Trash Talking the Pillsbury Doughboy

“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 My Way

Detail of assemblage titled Going To Heaven

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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An Imitation of Life

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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Moving On

RARELY DO I KNOW, upon first encountering it, what an object might become, and like most things I collected, this trowel appealed to me solely on the basis of its intrinsic qualities. Once back in the studio, I realized the dappled pattern of rust on the steel blade matched almost exactly a pattern of spots…
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Cha-Cha-Cha-Cha Changes

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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The Story of a Brand

Dog peeking from under table

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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You Gotta Have Heart

Salma Hayek

WRITING IS SORTA like dating. Not that I’m dating. I’m a happily married man. But I remember dating, and one of the lessons I learned early on is that, while there were women who would never, ever be interested in me, this was good news not bad, and no reflection on either of us. But once…
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