Speaker 1: We're going to close the show today with the cartoonist, Liana Finck. Liana is a regular and really beloved presence at the New Yorker. She's written a number of books. Her new one is called Let There Be Light. It's a graphic retelling of the book of Genesis featuring a female God whom Liana calls a self-portrait. A few years ago, we spent the day with Liana Finck as she worked on some drawings for New Yorker. She met our producer early in the morning at the terminal of the Long Island Rail Road. That's the commuter train that runs east of New York City.
Liana Fink: Should we get on?
Speaker 1: Liana was going just for the ride.
Liana Fink: I like to come up with New Yorker cartoons on the train. It's good because I don't have a fixed workspace. I started working in fancy cafes. Those are wonderful but they are obnoxious. People are always eyeing your table because they want to sit at it. I can't stand when people talk to me when I'm working but I love when they talk to each other.
I don't like to be in a vacuum when I'm drawing. I think my ideal would really be to be a ghost and get to be around people all the time and the sweet non-threatening base. I'm also not a very young woman so if someone felt talking to a stranger, I would be the first stranger they would go to. A train is better because people are mostly facing the same way. No one's going to look you in the eye.
The train that we're on is one of the less fancy Long Island Rail Road trains. When you take a different train to Long Island, you get a slightly fancier train with seats that go all the way up to the top of your head but these seats, you can see people's hats. There's one person in every fifth seat of the train, I would say. It's after sunrise but not very long after. The sky is grayish and cloudy. There’s a 7-Eleven, and an auto body shop, and a lot of cars. It's a type of bleak that I like. It's maybe suburban sprawl.
I'm always mean to start coming up with cartoons on the train, but sometimes I just send emails and look out the window but I start to feel free in a certain way. I think one of the nice things about the train is that I can't really do perfectly finished work on it. I can't make a finished cartoon. I have to just come up with ideas. I think my favorite thing to do is just to think and to play. On the train, I'm forced to just think and doodle.
We're transferring at Babylon. We just got onto a fancier train with higher headrests and two stories and a bathroom. I printed out an old batch of New Yorker cartoons that I liked a lot that didn’t sell even though I thought they were really good at that time. I'm going to look at them and see if I can make them clearer and maybe this time they'll sell.
This one is a pine tree with an air freshener dangling from it that is shaped like a car. That's good. I don't need to fix that one up. This is a hall of statues. Oh, I guess they are busts on pillars that says, “Hall of life-sized Pez dispensers.” This one doesn't bring me joy anymore. I don't think it's funny anymore. I don't think it ever was. This one is interesting. I think this one brings me joy. It says, “Pigeon nest,” and it's a nest on a tree that's made of garbage. I love pigeons. I think I need to think more about maybe the reason this isn't a good cartoon yet is that it's on a tree. Maybe a pigeon nest isn't on a tree. I'll think about that.
Here's this stupid one. It's a bird inside a gator's mouth and the bird is saying, “Do you even floss?” I have really good dental hygiene. Birds are the dentist's patron animal because they do clean the mouths of some kind of gator, allo or croco. The gator does not look anatomically correct. I once saw an iguana that got loose from its container on a train. It was just walking really slowly down the train aisle and then its owner didn't realize that it had escaped and everyone just kind of like, “What's that?” It was really big.
It's getting really beautiful outside. There's a pond out the window with those things that look like wheat coming out of it. The houses, they look like a fisherman might live in them. It looks like the town has been this way for a long time. I love that it doesn't look brand new. It's funny. I don't think I'm telling you accurate stuff about what I think about on the train because my drawing self I think is one self and my talking self is another self and I just can't access the drawing self when I'm talking.
My drawing self is smart and savvy and knows exactly what she's doing. My talking self is kind of a human impersonator. In my drawing, I feel like I can be anyone. I can channel all kinds of personalities and thoughts and I don't tell myself what to draw. It just comes out. When I'm in this city, I feel like my social self, which isn't exactly my real self is just on high alert and she's always expecting someone to talk to her. On the train, you have no choices and no one's going to talk to you. I get to just put her on a shelf a bit more and then ideas come out. The drawing self gets to be alive again. It's almost time for us to get off. I always wish that I had a lot longer and that's a nice feeling.
Speaker 1: Liana Finck riding The Long Island Rail Road back in 2017. Her books include Passing for Human and her new book, Let There Be Light: The Real Story of Her Creation.
Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.
New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.
