Abstract: The Art of Design

Part of this is I'm trying to figure out

some of the big picture things.

How aesthetically to tell your story.

And even before that, kind of what your story is, you know?

Roll, camera.

I've been thinking about

how we would kind of create the documentary.

And in my general state of anxiety right now, I came to this question:

Is this about me, or is this by me?

And you don't even see me drawing, right?

We don't. We're just seeing the top half of your head.

So you can act with your eyes.

When I design the experience for the viewer,

of course I want to come across as good as I possibly can.

'Cause we're vain and we have to be.

And if it's about me,

it's a little bit, just tug of war of how much do you make me reveal

and how much do I reveal of stuff that I might not want to reveal.

But, ultimately, it's not about me.

Be an artist.

Be an artist.

I would say everything that happens between nine and six

is about work.

I work mostly by myself.

So I sit at my desk and I draw and I design.

So I'm there,

and it's me and my art supplies and my computer and my coffee maker,

so it's kind of me, me, me.

I'm such a control freak that I would always love to sit down

and come up with the perfect formula for creating art.

But it doesn't work that way.

It's a little bit of a painful realization,

because, ultimately, it really is, to a very large degree,

staring at paper.

And I have to trust for kind of crazy moments to happen.

I would say that abstraction probably is, for me, the most important concept of art.

Where you say, "Oh, I'm just drawing a simple box,

because I love things that are not precious."

But it's the idea of, like, I start with a thousand different thoughts

and then I, one by one, throw them all out,

until, at the end, I have the one or two or three

that are essential to the whole question.

But the abstraction, for me,

is this idea of getting rid of everything that's not essential to making a point.

This thing here, it's called The Good Shape or The Good Form .

So I take this flatiron shape and I start doing things out of it.

Men, women,

bathroom, strongman, nuclear power plant,

cowboys and Indians,

all sorts of sports.

So what did your teachers make of you?

I had a very, very difficult teacher, Heinz Edelmann,

who did Yellow Submarine, The Beatles' movie,

and did amazing posters and book work.

Fantastic designer, but let's say he did not teach by encouragement.

The highest compliment that you could hope for was,

"Oh, we don't really have a problem with that."

That was like, "Yes!"

When I grew up in South Western Germany, I was always drawing.

It was all about getting action and proportion right.

Drawing things very dynamic.

And that was the goal.

To kind of get there, to this, like, hyperrealist, amazing painting.

And this is kind of the notion that I went to art school with.

But the teacher I had at art school, Mr. Edelmann,

he made it pretty clear that he really disliked this stuff that I was doing.

So I was drawing hundreds of sketches on just letter-sized paper,

and each week, he would come in and go through them

and basically say, "Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope."

"Oh, this one's okay!"

'Cause this is what we did in school.

Take a topic, like a red clown's nose,

and then just squeeze the hell out of it.

Just do every single variation.

Eventually, I realized that it's not about something super simple

like a black square or, like, one line.

But each idea requires a very specific amount of information.

Sometimes it's a lot: a lot of details, a lot of realism.

Sometimes it's really just this one line. The one pixel.

But each idea has one moment on that scale.

So, lets say you want to illustrate the idea of a heart as a symbol for love.

When you illustrate it, as just, like, a red square,

which is the ultimate abstraction of a heart,

nobody knows what you're talking about, so it totally falls flat.

When you go all the way realistic

and draw an actual heart made out of flesh and blood and pumping,

it's just so disgusting

that the last thing anybody would ever think about is love.

And somewhere between that abstract red square

and the real, kind of butchered heart,

is the graphic shape that kind of looks like that, and kind of looks like that,

and it's just right to transport this idea of a symbol for love.

New Yorker covers are the biggest deal for an illustrator, I think.

Once you see The New Yorker cover once,

you see the history, you see the artist,

you see, most importantly, I guess, the cultural impact.

This was my... This was the first one.

What was the date?

