Considering a move to tumblr.

Just testing the feed from blogger to tumblr here. Hmmm. Should I do it? Not sure if it's possible to blog in blogger and have it feed automatically to tumblr.

Marking time.

An evocative word.

Life & Death In the Company of Animals

My empathy for animals has somehow deepened.

I've enjoyed some pretty awe-inspiring moments in the company of animals. Remind me to tell you about the time that, near delirious at the end of a 22-mile run, I happened upon a cow giving birth in a field along a coast road in western Ireland; I wasn't even sure which anatomy I was spying through my sweat-soaked eyes. The cow seemed completely nonplussed—munching grass, studying me casually while a slimy bundle blossomed from her behind.

We have three dogs and a cat. The latter is almost never to be found, unless she's sure the dogs are in bed for the night. When the coast is clear she curls in the crook of my left arm (never the right) and throws her head back to look at me, as if to say, "I'm yours." But in this house dogs reign supreme. They command an enormous portion of our time and attention, and bleed us of tremendous stores of energy. And yet our mutual devotion is astonishingly deep and gratifying. They're maddening and delightful, pushy and sublime. We have three of them because I can't bear the thought of being without a buffer creature should one die. There have to be two around, always. There's no more sympathetic creature than a lonesome dog, especially when you once had two.

John Berger wrote a great essay entitled Why Look At Animals, from his collection called About Looking. It's a classic Berger study, obliquely, quietly revealing unspoken truths in everyday perceptual experience. It's worth a read if you have the time.

*   *   *

Something happened to me a couple of days ago—something involving an animal—and it's leapt to the fore over and over in memory. I witnessed a profoundly pathetic and yet dignified moment of passage, the space between life and death. It happened to a squirrel. Before reflecting on this, I was unsure why it moved me so thoroughly. In retrospect, I think that—while I have encountered many a dead animal—I have only ever watched one other creature die. That was my poor, old, blind dachshund Heinz, whose pain-wracked face had been inches from mine as the vet put him down after being run over by our neighbor's car. I'd watched his eyes close as the poison took effect. I wept openly, my insides heaving from the grief, 13 years of knowing suddenly cascading down, out of nowhere.

This squirrel's death was first a puzzle, then a revelation. I was nearing the end of a run when a car which had slowly passed me from behind made a quick left turn into a gravel parking spot at the side of the lake near my house. As I ran a few feet further, I saw in the middle of the road the beautiful squirrel, its head close to the pavement. While it appeared perfectly normal in most ways—its body wasn't mangled, there didn't seem to be any blood—the squirrel seemed to be looking for something, to be asking a question with its entire body. It crept no more than 2 feet toward the side of the road, and then in less than five seconds it was dead. Its eyes closed suddenly and with gracious finality. Its face was beautiful and the dignity with which it confronted those last futile moments while trying its best to survive felt complete. It tried and lost, but in losing it surrendered none of its beauty. I let out an audible, sympathetic moan. The driver got out of his car with his fishing pole, completely oblivious to the squirrel. He glanced my way, turned to the lake which was teeming with fish, and went about the business of baiting his hook.

Praise, Criticism and Humility.

"When praise comes, don’t let yourself be swept away by it. If you do, you will as surely be swept away by the criticism that life inevitably brings."

-Eknath Easwaran

*   *   *

Sometimes it's easy to mistake self-deprecation for humility. I've gotten a little better at accepting compliments graciously in recent years, but I can easily trace absurdly poignant evidence of self-deprecation back to childhood, to the near pathological auto-under-valuing that was interwoven through daily life. A memory from age 7 or so has stuck with me for quite a while. I had a boyhood friend named Eddie and in the summers we spent countless hours digging, playing games and building forts in the woods which separated our backyards. One day, deeply immersed in an excavation straight through the center of the earth to China with little more than a couple of garden trowels, I heard his mother calling out to us in her gracious Virginia lilt, 

"Eddddddddie, it's lunchtime! Robert, would you like a sandwich too?"

