandlot team: these are my peeps! We don’t necessarily play the same position, but we play the same way, or share certain values—how things are put together, how the drawing works, the approach to a medium, even the “rules” of the world or the cultural sensibility: witty, urgent, lovely, languid, brutal, dense, balletic, coarse, astringent, funny.

Constellation of influence may be a little too detached or formal for some; too analytical. Maybe more like traveling companions—people you admire and would like to spend time around, without devolving into fanboys and girls. (These prospective companions don’t really get a vote; you are choosing them, not vice versa.)

You might also think of these people as beloved but distant friends, whose letters buoy you when things look bleak. 

Whichever image works.

D.B. Dowd, Paris Rooftops, from Spartan Holiday No. 3 French Lesson, Spartan Holiday Books, 2019.

A few thoughts on how belonging or membership can be experienced. But maybe first, how they might not be. For example, Pinterest [which I use here as a semi-passé stand-in for the various digital closets where we stash passing interests]. I have come to regard Pinterest as a scourge, in part because it dominates Google image searches in a particularly unhelpful way, gumming up results with less-than-useful material. 

But separately, for the purpose of discovering aesthetic and cultural affinities, Pinterest has a cheapening effect. Yes, it works as a collecting tool. In the digital age, we see many, many image on a daily basis. Some catch our eye. Of those, a certain number might be flagged as favorites and uploaded to the various platforms where we put, even hoard, such things: Instagram, Figma, etc. 

But what does it cost us to do so? Zero. Having a mountain of jpegs sitting on some server in East Ether does not enable them to act on you over time. Lived osmosis comes from steady exposure. I encourage students to print out images that seem important to them; in a further edit, since space is always scarce, I urge them to pin up the most relevant stuff where they work. (Why or how they are relevant need not be explained up front; that recognition can emerge over time.)

D.B. Dowd, K is for Knowledge spread from A is for Autocrat: A Trumpian Alphabet, Illustrated. Spartan Holiday Books, 2020. Graphic design by Scott Gericke.

What ties all this together?…How do these sources make a meaningful set? First, many/most bear traces of their mediums. How they were made has not been disguised, but rather foregrounded.

Harry Beckhoff, Illustration for Lonely Heart, by Damon Runyon, Collier’s, January 16, 1937. I adore Beckhoff’s work during this period—two color gigs, mid 30s into early 40s.

Why pin things up? The speed of digital experience and social media have produced a kinda cool standard of achievement. That’s fine for consumers of various stimuli. But kinda cool is a weak standard. (Digital tools are a contributor to this. The screen glows. Colored light is always awesome. But the light is not the form. Unfinished things can feel finished when they are not.) The best work reveals itself over time, and bears sustained looking. You can’t get that from the scan that produces a quick judgment. The scan measures attractiveness, which is not nothing (!) but nowhere near everything.

Sifo wooden puzzle, circa 1950. I collect these things.

For me personally, there is an experiential aspect to influence. I frequent antique malls on the prowl for research materials in the form of printed ephemera. I write about visual culture, so there is reason to trawl in such places. But I also go for the purpose of being surprised in my studio practice. I find something that sticks: a palette, some lettering, a figurine or tin toy. Some day perhaps I will write an essay on a handful of those items that stuck, provocations which seeded something down the line.

DB Dowd, View from Cherry Street, Plate 2 from Cry Mustardville: Reports from the Recent Calamity and Commentary Thereupon, Charles Bevan Press. 1995. Linoleum reduction cut printed in two colors. The first major project I produced in which the writing, illustration, design, and printing were all conceived as an integrated whole (although text and image appeared on separate pages, so not truly integrated—thoughtfully juxtaposed and sequenced, but distinct. It would take longer for me to see word and image as truly fluid.

My own path has been complex, especially as I have had to account for the roles of writing and drawing in my own work. Over time I’ve come to acknowledge the primary generative role of writing in many of my projects. When the writing leads, I am able to design images very fluidly to complement the textual argument. It wasn’t always so, and it took many years for me to figure that out. As I have come to terms with that, my constellation of influences has changed. (My approach to illustration when I haven’t written the text isn’t so different. I still read for meaning and go, but the integration of elements [drawing, lettering, photography] requires more negotiation.)

James Barrett & Sons, five textile printing blocks from a set of nine used to print a paisley pattern on silk. Dartford, England. 1880-1910. On display at the Winterthur Museum and Garden, New Castle County, Delaware.

Block printed textile, 19th century. Winterthur Museum and Garden.

I started as a printmaker many years ago. The intersection of drawing and printing has been of great interest to me as a theoretical question as well as a formal, visual one. I wrote about it at some length in my book Stick Figures (Spartan Holiday Books in association with Norman Rockwell Museum, 2018). Specifically, in Chapter 3: “On Printed Pictures.”

DB Dowd, Only to wanderers can come, hand lettering Spartan Holiday No. 2, 2014.

The role of lettering and typography has risen in my work quite substantially over time, too, especially as I have come to see drawing as fundamental to all of it.

Herbert Matter, advertising design for Knoll Associates. This is from the Herbert Matter Archive in the Dowd Illustration Research Archive (DIRA) at Washington University, all of which pertains to his work for Knoll.

Graphic designers have come to matter much more to me. Drawing and design no longer seem like separate activities.

The vernacular drawing styles used on midcentury advertising characters and package designs have become objects of scrutiny.

Illustrator uncredited, agency unknown, undersea troubles in TUMS ad, Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 27, 1953. I enjoy the transparent characters—how the contour lines of the figures are complemented and undercut by the negative shapes of light on dunes or whatever those suggestive forms are meant to convey. (We’re underwater is clear enough.) The octopus and the sword/sawfish are up to no good.

Not so long ago, while looking through archival materials for something else, I came upon this drawing in a newspaper advertisement for TUMS, coincidentally still headquartered and manufactured in St. Louis.

Ben Shahn, Typewriter. 1956.

So what ties all this together? How do these sources (which include some of my own) make a meaningful set? It’s possible to push too hard for clarity, but I think here the answer is pretty clear.

First, many/most of these images bear traces of their mediums. How they were made has not been disguised, but rather foregrounded: the screen-tone dot pattern (to be distinguished from a halftone) in the Kay Draper; the painterliness of Guston; the tracking lines on the Winky Dink television screen; the slightly crude linoleum cuts in the Mustardville print; the block printing matrices and textile sample; the scratchy line in the Ben Shahn drawing above.

Second, these images call attention to how they are designed, or the way they are put together. The Beckhoff, the Criss, the Davis, the Sifo puzzle(!), the TUMS ad, my K is for Knowledge spread as well as my lettering for Only the Wanderer.

I have been thinking about this question for so many years that I have moved past thinking about individual people, and on to the tissue of visual culture in its many manifestations. That I am drawn to the vernacular and uncredited as much if not more that I am to celebrated folks is a product of long experience, in the best sense. I am in love with looking and with making, and these are things that nourish me. So I guess I have come to think less about who my traveling companions are, and more about our shared tastes across time.

Among the how, the what, and the why, I am drawn most to how: how people see, how they organize their ideas, how they draw and make letterforms, how they move and push and touch materials. I am fondest of interactions between intelligence and immediacy.

With the folks at Princeton University Press, I have begun to promote Reading Pictures: A History of Illustration, with a publication date exactly two months from today. I will be posting on themes from the book every week or so in the run up to publication. Today I want to explore the genesis of the project, which at the time seemed unlikely. I’m grateful that it turned out differently.

Toward the end of 2021, I became involved in conversations about a book project on the history of illustration. I had long been wary of the subject, skeptical that it was possible to write anything other than sketches of canonical figures interspersed with lucky obscurities who might merit mention. I had done some of that as a service to students but I did not see a larger project as viable. I did not believe that anyone had convincingly established that illustration had a history. Sure, it had a past; plentiful chronicles had been spun over a century and more to prove it, but history is a higher standard.

Recent titles have expanded the range of material characterized or suggested as illustration, from cave painting to fresco cycles and relief sculpture. The new Lucas Museum of “Narrative Art” captures some of this elasticity, which may serve the interests of young people exploring the viability of the art form by suggesting a deeper cultural patrimony. But it does little to bring greater clarity to the study of illustration as a subject, even as increasing numbers of people have begun to research illustrated materials. Analytical lassitude often prevails. This is due to the unavoidable fact that illustration has long suffered from fraught status as an aesthetic category, suspended between literary discourse and art history. Mixed, mongrel, minor.

