 The cartoonist and author Liana Finck drew the cover of our Summer Issue this year, expanding on her usual anxious black line to give us a lurid, saturated landscape of peril and threat, which she titled Why can’t you just relax? Sometime around 2018 I started to notice—and love—Finck’s wonderful drawings and cartoons, mainly in The New Yorker but also in our pages, where she has written and illustrated cartoons about the Met, Michelangelo, and the art of observing. I finally introduced myself to her at a show of her drawings on the Lower East Side, and she soon made an appearance as a character in a ghost story I wrote for a 2019 collection.  Liana Finck; photograph by Jorge Colombo In addition to her illustrations, which have also appeared in The Atlantic, New York magazine, and The New York Times, Finck is the author and illustrator of seven books, including A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York (2014), Let There Be Light: The Real Story of Her Creation (2022), and, out this year, the children’s book Mixed Feelings. Last week, I wrote to Finck to ask her about color, line, and what drives her nuts. Leanne Shapton: I love your title for our cover. Have you ever been asked the question, Why can’t you just relax? Liana Finck: Oh yes. My favorite ways to relax are working and running. How has your summer been, and how have you kept your cool, physically and psychologically, in this climate? It’s been a surprise, after a spring that felt like it lasted a year. I moved and had a second baby in March and have been adapting slowly, in layers. Suddenly it’s summer, and has been for over a month?? It’s hot! Every morning I put sunscreen on myself and my son, but thankfully not on the dog. We just hired a nanny last week—I’m surprised and grateful to have my time back. What drives you nuts? Clutter, dirt, noise, wasting time, being bored, uncertainty, people standing too close, being looked at, having to do things, sitting still, not knowing when something will end, high noon, meetings, surprises, fascism. What did you read and look at as a child? My first love was kids’ books. I remember reading Sayonara, Mrs. Kackleman by Maira Kalman around the time it came out—was I four?—and being blown away that a writer could talk so directly to a reader. I was a poetry-reading tween—mostly Mark Strand—and was obsessed with lots of things as a teenager: Roz Chast, Proust, Kafka, Cézanne, Dan Clowes, David Lynch. A lot of men; it gave me an eating disorder trying to be like the mysterious, alluring women in their stories. I will say in my defense that I have the emotional intelligence of a toddler. My favorite writer was, and still is, Nabokov.  It’s nice to see you use a lot of color, as so much of your output is black line work. Can you tell me about the colors and palettes that appeal to you, in both your work and your life? My mom, a painter, helped me with the color for this cover. She made it muted and a little less nightmarish. (The nightmarishness was intentional but off-putting—I initially had the grass as this poison green.) When it comes to color, I have an inner sense telling me how to do it, and I know when I don’t like something, but it’s rare that what comes out matches what I envisioned—and besides, I think my inner sense is too specific to make sense to others. Maybe I’m not much of a colorist. For this cover I was trying to channel a Tintin cover, both in lines and colors. I was working on the iPad, and iPad drawings remind me of Tintin. Color in life! I’m so fond of the way some artists use it. You really notice when it’s someone’s joy. How did you develop your sense of humor, and did it evolve parallel to your drawing style? My sense of humor is like Schrödinger’s cat. I’m not sure whether it’s there at all, or just a mislabeled fondness for morbidity. I love when other people are funny though. It always feels like a magic trick—playing with light. My brother is funny, and so is my husband. But I’m a pretty serious person, or at least a quiet one. What have you been you reading and watching lately? I’ve been watching the second season of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, speaking of people who are ambiguously funny. I didn’t think I could like anything more than the first season, but I think I like this one even better. I watch very little TV—maybe one show every year or two. In general, I don’t have much brain space to take stuff in. (Is this kind of media saturation a common problem these days? It frightens me.) I’m reading Katie Fricas’s Checked Out—a new graphic memoir—it’s so good, joyful. It has brought me back to my own freewheeling days drawing, dating, and scraping by in the slightly less corporate New York of the 2010s. And speaking of color: wow. You should read it. You should all read comics! More by Liana Finck at nybooks.com Rear Window“I’ve named the dog Walt, for now at least. I’m not very good with names. I️ feel like things are embodied completely by their physical forms — this deep, patently false belief is one of the many problematic things about us cartoonists — and a name just adds another, confusing, wholly unnecessary dimension. Names work best in fiction, when there are no images. The names are the images. That said, I’ve named the woman—Walt’s owner—Jasmine.”  A Sketched Guide to MichelangeloThe Michelangelo show at the Met is a conundrum. On the one hand, the work is for the most part so private. On the other hand, the show is a blockbuster, full to the brim with the kinds of people who go to big name museum shows.  The Artist’s ClosetEvery Friday night I go to the Met to draw. For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the Review’s website. And let us know what you think: send your comments to editor@nybooks.com; we do write back.  Save $168 on an inspired pairing! |
sábado, 23 de agosto de 2025
Color in Life!
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