Leatherbound

Pressed leaf from a Ginkgo biloba tree.

As a publisher, I have books of all shapes, sizes, types, languages, and purposes. Most are for reading, but I am media-independent as a creator, which means I do not experience biases based on other people's preferences. 

A junior staff member from a small family business I worked at years ago was horrified to discover that my priceless going away gift, presented to a homesick Midwestern admin, was actually a one-of-a-kind art piece crafted from a hollowed out duplicate of a hardcover classic that's been in print for hundreds of years.  

A gift of a leather bound journal for whatever I want. Thanks, Jang!

Yeah, I know. It's why neither former female employee (not the gift getter, nor the assistant) works in publishing anymore. They don't understand that a book is more than text communication; it's also an art object. The very essence behind my success lies in my ability to transcend individual intentions (which are probably wrong) to ascertain real value, make something from it, and present it to all of you. That does not mean the people around me necessarily "get it", or see worth right away, because they can't. My job is to see.

I use bound materials the way any artist uses any medium in a serious way: by pushing it further than you ever could, and that's what keeps it so fun and fresh. Plus, I really enjoy the feeling of "shock and awe" on your faces that rings in "frontiering". Hey, parents get bored, too! Have fun this weekend and go make something, will ya?


"For those who fight for it, 
life has a flavor that the sheltered will never know."
- from the movie, Sucker Punch.

Figures

Reality, no airbrushing required.

My daily bathroom reading almost always includes excerpts from a bi-annual magazine called RISD XYZ (http://issuu.com/risd/docs/risdxyz_fall-winter_2014-15?e=0/10291099), produced, written, illustrated, and designed by my alma mater. It was no surprise to me when I saw a brief bit in the Spring/Summer issue about our commonly held attitudes toward the human body, which are analogous to those of a medical doctor. In fact, many RISD scholars also work in major scientific fields, or take coursework as students at Brown that strengthens their understanding of their core major, or serving as an important counterpoint to it. 

What's key to every artist's/scientist's path is the formation of bridges between the disciplines. It's what every person, place, and thing on the planet depends on us to do: rigorous scholarship that expands to fit the spaces and gaps between the average person's understanding. "Seeing connections", as well call it in our verbal form that is Design Intelligence. It means that we are so far ahead of the curve, we often don't reflect the current dynamic in society, and why would we? 

Studying the human form in every direction, light, and body type.

The crew of the USS Enterprise boldly goes where no man (or woman) has gone before, and that's a bumpy, rocky road indeed. We go it alone, usually without support, or kinship, even within our degree departments, because we are not there to seek approval. We are there to learn and observe and do, in an environment so strict, I called it "Art Boot Camp", sometimes bordering on the abusive, like the music students' instructor depicted in the recent movie "Whiplash". It's really intense, and for some minds it is not survivable, because of the intensity and maturity required to create great art.

Bodies as they are: not by Hollywood, or television, or magazine ads.

And so it is with our relationship to the human body. Our professors do not care what our "feelings" are regarding anatomy, but merely our ability to render it in whatever form we need to, so that we may accurately solve a problem. We drew bodies in space and motion that make the typical art school student have permanent night sweats: this large man has a hernia that has expanded his body in a unique way, requiring him to wear white compression tights while modeling (use your imagination); this woman had dreads, tattoos, and almost no body fat; this beautiful woman of 90 dozed as she sat half-naked in the slanting light of a tall studio window, while we struggled to capture just a bit of what made her "Pearl" in oils, an infamous painter's model who will live forever in our works. 

Serving up reality in each and every century.

Not bodies that would be considered by the warped weirdos of Hollywood as "perfect", or magazine-quality airbrushed photos, or body parts mangled and mutilated by multiple plastic surgeries, nor faked in any way, shape, or form. Here was a man "out of shape" due to an incurable and ongoing genetic condition, there a still-beautiful woman with limbs pulled down by the enduring weight of gravity: in short, I saw real bodies without interference or prejudice, for purely academic purposes, in a studio space that has nothing to do with sexuality or titillation, and everything to do with study. The human body is extremely complex and hard to draw, even more so when it is aged or infirm, which is exactly how our professors designed it to be.

Nudity in every medium and shade.

One RISD-oid focuses on eyes to become an Oculist for wounded vets, another dissects flowers regularly at the nature lab to produce textbooks on Botany. This one designs swimwear for women who have recently undergone mastectomies, as this shoe designer works in service to people with orthopedic foot problems. In short, how you think you look is irrelevant to us, which flies directly in the face of most popular media today.

