altpick connects

DF: I’ve gotten hired by the Washington Post to illustrate a book review about “The revised fundamentals of caregiving” by Jonathan Evison. The main aspect of the story is that a man is down on his luck and the only job available was to be a caregiver for someone in poor health. He is assigned to a 19 year old he has a degenerative disease that is slowly killing him. The main character spends the entire book trying to show the beauty and wealth life has while also trying to deal with his own demons. The idea for this illustration was to show how the young man was slowly falling apart and how that was also hurting his caretaker. Like many illustrations, I try to dig deep on what the emotional pressure point of the article is and try to focus the emphasis on that. The idea for this came after I was walking home after getting coffee and saw a mangled umbrella in a trash can on a street corner.

DF: I was asked by the exceptional folks at National Public Radio to make a piece for their 2013 Calendar. The art direction was to make an image that reflected our personal connection with the radio. I was in high school when I started to listen to NPR. For the longest time I wanted to go to college to eventually go back to my home town and make something there. I really didn’t know what. Listening to NPR opened me up to a world out there that I wasn’t aware of and made me want to begin exploring it.

DF:  Not long ago, I started working in a limited color style along with my painted work. I’m doing this to not only offer something more bold and graphic but to challenge myself to make something more minimal and to the point. Not everything needs to be a landscape of detail. This piece was done for the Globe and Mail for a story about a woman who loses her job and realizes that her identity is completely wrapped up in what she did for a living. A consistent conversation I have with my studio mate is about this very subject. Are we our work? I like to think that the majority of it is an extension of myself, but when does the identity of the illustrator end and where does Daniel Fishel begin? Making an image showing a invisible business women looking at herself in sweatpants and a t-shirt seemed like an obvious answer to show her externalizing this question I often times pose to myself.