Illustration has long suffered from fraught status as an aesthetic category, suspended between literary discourse and art history. Mixed, mongrel, minor.

When contacted about the idea of working on a project with an unsatisfying working title of A Visual History of Illustration, I was disinclined. But a countervailing impulse came from the recent experience of teaching my version of an illustration history course to a new audience: incoming graduate students in our MFA in Illustration and Visual Culture program at the Sam Fox School at Washington University. The lack of a suitable text required me to generate all my own materials, and the thought of developing a book to carry some of that load appealed to me. My pessimism was also challenged by opportunity. Could I tackle the problem that annoyed me?

In dialogue with the folks at Quarto in London and Princeton University Press, co-developers of the project, I agreed to spend a month pondering the question. At the very beginning of a sabbatical leave, I had the head space to work on it. If I could rough out a thesis worthy of such a book, I would take it on.

Illustrations, I would later conclude, are pictorial, symbolic, and decorative contributions to reading experiences.

At the heart of the problem were two questions of exclusion designed to overcome lazy thinking: as for artifacts, what isn’t illustration, and to address the problem of change over time, when wasn’t illustration? I made satisfactory progress on both questions soon enough, and agreed to write the book. Illustrations, I would later conclude, are pictorial, symbolic, and decorative contributions to reading experiences. The story of reading and the evolution of literacy including the complementary acts of reading and looking would become central to the project. The research journey that followed led to a career project, and a deeply rewarding experience.

I might add that the primacy of literacy in all its fullness is as relevant to our deeply unsettled historical moment as it is to my book project, if not more so. In coming weeks I will write more about dimensions of Reading Pictures as publication approaches…

I am teaching the course I launched in 2023, Advanced Figure Drawing: Studio and Site, integrating studio work with the model with onsite reportage. We’ve had a nice run so far, now rounding the last turn and bringing the course home. As a group we have made useful discoveries about economy, equivalence, pictorial design, and the process of drawing through “mistakes,” not erasing them or heaven forbid avoiding them altogether. Good solid work has been happening.

But now the terms are changing. We have about a month left, and we need to convert our discoveries into a process that retains immediacy but benefits from process and planning. That is, to make something like “finished” works. This is turning out to be a challenge, and today I want to grab that transition and hoist it up in plain view.

The image at the top of this post dates to 2015. Ten years ago! I took my sketchbook and my camping chair to Lulu’s, a landmark Chinese restaurant on Olive in St. Louis County (an area to which residents of the former St. Louis Chinatown, displaced by “urban renewal” for the [first] Busch Stadium, decamped from 1964). I made a series of very informative pencils, knowing that I was composing for a two-page spread. The drawing on the right engaged the transition from the parking lot and the peculiar outbuilding on the right to the edge of the restaurant proper on the left, with the pagoda-like roof. As is often the case, I was fascinated by the sheer crappiness of the wires and lights and posts and signage, etcetera. The lion on the left side was one of two such statues flanking the entrance. I found the lion and the stripes on the empty parking lot echoed yet contrasted with the density on the right page. (I went to draw the site at around 6:00 am so I would not be bothered by or have to explain myself to anyone.)

But the round of pencils was only part of the process. Once I had decided on an approach to framing the spread I had to convert the pencil to a more graphic form. The pencil was a preliminary artifact; it had to supply authoritative information, but required realization to be of any use for a finished thing. Realization, in this case, turned out to inking, executed in wash and full-strength black goauche with white corrections. I avoided wash on the left drawing— the lion and the parking lot—to create something more guttural and elemental.

But the key drawings from the site required supplementing. There were indeed bare trees growing behind Lulu’s but my view was sufficiently obstructed that I decided to draw a stand of trees elsewhere and drop that drawing (which I did not ink) behind the key drawing. I also added the drawing of the taxi and the clumpy mass that appears behind it. The drawing on the right was assembled and edited in Photoshop. I added assorted lettering passages from an alphabet I had built from my own handwriting in Illustrator.

Meanwhile, the image on the left was built in InDesign, and the right hand composite was later placed in the same inDesign file. All of the color was managed digitally in either Photoshop or InDesign.

So the immediacy of the drawing was spread across several episodes: first pencil, then ink, then assembled other elements. The process accommodated editing through subtraction (white correction) redrawing, and the use of digital tools to manage levels of contrast (for example, the trees stayed in pencil; the contrast levels were bumped to give greater definition to the pencil; and they were assigned the dark green line color to keep them from competing with the black and gray. Color fields in green (a range of values) and brick red also played a critical role in establishing value and temperature. That’s a lot of steps to get to a realized spread.

And now I turn to address my students directly: Gang, your final group of works shall involve more than one step. That need not include digital media; It could be as simple as pencil in the field with media added later. Somehow I want you to explicitly engage the problem of realization, accounting for the immediacy of drawing and the contributions of media and process. You must edit from the primary experience, adding, subtracting, and supplementing to add weight and heft.

Below I have pulled a handful of other posts where I explicitly address process and media. Please read and be ready to discuss when we gather. (I will be posting an announcement on Canvas presently.)

Please read The Visual Correspondent with diverse sources. There is a construction site drawing by Mike Hirshon toward the bottom of the page, about which more presently;

Please read An Illustrated Affair, an account of a day spent drawing the wedding of the above-mentioned Mike Hirshon, a former student who has gone on to found the illustration program at the University of Utah;

Please read Onsite Drawing and the Uses of Photography 1, something I wrote as I was wrestling with questions of reference early in my adventures with onsite work now many years ago, but still relevant methinks.

To discuss!

I published the book Stick Figures: Drawing as a Human Practice in 2018. The project was designed to theorize under-considered aspects of drawing and printing; to reflect on vernacular visual culture; and to explore the relationship between illustration and cartooning. Viewed from a distance, it’s a book with a split personality. The first four chapters are strongly theoretical, the fifth addresses practice, and the sixth and seventh wade into the cultural history of American periodical publishing, among other things. To the extent it holds together, it might be unified by the spirit of impatience which brought it into being. As I wrote in the introduction “Stick Figures is a deeply ideological project.”

I have spent the last three years working on an ambitious undertaking which has kept me largely offline. The new book addresses “the history of illustration,” a subject about which I have expressed skepticism over the years. More to come on that before long.

But for now I want to return to Stick Figures to clarify something which has nagged at me for a long time. At root that book sought to define drawing beyond the Beaux-Arts tradition of illusion-making.

The images at left appear in Chapter 1 of the book to explain the concept of a hieratic image, or one which does not admit the problem of point of view: We are able to see both horns on the sheep and both sides of the vehicle because each composer had a reason to show the subject thusly. The animal looks like this, but you need to see all its parts (including cloven toes) at once. The sedan appears flattened because we need to document all its dings and dents in a single image if we’re to complete this car rental.

The discussion of hieratic images helps to develop the concept of the glyphic mode, which (in Chapter 2) is paired with the graphic sensibility. These ideas are distinguished from a competing tradition, associated with the history of painting, which I dubbed the vedutic mode, paired with the painterly sensibility. The concept of the painterly gives way to photography and cinema.

I struggled for a long time to find the right language for the counterpart to the glyphic mode. I got “vedutic” from the Italian veduta or view, to convey the idea of a vista, like looking across the Grand Canyon. I was seeking to capture the experience of atmospheric vision, of simulated immanence, which we associate with the Hudson River School, etc. Vedutic always felt forced—mannered, possibly silly—as a coinage, but it was the best I could do at the time.

By contrast, glyphic always made perfect sense. The idea of a glyph (a specialized usage as I noted in the book, an integer of symbolic form) could be made by anyone with a simple tool. The unit or “atom” of the glyphic mode (as shown in the table above, from section 1.3 on page 17) is the calligraphic stroke; the basis or “molecule” is the glyph itself—a character, symbol, or pictograph. It followed that application was direct, and the ground was tabular.

As I look back at the table now, I see that the unit or “atom” for the opposing mode was and remains correct—the daub of paint, the grain of photography, the dot of a halftone, and the pixel of computing. The basis or “molecule” is also roughly correct if inelegant: the spritz captures the act of blowing paint through a prehistoric bone: an indirect effect.

