Listening for another world

Sunday, February 9, 2020

My kids leave abandoned drawings all over the house, so I like to steal them and add (the wrong) words. This is my 7-year-old’s drawing + words clipped from the newspaper.

Hands in motion

Saturday, February 8, 2020

Gjon Mili, photo of the juggler Stan Cavenaugh, 1941

Looking at Gjon Mili’s remarkable photographs of humans in motion, I was reminded of all the drawings in Jason Polan’s Every Person in New York with more than two hands or arms:

“I only draw the person while I can see them,” Jason said. “The majority of the drawings are done (mostly) while I’m looking at the person, not at the paper.”

If they move or get up from a pose, I cannot cheat at all by filling in a leg that had been folded or an arm pointing. This is why some of the people in the drawings might have an extra arm or leg — it had moved while I was drawing them. I think, hope, this makes the drawings better.

It does.

The art of rejection

Friday, February 7, 2020

A photo from my friend and cartoonist Drew Dernavich:

Before I started submitting digital sketches to @newyorkermag a few years ago, I was doing them the old-school way: Sharpie on paper. But that takes up too much space, so I’m cleaning house. Here is the pile of ideas that got published vs. the ones that got rejected. And in multiple views so you can see the actual ratio. Cruel business, my friends. I’m still generating a lot of crappy rejected ideas, they’re just in digital form now!

Check out Drew’s Instagram for a sale of his rejects.

The art of mending

Thursday, February 6, 2020

It was interesting to come across Dorothea Lange’s 1934 photo of a woman’s mended stockings after reading about the Japanese art of Sashiko, which seems to be having a moment online:

Miho Takeuchi, a traditional sashiko instructor and designer born in Japan and based in the United States, tells me via email that sashiko, which developed in poor communities in Japan’s Edo period, “was born from the necessity of mending and patching garments, beddings and household items. In ancient days, clothing and bedding were made from homespun fabrics woven from native fibrous plants such as wisteria and hemp and necessity demanded that this clothing be recycled for as long as possible.” It was only later, she tells me, that the technique evolved to include the elaborate surface-level designs and intricate patterns popular with visible menders today.

“Whereas mending was once the province of those who could not afford new clothes,” the article notes, “today’s visible mending is the province, primarily, of those who can afford the time and attention it takes to make one’s clothes into a statement.” (See: “The poor can’t afford not to wear nice clothes.”)

Here is another photo by Lange, which seems to be of the same legs, stockings, and shoes, but look closely at both images, and you’ll see different contexts. In the first image, which is cropped closely on the legs coming out of shadows, the shoes are resting on worn wooden planks, and the mends almost look like scars. In the second image, where you can see the rest of her outfit and the smooth floor, the mending on the stockings looks more subtle and elegant.

I did a bunch of digging in Lange’s archives at the Library of Congress, but couldn’t find any more images of these feet. (Lange did a whole series of worn stockings and shoes. It’s interesting to note how much Lange liked photographing legs and feet — her own foot was misshapen by childhood polio and she walked with a limp.) Would love to know more about these images, or if there are any others in the series, if anybody knows.