It is a public space rife with anorexia, eating disorders, and seriously untreated madness. Every day and/or night of the week, I can turn on the t.v. to see women so fundamentally sick, they have formed an unnatural human shape made for media called "The Bobblehead" (a.k.a The Lollipop, or The Q-tip): a woman with a very round, large head who has dieted to excess and illness, to create grotesquely thin stick arms and legs. It's disgusting and abnormal, but so is "Reality T.V."; a format specifically designed to exploit the drunk and deluded, and the mentally ill or alcoholic alike. Why would I ever count on such a population group to guide and/or inform me about the human form?!

Capturing kinetic energy in each brushstroke  for "Gesture Drawing".

I never would, because I'm half afraid that my old college mentor would ring my doorbell or knock on my front door someday in the future, to take away my hand-drawn calligraphic diploma from the most difficult school on Earth. I would never disrespect their faith in me, nor the hours we spent as a community honing our skills to lead each and every major conversation that exists in society, in whatever language we want to, or whatever format we choose, a thousand times all around the world (thanks to Lao Shir Cindy Ming for that opening phrase in her form of Tai Chi). 

That's what a true master is about, and that's what you will always see from me; the work and the truth that I began in earnest as a teenager, with a foundation that existed way before my time. You can see the truth about who we are as a species here, because that's part of my eternal promise to you. Live on, humans.

Dark and light and "happy accidents" are part of the art-making process.

Bodies of flesh, blood, and bone not owned by some t.v. exec.

Who are you, really?

Men and women scrutinized under the gaze of our study for hours.

Bodies in motion, active and alive, moving through 3-dimensional space.

As individuals, and in groups.

Bodies that were both near and far, up close and also impersonal.

Please note: All images shown here are from my portfolio and are original works of art. You do not have permission to reproduce any or all of them, in any portion. Thank you, Marie.

The Bronze Age

My bronze sculpture.

Years ago one of my part-time jobs was "pizza-maker" at a small place in Providence. It was boomin' when I applied for a job that first summer in town, but it went down quickly from the owner's neglect. He was all about money, which pretty much guarantees that you lose the soul you have for your food like <snaps fingers> this!

It was actually the perfect lesson for master "Artists-in-Training", and there were three of us who worked there: Crystal, a beautiful girl with perfectly straight, long brown hair with a sweet attitude, Greg Van Zandt, a disturbingly talented sculptor in love with Crystal the photographer, in a relationship that didn't quite work because it felt forced, and then there was me, awkwardly stuck into their love triangle at the restaurant. The other worker was an Italian-American lady from East Providence, working class like our boss, and friends with all the native-born security guys who worked at the school.

Close-up of the casts' cutting.

Gradually we quit the joint, one by one, leaving us with less people, and then less customers, as he took the heart out of the business and walked away. People could feel it, and his longer-term staff tried to talk to him about it, but at that point, he was all about the "Benjamins", which culminated in me working the counter and the ovens one night solo, and you all knew what happened to me from that scenario. 

We were fleeing a sinking ship, and we knew it. The food had no more soul, which is a major shame because we served a deep dish, Chicago-style pizza that's still rather unique for the East Coast, and a Providence version of a subway sandwich that they call "grindah's" which is "a grinder" in English. Oh. Yeah, I never heard of it either. 
It's a food word that exists only in Rhode Island.

The details of the shoots that grew out of the potato.

Anyway, one night when the work was slow, Greg was in the back with me talking about, well, work. It was pretty much all we thought about, because that's the way they want it, "they" being the Master Educators/Artists who trained us. But crossover was always there, as our worlds collided between the kitchen and the studio. Greg was a handsome boy with brown curls and light eyes who reminded me of my Irish twin brother, driven mad with work. 

He started having "hauntings" at the old house he lived in, that he said he captured in his black and white photos (or so he told me about his crit, but you couldn't really trust a fellow students' word because competition starts to eat at them badly, making them do rotten things to one another), so I took his mental degrading with a grain of salt, thinking it would ease with time upon his graduation, not knowing then that our teachers' built into us a type of post-RISD "PTSD" that's part of our artistic journey home.

Such intricacies in nature captured in metal that has cooled.