As a concept, the problem at the mode level is this: the term vedutic is frankly erroneous. It gets at what the result is like, not what the approach does. On some level I have known this for at least five years. But the logical mistake never crystallized.

Last Saturday, on February 1, 2025, while taking a shower, the correct term came to me out of the blue: optical. The opposite of the glyphic mode is the optical mode. The daubs and dots and pixels produce optical experiences.

I printed 2000 copies of Stick Figures. Very few remain. If I could I would print an errata notice and tuck it inside every copy to say the the reader should substitute OPTICAL for VEDUTIC in the table reproduced above.

As I am coming out of the tunnel of the new book teased above, which has influenced my thinking on related subjects in powerful ways, I believe that the theoretical chapters of Stick Figures (particularly 1-4) informed by subsequent work suggest a fruitful path.

I have returned to teaching figure drawing this spring. The class has alternated between several sessions with a nude model interspersed with onsite work. On the off days we have used on location drawing to introduce figurative groups and genre scenes and the problem (and opportunity!) of setting. We are really just getting started, but our activities are beginning to mesh. I’m excited.

Tonight’s post is designed to provide information and expectations for a journalistic foray: the phenomenon of Super Bowl LIX (omg can we lose the Roman numerals at this point and just say 59) to be played at the Caesar’s Superdome in New Orleans on Sunday, February 9. The game features the AFC champion Kansas City Chiefs and NFC champs Philadelphia Eagles. (Two years ago when I did this project the same two teams were playing. This time I had been hoping for a Buffalo Bills / Detroit Lions Superbowl, but t’was not to be.

The Super Bowl is a truly grandiose spectacle. The game (often, but not always) pits two well-matched teams in a colorful mock-martial contest with real violence and unforgiving margins of error for players and coaches alike. The halftime show features major pop stars (this time, Kendrick Lamar) armies of dancers and amped-up stagecraft.

The Big Easy may be the physical site of SB 59, but 100 million people will view it live on television. In addition to following the game many will actively await commercial breaks to view new, highly ambitious (and expensive) advertisements for a wide variety of products and services.

Millions of people will gather at privately organized parties and all manner of establishments. Each of these settings is its own arena. Some track the game; some drink too much; some haul in the catering trays; some nuzzle or flirt; some bicker and leave early. Sometimes a big lead opens up and the giant monitor (or banks of them) plays indifferently.

What is your brief? Your job is to conduct research through observation, which should include drawing and some writing. The writing is just to help you contain or bracket the experience in a frame. A single sentence could function like a premise; several of them could suggest an arc.

You can limit yourself to the game itself, and use the television broadcast as a primary source. You can draw the social envelope in which the game is broadcast where you are, whether at a private party or a bar. You can explore an angle—for example, the monumentally gendered display put on by the NFL: from the exaggerated physiques suggested by shoulder pads and other aspects of team uniforms, elaborate dominance performances (say, after a quarterback sack), and the cheerleader squads, a bizarre affectation of school days. But at first, your job is to notice what you notice, and then try to capture that in words and images. I would make solid drawings, but not try to finish them. You can ink them later or try another “finishing” approach, including leaving well enough alone. In any event, assume that you cannot possibly understand the event in real time. Plan to produce a variety of materials; have a concrete record.

SECONDARILY, I also want you to generate reference material using photography and video to supplement your drawing, not to precede it. You should have these supporting materials in hand after you are done with your session. Above all, as you experience the game in your particular setting, ask yourself: what is the story???

When we meet on Monday we’ll have a look at everyone’s raw work product from the game.

Perhaps you will develop some finished work from this experience, several weeks down the road. I don’t want you to get hung up trying to engineer that. This is more of a test experience: What is it like to report on a complicated event? Give yourself to the present tense of your Super Bowl Sunday experience. Draw, write, shoot, notate. Keep in mind you could use the resources you generate later, not necessarily immediately. Above all, pay attention and have fun!

Resuscitating an old post for a refreshed purpose. I’m teaching in our semi-new beginning drawing program in a unit called Drawing as Story.

As I have been wrapping up the manuscript on my forthcoming illustration history, Reading Pictures (more on that before long) I have been thinking a lot about literacy and images. Not only looking with reading, but also looking as reading. Comic strips without speech are perhaps the purest form of this.

A few years back I came across an obscure but wonderful comic strip titled Jucika, published in Hungary from 1957 to 1970. Pál Pusztai drew the strip, which focused on the exploits of its title character, an enterprising young woman with comedic gifts, a curvy profile, and a rotating set of jobs which set her up for social-sexual hijinx of various sorts. She is comely, enterprising, dogged, witty, and decent. She lives in a world of variously grumpy, clueless, kind, oafish, and endlessly manipulatable men.

Her problems are posed and resolved in a relentless three-frame format, always wordlessly. She is late for work; her apartment is cold; the sun comes out when she goes skiing, causing the snow to melts; while giving a tour, her clients are distracted by attractive women passersby; she catches her mesh bag on the button of a coat worn by an unhappy man; she is tired and her guests won’t leave; on an on, ad infinitum.

I find the strip captivating due to the purity of its problem and restrictive means. No words, in and out, a three panel gag. The character drawing has a designed quality to it, like a lot of midcentury cartooning, but also a kind of Balkan exoticism.

Pusztai’s strip came to light via the Internet, and has blown up into a cult of sorts. There is a Twitter feed @JucikaDaily and an imgur gallery by CatnipHip. A TV Tropes entry offers this publishing context, among other information: “Originally circulated in the social magazine Érdekes Újság, it moved to the country's sole officially sanctioned satirical newspaper Ludas Matyi in 1959, where it became an iconic part of Socialist era pop culture.”

Okay, so now the assignment part: Students, please pick two of the prompts below.

Mistaken Identity
Faux Pas
Narrow Escape
Stormy Weather
Ugly Baby
First Date

Work on two solutions for each prompt to create a three-panel strip. That is, four sketches of possible strips. Your job is capture a concept clearly and effectively, not to make a super finished version, so we can review and select one or two to take to finish. The sketches should be legible, but do not need to be fussed over.

Have a blast. Please bring your sketches to class on Monday, November 18. Note: remember that you will have to pin them up, so if they are in a sketchbook, please photocopy them rather than tearing them out!

Groups of visiting students and their parents passing through with regularity, each led by a tour guide walking backwards (a Wash U thing). These small herds milled about waiting for an opportunity to take photos in front of (or leaning against) large wooden characters spelling out #WASHU’27 . Each group told a variation on the same story: eager , coltish prospective students in lanyards and sportswear, bounding about or hanging back; variously doting, distracted, or engaged parents; the ever rear-facing institutional enthuisast. Campus regulars passing through; somebody on a riding mower down the way.

These tableaux went by quickly. I got talking about how you have to adapt to get a story down in minimal time, sometimes in seconds. That got me thinking about the experience described below. So I’m dusting off this post for a new audience. In conversation this morning I speculated that I had done this in 2015, but now that I have gone back to check—egads!—it was 2012, more than a decade ago! Yikes. Today is April 10, 2023. The story below was first posted on September 9, 2012.

Five weeks ago I traveled to the Bay Area to attend the wedding of a former student. Illustrator Mike Hirshon married Robin Meyer, a linguist who recently won a Fulbright to Holland. The link above highlights Mike's design work for the affair, which was quite comprehensive. By now they will have made their way to Amsterdam for the coming year. I'm already looking forward to Mike's reportage drawing from that very picturesque city.

Insert: Mike graduated from SVA's Illustration as Visual Essay program in 2015. He did in fact, do some beautiful work in Amsterdam, which can be seen on his site: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3. Here's his SVA Thesis, which is a wonderful project: Lost at Home. Mike and Robin lived in Madison, Wisconsin before moving to Salt Lake City , where Mike is now an assistant professor of art. He leads their illustration program. (Perfectly randomly Mike and I were invited to be a show together at SUNY Brockport in the Fall of 2021. Neither of us traveled to see it.)

Mike and Robin invited me to the wedding. Not only that, they asked me to draw it. Like a wedding photographer, but a more oblique one, with a pencil. When they first asked me, more than a year ago, it seemed–to my relief–that my schedule would not permit it. But when it became possible, I consented, if more nervously than I let on. I agreed for several reasons, chief among them my fondness for Mike. But partly I decided to do it as a challenge. So, you think you can draw? Well try this.

