Studio360 | New Yorker Cover Illustrator Barry Blitt
Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen
PRX
4.6 • 675 Ratings
🗓️ 1 December 2017
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Illustrator and political cartoonist Barry Blitt is best known for his New Yorker covers. Over the past three decades, he’s paired his signature ink and watercolors with his dry wit. This past fall he published a beautiful coffee-table book that’s a retrospective of his most memorable work.
Blitt invited Studio 360 to meet him at his home in Connecticut—which happens to be the former home of Arthur Miller—for a walk-though of his home studio, creative process, and some of his most iconic illustrations. “What you're looking for is life in the line” he says about finding his finished product, “sometimes you'll do a drawing that doesn't look enough like Hillary and you draw it a second time the second time it looks more like her but the first time there was some magic or discovery in the actual line work and it's better drawing and that's the one you use.”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From PRX. |
| 0:07.5 | Studio 360. |
| 0:14.8 | I am a big fan of illustration, |
| 0:19.9 | magazines, newspapers, wherever. And Barry Blit is one of my favorite |
| 0:25.8 | illustrators. When I was editing Spy Magazine 25 years ago, I loved commissioning him to |
| 0:31.3 | create these witty and charming watercolor and ink pictures. And since then, Barry has become one of the main cover artists for the New Yorker. |
| 0:40.3 | Even though Barry contributed to Spy and I was a New Yorker staff writer for a few years in the 90s, |
| 0:46.3 | we'd never actually met. |
| 0:48.3 | Since he's just published a beautiful coffee table book retrospective of his greatest hits, we decided that |
| 0:55.5 | was a good pretext for finally getting together. Barry's from Canada, but he lives and works |
| 1:01.1 | in a house in a bucolic little town in northwest Connecticut. About a two-hour drive north |
| 1:06.3 | of New York City. Turning off the highway, my producers and I drove down this winding dirt road through the woods, |
| 1:13.9 | and at the top of a little hill is the home of Barry Blit, which also happens to be the former home |
| 1:22.0 | back in the 1950s of Arthur Miller. |
| 1:27.1 | Hello, Barry Gluck. |
| 1:28.2 | I'm going to meet you. |
| 1:29.8 | That's going to meet you. |
| 1:30.5 | Thank you. |
| 1:35.2 | Past the kitchen and living room, Barry walked us to the back of his house. |
| 1:40.1 | This is a beautiful little studio with a big drawing desk that looks, if I were the production designer for a movie about an artist or an illustrator, this is how I would prop it. |
| 1:51.1 | It looks perfect. |
| 1:52.2 | I mean... |
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