Issue link: https://www.balharbourdigital.com/i/384868
156 BAL HARBOUR tarving artists everywhere are praying that they'll someday get a two-book deal and a massive social media following for their work. And there are plenty of others who would happily settle for a well-paid career as a creative executive at a high-end cosmetics company. All of those people probably despise Donald Robertson, aka Donald Drawbertson, who lives both those lives at the same time. At 52, the Westchester commuter dad—he has five children to add to his two careers—is one of the first art stars minted via popularity on Instagram, where he now has more than 84,000 followers (@donalddrawbertson). He does a lot of his drawing on the train on the way to his day job in Manhattan, where he's a roving creative director for the Estée Lauder beauty empire, which includes Bobbi Brown and MAC Cosmetics, a brand he helped found three decades ago. Although his hobby sounds high-tech because of its delivery system, the painterly, brushstrokey and tossed-off style of his drawings is a kind of throwback to an earlier era. There's a sense of old-fashioned fun in his lineups of bathing beauties (the typical Robertson post has a row of jaunty figures) and his explosions of lipstick kiss marks. Despite some comparisons to Andy Warhol, Robertson is coming from a very different place, and the storybook quality of this work is what keeps people coming back. "It's not computery, it's not tech— people love that," he says, comparing the appeal of his work to Wes Anderson's aesthetic. "I have to make sure that it doesn't get too slick— I have to keep the hand in there. They have to be able to see me making it." Robertson's most famous drawing to date showed Vogue Editor- in-Chief Anna Wintour seated at her desk, with a glasses-wearing giraffe named Mitford showing her a memo. "There was so much commotion about that giraffe!" says Robertson with a laugh. Not only was the image regrammed zillions of times, it led to a two-book deal at Viking, one of which will follow the adventur es of Mitford, the intern-giraffe, in the "fashion zoo." The other subject is still to be determined. Among his other commissions of late, Robertson has an eight-page spread coming up in Harper's Bazaar UK. "Whoever heard of such a thing for an illustrator-painter?" he asks, still in disbelief. "It's the kind of thing Mario Testino would get." When Robertson posted a cheeky drawing of Vanity Fair Editor-in- Chief Graydon Carter, suggesting that his skin tone was that of a Ritz Cracker and he should therefore be the brand's spokesman, Vanity Fair regrammed it—and Carter himself asked to have the original. "It was like something that could have happened in 1935," says Robertson, S ALL PHOTOS BY TARA SGROI