Struck dumb with vague embarrassment, I replied with great discomfort and characteristic crypticism, "I don't care." 

What the hell kind of answer is that? I'm sure it puzzled or maybe even irritated her, but if it did she was too kind to let me notice. She was a really nice lady. We liked each other.

I can't fully explain why questions like that of Eddie's mom made me so uncomfortable but I struggled to accept the goodwill of others for my entire childhood and well into adulthood. I suppose it had something to do with a misplaced aversion to making myself in any way burdensome. This inability to accept gifts from others—whether in the form of kind words or something of material value—is a character flaw, something I've had to come to terms with in recent years. And while it may seem that this sort of chin-to-chest self-deprecation is active evidence of humility, I've come to realize it's not. I've learned that undervaluing oneself is the exquisite complement to boastfulness and bluster, classic enemies of humility. A closer look reveals that it's egocentric behavior masquerading as humbleness, a self-perception that one's every action has some consequential effect on others; that accepting a sandwich would in some way might ruin someone's day; a perception that you are important enough to have a disproportionate impact on everyone and everything around you.

*   *   *

It seems the older we get, the bigger our egos grow. As the expression goes, "the bigger they come, the harder they fall." Validation and praise mean everything to us and yet our worlds crumble the moment we experience rejection or marginalization. Enormous egos fight for central validation in creative circles, each with an insatiable desire for praise, and yet the most inadvertent slight sends us cursing bitterly in the shadows. We have to maintain perspective, to remain humble through darkness and light, praise and criticism. 

I endured a truly rough patch in my teaching a few years ago. Leading students outside the scope of my expertise in a special, two year, interdisciplinary appointment in Italy, I failed to reach all of my students, no matter how hard I tried. And I tried very hard. While not everyone was unhappy with my efforts (I tend to pay a bit more attention to criticism than praise), the acerbic barbs of a handful of students wounded me deeply for two years. I wasn't used to this brand of assessment, and I truly thought my career as a teacher was coming to a close. When I returned to my regular teaching duties back home, once again within the cozy realm of my personal competency, I expected everything to normalize, but I was quickly reminded of an unpleasant reality about teaching in our program: I had quite literally disappeared, and when I returned I felt like an absolute nobody. I was the new guy all over again, and it took me three full years to rebuild the confidence of an entirely new crop of students and my former reputation as a competent teacher. What a struggle that was, and there seemed to me no way to resolve it other than to ride it out or quit. I damn near did the latter, interviewing for and being offered jobs elsewhere, which would have had me doing things far from the world of studio education.

These days, my students amaze and inspire me, and I'm especially moved by their sensitivity when the occasional stressed out 19-year-old comes to see me in my office, soon in tears as they close the door for privacy. Crumbling under the workload, these beautiful people reveal themselves as completely human in their fragility,  shedding their classroom-wrought, strong, balanced, perfectly poised personae. In the presence of their peers they appear to accept praise and criticism with equally objective measure, seemingly unaffected on an emotional level by all the chatter about their work. Extraordinary accolades do not seem to puff them up, just as devastating criticism doesn't cut them down. Maybe I'm fooled by some resilient veneer, but they always seem to remain humble—asserting in their behavior that they're neither better nor worse, neither more or less deserving of respect than anyone else. They present as exceedingly gracious and level-headed beacons of hope in a world in which most adults bristle at criticism and stew savagely over minor professional slights one day and rattle off news of accomplishments on Facebook the next. 

Eknath Eswaran's quote at the top of this entry elegantly summarizes the most sound philosophy we can follow. We need to keep our egos in check not only when it comes to our accomplishments, but our failures as well. Personally, while things are good again (and I don't think I have ever enjoyed teaching as much as I have the past two years) I lately try a bit harder to catch myself before grandstanding when good things happen and I've tried even harder to give myself a break when I don't get it right. I'm still not very good at accepting either praise or criticism with measured objectivity, but I try to do so in an effort to exercise some of the humility I so admire in my students. I'm still grossly egocentric. More than anything I hope my students can remain humble—aware of their merits and flaws, but equally unfettered by either. Unfettered, that is, unless they truly need to close themselves in my office and cry.

