ROZ CHAST

www.cartoonbank.com

risd connection: BFA in Painting, 1977

medium: cartoons and line drawings

talent: Chast uses words and images to satirize the anxieties and absurdities of day-to-day life in her quirky, often twisted cartoons.

getting there: Having grown up “uneventfully” in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, Chast moved only once as a child — across the street. The one highlight: her parents subscribed to The New Yorker and she found the morbid wit of Charles Addams just what she needed to inspire her to begin drawing her own cartoons for fun. While she studied painting at RISD and didn’t find it to be much of “a cartoon kind of a place,” the year after graduation she had a portfolio of cartoons and illustrations ready to cart around Manhattan.

making it: When Chast dropped off her first stack of cartoons at the revered New Yorker in 1978, long-time art editor Lee Lorenz excitedly bought one right away, noting that her work was a breakthrough in the genre. Since then she has been among the select few artists whose cartoons and illustrations appear almost weekly in and on the cover of the magazine. Chast has written and/or illustrated a dozen books (Childproof: Cartoons About Parents and Children, Meet My Staff, Mondo Boxo, Unscientific American, Parallel Universes) and is perpetually at work on more. Her most recent book, Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons, 1978-2006 (Bloomsbury, October 2006), is a 400-page compendium covering highlights from her career to date.

average day: … pulling out the clips, notes and odds-and-ends she gathers each week to come up with eight to 10 new cartoons to show New Yorker editors (rejecting more ideas than not)… sharing quips from the local paper with her husband, fiction writer Bill Franzen… collapsing on the couch for a welcomed dose of The Simpsons…

discoveries: 1) “I’m horribly, relentlessly serious. But that’s probably why the other stuff comes out.” 2) “It is true that I am very good at worrying. ”