Author: Elizabeth Derby

If you’ve heard the name Jen Sorensen, it may be because she’s the 2014 winner and first female recipient of the prestigious Herblock Prize for editorial cartooning—or because she’s been published in C-VILLE Weekly for more than a decade.

“I went to UVA as an undergrad and wound up sticking around Charlottesville for many years after I graduated,” Sorensen said in a recent phone interview. “I think it was in 2002 that I wound up coming into the C-VILLE Weekly office for a meeting with Cathy Harding, the editor then. It was kind of scary, but she gave me a chance, and it was the beginning of my getting published by alt weeklies.”

Today, Sorensen’s work appears in The Progressive, The Nation, The Austin Chronicle, NPR, Ms., Politico, activist website Daily Kos, and alt weeklies around the country. She’s known for pointed observation of thorny issues like gun control, racism, income inequality, health care, and sexism.

After being a finalist for the Herblock in 2011, Sorensen told the Washington Post that she admired the prize’s eponymous artist because “he cartooned from a definite moral perspective—and a good one, at that. Too many daily editorial cartoonists go for the easy-breezy sight gag or contemporary movie reference without actually saying much. Herblock took the job seriously.”

Sorensen often tackles the telling of difficult truths with a strong first-person narrative. Her point of view is an easy stand-in for “the little guy,” oft-maligned by big business or murky government policy, and her careful explanations of complicated issues expose convoluted logic for easy scrutiny. The results are factually substantiated arguments for or against politically controversial subjects. Take her widely read 2012 piece “An Open Letter to the Supreme Court About Health Insurance.”

“I drew [‘An Open Letter’] right before the Supreme Court was ruling on the Affordable Care Act,” Sorensen said. “I just wanted to say that as a self-employed person I’d had a lot of problems with health insurance over the years. My husband got denied because he had plantar fasciitis. My insurance costs were skyrocketing.”

The piece went on to win a Robert F. Kennedy journalism award for editorial cartooning, and her 2014 follow-up comic, “My Experience with Obamacare: A Freelancer in Texas Applies for Health Insurance,” went viral after being featured on NPR.

“I was trying to combat some of the conventional wisdom about Obamacare and share a story that many people aren’t hearing,” Sorensen said. “Yes, it’s annoying that the website went down yesterday, but I think that pales in comparison to the benefit of people like me being able to receive care.”

Sorensen’s commentary ranges from coverage of Democratic conventions and Sarah Palin rallies to cartoons about “the coup against President Sullivan and the corporatization of higher education,” she said. It’s an evolution she might not have foreseen as an undergrad.

“When I got out of college my biggest influences were Robert Crumb and B. Kliban, people who had an absurdist sense of humor,” she said. “That’s how my strip started out in the late ’90s. Then the 2000 election came along, and the political climate changed so dramatically I felt compelled to draw about it.”

When asked if she misses creating lighter fare, Sorensen mentioned the book of Gary Larson wiener dog art she has lying around her house. “I look at all these fake paintings and think, ‘This is pure humor just for humor’s sake,’” she said. “I still love doing strips about pop culture and technology, but politics are an endless source of inspiration. I can’t help myself.”

Sorensen and Bob Woodward will speak at the annual Herblock Prize ceremony at the Library of Congress on April 29. See page 31 for this week’s comic.

*A previous version of this story mistakenly cited Pete Levin, not B. Kliban, as one of Sorensen’s biggest influences.  It also said that Gary Larson art appeared on her walls of her home instead of in a book.

“I recently saw a book of Picasso’s work where they published everything he did, and between two awesome paintings were about a hundred that weren’t so great.” Warren Craghead laughed with what sounded like relief. “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, right. This is the real world. I shouldn’t feel so bad about myself.’”

The Charlottesville-based cartoonist has made a creative career of drawing “without thinking,” sketching by impulse during television shows, theater performances, even at stoplights. He also creates more careful and deliberate drawings but commits to execution above all else.

Incredibly prolific, with a pen in hand and pad in pocket at any given time, “I draw all the time,” Craghead said near the end of our phone interview. “I’m kind of drawing right now.”

We discussed a theory I’ve read in Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art: Artists need diligence, to do the work and remain divorced from the outcome. Waiting for the muse is for amateurs, Pressfield said. Consistency predicates success.

“Art doesn’t have to be a rarified space,” Craghead agreed. “I don’t have to go to a studio with my fancy paper and expensive pen. My batting average of good drawings is not better than anyone else’s, but I do more of them. It’s the way I process the world.”

Craghead draws in visceral reaction to the world around him, filtering news through sketches in order to assemble ideas into narrative coherence. “I see these horrible things on the news and feel powerless, so even though it does nothing in the real world I start drawing about it,” he said. His recent book, Untitled, is a collection drawn from images of victims of a gas attack in Ghouta, Syria, and all proceeds from it go to Save The Children’s Syrian Children’s Relief Fund.

Ladyh8rs, a Tumblr Craghead created and dedicated to “grotesque portraits of misogynists,” came to him when “they were contemplating making transvaginal ultrasounds a prerequisite to abortions in Virginia, and I got really mad,” he said. “Unfortunately there are always new people to draw.”

Craghead’s children, Violet and Ginger, are happier subjects of inspection. “Fauves,” a series of RGB-saturated children’s comics, records their actions and conversations in an attempt to capture “the crazy incandescence of kids.”

Not all of his work follows a theme, however. “I started as a painter, so I got used to confusion, being O.K. with chaos and not having everything nailed down,” he said. He often blends language with his sketches, approaching pieces like a poet. “People talk about comics and jump right to graphic novels, but words and images together don’t necessarily have to be a story,” he said.

In fact, exposing art to the world may be just as important as the art itself. “My work insists that art can be accessible, cryptic, and beautiful all at the same time,” reads Craghead’s artist statement, and his brand of “eco-lo-fi-publishing” makes it possible. He sends work out into the world—a concept he calls “seed toss”—as notes for his daughters’ lunches, free print-and-fold art books, drawings on postcards, and sketches on Post-Its that he leaves around town. “I’m sure most of them just get swept aside when someone cleans up,” he said, but permanence isn’t the point.

“Think about humans versus dandelions,” he said. “We gestate our young, these singular creatures, and take care of them for years. Some artists work that way, but there’s another way of looking at it. Dandelions release thousands of seeds. The majority don’t survive, but everywhere there can be a dandelion, there will be a dandelion.”

See Warren Craighead’s exhibit “We Are Waiting in a Forest” at WriterHouse through the end of April.

If you’re tired of grey skies and slush, you might want to visit Les Yeux du Monde before the end of March. “When you walk in the gallery, you see a lot of color,” said Lyn Bolen Warren, the curator of the space’s current exhibit, Visions of Spring. “You see these big painted urns reaching upward, a collage of a tree that is almost life-size. Some pieces are smaller, quieter and more meditative, but the colors are very optimistic. They all have that same hopeful feel.”

Visions of Spring, a six-artist show that runs through March 30, portrays landscapes and life sources, lakes and fields and flowers and fruits that recall natural renewal and preservation. “Some artists are very specific,” Warren said. “They grew up on farms and are watching the world turn into parking lots, so this is how they try to preserve what they remember.”

While each artist brings distinct intentions and styles to the show, Warren, who has her Ph.D. in art history, selected both gallery newcomers and regulars for their awareness of art in its historical context. “Priscilla’s paintings are like Monet’s,” she said. “Ann Lyne has her own really expressionistic stylist way of painting, with lots of gesture and movement, that references the greats from Degas to Matisse, Picasso and Diebenkorn. Lou Jordan’s latest paintings are reminiscent of Milton Avery in their color and subject matter. John McCarthy, who died in 2008, wrote about studying Matisse and his colors. He was interested in doing the things the early modern masters did, and he did a great job learning their lessons.”

Unlike the work by the masters, however, many pieces in Visions “can be purchased for less than the cost of having a poster framed,” Warren said. And they preserve the energy of blue skies and warm breezes, the resonant gratitude of artists who dwell in a confluence of memory and present moment.

Contributing artist Elizabeth Bradford called her work a meditation, “the meeting of a real place, my spiritual reaction to it, and the visual vocabulary I use for expressing that reaction. Sometimes that meditation is about stillness, and sometimes it is about overwhelming activity, both of which exist side by side in the natural world.”

“Spring by the Lake was literally painted when the very first natural wildflowers peeked up through the ground,” said contributor Priscilla Whitlock. “Imagine standing in the middle of a field with clovers, blue-eyed grasses, buttercups, ferns, and colored weeds intermingling at your feet. The brush work echoes the rhythm of the growth on the ground.”

Lou Jordan uses oil paints to likewise savor and spend time with his subjects. “When I spent time in Rome recently, I looked out our window and saw herb beds and an orchard,” he said. “Lemon trees were wrapped in white to protect them from cool weather as the lemons ripened. The beds were turned over for new plants, and early lettuce and herbs were visible in some. I painted this many times, and I walked through it and remembered it.”

“I grew up on a farm in Kentucky with a naturalist painter grandmother who took her grandchildren on long nature walks,” said Cary Brown, a contributor whose paintings pay homage to springtime birds in danger of extinction. “For instance, the Whippoorwill has almost completely disappeared because of compromised farmland and pesticides,” she said. “This was a bird many of us knew in our childhoods, a sound we went to sleep hearing.”

John McCarthy’s wife, Judy, sees gratitude in her late husband’s work, a translation of the joy we all feel when springtime finally arrives. “Winters were so cold and confining to him,” she wrote, “and this was the time of year he would venture out and take photos of new buds in the fading light. The colors were so glorious after the dark days of winter. He would have epiphany moments that were then transformed into works of art, and we would both see the world with new eyes.”

Les Yeux du Monde will host an artists’ luncheon on Wednesday, March 26.