Chris Gash

This is the most recent illustration I did for The New York Times Book Review, from last month:

For illustration, the Book Review is an institution.   Every Sunday when I was a student, I would get the paper and check there first to see who was working – Niemann, Mirko, Richard McGuire, Boris Kulikov, Robert Grossman’s color spots on the back page; it was a ritual.  In addition to (and on occasion, instead of) whatever academic tasks I had on my desk, I would take selections each week from the Book Review to illustrate, my own extracurricular job training.  It seemed so mysterious to me then, as if it had its own esoteric style, not illustration style per se, but a methodology, and one that seemed more abstract in terms of the relationship between word and image.  Whether that assessment was an accurate one or not, it is how I have approached the assignments, and why I’ve enjoyed working for them so much over the past ten years.

In August of 2000, I made the call to show my book to Steve Heller.  I hadn’t yet done a single drop-off or seen anyone else.  It seemed like a grand tradition of illustration to begin my career (hopefully) in Heller’s office.  Normally, a situation like that will cause me to perspire at a rate that some people can find alarming, but the whole thing took just short of a minute, and the speed with which he flipped through my portfolio pages turned up a breeze that kept me from looking undignified.  When I stepped outside the offices of The Times, I realized the difference between wanting an illustration assignment and actually getting one that was due in 48 hours; ‘holy crap’ sums up that feeling pretty nicely, I think.  (Quick side note: Heller never wanted sketches; you just edited yourself and went straight to final, and only then did you find out if you had succeeded.)

(Quick other side note: 48 hours now seems like a reasonably cushy schedule.)

Two days later I hand-delivered this to Steve’s office, my first-ever pro work:

Success!  Phew.

What I have loved all along was the feeling that I could try something out of my usual repertory if the assignment called for it, like this for a book about a woman’s family history and their traditions of quilting:

Later, after the Book Review went to full color, I did this simpler, narrative treatment for a book about the treacherous crossings during the American westward expansion:

That was one of the last assignments I did for Steve before he passed the torch to Nicholas Blechman.  I was never a regular like some of the artists who worked the Book Review weekly, but whenever I had time, I would check in with Heller to see if something was available, and Nicholas agreed to keep that arrangement.

The first assignment I did for Nicholas was for a novel about a high school teacher in Las Vegas who also drove prostitutes to their appointments, eventually ending up driving one of his own students:

This image for me is very much at the heart of what I love about the Book Review.  It’s a very different process for me to get to the end result, and I suppose that has to do with the content and how different it is from a business or technology magazine, but there also seems to be an illustration culture there, and whether I am romanticizing it or not, I always felt as if I could do something uncommon.

This one was for a book about a sportswriter with an unorthodox style; he traveled to India to cover a cricket match but spent most of his word-count chronicling his hotel room’s tick infestation:

These last two are more recent; in fact, they preceded the image at the beginning of this post.  This first one was a smaller spot for a mystery novel:

The second (and one of my all-time favorite images for the Book Review) was for a book about two Cold War British children who coped with their mother’s death by pretending she was a communist spy who was actually picked up by authorities:

To date, the Book Review continues to be a place I look to see great illustration, illustration that I find exciting.  While the mystery of being on the outside looking in may be gone, each assignment still feels as new and challenging to me as the first – and that’s saying something.