Tom Bachtell

Tom Bachtell
Alma mater	Yellow Springs High School Cleveland Institute of Music Case Western Reserve University
Occupation	Illustrator, Caricaturist, Pianist, Dance instructor, Dancer
Partner(s)	Andrew Patner (1990-2015)

Tom Bachtell is a self-taught artist who is an illustrator and caricaturist for The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town as well as other sections, contributing regularly for 27 years. He has done work for Entertainment Weekly, Newsweek, Forbes, Bon Appétit, Town & Country, Mother Jones, New York, Poetry, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Observer and London’s Evening Standard as well as Marshall Field, Lands' End and the chamber-music series at the University of Chicago as part of his ad-campaign clientele. His brush-and-ink style is considered to be reminiscent of American cartoonists from the 1920s and 1930s. He was a finalist for the 18th Lambda Literary Awards as illustrator along with editor Robert Trachtenberg for the book “When I Knew” under the Belles Lettres category.

Tom Bachtell was interested in drawing as a child and was especially fixated on the older works from New Yorker cartoonists from the 1930s and 1940s such as Peter Arno, Charles Addams, Arnold Roth, James Thurber, Syd Hoff and Al Hirschfeld. His mother, an editor and writer, encouraged him to draw. The earliest portrait he did is that of his mother when he was 4 or 5 years old. When he was 10, he drew his impression of the guests at his parents’ cocktail party at their Ohio home on a portable chalkboard. He saw the adults as fancily dressed, laughing and drinking. He remembered enjoying it. He never planned it but thought it was good and had social satire in it. Tom attended and graduated from Yellow Springs High School in 1975. He thought drawing was not a legitimate career so he pursued other interests and went to university and conservatory. He majored in English and music (under the Joint Music Program at Cleveland Institute of Music) and minored in dance at Case Western Reserve University. He trained as a pianist and studied the harpsichord at the Cleveland Institute of Music. During college, he drew for friends and for himself. He graduated his liberal arts degree magna cum laude in 1980. In his early 20s he started a modern dance company. At a point Tom thought he wouldn’t be good enough to make a living from performing music. After finishing college, he decided to teach himself how to draw and make a living from it. When he was 26 his mother passed away.

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