I'm not a good businessman and I don't promote myself particularly well. It's best I don't talk to anybody lest I alienate myself.
Barry BlittI do a lot of pivoting. There was one cover I did of Donald Trump, after he won Iowa, it seemed like it was over for him at the beginning of the primary process. I was given the go-ahead on it right away. I drew it and he won the next primary, and suddenly, the cover didn't make any sense. And then, after the Democratic National Convention, it seemed like he was finished, Hillary Clinton seemed to be gaining strength, so the cover ran then. So it seemed like you can come up with an idea and it can be rendered useless two days later and then all of a sudden it's relevant again.
Barry BlittI've been thinking of trying to de-caricaturize Donald Trump. I thought it would be fun to try and, since he's already a caricature, to make him normal looking.
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 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 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