If you subscribe to Willamette Week or The New Yorker, or even if you just read one or the other in your dentist’s waiting room, you may have found yourself chuckling over a cartoon with the initials “OSB” printed in one corner. Oren Simon Bernstein, a neighbor who lives on NE 35th Avenue just north of Wilshire Park, is the culprit.
When I interviewed Oren, I asked him how he comes up with ideas. Sometimes, he said, they just pop fully fledged into his head; sometimes a theme evolves and he reworks it over time; and sometimes he’s with pick a theme out of the air and brainstorm elements that might be cartoon material. One such brainstorming session revolved around passwords—a familiar issue associated with lots of exasperating feelings. That led to merging the universal problem of trying to come up with acceptable secure passwords with the fact that the shower is where many people come up with all sorts of good ideas.
Another thing I learned is that there is more to a final cartoon than the joke. Bernstein says he has learned a lot of things from fellow Portland New Yorker cartoonists Tom Toro, Shannon Wheeler, Maggie Larson, and Mat Barton. For instance, he learned that neutral expressions let viewers identify more readily with situations and that drawing viewers’ visual attention to the image’s key elements is important. Both techniques emerge in many of Bernstein’s works.
Oren has a diversified background. Born in Israel, he spent his childhood in England and his high school years in Columbus, Indiana. He then studied mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and shortly thereafter moved to Portland. Here, he works remotely, helping design the cryostat, an apparatus for maintaining a very low temperature, which surrounds the Commonwealth Fusion Systems’ fusion reactor.
Oren says he’s loved to draw for as long as he can remember, and much of his engineering work takes advantage of this skill.
But give him a bit of spare time, his iPad, and an Apple Pencil and funny things happen. Take a look at his Instagram site (instagram.com/osbdraws) and you’ll see what I mean.
The New Yorker magazine receives 1,000 to 2,000 cartoon submissions weekly, typically accepting just 18 to 20 of them. Bernstein has had six accepted for publication, which has encouraged him to keep at it. In 2021 he became a weekly contributor to Willamette Week. He says he is still evolving a personal style but thinks his more recent characters—large-headed, small-handed, genderless individuals—have promise. It is going to be fun for readers to watch how this evolves.
Peter Mogielnicki is a retired physician promoting urban rewilding, doing what he can to move the climate change needle, and posting brief essays at cereflections.com. In the spirit of full disclosure, he is Oren Bernstein’s father-in-law.