Arts & Entertainment

Sorting through Brooklyn’s layers, with Nancy Doniger

March 6, 2013 Heather Chin
Image courtesy of Nancy Doniger.
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The inside of Nancy Doniger’s basement studio in South Park Slope looks much like what you’d expect for a prolific illustrator of children’s books and posters: large L-shaped wooden table, glass plates for easy cleanup of ink stains, printing press, lots and lots of scrapbook paper rolls, scissors, paints and inks, brushes, markers, pencils, corkboards with sketches and ideas, bookshelves, and a computer.

But it is what Doniger imagines and creates with these ordinary materials that makes her artwork extraordinary – at once alive yet a memory, at once young yet timeless.

Her illustrations, collages and prints are bold, colorful, and playful; they have a self-described “graphic style with a ‘quirky’ edge.” They have appeared in print and online in books, newspapers, and magazines around the world, as well as in businesses and private homes.

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For example, “Carousel” (featured on this issue’s cover) was a commission from the Brooklyn Historical Society in 2007 and commemorated the impending restoration of Jane’s Carousel in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Crafted as a collage, Doniger “wanted the feeling of layering because Brooklyn is very much [full of layers].

“I wanted to get in both bridges and I wanted the two horses to be able to be seen so I made them very different from each other. Then adding the lights felt [like it made it] pop,” she explained. “The Manhattan Bridge [was sent by a friend] from a wedding invitation, the brown Brooklyn Bridge is from a paper bag… it went through a lot of revisions and I played with the pieces of paper.”

Born in Montvale, New Jersey, Doniger grew up with an aeronautical engineer father and a science teacher mother who responded to her tendency to draw constantly by installing a chalkboard in her room that went as high as she could reach. Growing up, she “always liked drawing people, animals, trees and such… more than trucks. I’ve always liked cutting things out, like collages.” According to her mother, she even once took a pair of scissors to the middle of her bedspread in order to get a color she needed for an impromptu art project.

Her favorite artists include Cezanne and Matisse, Harlem Renaissance artist Romare Bearden and sculptor Henry Moore. Like Bearden, she took classes at the Art Students League, in addition to majoring in psychology and minoring in art at Rutgers, and  then later, enrolling in the NY Studio School and Parsons School of Design.

Building a career as a full-time artist in Brooklyn has not been without its challenges, but a combination of passion and great networking and advice from Milton Glaser and Steve Heller of The New York Times helped Doniger get her start. Her first book, Morning, Noon, and Night: Poems To Fill Your Day, is still in print and in use in schools across the country; the likenesses of her eldest son and his childhood friends staring back at her.

“My kids – aged 24 and 12 – inspire me and being here in Brooklyn inspires me. I work differently when I’m out in the country,” said Doniger. “Here in Brooklyn, the tumble of life is in these images. There are so many people, elevated trains, and things happening underground… I spend a lot of time in Prospect Park with my kids and dog, walking in the park, drawing.”

“Knowing where we are in relation to the water and the river” is important to her, too, which is why she has often found herself drawing down by Fairway on the Red Hook waterfront and over on 9th Street, “just as you are crossing 2nd Avenue and getting under the overpass where there are all those warehouse-buildings and then the highway going up and the harbor behind it… it’s just amazing.”

What is a typical day like for her? “It’s a balance of starting new things and letting people know what I’m doing and working on things that are in-progress,” she said. “I go back and forth between digital work and collage and printmaking.”

And because making art can be an isolating process, Doniger makes sure to socialize and network with fellow artist. There’s a monthly illustrator lunch group, the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, and, most conveniently, her neighbors and husband, Eric Jacobson, who is a sculptor and licensed art therapist.

“Living with a sculptor is a wonderful thing and it’s just wonderful living in a place with so many artists, musicians and writers. It feels kind of bubbly here,” she said.

Looking towards the future, Doniger said she would like to do more writing, particularly of her own books, and also to do textile design – creating her own kid-oriented fabrics.

“Just to do more work and more writing… The [image of the] boy on the swing is part of one of the books, about a little boy that wears a red hat all the time, at night and on the bath tub; that will be ink and wash. Then there is a Button Box story that will be collage and photographs of buttons,” Doniger said. “My husband and I are starting to collaborate on some pieces [and] I’d like to show the prints I’ve started doing.”

Art, for her, she said, is more than just a lifestyle – it’s a form of communication.

“Drawings are a form of thinking… they’re kind of like dreams and thoughts and creatures that are pre-verbal,” she said. “[Art is] something I really can’t imagine living without. It’s like air. I just love the unexpectedness and being able to express myself and also to tell a story. I like the telling a story part. It just feels very primal to me so it is very hard to imagine not doing art wherever I go. I use art even more so [than speaking]. I’m more comfortable drawing than talking.”

To see more of Nancy Doniger’s work, visit www.donigerillustration.com.


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