A dispatch from our Art Editor on the art and illustrations in the Review’s July 18 issue.
We closed our annual Fiction Issue while I was on the West Coast. Between checking layouts and getting illustration revisions, my hosts and I swam in Scotts Flat Lake and made strawberry milkshakes. One day we took the train from Colfax to Truckee, which crosses the Donner Pass.
Painting from a moving vehicle is my version of painting en plein air. I love the perspective from the passenger seat in a car—I recently published a book in Germany collecting some of the work I’ve made in automobiles. On Amtrak’s California Zephyr, I painted from our upper-level seats, looking out over Donner Lake as we crossed the pass where, during the winter of 1846–1847, eighty-seven ill-fated pioneers were forced to resort to cannibalism and murder after their wagons were snowbound. Forty-eight survived.
As my traveling companions got snacks and seats in the observation car, I got out my paint and sketched the landscape out my window, my paper and supplies covering two tray tables.
The cover of the Fiction Issue gets the fully illustrated treatment. and I was happy to finally work with Iris de Moüy, a Parisian artist whose loose and energetic style I’ve been admiring for years. Last week I got to interview her about the cover, horses, Colette’s diaries, and the Paris Olympics.
Inside, we were excited to publish new fiction by Mohamed Mbougar Sarr and Helen DeWitt, and I decided to illustrate their stories with fine art. For Sarr’s, I chose a beautifully dark waterside painting by the Polish artist Malgorzata Maj, whose Instagram feed was sent to me last year by Jon Klassen. The art had to be selected before the English translation of the story arrived, and since my French is only comme si, comme ça, I went on an editor’s suggestion of “waves dying on a deserted beach, gorgeously.”
After reading DeWitt’s story, much of which takes place in a Manhattan Dunkin’ Donuts, I looked up the artist Dike Blair, recalling his tabletops and diner scenes. To my delight, he had done two paintings of Dunkin’ interiors. (Fun fact: Lucia DeRespinis, the woman who designed the Dunkin’ logo in 1976, is giving a talk at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum on July 20). For Michael Gorra’s review of Percival Everett’s new book, James, I asked Zack Rosebrugh for a portrait. He gave us a seated Everett against a gridded background. As usual, Rosebrugh’s palette was unexpected and charming.
I love when Tom Bachtell draws Trump, so I immediately thought of him for Fintan O’Toole’s essay on the former president’s frenemies. Bachtell took inspiration from O’Toole’s reference to Plato’s description of the friendlessness of the tyrant, and included a tiny pile of corpses behind the toga-clad Trump, Chris Christie, Rudy Giuliani, and Roy Cohn.
The London-based illustrator Ruby Ash wrote me out of the blue, and I decided to try her out on Natasha Wimmer’s review of Ángel Bonomini’s The Novices of Lerna. Like Bachtell, Ash did a close read of the text to find a springboard. She wrote to me: “I was inspired by the descriptions of his writing as having a dreamlike quality. This sentence in particular: ‘his stories—even the darkest ones—have a distinct sweetness of tone, and a fair number are flower- and star-bedecked.’ The warm late afternoon glow with a shadow of a floral across his face is a suggestion of the cozy and luminous quality of his work.”
For Yuri Slezkine on two hundred years of Russian novelists, we plumbed our archive of David Levine drawings for a Tolstoy and a Chekhov. When we republish Levine’s work, it can feel like eating off beloved heirloom china or using a piece of furniture that’s been in the family for generations. The ever-wonderful Michelle Mildenberg made a sharp likeness of Tommy Orange for Francine Prose’s review of his books There There and Wandering Stars. Her palette of blues contrasted well with Rosebrugh’s and Ash’s portraits.
For Kenneth Roth’s essay about the war crimes that have been committed in Gaza, one of our editors, Nawal Arjini, found an evocative 2015 painting by the Palestinian artist Tayseer Barakat, titled Conversation.
Finally, the slightly Sergeant Pepper–ish series art in the issue was drawn by the Barcelona-based Georgie McAusland. She called them “Trimmings.”
The landscapes from the train were gorgeous, but reading about starvation in Gaza before lunch and then eating our overpriced grilled cheese sandwiches in the comfortable dining car while crossing the tragic Donner Pass left plenty of room to despair at the human condition.
