The artist Eric Drooker, a New York native and Berkeley resident, has been following the Occupy Wall Street protests closely, posting numerous updates on his Facebook page and even designing posters that can be used by participants. This week The New Yorker is featuring one of Drooker’s drawings, a gloomy, moody picture of an urban skyline dominated by smokestacks and a strange sphinx-like bull at the top.
“Manhattan Island has become more and more an exclusive place for the super wealthy, or the super corporations—and a hostile place for people to live, not just for the working class, but even for the middle class,” Drooker said on The New Yorker web site. “The city has become this monolithic cathedral to money.”
Drooker, who has drawn regularly for the The New Yorker since 1994, sent in the picture a year ago, according to Berkeleyan Paul Rauber, who spoke with Drooker’s wife.
“Spoke to his wife this morning; she said he’d sent this in almost a year ago, but it was ruled ‘too dark’,” Rauber wrote on his Facebook page. “Sometimes, I guess, you just have to wait for the zeitgeist to catch up with you.”
Drooker, a painter and graphic novelist, who also designed the animation for the recent film, Howl, based on Allen Ginsburg’s poem, is currently in Mexico.
The New Yorker cover is “old fashioned pen and ink,” Drooker said on his Facebook page. “Color (and smoke) were added digitally.”
