By Todd Savage
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His style is entirely self-taught. As a child, he loved cartoons and enjoyed thumbing through his parents’ New Yorkers to admire the work of artists like Peter Arno, Charles Addams, and Al Hirschfeld. When he was ten, his parents hosted a cocktail party at their Ohio home. He recalls using a portable chalkboard to create a drawing of his impressions of the party: adults standing around in fancy clothes, drinking and laughing. “I remember having a blast doing it,” Bachtell says. “It just came out, and it wasn’t premeditated or anything. I realized that it was good. But it had an element of social satire–that was when I discovered it.”
Bachtell studied English at Case Western Reserve University and piano at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and started a modern dance company in his early 20s. But even though he had continued to draw cartoons, he avoided art classes. He’d taken a drawing class in college but worried that formal courses would rein in the looseness of his emerging style. “They seemed stilted and formal to me and not fun,” he says. After he moved to Chicago in 1983, Bachtell found a day job as a copywriter and started sending out his drawings.
Bachtell has his own way of measuring success. “Sometimes when you see theater or puppets you start forgetting that these are actors, or they’re little things that are being manipulated,” he says. “I think it’s the same way with a drawing. All of a sudden you don’t see the linework. You don’t see the mechanics. The drawing takes on a life of its own.”