He was walking, eating, breathing stress. As he stood in the back, chain smoking and leaning against a stainless steel kitchen fridge, he told me about some of his background, none of which I can verify to you today; that he was related to the musician/actor Little Stevie, and that he got into Cooper Union by crumpling up his cigarette package into art (the only object he had on him) to complete the 3D portion of the exam in the prof's office, which immediately got him in and which he turned down, even though it was a free ride. That's how exalted our school was then, as it is now, and as it will be forever.

A bronze patina over time.

He began a series of castings in the same way, taking an old potato growing in the fridge and dipping it expensively into liquid bronze. 
It was experimental, extremely hard to do with unstable materials that made it completely risky, and also very brilliant. It was beautiful. 
He had one in his backpack that he tossed to me. Whoa... It had the heft and surprising weight of a much denser object, and it was art. He told me diffidently that I could have it, which astonished me. We were so broke, we depended on the food we made for our customers because we ate it at home, too. 

A sweeping motion captured in its' curved lines.

I fed my housemates with the stuff we made, as well. He shrugged his shoulders, and explained to me that the first castings were practice. See how he cut it here after it cooled? It didn't stand right, and at RISD we study "The Art of Perfection". It just didn't make the cut for a class critique. I understood, but I also realized that I would never get an objet d'art like this again. After each and every wandering gypsy move I have ever made, I have kept it with me, and here it is, photographed in my kitchen: with objects both precious and plastic, light-hearted and serious, expensive and expansive. Thanks, Greg.

Atop the kitchen fridge: it doesn't sit right, so it topples over. I love it!

Cloud Blanket

Well-defined, easily discernible foreground, middle ground, background.

Rows of clouds full of condensation, tendrils of rain.

Sometimes the skies thicken with a bank of clouds so thick, you can feel the air pressing down on you. A week or so ago just such a phenomenon occurred, and it was spectacular: row upon row, and layer upon layer of differently colored clouds, creating the perfect photographic composition of an easily seen, well-defined foreground, middle ground, and background. It's the kind of set up you have to wait for, and then snap it when you see it. You just can't force Mother Nature. She rolls in on her own time, homies!

Banks upon banks of thick clouds.

Reel Life: A Sensei's Vampire Senses

In order to become a master of the arts, one must succumb to it wholly and completely. Where there is great love, there can be no half way. Once an art has chosen you, you must follow where it takes you, dedicated to the end. That's the price of great passion; utter devotion, and the sublimation of the self in search of the attainment of mastery. Many a sensei has often said that "in the pursuit of perfection, we attain excellence", and so it goes for the artist in their search. We hone our senses to their human heights, hoping to achieve greatness, and in doing so, we may attain immortality, or what passes for it in our human world, limited as that is by our perceptions.


 
I submit to you for your perusal two such examples of artistry and devotion in cinema, "Jiro Dreams of Sushi" and "Frostbitten": one, the story of a lifelong chef in his noble quest for mastery with his chosen elements through the Art of Sushi, and the other a perfect show about the joys of a well-done horror movie; there's camp, humor, fun, gore, suspense, and irony. Sometimes, there isn't an obvious harmony between the movies I select, but the cognitive dissonance of what appears to be a random selection, that then stitches itself into a matched set before my very eyes, forming connections by what feels to be of its' own will, but is indeed of my making. Everyday magic is the ability of the best human minds to stretch out to reach the edge of it's vast limits through the daily discipline of practice. In doing so, the master vaults way past the average person in abilities, attaining powers of craft that allude the individual incapable of such acts of constancy.  Look, and see.

Street Games: Whiskey and Sidewalk Chalk

A bottle of Fireball whiskey....

It's amazing the things you find when you're walking around, paying attention to the details. I regularly take street photos, and afterwards, I'm surprised at what at get, because it's usually more beautiful than I think it is, though occasionally it's the reverse. There's only so many sunset photos one can absorb with fresh eyes. I shoot regularly because I'm trained to, so the compositions and the juxtapositions happen automatically for me, but sometimes associations reveal themselves to me much later, after that quick, five-second pic.

...now turn this way!

In that sense, photography hasn't changed for me at all. Part of the excitement was seeing an image slowly ghost itself onto paper, floating in its' chemical bath, and watching that happen, only truly knowing then what you caught previously on film. Technology doesn't replace what I do, it just prevents me from breathing in the sulfur and selenium of the old, traditional, black and white chemical photography process, and for that, I'm grateful.  

What do you see around you today?