Sketchbook: One Day University.

We spent the day listening to some really stimulating lectures by Professors from Columbia, Yale, Brown and Rutgers University. I'm so glad I went. 

I've said before that sketching while listening to discussion intensifies my focus on what's being said, and helps me make sense of information. Below are spreads from each of the talks.

Louis Masur from Rutgers talked about Lincoln as "evolutionary" rather than "revolutionary," and chronicled the transformation of his thinking about slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment.

My favorite talk of the day was delivered by the brilliant Tamar Szabó Gendler from Yale. She offered a cogent yet brief discussion entitled "How to Think Like a Philosopher." Excellent and very helpful to me as I continue to frame my thinking on Truth Beauty and Goodness in studio discourse.

In the middle of all of it, I took a break to reflect on some thoughts about the role of philosophy in critical discourse, the subject of my talk at the ATINER conference in Greece the first week of June.

Tina Rivers from Columbia discussed four paintings which exemplify particular roles of the art. Good talk about some great contributions to painting.

Finally, John Stein from Brown discussed learning, memory and the brain—a fascinating explanation of various times of memory, the physiological processes which trigger them and ways to keep neurogenesis active.

From terror to fear to myth.

I wrote this on 15 April, after the bombings at the Boston Marathon. 

Yesterday we hosted what has become a springtime tradition at the house. In April, as every austere and stoic soul in New England is hanging by the thinnest of threads, cursing the bitter north wind and praying for just a hint of earthly delight, we invite friends over for an exchange of green things. People bring hopeful plants to share with one another and the idea is to offer a sense of renewed optimism after the grayness of winter, instilling a faint vision of metaphorical rebirth by planting saplings, seeds or bulbs, even if doing so is weeks away. Spring and then summer in New England are unparalleled—absolutely perfect—so the wretched winters here are bearable with a couple of reminders that the chill will soon go into hiding.

A couple of friends didn't make the party because they were running the Boston Marathon today. I envied them, mostly because they're about my age and are still giving it a go, while I've put aside those grand aspirations in recent years, always with the hope that I'll be running in top form again any day now (cue laugh track). One of these friends contacted me to say that he needed the rest, having scored a number at the last minute. He's run the race since he was a teenager growing up in Brockton, far eclipsing my own Boston experiences, which number two races in unseasonable and viscious heat—both pretty humbling experiences after qualifying and convincing myself that I'd do just as well on that infamously tricky Boston course.

Today was horrific and for those of us who got the news remotely, it came upon us in nauseating waves, an all-too-familiar recognition, something sadly familiar and infuriating. John and I had just finished a five mile run on a hilly loop when we received simultaneous text messages asking if we were OK and begging assurance that we were nowhere near the race course. Back home, throughout the afternoon I checked confusing headlines and studied the same gory and chaotic photos online, turning over in my imagination the origins of something so vile, the filthy, small minds who devised the destruction.

The last stretch of the Boston Marathon, whether you finish strong or part of the zombie parade, is designed to be jubilant and for race qualifiers it's especially rewarding. If you're not running for charity or as a bandit, qualifying for Boston can be pretty challenging after months of obsessive training, earning an acceptable time in a previous marathon, and (more and more) a bit of fortunate timing when registration opens. Nevertheless, no matter how folks get there, with such an arduous process of self-discovery behind them, crossing the finish line concludes a journey much longer than 26.2 miles for many people. Reaching the end is a transformative moment, teeming with significance. So what more insidious, hateful way to upend that joy than to install ferocious bombs yards from the finish line—blowing the legs off spectators, mostly the families and friends of runners? As we listened to the confusing pieces of news and began to make sense of the event, I was immediately taken back to that beautiful, horrible day in 2001 when my kids (then all very young) came home one-by-one from school. With each, I tried to explain to them how a small group of perverse minds conspired with unfathomable loathing to crash four planes with the intention of killing 3000 people and forever scarring the lives of hundreds of millions more.

