Still Life With Businessman

There is something wonderfully straightforward about still life. It asks the viewer to make sense of the adjacence of unrelated things. Because they are arranged like a place setting are they to eat? Should the head of a businessman be eaten with a salad fork or a garden trowel? What does Emily Post say? I used the same kind of principle to arrange the entries in A Book of Ages (Harmony,2008/Three Rivers Press,2010), without comment, without footnotes, hoping the reader would see the ironies that emerged. I may have been too subtle about it. (The book remains the perfect gift item for your hard-to-amuse brother-in-law and every bookish person on your list.)

Paris Café Life

I did this illustration for the cover of a corporate magazine but I don't think anything in the magazine was about Paris or cafés or boulevardiers. But today is Bastille Day, so I thought it seemed an apt image. And who knows––maybe civilization will return to this side of the Atlantic. Maybe it already has, though not very many of us have the luxury of long afternoons spent discussing literature and culture.