"The Mysterious Cover Artist Who Captured the Decline of the Rich/Mary Petty was reclusive, uncompromising, but she peered into a fading world with unmatched warmth and brilliance."

I hope you can get past the New Yorker pay wall to see this article, with writing by the artist Chris Ware, and many wonderful New Yorker covers by Mary Petty.

Excerpt:

Her eye was extraordinary, conjuring an Edwardian era through its tiniest features: the brocaded wallpaper, the finely tiled kitchen floors, the thin brass faucets, the plush upholstery.

James Thurber, in an introduction to “This Petty Pace” (1945), the sole published collection of the artist’s work, describes the young Petty as a “slip of a girl.” Like her husband, she initially preferred to mail in her submissions, but by the nineteen-forties she had become a “common sight” at the magazine’s office, “sitting, cool and almost undismayed, on the edge of a chair.” Thurber reports that she would spend three weeks on a drawing; when she was done, she would say that she hated it and herself. “Everybody else, of course, loves it and her,” Thurber adds, observing that what Petty offered in her work was “not a trick, but a magic. . . . She catches time in a foreshortened crouch that intensifies her satirical effects.”

Time in a foreshortened crouch — is anyone catching that anymore?

Example:

ADDED: Ware notes that Petty seems to have influenced Edward Gorey. And I'll just note that the book title — "This Petty Pace" — is a reference to a Shakespeare soliloquy, from "MacBeth," which also has something to say about time.

"The spelling vendor is the standard spelling. The New Yorker, as part of its bizarre house style, uses the spelling vender. No one else does, besides those trying to emulate The New Yorker’s style."

"Of the 45 examples in COCA, only 17 were actual uses of the spelling vender outside of The New Yorker (compared with over 2000 examples of vendor, a ratio of over 100 to 1). Two were proper names, eleven were from The New Yorker, and fifteen were in foreign languages." 

The website English Language & Usage gave me answered the spelling question that I had as I wrote the previous post. I'd thought "vendor" seems right, but maybe it's like "advisor," and it's wrong in that pretentious way that is most important to avoid. 

"Vender" looks wrong, but it has the virtue of adherence to the general rule of adding "-er" to verbs to make them into a noun doing whatever the verb has them doing — "paint" become "painter," not "paintor," and "blog" becomes "blogger," not "bloggor."

"How to Draw Literary Cartoons."

Interview with the artist, Amy Kurzweil, here. Sample:

What’s your favorite New Yorker cartoon trope or cliché (e.g., desert island, grim reaper, Rapunzel tower)? 

I’ll go with the Moby Dick trope, because whales are easy to draw, and I like a good metaphor for the unattainable.

Ah, yes... I was just reading those pages in "The New Yorker Encyclopedia of Cartoons":

 

AND: Here's the video with the title that's in the post title. I've moved it below the fold because it's autoplaying. I hate that. But it's a nice video about the great subject of drawing. And they even talk about the "Seinfeld" episode with the confusion about New Yorker cartoons: