Grant Funds

Biomass Study

In Randolph

By Sara Nelson

When asked for a cartoon to represent his receipt of Vermont's highest arts award, Brookfield cartoonist Ed Koren remembered this New Yorker gem fro the 1960's. See the print edition of The Herald for a two-page spread featuring many of Koren's Vermont-oriented drawings. (Herald illustration by Ed Koren, Bob Eddy, and Tim Calabro)

To his Brookfield neighbors, Ed Koren might seem like a lucky guy who doesn't need a day job, the guy who's always out jogging or kayaking in the middle of the day, the friendly volunteer firefighter who lives in the cheerful white house in Pond Village.

The truth is more complicated. Ed Koren is a bit of an undercover agent, a celebrated interpreter of Brookfield and Vermont to a wide, largely urban, audience.

"I'm an eavesdropper and a voyeur," Koren admitted this week, with a twinkle in his eye.

"I'm always listening, observing what people look like, how they walk, how they sit, how they lift things, how they run. I walk around with a little notebook."

For newspaper editors, no Ed Koren cartoon has more resonance than this one that graced the cover of a 2001 New Yorker.

And people all over the world will eventually see the results of some of those notebook sketches. Koren is one of the best-known cartoonists in America- over the past 45 years, close to a thousand of his cartoons have been published the New Yorker, the magazine that every cartoonist wants to be published in.

Tomorrow, the Vermont Arts Council will honor Ed Koren's eavesdropping achievements with the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts, to be presented in a ceremony tomorrow in Montpelier.

The recognition, the state's most prestigious arts award, is bestowed upon a Vermont artist "who has achieved national or international stature for making a significant contribution to the advancement of his or her chosen art form."

Koren said he's doubly honored since, "cartoonists are the poor stepchildren of the arts. We're not really thought of as serious artists with great philosophical depth."

"Of course, I disagree."

Anthropology might be a better term for Koren's covert observations. His subject matter- "the middle class domesticity that is unremarkable but crushingly familiar to enormous numbers of Americans," as he has put it- demands a good eye and ear if it's going to be turned into something funny.

Koren has showered his talents not only on New Yorkers. Central Vermont residents may have seen Koren's shaggy monsters and large-nosed people in the numerous T-shirts he has designed for organizations such as Vermont Public Radio, the Brookfield Fire Department, and, most recently, Chandler Center for the Arts.

Koren's cartoons have also been collected in numerous books and shown in museums and galleries.

A Gradual Path

The 72-year-old's path to cartooning glory has been gradual. Koren grew up in New York City and attended Columbia, where he drew cartoons for the school newspaper. His senior year, the editors of the New Yorker invited him to "come down for a chat."

"They said 'we like your work, but we don't like it yet,'" Koren recalls. "But they encouraged me to submit my stuff."

Despite the early encouragement, it was years before the magazine would publish one of Koren's cartoons. Luckily, Koren didn't put all his eggs in that basket.

On the advice of one of his teachers, he went to Paris and studied with the famous printmaker, S.W. Hayter. He returned to New York, went back to school for his MFA, and got a job teaching at Brown University.

Although he was getting discouraged about cartooning, Koren kept sending his work to the magazine. Finally, in 1962 the New Yorker published his first cartoon.

Two years later they published a second, and then gradually, in fits and starts, more and more.

"There was a learning curve," Koren said. "My first work was awful. I can see why they didn't print it."

Becoming a good cartoonist, Koren said, has meant spending a lot of time solving "structural, technical problems- getting the foreground and background right, figuring out the placement of objects."

"In that way it's a little bit like directing theater."

His unique, scratchy style has emerged over time.

"But not consciously. It's just emerged. It's a non-process," he explained, adding that many artists and illustrators have influenced him.

Similarly, Koren said that each cartoon evolves organically, and typically an idea will undergo "a high degree of transformation" before it turns out as a cartoon.

"There's no formula- it's a scattershot affair."

Koren said he has to be "a visual observer as much as a listener" in order to know how to turn the situations in life that strike him as funny into successful cartoons.

"People don't think about it, but a good cartoon doesn't just illustrate a joke. The drawing is part of the joke."

Satiric Bite

Koren says he is fascinated by people who "live the unexamined life." Many of his quirky cartoons, though endearing, have a satiric bite. American obsessions with political correctness, social status, and children's test scores often show up, as in the panel where a preschooler proudly shows his father a crayon drawing marked "good," and the worried father chides the boy, "'Good' is not good enough."

Other Koren cartoons celebrate the idiosyncratic sweetness or sourness of human relationship. For example, a woman at a party says to a man wearing an extensive tool belt over his sport coat, "I hear you enjoy tinkering." In another cartoon, a restaurant hostess asks a dour middle-aged couple, "Would you prefer the talking or the non-talking section?"

Then there are Koren's monster cartoons, where one unidentifiable furry beast might say to another, "Tell me about your first wife."

The portrait of human nature that emerges from these cartoons is both poignant and absurd. Like Koren's monsters, we are sensitive creatures with sharp teeth.

Koren said he's always been "a bit of a contrarian."

"I had a childhood of not belonging, a disaffected youth."

Koren said this feeling of being an outsider has probably been an asset to his skills as a social critic. Even when he became successful with the influential New Yorker crowd, Koren says he never lost his sense of curiosity about human nature.

"Whatever entree it gave me into those circles was just a greater field to be interested in."

And despite his issues with certain aspects of American culture, Koren also has a great affection for his country.

"I need my culture. I can understand it, read it in a way I couldn't read any other culture," he said.

Koren first came to Vermont when he was 17, to perform in the now defunct MacArthur Summer Theater in Waitsfield. He fell in love with the place.

"It turned out I was a country boy at heart," Koren said.

Thirty years ago, friends who lived in Braintree persuaded him to leave New York for Brookfield, a move that has allowed Koren to indulge his fondness for outdoor activities, while keeping a low profile as an anthropological cartoonist.

Rural Vermont might seem a difficult place to find subjects appropriate for a magazine called the New Yorker, but Koren has seamlessly incorporated pickup trucks, steepled churches and overalls into his cartoons, and the New Yorker is still publishing them.

Luckily for Koren, humans apparently do universally funny things, no matter where they live.