Rejection hurts. But in the art "bidnes" it is a way of life.
Don't believe me? Ask Drew Dernavich.
His woodblock print-style cartoons appear regularly in the Boston Globe and The New Yorker. It's an artists dream!
Or is it?
Drew estimates that only one out of 20 of his cartoons make it to print... and astoundly good batting average, by the way.
He describes the experience for an article in the Boston Globe celebrating the forth coming book of rejected cartoons, titled "The Rejection Collection: Cartoons You Never Saw, and Never Will See, in The New Yorker" (Simon Spotlight Entertainment).
I live in Boston, separated from New York’s cartoon community, so I never fully understood the selection process. But I do occasionally make the trip down to Manhattan to drop off my weekly batch of cartoons in person, as many of the other cartoonists do. On one of my visits to the magazine, I saw the pile of submissions coming in for that week.
There were 15 cartoons by BEK (Bruce Eric Kaplan), all in his bleak and biting style and all very funny. Next, there were a dozen zingers by David Sipress. And so on through the enormous pile. I realized The New Yorker can’t publish even a fraction of what its roster of more than 40 cartoonists churns out every week. There just isn’t room.
Drew Dernavich, a very active graphic facilitator in Boston, will appear with fellow New Yorker cartoonists Matt Diffee and Eric Lewis at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge on Nov. 15 to discuss the experiences behind the rejection.
My personal favorite for the pure ick factor is the P.C. Vey piece with the tagline: "These stem cells taste funny."
See more of Drew's work at drewdernavich.com.
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