I created these images for an educational platform for middle grades on Phase Changes (the process through which substances change from a solid to a liquid to a gas). The material lends itself to abstraction, but the art directors wanted to make sure the human element was still present.
For the unit on Phase Change, students are presented with a mystery about a lake on Jupiter’s moon, Titan. I wanted the unit art to convey the mystery and adventure of science in general, as well as give a hint about what the students will learn in particular(evaporation in this case).
The processes of science are so similar to the processes of art: look, look again, and look yet again. Change your mind, look closer, rethink your assumptions. And look again.
I created this illustration after I read about the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on black, brown, and Indigenous people. The disease doesn’t discriminate, but gives us a clear map of who is privileged enough to be able to work from home, to pay someone else to deliver groceries, to relocate out of the city, to access healthcare if they do fall ill. So populations who already have a higher rate of co-morbidities and consequently a higher risk of dying from the disease and who can least afford to get sick now shoulder Atlas’ burden: keeping our world running—delivering our packages and food, driving our cabs and subways—while risking exposure to COVID 19.
Scientists had long thought the story of trees was one of competition for scarce resources, but new research shows they communicate and cooperate using networks of fungi. Under the ground, fungal threads connect almost every tree in the forest, regardless of species so trees can share resources.
Solar geoengineering is a possible solution to artificially cool the planet that scientists had long rejected. We would inject a layer of particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays back into space. I find the scale of the solution and possible unintended consequences really frightening, but the consensus for smaller-scale and less drastic approaches has never seemed further away.
Scientists now think whale beaching might correlate with sunspot activity. While they can’t yet draw a definitive conclusion, they hypothesize that sunspots create electromagnetic distortions that interfere with the way whales navigate.
A fun aspect of my work with Juilliard is occasionally being asked to submit designs for a program. In this case, the Drama students were performing Sophocles’ bloody tale of vengeance and guilt, The Oresteia. I love the Ancient Greeks and their bloodthirsty, elemental stories and myths. I wanted to capture Orestes pursued and driven mad by his guilt and the personification of that guilt, The Furies.
I did a typographical treatment as well, hoping to capture that same feeling: the blood, the madness, no escape! I did a red (I couldn’t resist), but also a black and white one for that stark graphic effect.
This Spanish-language e-book is a playful introduction to the internal structures and organs of the body for kindergartners. The e-book uses the sounds the body makes to introduce the organs and explain their function. I wanted to use a super-saturated color palette since this e-book is aimed at very young children. Although I created this book digitally, my art director, Julia Sverchuk, asked me for a hand-made feeling in the illustrations, as if I were using felt and thread instead of vector shapes.
This overview of the body and its music needed a conductor, to ensure all its systems work in concert.
I loved creating this image of the muscles of the face working with the teeth and tongue to create a whistling sound.
New York City went on lockdown for several weeks in March 2020. This is my visual diary from that time. For me, since I am privileged to be able to stay home and work, it mainly meant a turning inward to examine my own emotional state, as well as some bittersweet reminiscing about my pre-pandemic world.
During the first few weeks of lockdown, I started to feel like a ghost haunting the apartment, going around and around in a circle doing all the things I would normally leave the house to do. Eating, socializing, dancing all happened at home, in the same 600 square feet.
One thing I really miss from pre-Corona times is dancing in a big, sweaty crowd.
Any social interactions during the lockdown have moved online, mostly to Zoom. Without Zoom, I would be completely isolated, but it’s nothing like seeing people face to face. The tiny delays, the freezes, the graininess of the image quality, the general feeling that we’re not quite connecting, it’s all very isolating, even when it’s the only way we can be together.
During lockdown, all my emotions are much more intense and harder to manage. I feel overwhelmed by the bad feelings and sometimes even the good.
I noticed how often the news has been giving us feel-good stories, and how easily moved I am to tears by them. While my tears usually start out pretty happy, darker feelings often take over.
The last of The Weather Inside. This is me choosing sometimes to ignore the news of the day and dive into escapism: books, art, movies, anything that takes me away. I remember seeing Matisse’s Swimmers at the Met a few years ago and reading some exhibition text that pointed out that he was creating all that joy and beauty during the war. It’s not that he was ignoring the death and devastation around him, but acknowledging that we need joy and beauty even more to survive in bleak times. The first is Floating Around and the second is Diving Down into the things that are giving me some solace in this moment.