It was a full day, to say the least. I reasoned, correctly, that the earlier I got there the more time I'd have to scope the place out, plus I would be able to make some preliminary drawings to warm up. I drew flowers being prepared, an entryway, and a handful of other things, including this assemblage of stuff.

Once the photographer(s) arrived I had a moving tableau to work from.

These drawings are the fastest ones I made that day, but some of my favorites, too.

No time to edit. A stout photographer. Practically instinctive responses.

Here I had a very quick shot at the bridesmaids. This was more strategic: draw legs and the spaces between them, plus get the dress-mass in one shot. If I'd had even another minute, I could have roughed in better heads. Not to be.

Mike's mother popped in very early to greet me. She whispered confidentially, If you draw me, make me younger and trim off about ten pounds. Unnecessary, of course. She has a great smile and a distinctive carriage, and when I got a brief opening during photographs, I took it. She was probably mortified by this drawing, but it seems to me that something of her spirit comes through it.

Then, a few set pieces. The signing of the ketubah–the marriage contract–something I had never witnessed. (Mike designed it; it's a lovely object.)

A sketch of the setting: the Outdoor Art Club, in Mill Valley, California. As the bar is being set up in the foreground. When we scanned these images–which are plain old No. 2 pencils on sketchbook spreads–we pumped the contrast a little. It works on the line drawings, but the tonal passages collapse some. Oh well.

The ceremony itself. I planned to make a drawing here that I'd work up later as a gouache painting. Here's the pencil, complete with notes to myself about color. It looks like a mess, but it captured the necessary information. Below it, the gouache. Painted right on top of the pencil drawing, in the book.  

Drawings like this compress time. I started the picture on the left, with the bridesmaids. When the other participants processed, the party closed in on itself. As the ceremony unfolded, the bridesmaids turned to face the action, and thus would not have been in these positions at the moment of the blessing captured on the right. Aspects of this temporal compression run all through the image.

I love the shapes of the hairdos and the dresses (See detail at the top of this post.)

Finally, two scenes from the reception. A priceless moment, of two little girls dancing in front of a jazz combo.

 A detail.

And chatting around the table. The woman on the left was a participant; a guest; the rabbi.

All told I made over 20 drawings that day.

When asked a few weeks before, I said I'd prefer to eat dinner with the vendors, not the guests. I supped with the photographers and the musicians. Despite my familiarity with the bride and groom (and as the day wore on, with their families, at least a little) I was there to practice my craft. Just like the others at my table. Pass the fish, please.

The Meyers put on a terrific event. Here they are with their daughter, earlier in the day. The only principal figure I failed to capture was Mr. Hirshon, Mike's dad, who kept moving out of view just as I turned to him. Next time!
 

Near the end, as the post-dinner dancing began, I hit my wall. As soon as my digestive system began to process the meal I'd just consumed, it became very clear that there would be no more drawing. I thanked my hosts and said farewell, then plopped my bag in the rental and drove off across the bay to Walnut Creek. Where I checked into a Motel 6 and collapsed. Needless to say, I slept well.
 

The next day I spent a very pleasant interlude with an old friend, then flew back to St. Louis.  

Several weeks later I shipped the book off to the newlyweds, with whom it will stay for many happy years. Bon voyage, Robin and Mike!

Updating some prior material (circa 2019) for the Super Bowl Sunday prompt, a project we’re coming back to this week in Advanced Figure Drawing. Introduced here.

I have written on the visual correspondent, and the visual essay, before. For a general round up, here is a good place to start. This post will address less expansive material, focusing on the nitty gritty of page design and the use of word and images to build a sequence across several spreads. The Super Bowl exercise is mapped onto a somewhat simpler project we have used for years in Word and Image 1, a gateway course to the Communication Design major. That visual essay project has typically used the St. Louis Riverfront as subject.

Students have been tasked with making a cycle of five images, which must be distributed across three spreads. In the case of the Super Bowl, the material can come from a physical site (say, a party or a bar) or working from the recorded broadcast. The material problem is based on a print magazine format pioneered in the mid-twentieth century (discussed, above links) by Esquire and Sports Illustrated, involving illustrator as correspondent, assigned to a site or event. At right, two examples. Al Parker, 1964; Robert Weaver, 1962. (I have written about the Weaver drawings that formed the basis of this project before, here.)

Five images and three spreads is bit of a math problem: 5 divided by 3 does not yield an even distribution. Below, in the case of the Weaver SI project, we get a single image across one spread, necessitated by the project requirements.

At the top of this post, I have drawn a set of quick sketches to show how the compositional problem of 2/2/1 might be approached. Below, and right, I have added some blown up versions of these ideas, noted with the letter (A through L) shown in the big set.

Students: these notes are not meant to be encyclopedic. I have made some doodles and put letters next to them to make it easier to refer to each visual idea. I made these notes in class on Monday and pinned them up for a quickie discussion. They are not Biblical. I am giving them to you here to remind you that you can think with your hands and make big decisions quickly, for testing purposes.

Key idea: the negative space is also a participant. See reversed out negative space in Spread Plan D (alternate version. That Pennsylvania-with-the-super-long-neck-shape is an equal participant in the composition!)

Remember: use the edge! (Your spreads are to by 16x10, trimmed out from 17x11, which means you can print and trim bleeds. That is not accidental.)

There are typographic questions to consider as well. I will try to get back to this post again in the next day or two and update with some thoughts about setting the type.

Before typesetting comes writing. You will need a title, possibly a subtitle, an author/illustrator credit, and five captions for your five pictures.

This is to get you started on composing your spreads. Have fun!

I have been teaching studio courses on the college level since I was a graduate student at the University of Nebraska in 1986. I should have had an apprentice semester but the lunatic painter who was assigned to the drawing class I TA’ed for that first fall was sufficiently erratic that when he just stopped coming to class I happily took it over. How could I do worse? I figured.

For the first ten years of my career I taught a lot of drawing. Since 1997 I have taught in a design program, working with illustrators and designers on image-making. During that time I came to think about the act of drawing quite differently. In my book Stick Figures: Drawing as a Human Practice (Spartan Holiday Books in association with Norman Rockwell Museum, 2018) I wrote

Drawing has been positioned solely and securely within artistic ideology and practice. But the Beaux-Arts academies that claimed the primacy of drawing plaster casts and draperies have long since passed from relevance. The post–World War II painters, since retired, who taught drawing in American colleges and universities, were acculturated into abstract expressionism. The gestural fetish and psychological essentialism of ab-ex made its way into beginning drawing instruction, leading to the lionization of “the mark” as a badge of the self.

Continuing: Institutionally, the practice of drawing remains an adjunct to art generally and painting specifically—even as art world careers continue to evolve away from traditional media and craft-based activities. People write and speak of the “post-studio artist.” It seems clear that we face a crisis of relevance in art education. Enrollments are down. 

Meanwhile, design programs continue to grow, due to expanding opportunities and increased cultural currency. At this late date Beaux-Arts–style drawing training holds little relevance for graphic designers, interaction designers, and photographers, especially when indifferently delivered; many such students chafe at required two-semester first-year drawing sequences, standard in many BFA programs. Many contemporary students who end up as illustrators and cartoonists—often naturally given to abbreviation and simplification of form— emerge from traditional drawing experiences defeated, their…proclivities disallowed, even belittled. I have worked with many such students; my studio-teaching career has in many ways been devoted to rehabilitating them.  Chapter 5: “Drawing for Humans,” Section 5.11, Academic Drawing. Page 121.

These trends have only intensified since in I wrote that passage in 2017-18.

And yet: I have also observed a different development which has concerned me. At Wash U we retooled our beginning drawing course along the lines that I advocated for in Stick Figures. The course is now taught in a tag-team format by an artist and an illustrator/designer. Different uses of drawing are explored across four units. The two-semester sequence was eliminated, and the other course slot given over to a digital studio course. As more design-friendly coursework has been implemented in the curriculum, there are fewer opportunities (both slots and actual courses) to pursue drawing for and in its own right. Illustration courses require plenty of image creation, but they are more focused on the design activity of solving problems. These experiences are crucial, but they help students get better at problem-solving, not drawing. Drawing improves through the practice of drawing, ideally in open-ended exploratory settings.

