Malling’s drawing ‘Norwegian Muskox’ is an exquisite example of what he is capable of. The drawing stands massive at 180 cm x 263 cm (approximately 6′ x 9′), both immense and tender, the drawing is a work of realism, but for foreign eyes, the animal is a surreal beast — a strange amalgam of the wooly mammoth and the bison.

Benjamin’s ‘Nest’ finds the child out of the mother, in her arms — a look-alike. Nuzzling the full body of her mother. Benjamin’s approach to the mother to child relationship is one grounded solely in truth — mother protects, a mother’s role as the nest. As home.

“The simpler the design gets, the more complicated the act of printing can become. Big flat shapes of color with no modulation require a steady hand. With a lot of our more minimal prints the artifice is in the way the layers come together, and if the elements are off-register the illusion of the print is ruined.”

– Melissa Buchanan

The illustrator has the art director and the client giving them comments at each step — the critique begins at the hiring and ends with the paycheck, which could speak to the importance of criticism in fine art, where there is nowhere to get honest feedback. Cheerleading is fundamentally positive, but the reader does not see all that is not written about, and in that silence may be my own criticism.