Drawing Words and Writing Pictures: An Appreciation of Maira Kalman
Designer and writer Frank Chimero salutes the methods and work of the legendary illustrator.
A lot of my job as a designer, writer, and illustrator is producing words and images, then finding interesting methods to merge them. I am always hungry for inspiration on ways to do this, but there are fewer examples than you’d expect. I will get to Maira Kalman and her books in a moment. First, I must ask a favor.
Go take a look at your bookshelf: most books are seas of text without pictures. When a book does have imagery, they are marooned onto their own page, or the text tiptoes alongside the image, reticent and scared of contact. Even this little post is guilty. Images and text are frequently described as natural partners, but there is very little intimacy in how they are treated. Like an old married couple, they sleep in separate beds.
Blending image and text requires a different kind of authorship. It can be done in teams, but I admire individuals who both write and draw to produce works completely their own. I’ve come to call it “drawing words and writing pictures.”
Now I will talk about Maira Kalman’s work.
In subject, everything is fair game with Kalman: dodos, presidents, dogs, numbers, teapots, Cheetos, the 18th century, last night. It is there, so why not? Once it’s all together, she plays with inversions to make everything fresh: the past can be immediate, the present viewed at a distance; the particular contains the universal, and our commonalities can be made curious and exotic. Sometimes I read her and think she is an alien, then I read more and come to realize I also want to be an alien—everything foreign, everything precious. Maira Kalman is the only person I would want to hear talk at length about a button.
Kalman lives at the happy confluence of memoir, journalism, comics, portraiture, and essay. She is Montaigne with a paintbrush. Her work embodies the diverse subject matter and blended presentation I aspire to in my own work: the text becomes image by her use of handwriting; the image becomes text in its specificity. It’s a natural union, because each part borrows from another part of the design.
Look again: there is a wholeness to the work, something you rarely see. Everything, no matter how disparate, fits together because it is part of this world and this life and expressed through the same hand and mind. If you feel this wholeness, its warmth will be familiar. It is the touch of genuine affection.
The art critic John Berger famously said that the opposite of love is not hate, but separation. Seeing and reading, drawing and writing — they all lead to their own kinds of thoughts. But by doing them together, perhaps we can imagine a bigger, kinder, more curious and commodious way of seeing this world. Maybe we could call it Kalmanesque.
Pitches, story ideas, and feedback welcome: submissions@magenta.as