After pondering this last year I proposed a new class which I am teaching this spring: Advanced Figure Drawing: Studio and Site. Here is the course description:

 This course combines figure drawing in studio settings with drawing onsite at dance rehearsals, baseball games, etc. Students will learn to observe under variable conditions and work at shifting tempos, developing strategies to reliably create effective figurative pictures. Designed for illustrators and narrative artists who want to combine the authority of observation with abbreviation needed to work at speed. Methodologies explored to include diverse media, reference photography and video. Historical and contemporary examples will be engaged for comparison. Students to be evaluated on formal and thematic clarity of their visual work, depth of investment, and participation in critique.

We have only just begun work but I’m enjoying combining work with the model with exploration in the field.

I’m attaching some images I showed on the first day in class. I introduced the concept of theatrical pictures as well as cinematic ones, which can be chiefly distinguished from one another on the basis of the z axis. Theatrical pictures tend to be shallow and arranged along a horizontal or x axis; we look across them. Cinematic pictures often rely on depth or a z axis; we plunge into such images and move through them, as if down a street or through a hallway. They operate sequentially.

We talked about characters needing something do in such pictures. Everybody needs a verb.

We talked about schematic and hieratic approaches to representing people, which long predate “figure drawing” as we use the term. I’m hopeful that we can approach the figure in an expansive, broadly useful way as we move through the course.

Several days ago I wrote about my brother Mark and New Year’s Eve.

Today the bell tolls on the anniversary of Mark’s passing. What a rough day! We all knew it was coming, but I thought he had as much as another week in him. Stunning that he went so quickly, but I remain grateful that he had no appreciable pain.

I might have waited for the anniversary of Mark’s memorial to post my eulogy, but today seems right. Below, remarks from the celebration of Mark Dowd’s life, an event timed for what would have been his 57th birthday: May 25th, 2021. The celebration was held at Shady Hollow Country Club where our father played golf and served as an early President (and where his memorial reception was held in 2016). A fitting place and a grand event. Lori cut a video to family photographs. I illustrated and with collaborator Scott Gericke designed the program. Importantly, each of Mark’s siblings spoke: Cindy, David, and me. So did son Maxwell Dowd, who did an impressive job with an impossible task.

_______________________________

5/25/2022

Good afternoon. We’re so delighted and thankful that you could join us here today for a celebration of Mark Dowd’s fifty-seventh birthday. 

I’m going to begin by telling a story about our father, who played a few rounds of golf here in his time and who I am certain is with us today. 

We did a lot of long-distance driving as a family, most memorably to Florida, and plenty of stories built up over time from our traveling misadventures. But the best of these stories, by far, is connected to a stop for gasoline in the very early days of self-service stations. Our father, for all his capacities, lacked a mechanical aptitude. Hear me when I say I am understating the case. 

Dad successfully initiated the fueling process, then to his credit checked the oil level by pulling out the dipstick, wiping it off, and reinserting to measure. He ascertained that he needed a quart, and went inside to buy it. When he returned to the car he was carrying one of those now-extinct cardboard cans with the metal top. He had also been given the metal spout used to puncture the can and pour the oil. 

We siblings were witness to what transpired next from the back two rows of the green station wagon. The hood was up, leaving a crescent of negative space which perfectly framed our father’s hands as he labored, quite awkwardly, to insert the metal spout in the can. [Gestures, exasperated grunts] After a series of attempts, he had mortally wounded the can without actually transferring any of its contents into the engine. We feared what might happen next until the gas station attendant mercifully entered the frame to rescue us all from this unfolding atrocity. A second pair of hands took the dripping can from our father and deftly inserted the spout, with a satisfying thunk. 

Never in our lives had we ever seen our father so defeated! But my God was it funny.

I’m telling you this story because in doing so, I can hear Mark roaring with laughter as it unfolds. We’ve recounted it a thousand times, all howling through it, taking turns finishing the story because the person telling it would be weeping with laughter. One of my very favorite things to do with Mark was to laugh with him, which I did, a lot. 

We don’t know anyone who wasn’t stunned by Mark’s departure, because it happened so quickly. At the end of September, he seemed himself—vigorous, forward-thinking, excited about prospects. By mid-December he’d been ravaged by disease. Ten weeks. The night we got him to Canton Mercy and secured a diagnosis, I left him on the ward in the wee hours and returned to his condo, where I paced the floor and typed thoughts on my phone. I hadn’t looked at those notes until about a week ago. The first sentence I wrote: My brother is a lion. 

I think it holds up. Proud. Ferocious. Stoic. 

Mark was also insistent, sometimes to excess. About certain things he could be a complete control freak. Woe be unto the person who pushed the right button on the wrong remote, in the incorrect sequence, the among the four such devices it took to operate his Byzantine home entertainment system.

As Cindy noted, Mark struggled early. School was frustrating for him, college a poor fit. What he learned, he gained through experience. 

Mark was tender and devoted and loyal in spades. He probably transported family members’ belongings from one place to another a hundred and fifty times. I think he might have personally handled every single container in Cindy’s house. Once he drove to St. Louis to help me move in a snowstorm. 

Mark was a fastidious housekeeper. He held strong opinions. He had really good taste, and a well-developed sense of personal style. Panache, you could say. He was one of a kind. 

Mark was born a tiger, but he became a lion. 

To begin with, fatherhood changed him. His devotion to Max was unshakeable.

Now: Being one, having had one, I will say: Fathers can be complicated. Life is complicated. But love is not. Love is simple. Your Dad loved you, Max. He was desperately proud of you. And he will be there, in memory, when you need him. 

What’s more, on those occasions when that’s not quite enough, we—this family—will be there in the flesh, whenever you call. You are stuck with us, buddy. 

Mark grew into himself as a professional. From an uncertain start, he built a career in sales, then relocated to Stark County to be near Max. Slowly, doggedly, with an unmatched work ethic, he remade himself as a start up guy. He co-created Agile Network Builders and exited successfully, then moved on to InfoGPS. His discipline and focus were legendary, to the point of monomania. In recent years, Mark—who only briefly attended and did not graduate from college–was mentoring MBA students and collaborating with academic deans to build co-curricular academic programming at Walsh University. Incredible! 

I would like to return to the wounded oil can and the vexatious TV remote. Mark and our father shared the same impatience. It would build and build, sometimes unseen, and then Kaboom! That volatility was a part of both of them. There were times when you just gave Mark a wide berth. 

But over the past three or four years, Mark mellowed. He kept his edge, to be certain, but overall he was calmer, and more settled. He acquired a new patience.  I think he came to understand his power, as well as its limits.

As we know Mark was dealt a tough hand. As he made his way through grim news and abrupt prognoses, he never complained. By contrast he was thankful, gracious, and funny to the last. As they say in gymnastics broadcasting, he nailed his dismount. 

He went out like a lion, but remained a loyal tiger. In his honor, let’s have a sing of the Massillon Alma Mater. Afterward please join us for cocktails, toasts, and lots of laughter on the patio outside. A proper sendoff for Mark! 

I have been quiet this year for many reasons, among them the way last year ended. One morning in mid-December I was summoned to Ohio by my sister Cynthia, who’d become powerfully worried about our youngest brother Mark—an ongoing discussion from early October, when he had started ailing seemingly quite suddenly. I drove the nine hours that very day. The following morning upon entering Mark’s condominium, my heart sank. Whatever illness had weakened him in mid-November (when I’d seen him last) had since advanced without mercy. None of the details matter from there. A metastatic cancer diagnosis, continued rapid decline, hospice from December 26.

The family mobilized. We’d planned to vacation in a sunny clime for Christmas, but canceled our plans immediately. Lori followed me to Stark County the following day. Both of our “boys” now men came from California almost as quickly. Xmas was a blur, and the lone surviving photograph looks like a 21st century Danse Macabre episode. Death himself among normies. But New Year’s Eve was different. A year ago today, on December 31, 2021, Mark summoned a grand energy to host a big party. Brother David and I were sent out to buy everybody’s favorite libation. Snacks and drinks abounded, and football played indifferently on the big screen (Georgia crushed Michigan, an unwelcome result). Mark’s son Max buoyed his spirits, and the evening was bright.

Mark actively presided over a busy condo until about 9:00 pm, then retired to his bed, from which he never rose again.

He died near dawn on January 3rd.

I will write more, and more seriously, about Mark’s last episode. I miss him every day. Every so often I think to call him, and realize I cannot.

