By page 400 or so I couldn’t put down China Mieville’s vibrating, seeping, crackling “Perdido Street Station” – its spell was cast and the web of wounded, brave, unearthly, mishapen characters drew me with them toward their final act. Mieville’s second novel, set on the artfully constructed continent city of New Crobuzon, is executed in [...]

No, I haven’t had that but it is the theme of an imagined piece of artwork that I put together for the subscription art service Papir Masse. Back in July PM issued a call for submissions, “summer postcards” – whimsical, sultry, true or imagined, PM was looking for some steamy summer reading and art. I [...]

There’s a mindblowing insight early in James Gleick’s “The Information” I wanted to share and fix in my mind: A mondegreen is not a transistor, inherently modern. Its modernity is harder to explain. The ingredients – songs, words, and imperfect understanding – are all as old as civilization. Yet for mondegreen’s to arise in the [...]

Okay, off the cuff. Can television, specifically evening programming that targets women, have an impact on behavior at the population level? Can these lessons be applied to other domains? The September 2011 National Geographic makes a compelling case that, when other conditions are right, television can have broad social and economic impact. Consider the case [...]

Continuing to work on wood panel I’ve been trying to loosen up from a conventional texture-collage approach. What else can be done with a rich and varied texture as background? Instead of a intentional color what happens when you go completely loose and forget about whether it makes sense from a composition standpoint? What happens [...]

A friend recently asked if I could make a “cat sarcophagus” for her daughter’s upcoming eighth birthday party. Along with the proposal she included a snapshot of a “cat mummy”  from London. Coincidentally, a few months prior, National Geographic had a cover issue dedicated to pet mummies of ancient Egypt, which my family had loved. So plenty [...]

Since the early ’90s I’ve occasionally experimented with multitrack recording and arranging. Somewhere around 1998 I put this piece together from clips from the early George Lucas film, “THX1138″ using Cakewalk, a bunch of analog inputs, a Macbook, and Berkeley software. Still holds up – barely! Click here to take a listen.

Gertrude Stein once wrote about ‘the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded.” I’ve always been struck since by puzzling constructions of repetitious word use. This is one I thought worked mysteriously well with images. In no particular order.

For family, friends, and kindred spirits

About a year ago a friend I’d met at Goucher College during a Peace Tiles workshop I’d run provided me with an opportunity to push forward an idea I’d had for a while: reproduce children’s artwork produced in a Peace Tiles workshop in a way that would be appropriate to a lively public environment and [...]

A few weeks ago I had a dream in which I visited a friend in Georgia at “his father’s home.” I’d never been there. In fact I’ve never met his father. Nonetheless, the dream was surprisingly vivid and I was able to recall the basic – and I thought later – very interesting design of [...]

One of the delights in taking a meander to – and through – a good antique or salvage shop is the discovery of once functional objects that have been shorn, busted, unmade and unusable. Yet a glimmer of their former utility is there – something to suggest that it should, or once would, do something. [...]

The poem that is the subject of this box – a steamy summery kind of musing, complete with blueberries, olympics, and humidity – is taken from the Fall 2006 ESOPUS magazine. Even though the poems, written in the ’80s by Vincent Katz, are about a breakup, I found them to be much more immediate, intimate, [...]

A few summers ago I experimented with thin, 3/16-inch plywood to produce textural finishes on top of which anyone could compose a visual engaging, personalized collage. I then took the dried mixedmedia work, sanded it up a bit, and wrapped in an arresting detail/section from a magazine cover. I composed little packages of collage items [...]

A friend recently asked if I could make a “cat sarcophagus” for her daughter’s upcoming eighth birthday party. Along with the proposal she included a snapshot of a “cat mummy” from London. Coincidentally, a few months prior, National Geographic had a cover issue dedicated to pet mummies of ancient Egypt, which my family had loved. [...]

Working between my daughter and an art project for the the Green Mountain Film Festival I caught this lovely shot of sunlight on chalk – with plaster of paris all over my hands.

One of the fun pieces of work for the last couple of years is participating in the Green Mountain Film Festival – as an Operations Committee Member, a film viewer and as a participating artist. This year, working with two friends/colleagues who are both gifted – one is a clothing maker/costume designer and the other [...]

Mine is the bottom right. The “cloud” text says, Children of the earth moulders of clay, movers of rock. In making the tile, I was struck by how well the lighting worked between the girl and the cloudy background I’d painted. That was a pleasing result. The concept continues my interest in the representation of [...]

At the end of “The Prophet,” in the company of the seeress Almitra, Almustafa bids farewell to the people of Orphalese, speaking of the misty nature of wanderer. But also about comings again, and truth and the fulfillment of love. “It is life in quest of life in bodies that fear the grave,” he says [...]

A recent re-reading of Khalil Gibran’s “The Prophet” got me thinking about journey’s recently, beginnings and endings. I’ve been in the studio a bit lately as well, going through some old family photographs, letters… bits and pieces of lives strewn across the globe with these vignettes of universality. A journey is an unwritten story… and [...]