Frail Fiend

BIG INTERVIEW - TOM BACHTELL

Tom Bachtell’s distinctive caricatures of the great and good have been a feature of the New Yorker’s ‘Talk of the Town’ for over twenty years. His self-taught brush-and-ink technique pays homage to some of the greatest cartoon artists and illustrators of the 1920s and 1930s. With a sweeping line here and a cunningly placed curve there, Bachtell can capture the essence of his subjects with what appears to be effortless ease. Sometimes even he wonders how he does it, so what chance have the rest of us got?

So you trained as a pianist at the Cleveland Institute of Music. 

Yes, I trained as a musician at CIM and I studied English and music at Case Western Reserve University. So it was both performance and academic studies.

When you were growing up were you always drawing?

Yes I was. I was always encouraged by my mother. I come from a pretty artistic family and I share some of my mother’s interest in a lot of different arts. She was also a writer and editor and when we were little she would make art projects for us and I remember sitting down at the kitchen with Manila pads and we would just draw, so I drew from a young age. In fact, I give talks occasionally about my work and I include a portrait that I did of my mother when I was about four or five and it was the earliest portrait I have. It’s sort of remarkable because you can see elements of my work today in that picture - it’s very instinctual. But drawing never really felt like a legitimate career choice in terms of training. When I was going to college there really wasn’t an opportunity to take courses in cartooning. I was always drawings friends and drawing for my own amusement. When I left college I realised I could probably teach myself how to draw and make a living from it. 

So it was a kind of a conscious decision to learn drawing. Did that entail taking classes or reading books or just practice, practice, practice?

It was more practice. I took one life drawing class. I wanted to develop a natural style; I knew that to have any kind of success the style would have to be organic. I don’t know if it was correct or not to make this assumption but I was afraid that if I started taking drawing classes I would become more absorbed in the technique. 

So, I just kept my eyes open and observed alot of illustration, then drawing things and sending work in to art directors. And I pretty quickly got jobs here in Chicago, working for the Tribune and other publications. To be honest, I really got them before I knew what I was doing - I didn’t really understand much about production or preparing art. I understood deadlines but I was on a very steep learning curve in terms of developing as an artist. I had to learn very quickly. I was also using alot of very unorthodox methods which in some ways worked to my advantage. I discovered alot of things by accident, experimenting with my ignorance in tools. 

What were the unorthodox methods?

Well, when I first started coloring things - this was before computers - I was using contact paper to create masks and I was using whatever I could to create color with. I remember once even drawing clouds with spray deodorant. The contact paper was pretty problematic. After a few layers it began pulling up previous layers; it was just a mess. Another thing is that I knew nothing about brushes or brush technique or materials, in general. So, I would just buy random brushes and just see what I could do with them, try to surprise myself. This has really impacted the way I work today.

At this stage were you doing caricature?

Well, it’s important to say that one of the last things I ever expected to do was to become a caricaturist. I thought I would become some kind of cartoonist. But there was just much more of a call for caricatures at the time. And one of my nightmares was that I would end up being a caricaturist at some kind of fair. I knew that I couldn’t do that. The idea of trying to draw peoples’ caricatures in a crowd setting, on the spot, was so horrifying to me. There are some artists out there who can do that with great skill - I just can’t. I knew that I would just have to squirrel myself away and keep drawing until I got something right.

I began to discover that I do have a certain ability to mimic people and I enjoy mimicking their physicality - I’m also a swing dancer - and so I liked to kind of inhabit people. Imagining how they felt, and that’s the process I go through when I’m drawing them - to try to tap into them in some way. I found I was able, in a very peculiar way, to create likenesses that didn’t make a whole lot of sense in terms of physiology or physiognomy, but I was somehow able to create certain effects that read as the character and convey certain aspects of their personalities. That was what kept pushing me. I sometimes call it the seven monkeys, seven typewriters approach to drawing - if you give me long enough eventually I’m going to come up with the right lines and you’ll recognise the person. 

There are videos of you at work, trying out different heads and superimposing them over others, all on paper. You must get through an incredible amount of paper, the way you work. 

It’s true. I do get through an awful lot of paper. 

You’ve been doing the Talk of the Town for twenty years. That adds up to hundreds of caricatures. Can you actually remember doing them? For instance, If I said “I like the way you did Gwenyth Paltrow’s eyes” would you pretend to know which drawing I meant or can you picture it in your minds eye?

