Kurt Woerpel’s Silver Lining zine brings together optimism and doom

From MTV News and Bloomberg Businessweek to Interview magazine, Kurt Woerpel has been neck-deep in design, editorial and art direction since leaving university. But people may not know the other side of Kurt’s practice – illustration. “I try to treat my drawings as a more personal avenue for expression,” he tells It’s Nice That.

Alongside his drawings, for the best part of a decade he has run a Risograph zine publishing house with his friends, TXTbooks. Although his illustrations may have been more on the down-low, in recent years they’ve started to bleed through into his commercial practice, most notably taking centre stage in Civilization’s collaboration with Comme Des Garcons. Now, his illustrative work and Risograph knowledge have collided with his zine and exhibition, Silver Lining.

“The old phrase ‘every cloud has got a silver lining’ is an invitation to find something positive in even the darkest situations,” Kurt says. “At the same time, the saying still acknowledges something bad has happened.” With this in mind, Kurt explains that the core of his illustrative project is rooted in the context of the world’s unsteady state. “It’s not been a great time for people across the world,” he says, “and on a personal level there have been deaths of friends, dealing with my chronic illness and pain, and then just run-of-the-mill bummers.” This series of events led Kurt to take an extended break from work, wherein he found time to creatively challenge himself and dive into personal projects. 

During his break, Kurt recalls spending plenty of time people-watching in New York City’s parks, as well as watching lots of films. Both of these visual practices ended up filtering down into the work he produced, creating illustrative scenes that oscillate between a sense of optimism and doom. “My thought for the exhibition was ‘what if you could see all the good and bad at once?’” Kurt says. “The drawings themselves are supposed to be these slice-of-life vignettes that don’t necessarily have a clear relationship.” Instead, they’re suggestive of something more profound – dictated by their proximity to one another on the wall.

Visually, Kurt took inspiration from photographic contact sheets and family photo albums, whereby one can see multiple photographs on a simple grid at once, suggesting a greater breadth of work and a broader narrative. “The hope was that people could hang any number of drawings they liked, making pairings in a way that could create new implications,” says Kurt. “I was happy to bury little easter eggs visually like the solar eclipse sun in the football player drawing next to the poorly repaired sinkhole in the large ‘x’ drawing.” 

Since Kurt exhibited Silver Lining, he’s since adapted the show into a zine of the same name, something he says was a given due to his connection with TXTbooks. “If the goal is for the work to be seen,” he says, “a $20 zine is much more likely to circulate than a hundred-something dollar drawing”, introducing greater longevity to the project. “It’s kind of like attending a concert vs. buying the album,” he ends. “The concert can overwhelm you with this sense of ‘wow’ I really felt that in my whole body, but the album can stay in arm’s reach.”