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Posts tagged "william steig"
Steig’s drawings seem to flow effortlessly from his mind to his pen and onto the paper. I doubt he ever looked at a blank sheet and thought, “I have nothing worthwhile to say today,” or “I can’t draw a car as well as Joe Shmoe, so why don’t I crawl back into bed and wait for the day to be over.” Steig gave himself permission to be playful and experimental. One of the many wonderful things about looking at his drawings is their message, especially to his fellow artists: Draw what you love and what interests you. Draw it how you want to draw it. When we are children we do this instinctively. But somewhere in our passage from childhood to adulthood, the ability to be truly and fearlessly creative is often lost. To quote Pablo Picasso, Steig’s favorite artist, “All children are artists. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
Steig is one of my favorites—Chast’s essay is from a new book on his work, Cats, Dogs, Men, Women, Ninnies & Clowns: The Lost Art of William Steig
The Original Shrek by William Steig
This week we’re celebrating William Steig, New Yorker cartoonist and children’s-book creator extraordinaire. One of his most famous characters has taken on such a life of his own that most people are completely unaware that he originally hatched from a book. Shrek, that putrid-green orge who pretends to be scary but really is a big old softie at heart, is about to star in his fourth movie and is making it big on Broadway as well. But Steig’s Shrek is neither cartoony nor cuddly: he’s one nasty mofo, and he’s proud of it.
Speaking of Pictures: William Steig « Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog
Over at Hairy Green Eyeball you’ll find some William Steig scans from a 1946 issue of LIFE Magazine and Steig’s 1963 book Continuous Performance, in which his drawings were done in the style of a child: William Steig’s Search for Time Lost
For over 40 years this book has both perplexed and excited its young and old readers, offering challenges and frustrations with a satisfying punch line. In the original Windmill paperback edition a summary of the book reads as follows: “Letters and words are used to create the sounds of words and simple sentences 4 u 2 figure out with the aid of illustrations.”
Examines the Steig “of the middle years” who drew the dark “symbolic drawings” of About People and The Lonely People.
Steig was going into the interior, and it changed him. In the three years between About People (his first collection of symbolic drawings) and The Lonely Ones, Steig’s lines loosened. He gave up the heavy gray shadows that gave his figures solidity; he spent much less time worrying about backgrounds. His drawings stopped looking like those of his contemporary, Charles Addams, and began, for all their allusions to Picasso and the Surrealists, to look like the drawings of Steig.
WILLIAM STEIG, ABOUT PEOPLE (1939)
Bad photocopies of a few pages of the cartoonist William Steig’s delightfully weird and sadly out-of-print About People:
From Steig’s obituary:
In the mid-1930’s, Mr. Steig began making ”symbolic drawings,” pen-and-ink works expressing states of mind. Like the poems of E. E. Cummings, they were subconscious excursions rendered on paper. When these drawings came out, nobody had seen anything quite like them.
…in 1936, Mr. Steig started making his ”symbolic drawings,” line drawings of people enduring shame, embarrassment and other emotional troubles. He drew kleptomaniacs, amnesiacs, people with nausea and lassitude, and less defined characters like the ”one who would like to be left alone” or the ”pleasant chap but never a friend.”
But when Mr. Steig showed his symbolic drawings to The New Yorker, Mr. Lorenz recalled, the magazine was not interested. A memo written by Harold Ross, the editor, noted that the drawings were very interesting and that someday people would hail him as a genius, but that they were not right for The New Yorker. They were simply, Mr. Lorenz said, ”too personal and not funny enough.” (This changed when William Shawn took over as the editor of The New Yorker in 1952.)
Mr. Steig published his symbolic drawings in ”About People,” (1939) ”The Lonely Ones” (1942) and ”All Embarrassed” (1944), books that were praised by Margaret Mead and the psychoanalysts Karen Horney and A. A. Brill.
