radiators

MORE ORNAMENTAL BREAKDOWN

ORNAMENTAL BREAKDOWN

recent pictures, shown at umass dartmouth in 2007
will be up at stir gallery in shanghai in december 2008

MENTAL PICTURES

I’m not sure what this is.

Pages from my notebook portfolio. Fragmented ideas collected in books. I began with books. My original "portfolio" wasn’t a portfolio at all, rather than showing what I had done. I wanted to present what I wanted to create, the book became a stage for ideas, a compilation of mostly unpublished work strewn with a few pages of tear sheets.

Idea Encapsulation

Encapsulating my work in book form grows out of my life of travel, keeping ideas and images in books, which serve as mental cabinets of ideas, has been a necessary means of storage.

Since an early age I’ve been an image scavenger, my mind has always been alert to image debris, my earliest work with found object were series of altered camel cigarette packs, or postage stamp where the engraved portraits of kings and poets were re-imagined using my own miniature filigree.

The process of over painting and existing image like the iconic cigarette packaging was revelatory for me.
I moved on to working on top of old engravings and found photos, painting, gold leafing and drawing them into new existence and meaning. I discovered Indian Mughal miniature painting a little later, copying them and tapping the richness of their structure and colors and exquisite detail,devotional pictures became my well of inspiration,not just the above-mentioned Indian miniatures, but also Greek icons, and Mexican votive paintings. Ephemeral printed material such as Hare Krishna consciousness imagery and Jehovah’s Witness apocalyptic ”rapture” illustrations were a source of light for my picture world.

These things make sense.

Compilation. Collection. Fusion. Confusion. Clarity. The sum of the parts. Picture research. Looking for light. Color. Mental connections. Working at the edges, living in the periphery.

Narrative abstract imagery.

Sequential image poetry.

Like film making, beginning middle end, every picture has this; a sequential flow of impressions.

Some images that I collect become part of a larger idea vocabulary, in Paris in the 1980’s I saw a carpenters model of the wooden structure of a church steeple. I have since used this image in my pictures many times, mainly as a device on which to hang objects and symbolic references, it works on a practical level but it also satisfies my interest in iconographic structure, spiritual reference and scientific diagram language. I think that the one vital element of artistic vision is to believe in the power of your personal interests and obsessions and to have faith that it is of interest to others.

kids

The initial stage of kid’s books, the collecting of ideas, editing and development has always been a struggle for me. I’m not a natural storyteller. I rarely wake up in the morning with a complete story structure in my head, my stories grow slowly sometimes over years, from seeds collected in notebooks. I have a strong feeling that the idea has to be BIG before it is a real Book.

Children’s books are about the same thing as my paintings and illustrations, the story is central, the technique and the art feed each other, a story can be inspired by a single concept, or a specific technique.

In Runaway Opposites which I illustrated for poems by Richard Wilbur.

I used 18th century portrait photos, antique toys and old Sears and Roebuck catalog imagery and typography as the creative spark and visual vehicle.

In Simons Book, the initial idea was built around a sketch that I did of a monster jumping through a hole in the page, the visuals were first worked out after which the text was added, in an almost caption like manner.

I develop the kid’s books very much in a vacuum.

I might take a month or two writing and organizing the pictures into a dummy before presenting to publishers,on some occasions the ideas that I come up with a sure fire flops, which I discover not long after I send it off to my agent, I think that this has to do with the fact that at the core of these books lies that fact that I’m making them for myself, I like kids. But I’m not thinking of them when I make kid’s books. I’m more interested in the idea, the image content and the artistic energy of the books, than the moralistic, pedagogical and pedantic concerns of the children’s book market.

waste

I believe that there is never a wasted effort, and most of the material I develop, I later put to use in one form or another. I continue to make books because they’re an integral part of the larger creative whole, they are segments of a creative output, the frame of mind that brings me to these projects is valuable to me on many levels, they are one form of my expression, a kind of visual poem, and perhaps a door to the world of the arts for the kids and adults who pick it up.