NEW YORKER ORIGINAL ILLUSTRATION SALE NOW ON!
Most of these spot illustrations were commissioned in the 1990s, for ‘Goings on About the Town’ or to fill a gap elsewhere in the magazine. Some were published some were not, as indicated.
All were created with quill pen and ink and watercolour on Arches or other archival art paper. [Please click on individual images for dimensions.]
For reference, the photographed pieces (where edges are visible) show what the actual paper looks like. Other, scanned images add shadows to the textured paper, which do not appear in real life.
When Tina Brown took over at the New Yorker, suddenly illustrators from outside the stuffy old shirt club and all over the world were being invited inside what had for decades been an impenetrable fortress. I never did do a cover, probably because to be honest, I was just happy to have fulfilled the goal of being in the magazine and didn’t persevere any further. The Sphinx would have been used to fill space in the art gallery and museum section of Goings On.
They commissioned a pile of art to have on hand, and had an impeccable filing system keep track of it all so they always had what they needed quickly…ah the days before internet. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to let me know I had a piece in ‘this week’s issue’, many years after the fact.
It was pretty easy to think up a variety of interesting divas, but sports – not so much. Fortunately there’s Sumo wrestling…
….and disco dancing (ok, not exactly a sport)!
I guess being small and simple, this one of the generic rock band was easy to plop in somewhere. I forget where.