#Gorey flamingo painting series#

“When I conceived of this, I thought of it as a little brick.” Each series is presented one image per page. “I think my sculptural background makes me think of books as objects,” McGuire said.

There are twenty-nine sets of spots, creating a compact white chunk of a book. This week, “ Sequential Drawings : The New Yorker Series,” a collection of McGuire’s favorite New Yorker spot-illustration series over the past decade plus, comes out from Pantheon. The single-artist tradition continued, as did the sequences from the beginning, McGuire was a master of the form. “I think it was because I was working on the animated film that made me think of it as a sequence,” he said. In 2005, for the eightieth-anniversary issue, “they said, ‘We want a whole issue done by one person,’ ” McGuire told me. For decades, spots had been drawn by many different artists per issue, as the cartoons are, each one doing its own thing while providing some relief for the eye. The idea concerned spot illustrations-the cozy little drawings of, say, a fork, a chair, or a window dotted with hanging plants-tucked into long sections of text. “They wrote me and said they had this idea,” McGuire said recently, at a café in the West Village, where he lives. McGuire has contributed covers and illustrations to the magazine for many years. In 2005, the artist Richard McGuire-now, perhaps, best known as the author of the lovely and powerful book “ Here”-was living in Paris, working on an animated film, when he heard from one of his editors at The New Yorker.

Gorey flamingo painting