The Friday Fillip: Let Me Illustrate

We love to rank. High and low, higher and lower yet: Social standing — whether “brow” or “class” — seats in the coliseum, credit cards, professors — whole universities¹, come to that — even art². You’ll know high art by where you find it. It’ll be in museums and grand concert halls, which are created to define high art. There’ll be a salon des refusés perhaps, for the near misses. And then — maybe even daubed on the outside of the same walls — there’s ephemera: pop, journalism, illustration, the work of hacks, jills and jacks of the trade, stuff that comes and goes daily and once upon a time wrapped your fish and chips back when there were still fish.

This ranking of art into “high” and “low” is mostly bollocks, of course, yet we all do it. I do it. I’ve been known to dis³ more than one drawing as “merely” illustration. I continue to make amends for that foolishness, one amend being today’s Fillip on the work of a marvellous illustrator.

Christoph Niemann specializes in delight, I’d say. Amid the smorgasbord of psychic-emotional “good” goods on offer — Ecstasy, Joy, Bliss, Pleasure, Delight, Euphoria, Rapture, Happiness, Gaiety, Enjoyment, Fun — I’m a big fan of delight, one of the lesser graces⁴, a lowercase god (this being a matter of measurement, not ranking). We may pursue happiness, à l’Americaine, but delight finds us, which is one of its most endearing features. It is tripped on, surprised when rounding a corner, popped like a bubble from within for no reason, and, in the case of Mr. Niemann, sent our way in lovely little postcards, as it were.

Click on the image to see the animated GIF in a popup

There are four main places you can see his work.

• The first would be on his own website, and I’d recommend you go straight to the Sunday Sketches portion of his portfolio, where his whimsical “modding” of bits of the real world is on offer. Horses and bananas? Surely not. But . . . Niemann sees it (and you can, too, if you click here).
• Then there’s his Instagram page featuring the gems he’s done for his New York Times Abstract Sunday Blog. I cannot capture their variety in words — and I ought not to be too liberal with my reproducing of them here, so you must go to have a look. But I’ll offer you one here, via this link.
• The Abstract Sunday Blog itself requires a visit, because there Niemann embeds his drawings in little tales that . . . delight, of course. I particularly recommend his Dante At the Beach, given my Dante reference earlier.
• Finally, go on over to The New Yorker page on Niemann to see his work for them. He’s created more than twenty covers, only some of which are on the webpage, it seems.