Drew Friedman: The Art of Drawing

Friedman in his studio – Photo by Greg Preston — Artworks © by Drew Friedman / All Rights Reserved

If you have never heard of Drew Friedman shame on you: Friedman is an award-winning illustrator whose work has appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Newsweek, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Observer, Esquire, RAW, Rolling Stone, and MAD Magazine.

Friedman is most familar for highly-detailed caricature, simultaneously photographic and grotesque, but recently has turned to painting.

Friedman the New York School of Visual Arts under Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Edward Sorel, Stan Mack, and Arnold Roth, among others, and his career bloomed in the 1980s writing and illustrating alternative comics, moving on to Heavy Metal, Weirdo, High Times, and National Lampoon.

Siegel and Shuster in a beautiful painting by Friedman

Friedman work has been widely collected, and he is included in nine volumes of the American Illustration annual. His most recent book is “Heroes of the Comics”, published by Fantagraphics books (2014).

“As far as satire, I’m not sure, not much of what passes as satire, now or ever, is funny or clever to me or even works on any satiric level. I think hands down the best satire ever created were those first 26 issues of MAD edited and written by Harvey Kurtzman.”

Blues.Gr have an awesome interview with him, that you should definitely visit at Illustrator/cartoonist Drew Friedman talks about Harvey Kurtzman, R. Crumb, Three Stooges & Superman – Blues.Gr. Go there now!