In all of this insanity I had a moment of clarity today. It came out of the blue, inexplicably. In the past several years I have seen many students with extraordinary gifts, complex minds and critical, creative perspectives invest a great deal of their talent in the rapidly expanding field of character design. In all honesty, the editorial illustrator in me finds this trend disheartening. In one portfolio after another young illustrators submit to the conventions of burgeoning industry, work which includes inventories of characters in costume and not much more. These are descriptive, objective studies, not images with individual perspective, circumstance or meaning beyond archetypal representation, and they feel empty—void of content or message—no matter how well they're drawn or painted, no matter how subtle the color palette. While I respect these endeavors, as I do any classification of applied illustration, these studies represent a significant disappointment after seeing such promise in these students in previous semesters. All along I've assumed that the students are merely pandering to a trending market. More than anything I hope for a more opinionated, vocal direction among our students, a return to the editorial voice which is more about chutzpa than costumes. 

Today I realized the origins of this fascination with heroic, mythic and fantastic characters in our nation's psyche and further indulged by students of art and design. In the same way that the Great Depression was the impetus for escapist cinema in the 1930s, terrorism has bred a desperate creative investment in superheroes, fairies and mythic dichotomies of good and evil. Today's young artist has known evil in ways my own generation never imagined. 

After a few years of frustration and (I'll admit it) a growing intolerance for escapist motives in young illustrators, today's realization is saddening.  A sympathetic, tragic chord has instead been struck. This generation of wonderfully creative people was raised in a culture of insidious fear, where no real life heroes can guarantee their safety, where economic collapse is at the whim of blustery, rogue financial institutions, and where bombs blow up people at one of the most celebrated, democratic sporting events in the world, turning the personal triumphs of hundreds of people into a nightmare, all over again. 

The Day of Nutritional Disasters.

Yesterday, I attended a morning meeting about fundraising for a huge project, and I made the foolish assumption that I shouldn't bother eating breakfast since the Development folks, whom most of us assume are rolling in dough and exceedingly sensitive to refined tastes, would have some healthy things to eat. Usually, our morning meetings at school include granola, unsweetened yogurt, maybe a scone and some fruit, along with coffee, juice and water. When I got there, however, I saw tidily laid out on the table, next to a regiment of promotional brochures and a big honking box of Dunkin' Donuts coffee, an assortment of gooey pastries—eclairs and the like—all small enough to fit in the palm of your hand but plentiful enough to help a man pack on about 25 pounds in the space of an hour. They were arranged like weapons in the armory of a medieval king: lethal little cream puffs and candy colored cakes concealing malignant motives.

Thus began my two day descent into the nutritional underworld. I stuffed about 9 or 10 of these shitty little things in my mouth before I noticed I was the only one eating. A little paper plate overflowed with crimped tissue linings over the course of an hour. Truth be told, one or two of these things may have been consumed by my colleagues, but my sweet tooth took control and I soon found myself bloated and irritable. Much worse, I wanted more. Much more.

No problem. My 11:00 o'clock meeting with a student turned out to be a surprise party for my assistant and me staged by an extremely affectionate and thoughtful group of our seniors who'd set up the appointment as a ploy to get me into the office for the party. While it was an impossibly touching gesture, I once again faced near criminal indictment in my consumption of Doritos, Oreos, Starburst candies and donuts. Every thank you was punctuated by the pop of another cookie or chip into my gluttonous pie hole.

Near death, I was sent reeling in a cloud of depression and lethargy. I swore off eating for the rest of the day, but no sooner had I made this promise than I was in yet another meeting. This was dinner fare, and it was full of creamy sauces, heavy breads and desserts. Oh, there was the half-heartedly prepared lettuce salad, given the gratuitous corner of my plate, but the die was cast early in the day and nothing was going to stop me. And more than 24 hours later, the momentum staged by the gastronomical engine of eclairs so early in the morning is still humming. I've somehow had an absolutely insatiable craving for potato chips all day. Something tells me there's an insidious plot afoot by the the USFDA, Frito-Lay and Little Debbie, because I've seen this pattern before: get me started and I can't stop if the fare is sweet, fatty or salty. It's the weirdest thing, and it's pretty depressing, literally. My blood sugar plummets, I get gloomy and pissed off, and a glimpse in the mirror instantly reveals the grotesque effects.

