I’ve just finished reading Maira Kalman‘s newest book, And the Pursuit of Happiness. I love her brevity. I aspire to it with a kind of cheerful hopelessness, knowing that no matter how hard I try, there’s always something more I want to add.
Still, in hopes that her wisdom will wear off on me, I have been following Kalman’s columns in the New York Times since 2006. Her paintings and commentary are the results of a daily search for beauty and wonder in both the quotidian and the marvelous.
A new exhibit of her work at the Jewish Museum on 5th Ave in New York opened March 13 and runs through July 31. It’s called “Maira Kalman: Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World).” In an interview at the Jewish Daily Forward, she talks about some wonderful new projects—including an upcoming children’s book on Abraham Lincoln and an illustrated version of Michael Pollan‘s Food Rules—and says that she likes her text to be “tart and spritely.”
Perhaps best known in some circles for her illustrated The Elements of Style, the classic how-not-to-write book by
Strunk & White, Kalman was born in Tel Aviv and came to the U.S. at the age of four.
