Color Me Orbach, A Hue Dunnit
Joanna Neborsky
Brandon Bird, page five from Law & Order: An Adventure to Color.
What Brandon Bird saw on an episode of "Late Night with Conan O’Brien" didn’t break the laws of the State of New York, but more simply those of the universe. A year ago, a staffer from the talk show asked Bird for a copy of his "Law & Order" coloring book to be presented on-air to Jerry Orbach, the actor who embodied the drama’s tall, craggy, Detective Lenny Briscoe for twelve seasons,* and whose tall, craggy contours Bird had worshipfully traced in this and other works. For the artist watching it happen on TV, the intersection of icon and image–and Conan!–was as strange and unlikely as one of Lenny’s crime-scene limericks. One of these, of course, appears in "Law & Order: An Adventure to Color" (of a victim’s watch: "It stopped tickin’ when he took a lickin’"). We have excerpted a page from the playful volume, and invite you to shade in the trenchcoat grays and court-panel ochres. At brandonbird.com, you can find the entire coloring book and more of the artist’s excursions in pop dementia (Christopher Walken, Mr. T, squids). They’ll make you want to be his friend.
* Orbach, the New York heart of "Law & Order," died last December
