A Plum Assignment

This article is part of a regular series of conversations with the Review’s contributors; read past entries here and sign up for our email newsletter to get them delivered to your inbox each week. The cover for our Fall Books Issue—a painting of ripe purple plums in a punnet, surrounded by hand-painted cover lines—was an unexpected collaboration between the Irish-born New Yorker Lena Beug, a commercials director, and the Canadian Jason Logan, who makes ink from natural pigments that he forages from rural and urban environments. I had assigned the fully illustrated cover to Logan, who was visiting New York at the end of August, and invited both Logan and Beug to dinner. While he was sketching ideas, she arrived bearing plums to cook the popular New York Times plum torte. The dinner table was covered in paint and paper, and Beug sat down and made some quick brush studies before starting to bake. After Logan’s first idea was rejected a few days later, he went back to the drawing board and made inky paintings of leaves and landscapes, hand lettering around the shapes. He then tossed one of Lena’s paintings into the ring. We agreed that it looked luscious. (The editors at first thought ...