Hill Residents Wendy MacNaughton and Caroline Paul Publish Lost Cat 

Jian Hong 

The Potrero View | April 2013

Growing up in Marin County, Potrero Hill resident Wendy MacNaughton always drew “the teacher instead of taking notes.” She shifted from drawing to writing advertising copy while she was studying fine arts and advertising at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, and altered her path again when she went on to earn a graduate degree in social work from Columbia University.

After graduate school she worked for a nonprofit advertising agency, and started drawing again. “I was living in Oakland and commuting to San Francisco,” she said. “I started drawing people on BART every day. I wrote notes about them. Over the course of three years I fell in love with drawing again. It felt like coming home again.”

MacNaughton sees drawing as a way to better understand the world around her. “For example, if I walk down the street and I am looking at things in the way I look at them when I draw, I notice more things — the direction between things, funny details — than otherwise I would notice. So I really enjoy moving through the world in my life through the lens of an illustrator.” 

“Usually I draw with a pen,” MacNaughton said, and then paints her drawing “with watercolor. It’s not like oil paint or pencil, where you can keep working on the same thing until it’s right. For pen, it either works or doesn’t work, but I prefer that.” If the drawing doesn’t work, she starts all over with a new piece of paper. If she redraws the same object, the results are never the same: “You cannot draw the same line twice.” If she keeps making “a bad line,” she said, “who cares? …Sometimes a bad line turns into something very unexpected and quite beautiful.” 

MacNaughton loves drawing the “Meanwhile” column for the online literary magazine The Rumpus. She gets a buzz out of illustrating a documentary series of San Francisco communities for Chronicle Books. “They are most rewarding,” she said, “because I learn about people, places and communities.” Having the privilege of being allowed into people’s lives to “observe and get to know them,” she’s delighted to share their stories with those who might “otherwise not hear.” 

A number of books illustrated by MacNaughton will be published over the next year, including Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation & GPS Technology. Written by her partner, Caroline Paul, the book, which will be published this month, is for “animal lovers, pet owners, and anyone who has ever done anything desperate for love.” The Essential Scratch & Sniff Guide to Wine, will be published by Houghton Mifflin, in October, 2013. San Francisco in its Own Words, from Chronicle Books, and Pen & Ink, Tattoos And The Stories Behind Them, from Bloomsbury, will be published in 2014. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times.

MacNaughton lives with Paul, and has a work residence at Intersection for the Arts. “That’s what I enjoy [doing] every day,” said MacNaughton, referring to her job as a fulltime artist and illustrator. 

For more information, wendymacnaughton.com/#about; lostcatbook.com/