My first New Yorker cover

“Nothing to See”

Friends,

Earlier this month, my first cover was published in The New Yorker, and the sparkles from that week are still glistening around me like ocean waves under the sun.

“Nothing to See.” You can read more about the artwork here.

Every time I pass the living room coffee table, I catch a glimpse of the cat’s lime green blinky blinks and think, what the hell is the cat I drew doing on a New Yorker cover?

And then I shake my head and say, ohhhhh, right. That really happened.

We go way back

When I was a kid and didn’t realize what New York City meant in relation to the rest of the world, I thought The New Yorker was a local, “city news” type of magazine with fun illustrations on the cover.

It wasn’t until I attended a New England boarding school that I opened the magazine to read it (always starting with the cartoons). There, The New Yorker could be found everywhere: crumpled, months-old issues stuck in the crack of a couch in the science wing, a fresh copy neatly rolled into the pocket of a dinner jacket.

This was my desk in Second Form, or eighth grade. I got lost in many books here, wrapped in silence and transported to different worlds.

But the place where New Yorker covers and cartoon clippings seemed happiest was in my favorite teacher’s classroom, where my metamorphosis began. Learning from this teacher and letting my creativity spill out into this classroom helped me slice out of my cocoon Zorro style and start expressing myself in art and writing. I grew the wings I have now in this special classroom, which was filled with colorful New Yorker covers and blessed with puffs of chalk dust.

The New Yorker doesn’t know this, but yes, we go way back.

The art

The idea for the cover came to me when I was listening to one of the 500 podcasts I tune into and cannot properly reference when I talk about them. Someone was speaking about the importance of drawing obsessions. Alrighty, my obsession is cats, I thought.

They are skittish, hissy, and alien-like, so no wonder we are a perfect match. However, cats, unlike me, can get away with a lot of naughtiness and still be adored by their human guardians. I found that relationship fascinating and wanted to make a picture that would capture that.

There were other renditions of this idea, where the cat is knocking over a flower vase…

…or a bowl of spaghetti and meatballs.

But as a wine lover, I am delighted that the art editors chose the one with the wine glass.

Fun facts about the art

• The rug: it was inspired by the light pink Persian rug that I begged / insisted my parents get for me on my 20th birthday. It has traveled and lived with me ever since.

• The bowl: after scrolling through a bunch of blue and white porcelain bowls on auction sites, I found one I liked from circa 1700 and referenced one of the shapes on that bowl.

• The bowl, continued: sometimes, when I like an artist and want to learn more about them, I type their name into YouTube and see what comes up. During a break from painting the cover art, I did this with cartoonist George Booth, and the search led me to a short documentary about him. To my surprise, he was eating noodles out of a blue and white porcelain bowl, not so different from the one that I had just painted. This synchronicity felt like a wink from George Booth and his cats.

  

• There is one other fun fact… but I am saving it to whisper into the ears of the art editors. ;-)

P.S. If you would like a print of the artwork, I am working on limited edition Riso prints that will be released in a few months. Shall let you know here in the newsletter when that’s ready.

Yesterday I had the best time repotting a plant and playing Mario Kart while jamming out to Billy Joel’s live concert in London from 1984. Give me the first couple of notes from “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” and I’m already swirling a big glass of red.

Raising a glass to you in a fluffy robe à la Tony Soprano,

Haruka