How to convey the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina? Anthony Russo conceptualized the drawing that ran with a New York Times special section while stuck in traffic on the Fall River bridge. The feel of the New Yorker’s Shouts and Murmurs column? Russo’s fanciful curlicues graced it for years. The versatile artist specializes in editorial illustration—the visual synthesis of the complex ideas in magazine and newspaper stories. “It’s about finding the emotional truth,” he explains.

He and his ilk are the most-published artists you’ve never heard of. Their names appear in tiny print on ephemeral publications, while the more solid works of their fine-art colleagues fill Soho galleries. But there are compensations. Since Russo’s first assignment —a chance gig for Boston’s The Real Paper—he has never lacked for income, nor intellectual stimulation.

It wasn’t always this way; as a struggling art grad, he fell for Little Compton, his home now, while working the deck of a commercial fishing boat. Fishing “taught me I needed to do something creative to survive,” he explains. “And URI, and its professors, taught me how to create.”

Russo’s work is on the front cover of this issue of QuadAngles.

—Pippa Jack