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“When you live in two different houses, you don’t really feel at home in either place,” she reflects. The illustrator grew up in Durham and Chatham counties, shuttling between the households of her divorced parents from the age of five. I want a home.”Įven before her nomadic post-college years, Allsbrook was no stranger to flux. Plus, as she recently acquired a new apartment in Queens and a new boyfriend in Bushwick, she’s in the market for more convenience and a modicum of stability: “It’s about figuring out where I’m comfortable and where I would like to be. “It’s been a nice thing, but I miss being on my own,” she says, explaining her current decision to leave the space. When she eventually returned to New York, she finally took the longed-for studio in the Pencil Factory, but is moving after a year.

“I used to look across the street at all the people who were working there, and it was like, ‘Oh, that’s who I want to be-they’re making their own careers, it’s really exciting.’” Subsequent moves took her to New Jersey and then to North Carolina, her home state, where she tried to save money while working on personal projects. Her first New York apartment after graduation was, in fact, close to the Pencil Factory. The illustrator is preparing for an imminent move-one of many since her time at RISD.

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Our meeting place was determined partly by its proximity to her shared studio space, in Greenpoint’s famed Pencil Factory building, and partly by the fact that said studio is currently full of boxes. Allsbrook has short brown hair and glasses, and she projects a clear-eyed intelligence and self-awareness. She’s nervous about getting all the preparations done in time, but excited by the project’s collaborative nature: “I like the idea of working with people who don’t do what I do,” she says. My first meeting with Allsbrook is in a wooden-seated booth in a comfortably worn bar in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a week before the tiki dinner. She and Potter developed the “tiki in winter” event with chef Tessa Liebman, collaboratively bringing together a summer-tinged, multicourse meal with an illustrated menu and an atmosphere of tropical magic. The Polynesian-themed room just described is part of another personal project: a special, one-off dinner. Since graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 2007, Allsbrook has been building a body of sharply conceived editorial work while making comics with her constant collaborator, writer Barrie Potter. Whether she’s illustrating an article or creating an original comic, Allsbrook, 30, has an unmistakable and memorable style-immensely skilled brushwork combined with a saturated palette to communicate emotional power with intelligence. She briskly wields a large brush dipped in black acrylic, building a restless accumulation of lines.įor readers of the New York Times, The New Yorker, McSweeney’s and many other publications, those lines and their sense of pressing movement and vitality may be familiar. The illustrator responsible for this roomful of Bali Ha’i imagery, Wesley Allsbrook, is standing on the papered table, wearing white jeans, a white button-down shirt tied at the waist, and black-and-white striped socks without shoes. Rising up the back wall is a pointed mountain range surrounded by frenetic sweeps of paint-the swirling mists and tempestuous clouds of a seductive tropical fantasyland.

Painted across the strips in sweeping brush strokes is a still-developing scene: painted waves that climb from the floor up the side of a paper-draped table a volcano and palm trees lush jungle leaves and vines. Round paper lanterns shine on a high-ceilinged room in which wide strips of newsprint are draped across every wall and floor.

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Through a wall of windows in a former warehouse, a glow of warmth and activity reaches the darkening pavement outside. On a bitterly cold February afternoon, the light is waning along a desolate stretch of Northern Boulevard in Queens.

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