All I really want to do today is to observe that New Year’s Eve—which I had tended to regard with annoyed suspicion, a dumb excuse to partay, will henceforth—evermore!—be Mark’s Day, a celebration of a complicated bon vivant with a heart of gold, who with life ebbing from his earthly (and earthy) vessel wanted nothing more than to see that everyone had one last good time.

More to come on the third. Tonight, a tip of the cap suffices.

I was lucky to know Noah MacMillan, a former student and friend whose far too brief life came to end on July 31, 2022. A Takoma Park, Maryland native, Noah attended Washington University in St. Louis and graduated from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts with a BFA in Communication Design (concentrating in illustration) in 2011. Noah spent his post-college years in St. Louis, leaving for Los Angeles with his fiancée Hitomi Inoue four or so years back. Noah began work on an MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 2019 but was unable to complete his degree for health reasons.

Hitomi and the MacMillan family arranged for two celebrations of Noah’s life: the first, in St. Louis, took place on Sunday, October 2, at the Sons of Rest pavilion in Tower Grove Park, a beloved spot. A second memorial event was held in Maryland on October 23.

I had corresponded with Noah’s father Jeffrey about the St. Louis event, and prepared remarks. Many lovely tributes poured forth from family and friends as the shadows lengthened across the grass, and I decided that nobody really needed to hear from me under the circumstances. I sought out Jeffrey as I left and said I would send him my thoughts. When I did so several days later, he thanked me and asked if I would permit the tribute I hadn’t delivered to spoken by someone else, during a second memorial planned for Maryland, the weekend before last. Of course I instantly assented. I have come to understand from his parents Lucinda and Jeffrey that Noah’s favorite high school history teacher Chris Jones read my words, and did so beautifully. (Thank you, Chris!)

Below, said remarks. The only thing I would add is the wonderful news that one of Noah’s soccer illustrations appears in a new round of United States Postal Service stamp designs announced in October. An airborne athlete in a similar illustration echoes Blake’s Orpheus-as-Goalie image in my talk, highlighted by Jeffrey MacMillan in a photograph from the October 23 event.

It’s an honor to be here with Noah’s family and his many intimate friends. It’s clear that he had a gift for friendship. As for me, I’m speaking in part as a representative of the Design faculty at the Sam Fox School at Washington University. Noah came through our program and embodied everything that we have ever hoped for our students: he was committed, collaborative, tenacious, generous, driven, accomplished. 

Noah entered Communication Design in the fall of 2009. I worked with him in several courses, including a word and image studio and an academic seminar in visual culture. My best opportunity for sustained studio work with Noah came during his next-to-last semester, in the fall of 2010. I then taught a methods course for senior illustrators devoted to digging into students’ natural proclivities and cultural interests, to help each define a direction for their final semester. That process tends to result in fairly full-contact teaching. Noah was all the way in, and sought to make the most of it. His work was searching, hungry. He pushed himself extremely hard but did so good-naturedly. He was a supportive colleague to others, but not blandly so—he was acute in critique. The work he did the following semester with John Hendrix (who is unavoidably absent today but with us in spirit) was later featured in Smithsonian Magazine, and was juried into American Illustration 31. That spring Noah won our department’s Robert Weaver Prize in Visual Journalism, named for an illustrator he admired deeply, and whose values he shared. Weaver was the godfather of the graduate program at SVA that Noah selected to enter in the fall of 2019.

After he graduated Noah’s skill, personable nature, and leadership capacities led us to hire him to assist in teaching a digital design class in our burgeoning program. He did a splendid job so far as he got, until his illness waylaid him. He spent the next several years facing down that challenge, working on freelance illustration jobs between courses of treatment. I had always liked and appreciated Noah, but now I came to admire him deeply. 

In the years after his recovery Noah worked courageously to rebuild a halting practice into a diverse, thriving enterprise, from mural work to editorial illustration to integrated efforts in design. His work was nationally recognized in our field, published in the major annuals. Noah’s reach came to extend beyond his immediate colleagues to the broader illustration community. He had a gift for leadership and the strength to step out ahead, but he could also come alongside to be a comrade and companion. 

Five years ago I had the privilege of working with Noah on a very tight turnaround project—an animated sequence for projection at a major conference. My wife Lori has a video marketing and film business [Storytrack.com], and had hired Noah very early on to produce a suite of illustrations. The project in question was for Lori’s client, and would require a great deal of work on a very tight turnaround. To pull it off, I would need a collaborator, not an assistant, and we both thought, “Noah!” Luckily he was free. He and I spent a very intense 3 to 4 days producing the project, and had a blast together. I have treasured that memory ever since. Lori would be here were she not out of the country at the moment; she was very fond of Noah. But honestly, who wasn’t?

When I read Hitomi’s Twitter post announcing Noah’s passing only moments after it went up, I practically buckled over. I’d been on research leave and off in my own world, unaware. I still can’t quite wrap my head around it, any more than I can accept the sudden loss of my younger brother at the very beginning of this year. These leave-takings can be a rough business. 

In 1885 the poet, artist, and printer William Blake painted Orpheus returning from the Shades. Orpheus was a unique character in the Greek array, a bard and musician who charmed the very stones beneath his feet. Such appeal enabled him to travel freely between the realm of the living and the underworld. Blake’s painting depicts Orpheus as an exultant figure proceeding along a stone incline curving through rock walls. At the end of an upraised arm, the bard’s left hand grasps the neck of a rounded lute, mirrored by a similar move with his right. A golden cloth wrapped around his waist billows impossibly behind him like a giant conch shell. Head back, eyes upward, Orpheus looks ready to launch himself to the plane of the living, a fusion of the athletic and the beautiful. 

If you rotate the figure by 90 degrees, Orpheus looks like an outstretched goalie blocking the ball-shaped lute. 

Recently I’ve been thinking about Noah and the story of Orpheus, about how his art and spirit continue to return to us. And I believe will keep doing so through the years.

The contemporary poet Michael R. Burch composed a take on that billowing musician-goalie, titled Orpheus, after Willam Blake. 

It begins:

Many a sun

and many a moon

I walked the earth

and whistled a tune.

I did not whistle

as I worked:

the whistle was my work.

I shirked

nothing I saw

and made a rhyme

to children at play

and hard time.

To me that line, “children at play / and hard time,” packs a wallop. The fact is: Noah did not get as many suns or moons as we or he wanted. 

But friends, even so and in every sense, we still have his whistle, which was his work. 

Thank you.

I was determined to post this tribute before the last sands of 2022 run out. One of two such subjects weighing upon me…

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is dominating the news and birthing memorable cultural material that will endure. People will be citing the heroic goodbye from Snake Island (Russian warship, go fuck yourself!) and the old woman handing out sunflower seeds will stick for a long time. Today, I wrote a long Twitter thread with some thoughts that had struck me in looking at an old project. I’m not correcting the pithy 280 character style: this is the thread pretty much, with the images I posted with it.

Two years ago I created an unusual ABC book w/ @scottygerk. [A is for Autocrat, Spartan Holiday Books, 2020.] It used the format to make moral arguments. Themes + events this weekend (Kyiv besieged, CPAC, 10 years since Trayvon Martin died) have called the book to mind. Using it to process things. Details posted throughout. 1/16

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine with horror, even as I’ve been inspired by the bravery of President Zelensky and the Ukrainian people. The war, which may yet spread, is casting light on the last 6 or 7 years: the moral rot of Trumpism, Republican cowardice. Seeing these pages in a fresh way. A moral iconography.  2/16

Truth and falsehood aren’t just words. The terrifying concreteness of what’s happening drives it home. Javelin anti-tank weapons—for a time, held back by DJT to extort Zelensky (unsuccessfully)—are being used by Ukrainians to disable armored vehicles as the Russians haltingly advance. 3/16

On the spread with U is V for Vampire in the dread person of Stephen Miller. The image has only grown more correct: apparatchiks like Miller embody a death of spirit, in dramatic contrast to the people of Kyiv, facing physical death with honor and courage. 4/16

W is for Women. Throughout the the past 6 years and during DJT’s first impeachment trial, he was capably countered and opposed by women: notably Marie Yovanovitch (then-ambassador to Ukraine, pictured) and Fiona Hill. 5/16 

The puppet master Putin, now increasingly isolated, only days ago was hailed (yet again) by DJT as “savvy” and “a genius.” Classically Trumpian compliments: morally neutral. Not “good,” or “decent.” Empty lovers of power, these two have been dually exposed—Trump as an instrumentalist, Putin as a neo-imperial lunatic  6/16