I don't know where I'm getting with this, other than serving up a public tirade of the ruinous effect this crap has had on the past two days. I'm not lying when I say I can totally see how excess Twinkie consumption drove an enraged Dan White to shoot up San Francisco City Hall way back in 1978. The Hostess-Snoball-Straight-to-Hell effect precipitated by that first bite is devastating for me. I can't run, I feel like shit, and I remain unmotivated throughout the day, slogging through work. It has little to do with my bulging belly bulk (although that's tragic, admittedly); it's more about the way some foods make me feel: like a five-foot-ten silicone implant with a gyroscope whirring inside, perched on stilts and flailing machetes.

In about 15 minutes I leave to have photographic portraits taken for a school-sponsored project intended to inspire, cheer and fortify diversity our community. Last night's dinner meeting presented an opportunity to write some material to orient the photographer before our session, so that he'd have a better sense of who I am. God help the poor man. He's soon to find out.

The Architecture of Pictorial Narrative

Diptych With Scenes of the Nativity, the Crucifixion, and the Last Judgment: 1275-1325.

Many months ago I was introduced to a sensitively wrought object from the RISD Museum’s collection, a carved, ivory dyptich which seamlessly intertwines the lives of Christ and the Blessed Mother from the Annunciation to the Last Judgment, calling out key phases in the history of their sacred relationship. The dyptich is small, only about 10 x 9 inches when open, and yet some potent storytelling unfolds within the close quarters of the carving, and every inch of space is put to elegant use. The flow of pictorial narrative is fluid but unusual to our 21^st century sensibilities, beginning in the lower left with the Annunciation and the birth of Christ, followed by the heraldic arrival of the three kings in the lower right. The top two registers are dedicated to Christ’s Crucifixion and the Blessed Mother’s celestial coronation, paired with the Last Judgment of Christ, who reigns omnipotent as the wee spirits of earth climb from sarcophagi beneath his feet. What a story, and it’s told with exquisite eloquence and economy in the space of 90 square inches.

This was an object of prayerful reflection for the person who owned it. The panels were carved sometime around 1300 and its craftsmanship signifies the importance of object to both maker and owner. But such impressive technical mastery underscores something even more culturally fascinating—the indispensible role of visual narrative as a vehicle for the stories that matter to us. I bring to this encounter the perspective of an illustrator, dedicated to the distillation of message and meaning in elaborately encoded constellations of visual signs. It’s no surprise, then, that I would be particularly struck by its maker’s mastery of narrative form.

There are striking structural likenesses between medieval art and things like contemporary comics, which continue to evolve in sophisticated ways. Check out Chris Ware’s most recent accomplishment, Building Stories, in which the architecture of page and picture become one, and the reading experience is as immersive as a 300-page novel. While the subject matter differs significantly in this comparison, the formal and temporal aspects of the reading experiences are equally sensitive to the architecture of pictorial narrative, transcending boundaries of space and time. In the dyptich’s lower left panel, for example, we actively decipher the story of the Annunciation and the birth of Christ almost simultaneously, accompanied by shepherds and their flocks embedded in the hills beyond.

Consider for a moment the enormous creative challenge faced by the maker of this object: wordlessly tell the life story of Jesus Christ and his Mother—from Madonna and Child to grieving mother and martyred son to King and Queen of Heaven—and make sure the person reading this story can carry it in his satchel on travels to strange lands. Make sure he can study it while resting beneath a tree, hold it reflectively in his hands as he dims the candle at night, carry its significance in his heart and dreams. A lifetime unfolds in this diminutive, sacred object, and we continue to learn from its eloquence.

