Quick Review

New York Drawings by Adrian Tomine

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I draw a little.  Nothing all that expert or polished, just doodles mostly, and some caricatures; pencil stuff.  The point of most if not quite all of it, for me, is to amuse: first myself, obviously, then my friends and finally the few other people who might ever actually see something I've drawn.  I've never studied either drawing or art, though I shouldn't mind taking a life-study class someday.  Something I've always meant to do.

Doesn't mean I haven't poured over other people's stuff with something like an appraising eye, looking to understand what they do, often as not, so much better than I ever might.  I've been losing myself in other people's drawings since I got hold of my first OZ book and disappeared into the world created as much for me by the illustrations of the great John R. Neill as by L. Frank Baum.  I sat copying those pictures of Jack Pumpkinhead and the Patchwork Girl by the hour. Now that I've settled heavily into middle age, I'm comfortable within my limitations, but there is still a very particular style of witty realism, something I've come to identify specifically with the New Yorker magazine, and even more specifically with Adrian Tomine, that I can not help but envy.  Is there anyone alive with a better eye and ear for a subway passenger or a telling moment on the platform?  Anyone with this economy of frame, anyone who can so effortlessly delineate character in five, three, two thick black brush-lines, use such perfectly true, perfectly tasteful and spare watercoloring to create both life and depth in even the simplest drawing?

Adrian Tomine is at pains at various points in this glorious new book to remind the viewer that he is still, first and foremost a cartoonist.  There are a few traditional, multi-panelled strips here -- all with distinctly New York gags, and all good.  I have to say though, I'd almost rather they weren't.  I admire Tomine's Optic Nerve enormously, but it's really just here, in his article illustrations, his witty covers, his spot illustrations for Talk of the Town, and most of all in his notebook sketches that I stand in complete awe of his incomparable taste and talent.

Taste seems a strange thing to admire in a contemporary cartoonist, but there it is.  For me, this has little or nothing to do with subject -- though there must be some influence admitted there as well -- and nearly all to do with the kind of discrimination that respects the weight of the frame, placement, necessity, color, wit.  Look at even one of the artist's more obvious covers: the owner of the little bookshop stepping out just in time to see his neighbor accepting her Amazon.com order from the UPS man.  Nothing is extraneous, nothing overdone, and yet there is such a beautifully controlled, and apt use of color, such clean and expressive use of the space, the street, the reactions.  Subtlety doesn't cover this kind of thing.  The joke isn't all that subtle -- likewise another favorite cover, the beautiful ice cream truck in the snow.  Either might as easily be a classic New Yorker cartoon from any number of other, cruder artists.  But Tomine isn't that guy.  Everything about his covers suggest an artist at the top of his form, masterfully aware of what does and does not matter pictorially and editorially, what will be both right and beautiful.

I really do wish I could do even a few of the things Adrian Tomine seems to do now all but automatically.  I don't think I ever could.  All i can do is be grateful for this beautifully made book which gathers up so much of the stuff of his that I love best.  I'm lost in Adrian Tomine's New York, a place every bit as beautiful and magical to me as OZ.



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