My Portals
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“My Portal” 2023 I am fascinated by portals, doorways between differing realities. Portals appear in many forms: windows, mirrors, paintings, books, imaginings, desires. I have always been fascinated by gorillas. Our close cousins, they seem both eerily familiar and impossibly foreign. They are immensely strong, but mostly gentle-natured. I always seek them out at zoos, […]
Aviary
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I have always envied birds their ability to fly. At some point, I began to wonder if, perhaps, the birds in turn envy us our opposable thumbs. I started several years ago drawing birds with human hands for feet, and began to notice that, once endowed with thumbs, they tended to take on other […]
The Shadow Man
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“The String Man and the Shadow Man Converse” 2020 The “Shadow Man” made his first appearance as a character in two colláge/drawings from a series that encompassed the early months of the Covid 19 pandemic. A thin, gray, mostly featureless character, he represents an ever-present awareness of mortality. Unlike the frightening cliché of the dispassionate […]
The Colláge Series
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Each of these images began as an abstract arrangement of shapes made without an image in mind, a colláge built by gluing various materials (various papers, thin slices of wood) to a backing of cotton rag board. The characters and their individual narratives emerged from these simple abstractions, and I drew them as they […]
Some Musings
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Original post July 28.2010 For several years I helped to run weekly life drawing sessions at AVA, a local community art center. One night we had a young woman named Melissa modeling. It was her first time, and she was quite good, and we used her frequently for a couple of years. Most […]