THE LIFE OF A CREATIVE isn’t all Peace Love & Understanding, and I might have tempered much of the pain this ego caused me and others if I’d heeded what I read in two little Hallmark cards (oh great fount of wisdom). The two said, 1. “I’m a legend in my own mind,” and 2….
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THAT MONTH-LONG stay this summer at an artist residency in Portobelo, Panama left quite an impression on my wife. So this weekend when we rode our bikes past a wooded area in Oak Cliff and speculated about what was rustling the trees a few yards away, I wasn’t surprised by what she said. “Monkeys. Whenever we heard rustling…
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QUITE SOME TIME back I made it my personal modus operandi to shirk, or at least shrink back from, technology. But this year I finally popped the red pill. For one thing I am currently committed to creating whatever I’m going to create by way of these plastic chiclets now clicking beneath my fingers (augmented,…
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“WONDERLAND” is a gift. But not to those artists among us who already make our way in a commercial art world. Rather this colorfully wrapped package is tagged for young creatives, filmmakers, musicians, writers, et al, just coming on the scene. Especially the ones fresh out of art school, eagerly scanning the horizon for the…
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GOING TO HEAVEN IS a sort of Defending Your Life meets Lord of the Flies. What happens if the afterlife completely turns your expectations upside-down? But it wasn’t my intent to go all theological on this old, whitewashed schoolhouse (or church house) window. What predetermined the concept was a cardboard box full of 70-year old newspapers I found…
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VISUAL THEMES run throughout both my collage and assemblage work. One theme in particular is illusion, and in the piece shown here it takes literal and figurative forms. The empty wooden case from an antique mantel clock, when viewed from the rear, struck me as the perfect scale model of a darkened stage, so the…
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MAYBE I’M A little too old for this dance; too old to be going through this kind of change. Or am I just wondering how it must appear to those around me? I wonder if I look kind of flaky, shifting once again in the path I take as a creative person. Kind of uncommitted….
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RECENTLY I CAME AROSS online images of the original Macintosh computer and I was stunned to realize the revolution this clunky, beige box incited when first released in January of 1984. (Sing it “happy birthday to you” in just five months.) What I remember most about its debut is how quickly I was ready to…
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DURING THE MONTHS immediately following 9/11, I began as a freelancer to write catalog copy for a tiny startup called Wisteria. After thirty years in the business, I’d never come face to face with a brand quite like it. Admittedly, the timing was coincidental. One event had nothing to do with the other, except in terms of…
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YEARS AGO, Les Kerr and I were talking to a photographer friend when he brought up a conversation he’d had with a prospective client from a packaged foods company. It’s a conversation that Les and I have inducted into our Hall of Fame of Funny Things We’ve Heard People Say. The prospect wanted to make…
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