Lurking behind everything in the Trump years was a culture of self-dealing. C was, is, and every shall be for corruption 2016-2020. Beware a reprise: The pollution remains on display in what was once called “conservatism” in Orlando this weekend. 7/16

The “swamp” will be cleaned! Beware fake news! The dishonesty was and remains boundless, the disinformation nonstop. Lavrov and Putin lie continuously, as do Rs. May these merchants of fakery be shamed by truth. Kudos to President Biden for his transparency with intel, which has helped to isolate Putin. 8/16

Ukrainian bravery miniaturizes the Republicans who have cravenly attended to the bottomless needs of Donald Trump. Lackeys like Senator Cruz. Contrast the valor of Zelensky with the cowardice of Cruz, despite the inverse stakes! 9/16

B does double duty. The courage of Colin Kaepernick’s convictions got him drummed out of the NFL for kneeling in silent protest. He has persisted, only just announcing a fund to provide 2nd-opinion autopsies in police related deaths. Other convictions: Abery’s killers, just last Tuesday. 10/16

Calling all would-be kings, despots, and insecure needbags: N is for Nero. As for your accomplices: O is for Odious. 11/16

Speaking of odious, the assembly of bigots and xenophobes at CPAC in Orlando truly beggars belief. Fealty to Putin is a form of scarcely concealed white nationalism, with targets at home and “at the [southern] border.” Let’s hope that the reputational collapse of Putin takes a few with him. 12/16

The antidote: P is for Pluralism, the future of multiracial democracy. The cramped ethnostate on implicit offer from today’s Republicans, cynically abetted by the Putin is a dead end. 

Congrats to Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson on her SCOTUS nomination. 13/16

Z is for Zephyr, people. Let the angel mark the sacrifice of brave Ukrainians, and the wind lift hopes. 14/16

A note at the back of the book about how this project happened. A chanced-upon 1946 pamphlet that sat in my studio for almost two years before I took up its implicit challenge. And a paragraph of introduction. 15/16

Forgot the ghouls at Fox News! Thanks for reading this thread. Tagging a few folks I follow and admire. Amplify at will. @HC_Richardson @AVindman @MaryLTrump @natsechobbyist @SteveSchmidtSES @samfox_MFA_IVC @juliaioffe @jelani9 @reedgalen @Kaepernick7  

(I still have a few copies of A is for Autocrat left at Spartan Holiday Books.) 16/16

In the last days before Covid-19 struck, I posted on one of my (few) truly productive social media discoveries (versus time-pissing ones): a cold war-era Hungarian comic strip by Pál Pusztai, named after Jucika, a comely office girl. Jucika is notably boy-crazy yet skilled at dishing out comeuppance to men. She has a gift for physical comedy and thinks on her feet like nobody’s business.

I wrote that her “problems are posed and resolved in a relentless three-frame format, always wordlessly.” In this set of strips, Jucika navigates the following situations: male passersby ogle her legs as she tries on shoes in a store; her boyfriend’s Christmas sweater turns out to be woefully oversized; her commuter bus arrives home during a downpour; her feet grow cold during wintry bus ride; she falls ill and requires a doctor at her apartment; she boards a train but realizes she’ll never find a seat. In every case she prevails through wits and wiles.

Pusztai’s strip came to light via the Internet last year, and has blown up into a cult of sorts. There is a Twitter feed @JucikaDaily and an imgur gallery by CatnipHip. A TV Tropes entry offers this publishing context, among other information: “Originally circulated in the social magazine Érdekes Újság, it moved to the country's sole officially sanctioned satirical newspaper Ludas Matyi in 1959, where it became an iconic part of Socialist era pop culture.”

These are wonderfully concise problems and solutions. Not everybody draws this way, to understate the case, but Pusztai does tremendous work with restricted means. Try to compose three-panel wordless strip concepts in response to the prompts below. How do you do? How do the Jucika strips help you think it through?

Right place, wrong time
Does that complete your order?
Halloween Party
Don’t Mind Me

In the very last hour of his foul presidency, a last thought for DJT…

I staggered to the end of 2020, like so many of us. I have little to say about that, other than to confess that although earnest efforts, my university teaching (three classes, delivered respectively to first year students, seniors in illustration, and a graduate lecture course—the Illustrated Periodical, a grounding for entering students in the Illustration and Visual Culture (MFA-IVC) program—was undistinguished. Yes, the pandemic conditions and the load were less than conducive for excellence. We do our best. So it goes.

During the summer of 2020, I knew what the fall would look and feel like. So I doubled down on the break to produce something of contemporary value—which turned out to be a Trumpian Alphabet. A is for Autocrat got a lot of investment during the eight weeks of frenzied making between late May and mid-July, through the promotion phase running almost to the election.

It pains me to admit it, but Donald J. Trump took a significant toll on my focus and productivity in the last five years, but especially in the last two. When I finally turned my editorial and creative energies to confronting that, and him, it came as a relief. A salvo, an indictment. Autocrat is richly visual, and I am proud of the illustration and design, another collaboration with Scott Gericke. In coming weeks I hope to do a quick tour through the vintage alphabet books I consulted to inform the project.

Despite high design values, the text of the project really drove it; I truly did want to build a moral indictment against Trump. In the very last hour of his foul presidency, I’m grabbing details from the book to highlight the case we made against him in mid-2020, or several hundred thousand Covid-19 deaths and one Capitol attack ago.

Thanks to my collaborators: Scott; Emily Bielski, who built the social media campaign elements; old and wise friend Jonathan Tazewell, who served as an editorial adivser; my son Daniel, the project researcher; my son Andrew, who conceived of the social media campaign and advised us on it; and my partner Lori Dowd, who the work at StoryTrack promoting the enterprise for Spartan Holiday Books.

A is for Autocrat can be purchased here.

Boy was I wrong!

Scheduled for January 15-16, the symposium (by year’s end, due to be sponsored by the plucky Berkshire Eagle, a local daily) was rendered unexpectedly urgent by Trump’s refusal to admit defeat, fed by a specious “Stop the Steal” campaign which came to a frenzied, seditious crescendo by the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6.

Over the weekend of January 2-3, by arrangement, I composed an op-ed on the subject of propaganda in the Age of Trump, which cuts both ways: on one hand, political argumentation with pointed rhetoric based on factual support; on the other, bogus claims inflated by bad faith actors. To be sure, the difference between the two might often be assigned to the eye of the beholder, but seldom has the contrast been so stark as from that 2015 escalator ride to today.

Then the Capitol was overrun, and events moved quickly. I revised the op-ed to keep up, but a certain anxiety set in. Details aside, the piece never ran in the Eagle. For posterity, I am publishing it here, as it would have run on the weekend of January 9-10, 2021. I’ll post on the symposium separately, but my opening remarks on the morning of January 16 included some of this material—particularly, the observations about the pamphlets of Martin Luther.

FOUR LONG YEARS AGO, at the Western entrance to the U.S. Capitol, Donald J. Trump perfunctorily recited an oath to defend the Constitution. He then launched his term with the memorably alarming “American Carnage” speech, a declaration of injury and malice unlike any other presidential address in American history.

So it began, and thus it continued. DJT spewed lies and grievances throughout his time in office. Last week those lies reached a crescendo, with insurrectionists rioting in the Capitol building a fortnight before Joseph R. Biden, Jr. replaces Trump in the Oval Office.

This shameful ugliness has led some, including President-elect Biden, to call for a cooling off, for a rhetorical de-escalation, in the name of national unity. But the deepening crisis in our democracy, abetted by Republican senators Hawley and Cruz, and House Minority Leader McCarthy, cannot be waited out. A desire for civility—and bogus cries for “unity”—must not suppress plain speech about damage to our polity.

Some hesitation may be understandable. During the Cold War, certain areas of national policy enjoyed bipartisan consensus. Norms of governance were well established. And tightly controlled broadcast licenses compressed the acceptable range of U.S. media reporting. Joe Biden remembers all of that. But today’s world is different. Toxic ideas are loose in the national bloodstream. And the answer to objectionable speech, including bigoted and seditious talk, is not politesse, but more speech—counter argument, that is––as Justice Louis D. Brandeis wrote in Whitney v. California (1927).

