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[ March 12th, 2007 ] Leela Corman was raised in Manhattan, studied illustration at Massachusetts College of Art, and currently lives in Brooklyn with her husband. Interested in many different aspects of the arts, Leela paints, illustrates books, draws comics, and teaches figure drawing and Middle Eastern dance. Influenced by classic painters, music, the human body and her environment, Leela's current projects include a graphic novel, "Unterzakhn", set in the tenements of the Lower East Side of NYC and an illustrated book, "The Long and the Short of it: The Madcap History of the Skirt". Some of Leela's illustration clients are Sasquatch Books, Family Circle, American Baby Magazine, PBS Online, Shape Magazine, NYT, and YM,and her comics have appeared in HEEB, Quadrado, Scheherazade, and PUSLE!. Leela talks with Altpick about illustration,comics,and her two distinctive styles.
Your thesis project for your degree in illustration at Mass Art was a comic book, wasn't it?
Are your biggest influences comic books?
My influences tend to be all over the map. I am particularly enamored with any artist who works with the material world very solidly. I especially like Degas and Hopper and Lucien Freud, and I love all the Weimar era painters, to name a few. I am very drawn to work that is about human beings. I am obsessed with the human condition. The human being, the human face and the human voice. All the music I love is centered around the voice, and all the art I love is about the human body. This may be because I grew up in New York City, and not in a natural environment.
Your work has a strong graphic quality and tends to be composed mostly in line. Can you talk about that? I've always liked line art. There's nothing like a strong graphic line. As a kid, I got interested in Japanese line art, and at the same time, I got into Archie comics. I always liked a strong crisp line. What's more seductive than a strong black line?
Would you call your illustrations cartoons?
Tell us about the graphic novel projects you are working on.
Why then and there?
I love my hometown, I'm obsessed with New York City almost to the exclusion of the rest of the world, so it seems fitting to do a project set in a historical period of NY that many people seem to have forgotten or fetishized. But I suspect that I won't really know why I am doing this project until it is done.
Do you find writing and drawing a difficult process? The things I do have merged so much. When I illustrate, I am responding to writing. And the writing within the comics is part of the parameters for my art. I used to be a different kind of artist when I was younger. I used to make books out of my own hair, and stay up all night making paintings with my bare hands in a jar of turpentine. Having this structure around me now gives my artistic life, not to mention my brain cells, more longevity.
But isn't creating characters and stories more difficult?
Tell us about some of your recent illustration projects. I just finished a book called The Long And The Short of It: The Madcap History of the Skirt, by Ali Basye, and that was one of the most fun projects I have ever illustrated. My favorite project to date was called You Grow Girl!, a kind of punk-rock gardening book by Gayla Trail, mostly about gardening in small spaces and urban environments. It was the first book I ever illustrated, so I put a lot into it and I learned a great deal. It wound up being a success because all the people involved (the writer, the packager, the editor and myself) were all very invested in it. I use that book now as a reference whenever I want to kill a window box full of plants.
What are your favorite illustration assignments?
What's your favorite color?
You have two distinct illustration styles. Can you talk about that?
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