Folding Laundry with the Dogs.

Challenges to Productive Discourse

In a previous entry I mused on the grandiose subjects of truth, beauty and goodness, asserting that these three great ideas of western philosophy are the bedrock of critical discourse in teaching and studying art. No big surprise there, but ask a group of students who have just pulled an all-nighter to consciously muse on these virtues and a slight panic ensues. While these are enormous topics, they comprise the metric of value judgements, guiding our opinions, our beliefs and our productive exchange with one another in studio critique. As definitive as that assertion may sound, I'll be the first to admit that digging deep takes patience and a genuine interest in at least trying to better understand our conceptions of these ideas as they relate to the art we make. That's sometimes hard to come by, for both students and their instructors.


I've been teaching for twenty-eight years. In this time, I have always been aware of the fragile veneer of professorial authority that exists in an age of relativism. Postmodern purists assert that there can be no truth (well, apart from math, and even that is questioned); that beauty is entirely a matter of individual taste (and that matters of taste are not worth discussing); and that goodness is likewise elusively relative, without definition. I envy the unflagging confidence of colleagues who render absolute judgments with ease, while to this day I still leave critique with a very heavy question: "why should they heed my opinion?"  This uncertainty has always made critique challenging for me, but I do think some acknowledgment of subjectivity—when and where it exists—is essential. The problem is that students sometimes want absolutes. They do not want "I don't know," and they've told me so.

Three Great Ideas: Truth, Beauty and Goodness.

Truth.

Beauty.

Goodness.

This timeless and formidable constellation of philosophical ideas is essential to our navigation of life. In fact, we cannot get through a day without these fundamental measurements of virtue. As I form the thoughts you're reading by putting pen to paper, I'm seeking common recognition of some simple truths. I'm trying to accomplish this with aesthetic appeal through the art of writing. And in the end I'm hoping for an enhanced awareness—a good outcome, some degree of betterment as a result of my efforts.  Judgments of what is true (or not true), beautiful (or not beautiful), and good (or not good) pervade our critical thinking, both consciously and unconsciously.

In particular these great ideas shepherd critical discourse with students of art and design. They are the foundation of our conversations about the aesthetic experiences our students are constructing. Where I teach, at Rhode Island School of Design, Illustration studio classes run five hours. That's 300 minutes of weekly debate about the merits and shortcomings of creative effort. I'm pretty sure that all studio faculty engage in this activity to some degree. We grapple with critical language to laud the beautiful or steer the ungainly into aesthetic balance. We weigh the value of one student's efforts against those of his peers, compare the success of formal decisions from one painting to the next, question the motives and intentions of the student in terms of the effect they wish to achieve. Most of us look for the true, the beautiful and the good as they are manifest in process, materiality and critical reflection. While a rubric for assessing these virtues would be mighty convenient, such simplistic, concrete measurement systems for art and design limit creative possibilities, and most of us steer clear of that. But while we may all be well served to identify truth, beauty and goodness as our shared foundation for critical discourse in studio education, the sort of exhaustive discussion necessary for thorough consideration and judgment against those ideas is rarely seen in the classroom. Why? Because it's difficult. Because it requires extremely nimble, patient, exceedingly curious minds and even the most gifted among us question the value of philosophy in our pragmatic, frenetic lives. To many, this level of philosophizing is akin to navel gazing, spinning wheels, an exercise in futility. To some extent, I agree, but only because I recognize the significant limits of time and temperament we face, with so much to accomplish every day. A thorough critical conversation, which even begins to scratch the surface of these ideas as they are manifest in the work of even a single student, could command an entire class period: five hours. Imagine the ensuing frustration if that were the case. Conversation about the nature of truth, beauty and goodness is necessarily circular and inconclusive. It can be unpleasant to dig in this way, of course, especially for an instructor, because doing so immediately opens the door to arguments of a professor's chief nemesis—subjectivity—the catch-all means of disqualification of critical judgment. And then there's time. With only 300 minutes and the hard-wrought work of 18 individuals to consider, there aren't enough hours in the day to completely, exhaustively discuss one piece, let alone the work of 17 more who are run ragged by working around the clock and who sometimes just want practical advice about form, color and composition. The last thing they want is more confusion. Unfortunately,  philosophy's first goal is to confuse. 

