26 Artists&Illustrators
of Ridley Road market, a vibrant local community being
threatened by gentrification. Once a subject is decided
upon for a commission such as this, she says it is
important to then approach it like an artist and make
decisions about what to leave in or out: “Otherwise you are
like a photographer for a local newspaper and you have to
go and ‘get’ the exact picture, which is quite limiting.”
When Lucinda finally decided to pull the New York
drawings out of her drawer, she worked with designer
Simon Esterson to make a prototype that she took to
several leading book publishers who fretted about print
costs and whether Lucinda had a sufficient following on
social media. Undeterred, she took matters into her own
hands and launched the project on the crowd-funding
website Kickstarter back in June. “I had faith that I could
find 1,000 people to buy this book,” she says proudly.
Backers were encouraged to pledge donations to cover
the production costs of New York: Lucinda Rogers, with
extra reward packages ranging from £10 for a pack of New
York postcards through to £3,000 for a signed copy of the
book with an original drawing. “The other beauty of this
approach, while it is difficult in its own way, is the ability to
decide on a design and the production values,” she says.House of Illustration curator Olivia Ahmad has edited the
132-page book, which will be printed in Italy on Fedrigoni
paper and thread-bound in a gold-foil embossed cover.
New York: Lucinda Rogers will be split geographically
into chapters that roughly follow the order in which she
explored Manhattan, starting with her early days on the
Upper West Side and progressing downtown. Though not
entirely comprehensive – Central Park was avoided, she
says, because “it’s really hard to draw trees” – she did use
the prospect of the book to fill in a few blanks in her urban
exploring, finally tackling forgotten subjects on recent trips
such as Chinatown and The High Line, the latter a public
park on a disused elevated railway that she calls “the
most obvious physical change in New York recently”.
At time of writing, a total of £61,916 had been raised
and orders for the book can still be made prior to printing
in December. Lucinda is clearly buoyed by the response
and the chance to compile these long-private drawings
into a cohesive whole. “Even though I’ll probably continue
to draw New York, it’s nice to say, well, this was this body of
work,” she says. “It’s good to draw a line under something.”
Lucinda Rogers: New York is available to pre-order at
lucindarogers.bigcartel.comABOVE John
Pitts, a Poet,
Selling T-Shirts
on Broadway,
ink and crayon
on cardboard,
50.5x40.5cm