Illo Watch

"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.