I started sending out Lunar New Year postcards a few years ago as a promotional piece. I love crafting my own take on the lunar animal every year and playing with different materials and processes. Each year, I take a different approach, sometimes more minimal and design-oriented, and sometimes maximalist and colorful, depending on how I’m feeling that year.
This was my Year of the Rat image, memified, to reference the hungry rat that stole our hearts while dragging a pizza up the subway stairs!
I love creating illustrations for books. Since I read a lot, it's an inexhaustible resource for inspiration.
I couldn’t decide which character should take precedence: the mysterious man who disappears, or the opaque, frustrating narrator who searched for him. See more about my process here.
I created illustrations for some Amplify e-books that are currently in elementary schools. One of the main directions overall was that each book should have a distinct look, as if a different illustrator created them.
Art direction: Julia Sverchuk
This illustration features James as he and a fellow British soldier patrol Colonial Boston harbor in a rowboat.
The cover for the Volcanoes e-book. I had a lot of fun with this illustration, done in pastel on black board.
This illustration features the baker’s boy Christopher in Colonial Boston. This image had to capture the setting as well as Christopher’s resentment at the British soldiers quartered in Boston.
An illustration depicting Mount Fuji, Japan’s famous volcano, for the e-book Volcanoes.
This illustration centers on Betsy, the slave of a tailor in Colonial Boston. As she overhears the tailor and his friend discussing their plans for a revolution, Betsy wonders about her place in their plan for a new country. I wanted to capture Betsy’s hopes and doubts in my depiction.
This illustration shows Einar confronting the villain Asger as his sister looks on.
In this illustration, Einar searches his Aunt Olga’s bag for the missing scimitar, much to his aunt’s chagrin.
Misha is a little boy who finds himself mysteriously transformed into a fox.
A little girl falls asleep on the way to the amusement park and has a dream heavily influenced by the unicorn tapestries.
Between 2017 and 2019, I attended and reportaged many protests against the policies of the Trump Administration. I was heartened and inspired by my fellow New Yorkers' steadfast and joyous resistance and their willingness to show up for each other.
Drawn on location at the Families Belong Together march protesting the immigration policy of family separation. The march began in Foley Square and crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, where I drew this.
Drawn on locationJanuary 29, 2017 at Battery Park in New York City, New Yorkers protested the first "Muslim Ban"—Trump's first executive order attempting to restrict people entering the US based on the religion of their country of origin.
Who doesn't love a dance party-protest? This was a protest against Attorney General Jeff Sessions' rescinding of an Obama administration memo that protected transgender students in schools with binary and gendered bathroom and locker room facilities. Drawn on location on February 26, 2017 just outside Trump Tower in midtown Manhattan.
Drawn on March 25, 2017 during the People for Free Press Rally and March that started in Bryant Park and marched to the New York Times building in support of the free press.
Another one from the Queer and Trans Dace Party-Protest, from when the MAGA dudes tried to join the dancing.
Drawn on February 4, 2017 at an LGBT rally in solidarity with the Muslim, immigrant, and asylum-seekers community outside the Stonewall Inn.
From January 29, 2017 Battery Park City protest against the first Muslim Ban.
Drawn on April 29, 2017 at the 100 Days of Failure rally to mark Trump's first 100 days in office. Every protest draws a few to a dozen very vocal Trump supporters. They are very interesting to draw as they're always very theatrical.
From January 29, 2017 Battery Park City protest against the first Muslim Ban.
Drawn at the People for a Free Press Rally and March
Drawn on February 4, 2017 at an LGBT rally in solidarity with the Muslim, immigrant, and asylum-seekers community outside the Stonewall Inn.
Drawn on April 29, 2017 at the 100 Days of Failure rally to mark Trump's first 100 days in office.
People are among my favorite subjects to draw. I try to get a likeness, of course, but what I try for even more is the feelings they give me from what I know about them—from what they’ve written or said. Or if I draw them from life, I consider their way of talking, their expressions, and gestures, all the cues that express who they are beneath their externals.
How many times have I read Jane Eyre? That would be really, really hard to say.
I made this portrait after watching I Am Not Your Negro, and then going down the rabbit hole on Youtube, watching interview after interview of James Baldwin speaking truth to power in a million different iterations. His sensitivity, his moral clarity, and the ferocity with which he wielded his myriad gifts left me in awe.
