The magazine business is dying. It's a hard time for publishing. It does seem that everyone is much more opinionated now. I think there's probably more room for making opinionated illustrations. There was a time when Time magazine and Newsweek would have a realistic painted cover. A friend of mine used to do a lot of those paintings and he was told by the art director at one point, we are switching to photography. It seems that if someone saw a painting on a cover, it took a while to do, it must be old news. Photography became more immediate.
Barry BlittI don't have a philosophy of caricature. I'm not even sure I am a caricaturist, in the strictest sense of the word - I don't really exaggerate much. For a while, recently, I was thinking of attempting a reverse-caricature of Donald Trump; he certainly already appears to be a caricature of himself. I wondered about de-caricaturizing him, scaling back his whole face and hair and visual excess, and attempting to shed light on him that way.
Barry BlittWhen I'm online and I see a picture I want to draw of anybody or anything, a unique angle of them or just something that looks very drawable, I slide it to my desktop and put it in a folder. It just seems like every picture of Trump is a revelation. Any angle. I didn't know a person could look like that. His facial expressions - he really is a cartoon. He's like an instruction manual of how to caricature someone.
Barry BlittA cartoonist's style is created by weaknesses and personal restrictions as much as strengths.
Barry BlittLuckily, my limited attention span is well suited to the velocity of the news cycles. There's an assault of stories coming at you on even a slow-ish news day, but certain things just tend to stick out. Certain stories just seem to have an odd sort of electricity. It does get tricky when you're pitching an image that won't hit the newsstands for another week. Not only can other, bigger stories break in the mean time, but other daily cartoonists, can also come up with the same idea - this is the most depressing thing - and put it out there so yours looks old by the time it's published.
Barry Blitt