Yes, I do remember the drawing. I have to say, I’m still fairly astonished when I get something particularly right. I wonder ‘how did I do that?’ I notice that Robert Risko talked about reducing things down to the simplest lines, which is true in my case also. The fewer lines the better, so yeah, if I can suggest something with as few lines as possible that makes me happy. I still don’t understand how it works. One of the things I’m interested in about caricature is that it’s not necessarily about exaggerating features but there’s an intuitive sense of how features relate to other features. Just because somebody has a big nose doesn’t mean that it’s automatically going to work to give them a big nose and to make that the most prominent thing. I’m often surprised by the whole process of how large to make someone’s eyes for instance. Someone might have squinty little eyes but you may need to make that the predominant feature on their face, because that just happens to work. How do you decide that is interesting to me. 

Yeah, if you look at someone like Paul Ryan, there’s one you did of him and his eyes are like these huge vortexes of pity. There must have been loads of iterations of that before you thought ‘I’ve got it’.

Yes, it’s true. He was actually very tough to draw and finally I kept having to deal with those eyes and I decided to go for it. Sometimes it’s just like a little switch in my head that I use to judge the correctness of something and if I can relax that switch, then often I can somehow subconsciously recognise ‘these features are okay, I can work with this’ and somehow the drawing starts working. If I can’t turn that switch off the drawing just never works. 

I was reading about your struggles with drawing Pierce Brosnan. I tried to draw Pierce Brosnan and it ended up looking like Leonard Cohen in a tuxedo. 

Yeah, I found him incredibly hard to draw. I think I drew him once after that first time and I sort of felt I got him a little bit better. I think something that alot of caricaturists have to deal with is that we often have to come up with people very, very quickly and I have to be honest - I try to read as much as I can, I don’t watch alot of television and I don’t go to the movies much - frequently I have to draw someone about whom I know absolutely nothing. I just very, very quickly have to get to know them. 

There are so many kind of blandly attractive celebrities out there now that it’s hard to kind of establish what these people are all about and how I feel about them in a short space of time. I find it so remarkable that if you look at some of the early caricatures - the kinds that used to hang in Sardi’s - really famous celebrities of the day were often portrayed in ways that people would never consider portraying them now. They were beautiful and ugly at the same time. But now I find there’s alot of pressure for people to look good and for artists to kind of flatter them and make them look good - it’s a challenge. 

You must have spent years looking at musical scores and how a mark placed a centimeter up, down or sideways changes the composition entirely. It’s the same with caricature. You can move an eye, or a mouth slightly and the whole drawing falls to pieces.

It’s interesting. It is amazing how that happens. There are times when I’ll start to get really fussy about the placement of an eye and I realise that the only way this is going to work is if I relax. You have to get into a zone and the other thing that I like doing - that I don’t always get a chance to do is deconstructing drawings to a certain extent. I love being able to put together - almost a collection of abstract lines - and make it work. And I can’t always do it. But that’s a goal that I always keep in mind. 

Would you restrain yourself if you’re doing a caricature of a public figure whose views you wouldn’t necessarily agree with, or would you be more cruel? 

It depends, I always try to maintain some kind of empathy with almost anybody that I am drawing. If there’s somebody I’ve decided I really don’t like — usually a politician — then I’ll often go for it. But I have found you could do a mean caricature and it would be completely ineffective; it ends up saying more about you as an artist than the subject. I’ve often found it’s best to be as sneaky as possible. It’s interesting how sometimes combining a certain amount of ‘meanness’ with a bit of empathy…it’s amazing how effective that can be rather than out-an-out meanness. It [meanness] is a sort of tool you have to use very carefully.

What about Barack Obama, caricature artists are still trying to get a handle on him. He seems harder to do than Bush.

I continue to find him a challenge. I think that part of it is that as artists we tap into the zeitgeist a little bit, and the perception of Obama is constantly changing and that’s partly what I’m responding to, whereas with George W. Bush there was a kind of an immediate consensus about who he was. It was kind of easy once I realised there wasn’t a whole lot I could do with his face. I found one or two tricks - like his eyebrows - that allowed me to have a whole lot of fun both in terms of comic effect and expression. 

Obama, he’s not easy to make fun of, partly because he’s a complicated person and my feelings about him change alot. I think in the beginning the media was very sensitive about portraying him - there was a little bit of caution and I had to deal with that aswell. 

The way Obama walks, he has a kind of shambling walk like his legs are too long or something. 

He has a beautiful walk. 

Do you think your interest in dance gives you an extra appreciation of how someone moves or even stands?

Oh absolutely. I’m kind of fascinated by the way everybody moves. Obama has this incredibly lankiness. He’s funny: He has a certain kind of stodginess he puts on for effect, but he can also move in such an elegant manner. I find it interesting how he tries to control his physicality. Bush had a very athletic physicality; he almost had more physical intelligence that anything else. That amazing moment when he was giving a press conference in Iraq and someone threw a shoe and his reflexes were so fast. Whatever I thought of him, that moment was so amazing. 

That was his greatest moment.

Yeah

Do you get much feedback from the people you caricature? Presumably people do buy the pieces. 

Yeah people do contact the New Yorker to buy them. It never ceases to amaze me that people want their caricatures. 

Would you get to meet them much?

Occasionally I’ve met a few people. I remember meeting Jake Gyllenhaal after drawing him and being almost afraid of what he was going to say but he told me he and his family loved the caricature. I think what’s nice too is that my caricatures at their best contain some gentle ribbing and I love it when the subjects appreciate that. It would be easy to be hurt or insulted but I feel as though I’ve succeeded when I achieve that. 

Would you get the text of the Talk of The Town in advance or do you just get a request for the particular caricature?

It depends. Everything happens so fast that often the stories are being written as I’m drawing them. I’d say maybe half the time I get the text in advance. My main concern is not drawing something that contradicts the tone of the text. That can be a challenge. The comment pieces are often the last to be written and I have to occasionally use guesswork. The office closes on Friday and I often don’t know what I’m drawing until Friday morning, so I will guess what’s likely to be involved and practise drawing them just in case. 

That must be kind of nerve-wracking.

It’s horribly nerve-wracking. I don’t know if I’ll ever get used to it. I guess we just have to adapt as we go along. The presence of the internet and the way that things are published now means there’s a constant news cycle. Everything seems to be kind of last minute. I need the chance to step away and look at things with a fresh eye. 

Do you send multiples of finished drawings or drafts of unfinished drawings?

I tend to send a variety. It’s tricky because there are alot of people [in the New Yorker] that will see the drawings and I’m cautious about locking myself into a choice too soon. I want to be open to changing and improving. But sometimes when people see them they think ‘let’s go with that’. I definitely still send things along but I try to be clear that it’s a rough and open to change. 

Do you get strange feedback from readers? Do people miss the point sometimes?

Well, I just did Putin recently and alot of people didn’t understand why I didn’t draw him without his shirt; other people thought I humanised him too much. I was struck by the way he conducted himself in a press conference. He had such a classic fragile over-sized male ego and he posing and doing all these gestures in this fussy Queen Anne Russian chair. I knew that David Remnick was writing the accompanying piece and I knew it would have a certain seriousness of tone - it seemed pointless to me to accompany it with some ridiculous drawing of Putin bare-chested. I have to worry about how the editor is going to respond. I can’t miss that. I wanted to push it as far as possible without drawing some kind of bland portrait. It kind of surprised me that so many people were saying “oh why didn’t you draw him with his shirt off - that would have been funny”.

There’s alot more color in your work outside of the New Yorker. And more use of the computer. Do you move easily between the black-and-white and the color or is it difficult?

I do get stuck in limbo for a little bit before I work out how to make that transition. When I start adding color it just looks like black-and-white work with color added on and it doesn’t work. I have to work out ways of getting rid of the black. It is a different mode. I really enjoy doing it but it’s hard to make the switch. 

You’re left-handed. Do you ever make a mistake waiting for the ink to dry?

Of course. It’s awful. It happens every day. It doesn’t matter how long I’ve been at this, I invariably forget to wait long enough for the ink to dry. It’s hard because I might be right in the middle of something and I want to keep going. I ruin several drawings every day.

You could have an exhibition of ‘smudged celebrities’.

That would be a good topic for a book.

Could you talk about some of the artists whose work you admire or who has had an influence on you? You’ve mentioned Arnold Roth in the past. There are similarities with his work.

I’m flattered to hear that. Definitely Arnold Roth, and when I was growing up I was just smitten with New Yorker cartoon artists. My mother had collections of cartoon art from the New Yorker. I loved James Thurber and Peter Arno and Charles Addams. Syd Hoff was another big one. I just loved his figures, and romanticized the world he drew. Those are probably the main people. They were all very different. I was also very influenced by Hirschfeld. His work used to really frighten me. I couldn’t help looking at it. It really drew me in but looking at it was also frightening. 

Because it was so good or because the depictions themselves were scary?

Because the depictions were scary. It was almost as if there was a strobe going off, illuminating his figures and they were so archly posed and lit. It wasn’t lit in the same way as say, Arno’s work was, but it was certainly suggestive or a theatrical setting. Peoples’ necks were taut and strained. He made a big impression on me. And then there were people like Ludwig Bemelmans who I loved. He did work for the New Yorker and the Madeleine books. I also loved learning that Caruso and Fellini were great caricature artists. They were both real naturals and I was always fascinated by that ability. There’s definitely a connection for me between the rhythm in music and the rhythm in line. 

 

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m working on a portrait of my modern dance professor from college. It’s as a present for her  birthday. It’s interesting capturing both her features and her ability to move and her love of movement. A personal project and actually very fun.