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.)

Ginger

In a previous century I was asked to illustrate a cookbook for Chronicle. The title was Ginger, and all the recipes were very gingery. I did not cook/mix/prepare everything in the book, but I did go rather overboard illustrating it, to the point where the art directors told me to stop or there wouldn't be room for text at all. I did a whole set of illustrations playing with the word Ginger. This one appeared on the half-title.