Illo Watch

"Spring Forward Faster," 3/31/05

Photo or illo? I suppose it doesn't matter. Anyway, what a thrill! I have that very same lightswitch in my apartment, and goodness, there it is on today's Times op-ed page! I hope it doesn't get too uppity from all the attention. Seriously, couldn't anyone think of a more interesting image or treatment for this piece? Contributor John Fulbrook has a long and impressive track record as an editorial designer and I hesitate to question his judgement, but this is a perfect example of a pic that would be great paired with the right title text (as in a book jacket or magazine cover) and just looks like nuthin' by itself.

"An Inside Job," 3/27/05

Scale shifts are a common trope of the op-ed illo. Often they're used to project a sense of overwhelming force (a huge foot coming down on the scene Terry Gilliam-style, a giant hand reaching out to help in a disaster) or dimunition in the face of historical momentum (someone standing on the shoulders of a giant). Today Michael Klein uses scale shift to convey a more balanced relationship. It's the intimate positioning of the two figures, one climbing up the tie of the other, that breaks the mold and gives the picture its disarming and playful air, making an otherwise conventional business-theme illo worth a longer look.

"Me and My Hybrid," 3/25/05

Tim Lane illo number three is the most conventional in Friday's triad. It's nothing fancy, but the shape of the exhaust cloud flows beautifully into the outline of the trees. And if  hybrid cars were available in models as lithe and sporty as the one in this drawing, they'd be the perfect automotive remedy for liberal guilt AND midlife crisis!

"Coal in a Nice Shade of Green," 3/25/05

Illo number two in the Tim Lane triad accompanies the most enterprising article in Friday's energy futures roundtable, explaining and promoting gasification technology, whereby plants capture energy from fossil fuel burning but store the CO2 byproducts underground and away from the atmosphere. Lane's small illo borrows conventions of technical drawing, with its pipes and mystery boxes, but disrupts the diagram with extra loops and that black oil-spill-shaped cutaway framing everything. Is he telegraphing obscurity, contamination, or just the complexity of any proposition to curb environmental despoilment while we continue to consume at full tilt? It's beyond me.

"What Happens Once the Oil Runs Out?", 3/25/05

I'll say it right off: Tim Lane is one of my favorite print illustrators working today. Along with his periodic appearances in the Times, I watch for his posters and buy any issues of his comics I can find. (Re: the latter, fans of postmodern pulp auteur Charles Burns would do well to seek out Lane's Happy Hour in America.) So a day like Friday, with not one, not two, but three Lane op-ed illos, is a joyous one here at I.W.H.Q. What I love about Lane's work is his eye for grotesquerie and surrealism combined with incredible precision of line. On the op-ed page, he doesn't generally concern himself with responding directly to the article. It's like he free-associates from the article and comes up with something that he just really wants to draw. At least, that's what he seems to have done in today's lead graphic. While his theme of technology eclipsed by nature is not incompatible with Kenneth Deffeyes' article, nothing points to an oil derrick grown over with antlers. (Tree branches? Nah, antlers!) The piece is arrestingly tight: the gentle curvatures of the branch-tips, the carefully rendered junctures of machine and organic matter, the contours of the snow-covered ground, everywhere Lane sweats the details, it pays off in stare-worthy spades. The other two drawings are not as impressive, but continue the theme of machinery gone wild. More about those in the next two posts.

"A Wall of Faith and History," 3/24/05

At the outset of Thursday's assault on Fortress Op-Ed Illo, Alex Nabaum looked pretty good. He had a strong graphic idea: for an essay on why the Middle East in 2005 is nothing like Berlin in 1989, a demonstrator's hammer hits a massive wall—and the hammer rather than the wall shatters on impact. His choice of a muscular, realistic style, with its revolutionary resonances, was fitting. But either something went awry in the execution, or this picture's meaning is more complex than it first lets on. First, the position of the hand, palm facing us, is off. The person with the hammer cannot be trying that hard to tear down the wall. He's got his back to it, as if to hammer theatrically while urging on a crowd before him, "Come, let us smash the state!" The lines where hammer meets wall are oddly done, too. Graphic convention holds that impact lines radiate evenly around the point of impact; these look more like a shadow or a reflection off the wall's surface. Maybe the point is, per the article title, that the wall isn't made of mere stone?  Rather than quibble over Nabaum's draftsmanship, I prefer to imagine that he is intimating something here. Perhaps he created an image with obvious inconsistencies because he's dismayed, as I am, that an argument against triumphalism in the Middle East even needs to be made at this point. Or maybe he'd respond to all this nitpicking by driving me off with a hammer.

"Jose Canseco, Hero," 3/18/05

When literary heavy hitters like Michael Chabon swing for the column-inch bleachers, the illo must, uh,  do a... sacrifice... bunt? Oh, forget it, I can't do baseball metaphors, even mixed ones. In any case, John Hendrix's pic of baseball's new positions, small though it may be, is a dead-on parody of the MLB house style.

"Don't Parade, Just Go Vote," 3/17/05

A fit of whimsy seems to come over the illo on holidays—at least, on the tribal ones like Superbowl Sunday and, in Thursday's case, St. Patrick's. Joshua Gorchov is allowed to take flight, producing a painterly work that draws its rainbows from the Art Deco arc motifs of Robert Delaunay and its beefy politicians' hands, from, well, I thought first of the earthier work of George Grosz. Then, in a move that I must imagine is original with Gorchov, he has the hands gesturing, Vanna-like, at a giant Irish Power salute. For those playing at home, furrow your brows and see if you can come up with a snappy exegesis on what this all has to do with Thomas Fleming's recollection of Irish pride forged into a cudgel at the ballot box. Here's mine: With the Bush Administration's embrace of crony-ish practices at the federal level, it's now easier to question the wholesale condemnation of ethnic city machines by reformists like LaGuardia and his successors. What was The Organization, after all, but an ebullient expression of community empowerment? And it sure did breed some loyal voters.

"Failing the Wrong Grades," 3/15/05

On first glance I mistook Grady White's illustration for a comic, which got me trying to puzzle out the hidden forces reconfiguring the chairs between panels. Reading Diane Ravitch's article, though, I realized that the panels are not sequential, but rather represent answers to the multiple-choice question of education reform. It's a nice gloss on the article, which confronts the notion that merely choosing to reform a failing system is enough and never mind what part of the system should change. I read White's use of chairs to signify the choices as an allusion to deck chair rearrangement on the Titanic, but maybe I'm just cynical-minded. Clever enough illo, in any case.
 

"A Family Tree in Every Gene," 3/14/05

Contrary to the usual nytimes.com style, today's drawing by Christophe Vorlet is not available for viewing at large size, only at the smaller, spot illo size. I don't know if this is because the illo is small enough that enlargement doesn't add anything, or generic enough that we're being discouraged from looking at it closely. I guess it's an OK accompaniment to an article about genetics and race, but it could just as easily be about psychoanalysis or identity theft tracking or baldness. It's an unfortunate missed opportunity, because the article is quite dense and challenging. (Haven't seen the print layout, though. Maybe there just wasn't enough space for a more interesting piece of art.)