There is a 1997 video clip of a crowd of these men milling about, with a small, fearful shape making its way behind them, toward the exit. They are blob-faced, with bad posture and changeable features. Chast’s are defined, if anything, by their amorphousness. Most cartoonists have specific-looking characters. I doubt these men knew what to make of young Roz and her drawings. I imagine her wading through a sea of older Jewish men, the career gag cartoonists, many of whom had cut their teeth writing for Charles Addams and now traveled the weekly cartoon circuit- The New Yorker, Playboy, there were others. She came to Manhattan after college with a portfolio full of cartoons and no backup plan. She went away to college at sixteen, first to Kirkland College in upstate New York, and then to the Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied painting and was benignly ignored by her peers and professors. An only child, she grew up with her mother-an intensely decisive assistant principal-and her father-a sweetly anxious French and Spanish teacher who couldn’t screw in a light bulb. Chast, who draws with Rapidograph pens and then adds watercolor, is the same way-she is a details person, as delighted by the gratuitous joke in the title of a book in the background of a cartoon as by the slam-dunk punch line in the caption.Ĭhast was born in 1954 in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Chast’s cartoons-populated by disgruntled men horrible storefronts dumb, square-toothed horses gourmandizing pigeons bottom-of-the-barrel bourgeoisie in optimistic little hats-are, at their heart, about deeper things: loneliness, family, the impossibility of maintaining order, and the batshit, bonkers ridiculousness of life.Ĭhast once described William Steig as “not a minimalist”-an artist for whom every sofa, wall, and shirt was a blank canvas on which to explore pattern and color. Her pictures are not illustrations of the things she’s saying but story itself. But she is a nonlinear and deeply visual thinker, equally likely to deploy line and color as a string of words to tell her stories. Chast lands in the storyteller camp, because the story is what she cares about most. One can divide comics artists into two categories: storytellers, who use drawings in service of their narratives, and illustrators, who take care with things like intricate, full-color cityscapes, and whose work is read with the part of the brain used for looking at paintings. And, of course, if something isn’t funny, it isn’t true. To her, the truth, even in its barbarism, is screamingly funny. I don’t think it has once occurred to Roz Chast that truth can possibly exist outside of funniness. There’s a certain type of comedy in which the comedian will examine and even dismantle a joke in service of the truth. Photo courtesy of Roz Chast, with thanks to Blow Up Lab in San Francisco. Donna Stonecipher The Ruins of Nostalgia 42Ĭhast in Washington Square Park, New York City, 1966.Donna Stonecipher The Ruins of Nostalgia 23.Donna Stonecipher The Ruins of Nostalgia 21.Donna Stonecipher The Ruins of Nostalgia 7.Ezra Pound “Hast thou 2 loaves of bread … ”.Ange Mlinko Amor (“Farai Un Vers De Dreyt Nien.Patrick Mackie Couples in the Death of Winter.Patrick Mackie A Set of Limericks with a Coda For John Ashbery.Peter Gizzi Speech Acts for a Dying World.Maxine Groffsky The Art of Editing No.Dany Laferrière The Art of Fiction No.Malcolm Gladwell & Michael Lewis Storytelling: An Exchange. More from Issue 222, Fall 2017 Buy this issue!
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