"Because of a minor illness, perhaps just a bad cold, I missed the first few days of kindergarten. As a result, my name was not on the class roster. When my teacher read out the class list, as she did each morning, my name was never called. It was not until my teacher noticed a drawing of a train I had made that she asked, 'Who are you?' And so it seemed to me, at the age of five, that my existence depended on my drawing."
— Mark Podwal
Mark Podwal may be best known for his distinctive drawings on The New York Times OP-ED page, unforgettable witnesses to the momentous political events of the past thirty-five years. Doctored Drawings includes a selection of these alongside others in which he depicts the human body as a medical specimen and visually represents the essence of the most important public health issues of our time.
As the pen becomes the scalpel, comedy and tragedy converge and the personal, medical, and political play off each other with surprising results. These strangely beautiful, witty images reveal the hand of a master, for no artist is better equipped to capture this subject: Podwal is also a practicing physician.
Mark Podwal had recently graduated from medical school in 1970 when his first drawing appeared in The New York Times. His work is represented in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Library of Congress, among many others. In 1996, the French government named him an officer of the Order of Arts and Letters. He is the author and illustrator of numerous books including Jerusalem Sky: Stars, Crosses and Crescents and A Sweet Year. King Solomon and His Magic Ring, his collaboration with Elie Wiesel, won a silver medal from the Society of Illustrators in 1999 and You Never Know, his collaboration with Francine Prose, won a National Jewish Book Award in 1998. He lives in Harrison, New York.
PRAISE FOR DOCTORED DRAWINGS
"Mark Podwal’s Doctored Drawings is plain brilliant! Podwal is like no one else that I know of, and his work will withstand the test of time." — David McCullough, author of 1776 and John Adams
"Mark Podwal is in every sense an illuminator."— Harold Bloom, author of Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
"Mark Podwal is one of those startling souls—they are very few—who can imagine, through the power of a unifying eye, connections so new that they shake the brain into fresh juxtapositions of understanding."
— Cynthia Ozick, author of The Din in the Head
"Mark Podwal's original drawings on current events in the fields of both politics and medicine reflect his great talent; endowed with insight and beauty they acquire the weight of personal commentary."— Elie Wiesel, author of Night
13-digit ISBN: 78-1-934137-02-4
