Virtual Memories Show 296:
Cathy B. Graham
“The great thing about being heartbroken is I become very focused on my work.”
Who starts a career at an age when most people are looking at retirement? Coming off a divorce and a three-decade hiatus from professional life, award-winning illustrator Cathy B. Graham is having a second bloom. We sat down to talk about painting, fashion illustration, and floral design, as captured in Second Bloom: Cathy Graham’s Art of the Table (Vendome Press). We get into her artistic upbringing, her RISD education alongside Roz Chast & Dave Calver, the art of entertaining, her love of the Thorne Miniature Rooms and their influence on her life, her trepidation about returning to oil painting, the joy of Instagram, her New York and how she shifted from SoHo artist to Upper East Side culture maven. Most importantly, we talk about the regeneration and finding your new life. Give it a listen! And go buy Second Bloom: Cathy Graham’s Art of the Table
“You can’t rewrite the script. You have to go forward.”
“When I was studying painting, I thought, ‘If I don’t have the facility to paint as well as John Singer Sargent, then why bother?’ I didn’t.”
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About our Guest
Cathy Barancik Graham is an award-winning artist and fashion illustrator. Her editorial work has appeared in The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and New York Magazine, and she has been commissioned by Bergdorf Goodman, Estée Lauder, CBS Records, and HBO. In addition, she has been a contributing editor of Elle Decor and House Beautiful. She is a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, from which she holds a BFA in Painting, and she studied Fashion Illustration at Parsons School of Design. For more than a decade, Cathy worked with the late floral designer and event planner Robert Isabell, noted for his unique lavish and innovative parties. Cathy resides in New York City, where she works to support cultural life by serving on the boards of Lincoln Center Theater, New York Restoration Project, and House of SpeakEasy.
Her first book, Second Bloom: Cathy Graham’s Art of the Table
Credits: This episode’s music is Fella by Hal Mayforth, used with permission from the artist. The conversation was recorded at Ms. Graham’s home on a pair of Blue enCORE 200 Microphones
(Fig Tree Books) chronicles that process, bringing to life a story of family and discovery. I talk with the award-winning columnist about how she came to Judaism from the 
(Little, Brown), his one in-person encounter with Gorey, how Gorey’s sexuality did and didn’t inform his work, and the challenge of writing the biography of an artist whose work always invited the reader to fill in the gaps. We get into how Gotham Book Mart made a cottage industry out of Gorey, the long-range impact of Gorey on America’s pop culture, the queerness of children’s literature beginning in the ’50s, the influence of Asian art and philosophy on Gorey’s work, his devotion to ballet and Balanchine, why the epic catalog makes for a great biographical tool, and a lot more, like Mark’s lifelong one-sided relationship with Patti Smith! 
, a seminal anthology of writings on digital culture; 
, 
, and the essay collection, 
. Like Gorey, his mission in life “is to make everybody as uneasy as possible.” His new book is 
. Now he’s back with the graphic novel 
(Liveright) and we got together at SPX to talk about how those careers mesh, how he got his start in illustration, how he approached his new book as fiction, and more. We get into his artistic, literary and cinematic influences, the struggles of studying representational art in the ’60s and ’70s, and the incredibly wrong geographic decision about a teaching gig that led him to the love of his life. We also discuss the elements of a good kids book and why so much of today’s market turns him off, the moment in Paris when he got over his fear of making comics, the memory palace he reverse-engineered to start his memoir, and the evolution Home After Dark took over 12 drafts (!) to tell the story David knew he had to tell. 
