drawpaintwritemakethings

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today might be the day

some tempera and acrylic over a map folds down to the size of a page to travel the world with you

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There are some thoughts about this, which you can read here.

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waiting for the emergency

an original painting in tempera and acrylic on heavy paper

26.5 x 35.75 inches, but folds down to just 5 x 9 inches to fit in an envelope

We have only two modes — complacency and panic.   — James R. Schlesinger

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Fine, it's number eight, then.

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Now set yourself

an original mixed media collage 

on hard panel

6 x 9 inches

an original collage comic, pop and ukiyo-e elements

The world changes in direct proportion to the number of people willing to be honest about their lives. — Armistead Maupin

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i swear i had a plan (mourn and move on)

a double-sided mixed media collage on canvas panel board

11 x 14 x .5 inches

I make collages. I join the shattered world creating a new harmony. — Louise Berliawsky Nevelson

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the spectacle is capital

an original painting and in mixed media on paper board and wood panel

9 x 12 inches

Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures.   — Guy Debord

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thrill seeker

mixed media on bamboo panel, 8.125 x 9.75 inches x .5 inches.

You live by what you thrill to, and there's the end of it.  — D.H. Lawrence

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How to Say No

an illustrated chapbook

28 pages plus covers

a little book about the word ’no’

how to draw no how to colour no how to print no how to collage no and then a section of addtional notes

stitched by hand

5.25 x 8 inches

to be found here

and everything else here

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stop holding onto yourself (all of us are in orbit); an original mixed media painting on cradled wood panel, 24 x 30 x 1.75 inches. 

Space is to place as eternity is to time. — Joseph Joubert

Character, in great and little things, means carrying through what you feel able to do.   — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.   — Henry David Thoreau

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three crushed collages

three original collages mounted to archival backing board (51pt weight)

each is 9 x 12 inches

drawing + painting + found paper + collage + wax transfer + writing + mark making + pressed layers

collages that look as if a handful of imagery has fallen like a comet and flattened on impact

oh my god, it"s a collage

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Your ambient themes for 2025. Feel free to add whatever layers of hypernormalisation feel most appropriate.

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untitled; paper collage

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the long road back

An essay written and sent out last night, ahead of today's inauguration, but it's more about the next year, and not being crushed by that, than anything else.

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heroes of the trojan war

mixed media collage on panel board

9 x 12 inches

the idea of a ruined city into a painting

In other news, my kid gets a parcel from grandma which includes a bag of Hershey’s Kisses (some kind of cookies-and-cream aberration) and now all this week I’ve had to watch a bag of candy slowly but surely fill up with discarded wrappers (while those infuriatingly tiny Hershey’s flags escape to the counter, and the floor, and everywhere else my eyes can see until the day I die). Taking something from a bag, unwrapping it, and placing the wrapper back in the bag might seem like an Oscar the Grouch level of laziness and bad habits until you remember the Gen Z of it all, the only generation that checks best-before dates like a character out of True Detective while at the same time having a finger planted firmly up one nostril. I keep trying to explain the nature of garbage to this kid, what is and what isn’t, telling her things like I don’t want to see her laptop dumped on the floor, having seen two wrecked already, that information machines were not designed for the floor, that you will never see people in real life or even in movies or television using laptops or typewriters or fax machines on the floor. “No, I bet I could find examples of that,” the kid says, with all the self-awareness of Joe Biden holding a pamphlet titled “Choosing the Right Time to Retire”.

Later she managed to get herself trapped under a fallen coat rack, I won’t even get into the mechanics of that one, suffice it to say that I was getting yelled at even as I freed her.

okay, this painting is meant for a frame but can stand on its own as well, on a mantle, dresser or corner of a cubicle

three quotes come to mind …

I should like to know who has been carried off, except poor dear me - I have been more ravished myself than anybody since the Trojan war — Lord Byron

The first to die was PROTESILAUS  A focused man who hurried to darkness  With forty black ships leaving the land behind  Men sailed with him from those flower-lit cliffs  Where the grass gives growth to everything  Pyrasus Iton Pteleus Antron  He died in mid-air jumping to be first ashore  There was his house half-built  His wife rushed out clawing her face  Podarcus his altogether less impressive brother  Took over command but that was long ago  He’s been in the black earth now for thousands of years — from Memorial by Alice Oswald

...like that star of the waning summer who beyond all stars rises bathed in the ocean stream to glitter in brilliance. ― Homer, The Iliad

everything from my store comes with an extra art surprise

escape from the dreaming planet ... give the gift of original art

buy from people, not corporations

buy things made by humans, not computers

remember, you can’t unplug a painting

oh my god, it’s a collage

you can find more of my work on Etsy

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Give the kid a ride to school today, on the way she’s telling me about how hard she’s working, something about fashion class and Pinterest boards, some Dora-level Spanish, and how they’re studying Persepolis, which she pronounces somewhere along the lines of peers-police, so I correct her, and then comment how strange this is, this wild mispronunciation, considering that there is a person literally standing at the front of the classroom saying this word over and over again, to which she argues (always the argument, no matter how small the stakes) that she’s not good at pronouncing things, and I reply this is no excuse, just like walking around with your fly undone cannot be excused by saying that you’re no good at zippers, and I close things by adding that I look forward to hearing all about the Islamic Revolution, and the Ayatollah Khomeini, or even just where Iran might be, on a map. Oh, I know all that stuff, my kid says, like Frog telling Toad that he never gets depressed, or Genghis Khan saying he is really a pacifist at heart. Have a good day, I call, as I watch her walk through the front doors. 

Later I find out that today is actually a snow day.��

Even though there’s no snow on the ground. 

Above is a library card art set: The Empire and the Future, a series of Imperial Studies Lectures delivered in the University of London, King's College (1916); Techniques of International Trade by Morris S. Rosenthal (1950); Glass by G.O. Jones (1971); Polystyrene by William C. Teach (1960); and Runnerless Molding by Ernest P. Moslo (1960). This set, which fits in a standard envelope, is in my Big Cartel store.

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A general sense of disquiet and why-is-this-happening these days, a kind of confusion around a system that revolts against elitism, incompetence and malfeasance by electing even more bloated, degrading examples of elitism, incompetence and malfeasance. It’s full-on kleptocracy now. Add in some natural disasters and things start looking biblical. And very difficult to remember that just because destroying an existing social order for the sake of some imagined ideal (Greater Russia, Shining Path, Khmer Rouge, China Rising, Make America Great Again) is irrational, understanding that doesn’t stop people from doing it. You can stop making sense on that one; dissect the errors all you like but criminals and true believers aren’t much bothered by argument and theory. As I tell my Gen Z kid all the time, being right about the bus schedule doesn’t change the fact that you need to get to school. Feelings do not change the weather. Still, like a collage, you can reaarange how things fit, or how you see them. In the end, all you can do is make sense of your own life, which is often hard enough.

This collage is called difficulty (i always cry at weddings).