These strange times have us seeking companionship in strange ways. In his latest cover, Adrian Tomine, an astute observer of social mores, finds the humor in our increasingly digital search for love. We recently talked to the artist about Zoom lighting, artistic technique, and more.
Your work tends toward concision, yet a big part of the pleasure in this cover is the accumulation of details. Was that difficult to achieve?
For better or worse, I’ve developed a fairly specific, detailed illustration style, and there’s no real shorthand for a messy room. Once I realized that I would actually have to draw all the things that would telegraph that messiness, I got a little obsessive about cataloguing artifacts from daily pandemic life. I have a feeling that, years from now, I might look back at this cover and have a kind of P.T.S.D. reaction to something as insignificant as a bottle of hand sanitizer.
You have a distinctive palette of muted, neutral tones, yet you’ve still managed to highlight your subject against the background. How important is light in your compositions?
I’ve wasted an insane amount of time thinking about lighting in Zoom meetings, so it seemed fitting that it would be central to this image. I’d love to be one of those effortlessly beautiful people who can just open their laptop in a dark room and look terrific, but, instead, I’m often rearranging entire rooms, running extension cords to various lighting sources, and scheduling meetings based on when I can get natural window light. Also, I was looking at Edward Hopper as I was working on this, and light was probably the most consistent thread that ran through his work.
You recently published a book, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist,” which makes a cameo on this cover. The book was very well received. Did the praise help you with the next project, or paralyze you?
Everything paralyzes me, whether it’s praise or criticism. Somehow I always find a way to carry on and to keep making things, but there’s literally no reaction to my work that I can’t twist into something to obsess over.
In your book, and in your New Yorker covers, you seem to home in on painful moments to find the humor in them. Do you experience a eureka moment when you locate that contradiction?
I think that’s a good way of putting it. To be honest, I don’t know how someone could get through life without being able to bask in that contradiction. In my personal life, I’ve often felt very moved by that act of finding humor in pain. If someone can authentically pull that off and be really funny, that’s worth more than a hundred words of earnest consolation to me.
I know you and your wife have been confined at home with two young children—but what’s with the cat? Is that from life or from your imagination?
That’s my tribute to our cats, Dolly and Pepper. Dolly passed away, unfortunately, but it felt nice to immortalize her in this way. I’ve drawn every other member of our household on the cover at some point, so it seemed only fair. (For the record, we keep the litter box in a much more socially distanced location.)
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