I'm often inspired by things I read. In a Letters of Note post about Helen Keller's impressions at the top of the Empire State Building. She wrote that, there, at the top of what was then the tallest building in the world, she had a vision of the universe.
There was the Hudson – more like the flash of a sword-blade than a noble river. The little island of Manhattan, set like a jewel in its nest of rainbow waters, stared up into my face, and the solar system circled about my head! Why, I thought, the sun and the stars are suburbs of New York, and I never knew it! I had a sort of wild desire to invest in a bit of real estate on one of the planets. All sense of depression and hard times vanished, I felt like being frivolous with the stars.
One of the joys of drawing people is trying to use all the graphic tools at my disposal to convey not just what a person looks like, but their life experience, what it's like to be in their presence. This man had clearly been through good times and bad, and I tried to convey the impression he gave me of enduring all things, and surviving with warmth and humor intact.
Friends of mine during a crit.
I created these illustrations for Amplify, a company that makes educational games for pre-literate children. Since the target audience can’t read yet, each one has to be very visually and conceptually clear.
Art direction: Julia Sverchuk
Sometimes, it’s as simple as defining a word. I looked to playing cards for inspiration on this one.
Players have to put the three pictures into a sequence. In this case, the sequence is: bears fatten up in the fall, hibernate in the winter, and wake in the spring.
Another sequencing set. In this one, the chicken is brought home in the first, lays an egg in the second, and then the egg is fried up in the third.
Another one from the sequencing game. Number one is planting seeds, number two is caring for small plants (and being patient), and number three is enjoying the sunflowers.
In this game, players have to discern the degrees of difference between words that can be put into a sequence. In this case, our mice start out having a difference, which turns into a disagreement, and then a squabble, which then escalates into a fight, and finally a brawl.
Another one where players learn about the nuance of words. In this case, the sequence is adore, admire, favor, dislike, and hate.
I'm lucky enough to live in the greatest city on the planet, where scenes and people to draw are just outside my door. And sometimes I visit other places.
A reportage of the restoration of the last wooden whaling ship in existence, the Charles W. Morgan at Mystic Seaport Museum of America and the Sea. I was privileged to take part in a show, Restoring a Past, Charting a Future at the Seaport in 2013 with the Dalvero Academy. Watching and documenting the restoration of this venerated whaler was a real joy.
This is the piece on view at Dalvero Academy's show, Journey of Transformation at Mystic Seaport.
Whales are the largest mammals yet live their lives unseen, to their detriment and ours: if we could more easily see them, perhaps their survival might be more urgent to us. When we do catch a glimpse of one, it’s impossible not to be moved.
In my piece, “sea change” refers to the change in the ocean over the past two hundred years. The whales have suffered these changes: first, from whaling and today from other survival challenges created by humans. “Sea change” also refers to Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest, in which the ocean transforms the substance of the body into riches. As the sea changes eyes to pearls, bones to coral in the song, so we changed the substance of the whales’ bodies into commodities.
I hope that my piece makes visible that lost, uncommodifiable richness and inspires connection with the whales that still remain.
Workers touching up the hull of the Charles W. Morgan near the completion of the restoration.
The Mystic Seaport Magazine chose my piece for the cover of their quarterly magazine to let their readers know about the Dalvero Academy show Restoring a Past, Charting a Future.
The Charles W. Morgan surrounded by scaffolding.
A portrait of Quentin Snediker, the Shipyard Director at Mystic Seaport Museum of America and the Sea.
In late 2014, I documented some of the Black Lives Matter protests in New York City that followed the deaths of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice by the police. These drawings were made on location during the protests and appeared in a show about reportage illustration at the University of the West of England.
Drawing on site is always a chance to experiment. You can never predict what will happen, who will wander into your drawing, so you're forced to react honestly, from observation.
I made this drawing on location in New London while the crew were bending on the sails in New London. It was a flurry of activity that involved perching on a line (a sheet, I guess they call it) under them, leaning against a spar, sometimes climbing up onto the spar. They all had to work together since the sails were too big for any one person to handle. It was, at all times, a five-person job.
I made this drawing at Mystic Seaport in the blacksmith’s shop.
I drew this on location in Boston when the Charles W. Morgan made a stop there on her historic 38th Voyage. I had thought the Morgan quite a large ship until I saw her next to the behemoth that is the Constitution.
