March 4, 2013

Here is what the New Yorker magazine has to say about its staff cartoonist, Roz Chast (November 26, 1954) :

Roz Chast received a B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design, with studies in graphic design and painting. However, after graduation she returned to her first love, cartooning. The New Yorker has continually published her work for more than thirty years, from black-and-white cartoons to color spreads, back pages, and covers. She has illustrated several children’s books, contributed to many humor collections, lectured widely, and received several prestigious awards, including honorary doctorates from Pratt Institute and Dartmouth College. Nine collections of Chast’s work have been published, including “Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, and Health-Inspected Cartoons, 1978-2006,” a twenty-nine-year survey. She is known for her cast of recurring characters, generally hapless but relatively cheerful “everyfolk.” The editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, has called her “the magazine's only certifiable genius.” In 2007, she collaborated with Steve Martin on the children’s book “The Alphabet from A to Y with Bonus Letter Z!,” and in 2012 she was awarded the N.Y.C. Literary Honor in Humor by Mayor Bloomberg.

A remarkable example of her art is the March 4, 2013, New Yorker cover We see a representation of an old theme-- mirrors reflecting the contents of mirrors with the premise of an infinite regress. Only in the hands of the cometary, if not stellar talent, of Roz Chast, each set of mirrored contents is slightly altered. The first reflection does not show the lady with a dog of the living room being reflected -- the first mirror shows a man with a cat, same pose, same sofa. The last regress visible has a gold fish pet.