July 9, 2001, the day I got married.

Which is especially fantastic.

What I love is that this is what they put on the magazine.

There's no headline.

There's not even a story.

This was July 4, 2001. It was about the missile shield.

The Dr. Strangelovian generals who start World War Three.

There's no story about this idea inside the magazine.

It's almost like the stage is pulled empty and this is the image for one week.

The second cover might actually have been... this one.

And, to a strange degree, this might even be the most exciting one,

because the first cover of The New Yorker is the Eustace Tilley,

this New York dandy with a top hat.

And we said, "Let's try to do an icon of an icon."

Making the butterfly just a blue square, makes absolutely no sense

unless you know the original.

I've done 22, I think.

The thing is, I never even thought about 22.

You think that when you've done two or three,

all of a sudden it becomes, like, "Oh, it's just another job."

It's not, because it's extremely exciting, but it never becomes easy.

So tell me about this New Yorker cover you're working on.

I'm doing this virtual reality cover,

which... It's more like augmented reality.

So the idea is I have this magazine open, on the front or on the back,

now I approach it with my phone or with my tablet

and then this whole three-dimensional animation comes out.

And you're just like, "No way!"

There's a lot of kind of levels of metaphors and drawing to work.

And 3-D and 2-D and back and forth, and it's kind of like physical and...

And I also knew I couldn't plan.

I couldn't have one idea that just solves the entire thing.

I had to start somewhere and then say, "Okay, is this strong enough

or flexible enough to just go to the next step?"

So the magazine, in theory, opened like that.

But I don't look at a magazine like that,

I think nobody ever looks at a magazine like that.

So I thought, when I have a magazine, I might look at it like that,

so, really seeing it as the inside-outside world.

And I was thinking,

"What's... What's like a very New York inside/outside scene?"

I realized that a subway...

I have the windows, I have people sitting in there

and then the whole subway can be...

Yeah, that's the idea of the magazine

as the plane that the person walks through.

You can see it from the inside or from the outside.

It's a New York City cab, off-duty,

which you can see...

It's off-duty here.

This is... Let's make it busy.

This one's busy.

It looks better, though, all black and yellow.

My favorite colors.

It's the restriction with Lego,

the restriction of...

just very low resolution...

It's almost like a three-dimensional pixel drawing...

that I enjoy so much.

Why have you done so much New York work?

Well, it started with my connection.

It was the first city I went to by myself...

and I think there's only one city in your life that you go to by yourself...

and you own that.

There was no uncle, there were no parents that paved the way.

It was like my place.

I moved to New York in '97.

To my surprise, when I went there and showed my book,

I realized that people understood 99% of my work.

Going to a country that's a few thousand miles away,

and everybody gets everything is really amazing.

In a very odd way, I felt very much at home

just being so immersed in American culture as a kid.

From music, to art, Magnum P.I.

Staten Island Ferry.

If you've been on the Staten Island Ferry, you know that this is it.

This is the essence of this kind of first tourist moment.

For me, this style is based on culture, on shared experiences.

This is more interesting than coming up with a visionary new way of speaking

that people then have to decipher.

There's this one Starbucks, and I love sitting in that window,

and that's been a place I've been sitting at

from my very first time coming to New York.

I always felt like, "That's where I want to sit and kind of look out."

And I've, a couple of times, tried to work from there,

because that's how I see myself, you know,

like the artist being in touch with the city...

And then we have this kind of emotional exchange,

people walking by...

It doesn't work at all.

The impact on the work is zero.

It's even actually confusing, and I can't really focus when I sit there.

This is the moment where I realized

that kind of, like, my real life and my work life, they don't really mix.

I see what you're saying.

I'm just trying to kind of solve it from a visual storytelling point of view.

I mean, I guess, the way I see some of these things,

it's almost like these very quick montages of very close shots,

you know, done very quickly.

Just...

Getting through the day, its ritual, like brushing your teeth.

I mean, again we can try...