This summer, I plan to present some thoughts on this subject at a conference in Athens, the historical and geographic seat of western thought on these ideas, and I may try to hash out my musings here, in this blog. More than anything, I'd like to impart in my students a level of acceptance and recognition that these ideas are what drive our every opinion and decision in the construction of art, and even form a more effective form of discourse to consciously address these issues in the work of every student. Truth, Beauty and Goodness are at the core of all critical discourse. Let's begin with that daunting reality.

Wrestlerman.

Do you want to know joy?

I have a simple prescription.

1. Work your ass off all day. Get yourself good and hungry. Make it a rewarding day somehow; one in which your students express unbridled enthusiasm, understand you, appreciate you. One in which the faculty member who's been cranky or troublesome smiles and says hello. A day which started at the gym and ended with the impression that you're doing it right.

2. Trudge up the hill, without an umbrella, at dusk, in the rain. Your obstacle needn't be a hill and it doesn't have to be raining. You can choose your own obstacles, but the point is to make your return to your car as urgent and discouraging as possible.

3. When you start your car, feel once again a surge of relief from the knowledge that it's been a good day. Tell yourself that you've turned a corner; tell yourself that you're back on track.

4. Arrive home. Allow yourself to be greeted by the cat at the door. Hold the cat. Talk to the cat.

5. Take from the refrigerator the following: a frozen pizza, a handful of fresh, raw green beans, and a plastic tub of calamata and oil-cured olives. Stand at the counter. Look at the olives.

6. Eat a calamata olive. Tell yourself you have never tasted anything so perfect. Tell yourself, "this is joy."

36 Bald Guys.

School Turnarounds.

Finished Illustration for Annenberg VUE, about the disastrous impact of federally mandated "school turnarounds."

Finished Cover.

VUE36 Cover.  I still have a few days before it's finally due but I think I am finished.

Last Minute Panic.

I experienced a last minute panic on this one.  I'd uploaded the first version for the client but felt very shaky about it, so I decided to try something to reconcile my misgivings.

Believe it or not I absolutely slaved over the bottom image. Two days of painting and re-painting to no satisfaction. The idea worked OK in the sketch, and the client approved it, but when I brought color into the game everything fell apart. I was shooting for my usual neo-primitive treatment of the face, but the guy is just too damned good looking to deserve such injustice. Ultimately, I erased the goofy stuff, did a quick, minimal trace of his features and overlaid it on the painting, making adjustments to the skull  to accommodate. Surprisingly, while I thought I'd distorted his head significantly in my first attempt, it was almost dead-on in the contour. Weird.

Anyway, this one's done. My butt's killing me from sitting for three days straight. God bless the dogs for their patience—they've been amazingly calm and loyal.

One Down, One to Go.

Sketches

Sketches for portraits of TEDMed Speakers.

Deborah Estrin is a computer scientist and one of the key developers of network sensing, with applications which include monitoring the self—one's health, state of mind, environment, etc.—with the use of remote devices. Something as commonplace as a smartphone can be used to remote monitor a patient's health, for example.

Peter Attia often uses himself as a test subject in his research on nutrition in an effort to combat obesity. He's also an accomplished swimmer.

A Few More Sketches.

The first two are ideas for a piece about the need for equitable distribution of federal resources.

A spot illustration about the need for more time for students, including the possibility of lengthening school days by three hours.

Another for the same article, but emphasizing "getting a piece of the pie" as a result of having more time for school and extracurricular activities.

Some other rejects for the piece about draconian school turnarounds, which sometimes includes replacing teachers and school staff without fully anticipating the negative repercussions.

Rejected cover ideas about the next four years of education reform.