NYLON - January 2008 - (Page 130) CERTAIN GENIUS If you haven’t yet visited the whimsical wonderful world of Maira Kalman, the time is now. By Kate Williams In her light-filled Village apartment, artist Maira Kalman, wearing chunky glasses and a crisp white shirt, looks almost exactly like her selfportraits. A friendly, fuzzy dog named Pete rarely leaves her side, and when I walk in, she offers me a cup of coffee, which she’s made in a French press and is pouring into a teacup illustrated with portraits of British royalty. I ask for a glass of water instead, and when Kalman responds with “Sure. Would you like some pomegrante-blueberry juice in it?” it’s the best question I’ve been asked all day. I first discovered Kalman’s whimsical world as a teenager, through a few of her capriciously illustrated and idiosyncratically written books. Though aimed at children, they possess a wonderfully wry sense of humor and deliciously lighthearted view, and are a delight and inspiration for anyone, no matter their age, who also desires to see life as such. Born in Israel and raised in the Bronx, Kalman attended NYU, where she met her future husband Tibor Kalman. It was the ’60s, and as she notes, “I wrote bad poetry, and he thought he was going to be a journalist with a side order of radical, blowing-up-theworld activist. We had a million jobs to pay our two-dollar rent.” They dropped in and dropped out of school, but a job decorating bookstore windows revealed their talent for working together and for design. After that, they started M&Co. (the M being Maira, of course), one of the most influential and groundbreaking design firms of the past century. M&Co. eventually closed its doors when Tibor went to work for Benetton, editing the company’s Colors magazine and creating their iconic ad campaigns (he died in 1999). Their work included designing album covers for the Talking Heads, which led to Kalman’s first book, a collaboration illustrating the lyrics to David Byrne’s “Stay Up Late.” “I started drawing because I got sick of my writing,” she explains, but she has, fortunately, continued to do both. In 2005, she illustrated Strunk & White’s iconic grammar guide The Elements of Style (“I found a copy in a bookstore and thought that this person must have loved words and possessed a wonderful sense of humor”) and last month saw the release of what she calls “a big, fat, adult book,” The Principles of Uncertainty (Penguin Press), a meandering meditation on everything from the extinction of the dodo bird, to the 17th-century philosophies of Spinoza and people who wear hats. Kalman loves hats (a collection lines shelves in her apartment), but more so, she loves people. “My favorite thing is to wander around and take pictures of people,” she says. “If you stood on the street for an hour, you could do an entire book of just who you saw standing in front of you waiting for the light to change.” As we talk, Kalman, with Pete at her side, walks me from her apartment to the studio she keeps a couple of floors below. In addition to being where she works, it’s where she houses her collections—besides hats, there are fruit wrappers, waterfall postcards, numbers, alphabets, and candy bars from all over the world. On her desk sits a very rough sketch of two men in robes and wooden sandals—haiku poets Kalman met while on one of her many strolls through the city. She was thrilled to have made their acquaintance, but is now kicking herself. “Later, I thought, ‘why didn’t I invite them back to my house!?’ So I looked for a way to find them. Like maybe there was a haiku poets’ convention in town…” she muses. For now, though, the poets remain unfound, but they are sure to surface again soon in the pages of her work, and this time, possibly even wearing hats.
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