A Collage of Runners

A recent drawing, a collage of drawings really. I like the cat's cradle of lines I can get by overlapping the drawings this way in Photoshop. The colored dots help differentiate them. In a way it's like the montages from films of the 1930s. We'll see how many different ways I can use this.

A Book of Ages

When Whitney Cookman was designing the cover of my book in 2007 I showed him several of my dot paintings. He liked this one and used it. It has an apt pointillism; the book is, after all, a 300 page accumulation of pointed anecdotes, unrelated but linked by the accident of being placed next to each other, having taken place in the same year-of-age. What plot the book sustains is invented in the readers mind. The stories are amusing and bite-sized, like the candy the cover art seems to suggest. The paperback edition, published today by Three Rivers Press, has a different cover with a bright orange balloon on it, not painted by me. The balloon is supposed to push the idea that A Book of Ages is a perfect birthday gift, and it is that. Subtlety doesn't usually sell a million copies. But I did like the candy-colored dots.

Iconography

This is one of my favorites from the dot series. I love it because it is so meaningless, which is another way of saying it could mean anything. I do no sketches and study no reference for this kind of painting. I carefully paint the dots, then quickly add the icons. I can't be thinking of anything or looking at anything or trying to say anything, which sounds kind of like bullshit. I suppose it is. I'm curious to see what comes out of the brush when I'm not trying to draw anything in particular. If something concrete comes into my head I make sure it's painted upside down. This is called method. It's a variation on the method I use to paint bagatelles, a way of tricking the subconscious into committing itself to paper.

A New Year (and Thoughts Appertaining Thereto)

I did this art to accompany an essay I wrote for Leite's Culinaria, a tasty food website out of New York. I also used this dot style for my book cover. (See right) The gist and anecdotes of the essay came from the book as well. In essence: we eat and drink with people we know and love and we live another year. It's a survival behavior. I practice it religiously.














(A Book of Ages makes a lovely hostess gift)

Della Francesca

This dot series I painted for gallery sale also got into American Illustration, but it never caught on in everyday illustration assignments. Why? I suppose it's process. I paint the dots, then I paint the iconography freehand. It's hard to run that through a sketch approval process. These I painted by taking small details from paintings by Piero Della Francesca. I was recently back from Italy and still agog over everything Italian. One use I've gotten out of this dot style: the cover of my book. (See right.) The gallery that sold my paintings recently closed. I'm looking for a new one.