Today the forms of such speech are notably fluid, from tweets and memes and Tik Toks to op-eds like this one. Most exploit text (or audio) and image relationships. Here too, the past offers useful examples. Martin Luther invented the social media of the 1520s by creating a new form, the printed pamphlet (flugshriften, or “flying writings”) to advance his religious reforms. These hybrid publications, bristling with woodcut illustrations, were written in German, not Latin. Subsequent pamphleteers included Thomas Paine, the author of Common Sense (1776), that wildly influential work in support of the American Revolution and opposition to monarchy. The Berkshires’ own Norman Rockwell gave visual form, and pictorial argument, to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s concept of the Four Freedoms, which FDR articulated in his 1941 State of the Union address (ironically, delivered on January 6).

Late last summer I proudly joined the ranks of the pamphleteers, publishing A is for Autocrat: A Trumpian Alphabet, Illustrated (Spartan Holiday Books, 2020). Modeled on a form intended for children, Autocrat uses direct language and visual metaphor to indict President Trump and his circle. The book employs letters and brief texts to capture examples of presidential malfeasance and, in a few cases, to isolate important American ideals.

All of these projects, including my own, are works of propaganda––attempts to persuade the public to adopt a given premise, to accept a certain view. But I also believe them to be fundamentally honorable. The key is audience trust. Are you working in good faith or bad?

Certainly we have seen propagandists who lie constantly, compulsively, about everything—crowd sizes, Covid-19 tests, imaginary voter fraud. But truth is armor. If you are scrupulous about what is true, you can make effective propaganda against a backdrop of unremitting falsehood. For this reason, I’m pleased to note, Autocrat is to my knowledge the only ABC book ever published with endnotes.

We are a clever people. Our writers, editors, illustrators, cartoonists, filmmakers, performers, and others have pushed back against emerging authoritarianism in American life. But our publishing ecosystem is in need of attention, as local journalism falters, media consolidation intensifies, and social media contribute to the spread of disinformation, collectively undermining the factual bases upon which argument depends.

The veracity of online organs can be hard to establish; the cultural filtration systems we rely on to evaluate sources will develop, but they will take time. Banning our liar-in-chief from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram may be a good start, but existing platforms, publications and institutions must do more to underscore and support our shared democratic values.

The future viability of American democracy is at stake. Donald Trump has been shamed, and if we are lucky he will be prematurely dismissed. But his ugliness has had a purpose. The battle remains joined, between the diverse, multiracial and polyglot future America, and the exhausted patriarchal Anglo-Saxon one. The former complicates and freshens our national ideals; the latter increasingly retreats to cramped, antidemocratic schemes of minority rule.

Let the TikToks and flugshriften, grounded in truth, lead the way forward.

Times are urgent. I have invested my available energies in promoting the project that animated my summer, A is for Autocrat: A Trumpian Alphabet, Illustrated. I look forward to writing about the project in a more reflective way, after the election is over.

As the leaves have turned and temperatures have dipped, the news from Trumpland has grown ever more troubling. Covid-19 cases are up. Another SCOTUS seat has been stolen by McConnell and his accomplices, this very evening.

I have been thinking a lot about the role of creative work in a democracy. Last week I spoke at an online event, Perspectives on the Four Freedoms at the Norman Rockwell Museum. I wrote a catalogue essay for the traveling show that has finally returned to the museum, which asked (several years ago): What does Rockwell have to offer us in an episode of unexpected ugliness? Not his squeamishness, which is considerable (for a fan of Dickens, he eschews villains) but generosity: he thinks better of us than we deserve. Then, over the weekend I published a piece about World War I posters for Hyperallergic. (It was a busy week.)

I feel as impassioned as I did when I sat down to pump out Autocrat, in late May.

I have made some new friends in recent months, including Jeremy D. Goodwin, the arts and culture reporter for St. Louis Public Radio. In late August, he interviewed me for his podcast, Cut & Paste, which was a great pleasure. Not all interviewers are equally prepared, and Jeremy did a fantastic job.

Many have ordered copies of Autocrat, and I’ve heard that at least some have been bolstered by it. A few weeks ago we decided to print more copies, to reach more folks. If you haven’t ordered, or if you have been thinking about getting additional copies for your friends, now’s the time! You could be holding a copy on Election Night.

We’ll be launching a final push this week on social media. 

Lastly, if you’ve already voted, way to go! If you haven’t, be sure to get to the polls on November 3 (and bring a chair)!

From a learning standpoint, the transition from halting uncertainty of how exactly am I handling people in my work? to the headlong effort of 100 images, followed by the considered embrace of lessons learned was and remains too important to give up. Onward!

Below is the prompt for the crew:

Dear Students:

You have heard this orally, but let me add a little prose here. I have asked you to produce 100 figurative images at a scale of AT LEAST 11 x 14 inches. Whole people, not just heads, though a few portraits will be fine.

(Keep scrolling down: the text runs along the left column, with images offered as a suggestion of available range distributed across both, with citations in the captions.)

I will come in for class on Monday and expect to see a stack of 100 pictures, numbered. We will confirm that they are all there. We will review the sets in succession.

Be aware that figures need not be (sharp intake of breath) The Figure, but rather pictures of people.

To make an obvious point: this will be a challenging process.  For starters, no matter what you do first, after 10 or 12 images you will have become bored and fatigued. Then it will occur to you that you have another 88 pictures to go--one for every key on a piano. Almost certainly you will spend too much time on some of your early efforts, which will annoy and possibly alarm you. 

I entreat you to make use of diverse media, from paint to collage to ink to (a few) digital images. As importantly, vary your method. Go outside and draw people playing soccer or walking their dogs. Draw at dinner. Watch a movie and whack out pictures of the characters. Draw people from memory. Invent people. 

Have a great weekend, everybody! If there are any alums out there, feel free to chime in with a comment of your memories, good and bad, of this experience. Or shoot me an email or DM and I will integrate...

So now the cat is out of the bag: Project X is A for Autocrat, the Trumpian ABC I am completing this week. Adding new image to the top of this post to mark same. More to come soon!—7/8/20.

About five weeks ago I embarked on a project to capture my revulsion at and more importantly mount a case against the conduct of our government—in particular, the current Administration. I have been working around the clock since, along with my collaborator, graphic designer Scott Gericke. The end is in sight, and the project—the first glimpses of which will begin to appear tomorrow—will be available later this summer. (The images in this post include process shots and prior projects, noted below. No spoilers.)

I have made a lot of projects in my life, and some of them have been pretty good. That said, nothing I have ever made has produced the kind of response that this one has, at least as viewed by a handful of people in preliminary form. We live in a divided time. Some will not be pleased. But I have said and drawn what I mean, and I am pleased to be wheeling this project into view. 

More to come on that front, and soon.

I have addressed “current events” before, but usually through satire and allegory. The above-mentioned allegories include: Cry Mustardville, a suite of prints (1995) addresses civil war and mental health, composed against a backdrop of Rwanda and the destruction of Yugoslavia; Sam the Dog (1997-99), a newspaper serial for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch [reconsidered in 2014, as the Ferguson protests exploded] addressed urban and surburban politics, and which briefly had an existence as an online animation property; Scenes from Starkdale, Ohio, an experimental animated film (2005-06) explores “islamo-fascist” anxiety and consumer culture. 

In 2008, as I wrote in my book Stick Figures: Drawing as a Human Practice (2018, Spartan Holiday Books in association with the Norman Rockwell Museum), “I went outside and started looking at things. Material facts. Cars. Buildings. People. Nonfiction.” I did so because I had gotten sick of commentary, of people shooting their mouths off. 

“For two years I filled up sketchbooks with no real sense of what the drawings were for. I see now that I was working out a way to situate myself in a landscape in defiance of placelessness, resisting what would come to be called “the cloud.”

I labored to re-embed myself in things and stuff as a bulwark against gaseous, disorienting chatter. Under the circumstances, a heroic materialism…What is, is. Look hard. Describe first. Interpret second.”

My upcoming project is grounded in reporting. None of it is fiction, although I use association and metaphor to sharpen the rhetoric. All told I see it as perfectly in line with my post-satirical career. I have found myself thinking about two aspects of the project which feel new to me: First is conceptual compression. Composing the text has felt like writing haikus, and choosing image vocabularies has required precision. Second is the use of a well-established cultural form, and one strongly associated with children. The reasons for that choice are sound.

I look forward to bringing out Project X in the next several weeks. Stay tuned!