Roz Chast
Roz Chast
Rosalind "Roz" Chastis an American cartoonist and a staff cartoonist for The New Yorker. She grew up in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, the only child of an assistant principal and a high school teacher who subscribed to The New Yorker. Her earliest cartoons were published in Christopher Street and The Village Voice. In 1978 The New Yorker accepted one of her cartoons and has since published more than 800. She also publishes cartoons in Scientific American and the Harvard...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCartoonist
Date of Birth26 November 1954
CountryUnited States of America
I've always wanted to learn how to hook rugs. A wonderful artist named Leslie Giuliani taught me how. The nice thing is you can change it as you go along.
I love seeing original cartoons. You get to see the artist's corrections, like erasures or Wite-Out or patches, and you get to see the artist's line in better detail, and what kind of ink they use - whether they like a cold black or a warm black, and what kind of paper they like, how big or small they like to draw - art nerd stuff like that.
I had the impression in art school that cartooning was thought of as a lesser art than painting because cartoons are reproduced, so the "work" is not the single thing like a painting, but instead is the reproduced image.
The fact that cartoons are reproduced doesn't mean anything to me as far as whether they are "real art" or not.
There's something about most phobias where there's a tiny, tiny corner where you think this really actually could happen.
I used to think of the cartoons as a magazine within a magazine. First you go through and read all the cartoons, and then you go back and read the articles.
Sometimes, you know - I think, with a lot of things, at the time, everything is extremely upsetting, and then you look back on it, and it actually can be sort of funny.
Did you know that you can live on Ensure for a year? A person can live for a really long time just lying in bed and drinking Ensure - way longer than you think.
I think of my drawing style like handwriting: it's a mix of whatever handwriting you're born with, plus bits and pieces you've pilfered from other people around you.
I think I have a habit of, in my head, taking notes on whatever, you know, whether they're verbal or pictorial or just making a note of things as they're happening.
It cracks me up to see these ads for TV - for Depends or for glue for your dentures. The people in them look 55 with a hint of gray. Where are the people who are falling apart? We don't see that.
One way of paying tribute to my parents was 'bearing witness' as the Quakers do - writing down everything that was happening instead of turning my back on it and pretending that it was all great.
My father was in terrible pain towards the end because of his bed sores, and he did go into hospice, and I think that was better in some ways. You know, I think his death was peaceful, and it was all right. He was just in terrible pain.
I love detail, like drawing what's on top of someone's coffee table. Maybe there's a little bowl of butterscotch candies on it, next to the four TV remotes.