Portrait of the Artist as a Not-so-young Man

I really enjoy sharing how I make art with others. I am philosophically committed to being open-source about all materials and process. I love the Open Art Hive movement. I came to my curious artistic focus during my many years of being an at-home dad when our children were little. I use to call it my kitchen art studio and I had many hours there making art and food at the same time. It is hard to tell sometimes where food ends and where art begins.

My artist statement speaks to my commitment to working with the barest of materials- Like Rumpelstiltskin, I am creating objects of art by weaving together the ubiquitous, the quotidian, and the ephemeral, instead of his straw. My work is sculptural basketry. Tatlin meets the Appalachian Craft tradition and beautiful organic forms take shape.

Rumpelstiltskin Was a genius at working with nothing to achieve his end. There was no better example of this principle until now.

I am focused on materials which are semi-archival, that cost nothing, and which weigh very little. Things like toothpicks, chair cain, thread, string, coffee filters and glue are all grist for my mill.

I have spent many an afternoon entertaining children with nothing but a box of toothpicks and a hot glue gun. When I add a piece of thread the project becomes a mobile which spins and floats on the subtle energy of a passing breeze in the room. Each piece is a puzzle or a game. They each result from a simple set of rules such as a decision to work flat, or to let gravity do the heavy lifting. I might create a framework using skewers to be used for toothpick weaving.

The building strategy I recommend is called tipping which means I keep the glue gun on the stand (think large can of tomatoes) and I apply the glue to the tips of the toothpicks. Depending on the application, picks can be tipped on one end or two. Picks can be made into doubles, triples (equilateral triangles), or 3-d tetrahedrons. Basic polygons can be made before they are applied to the structure.

Bowery & Basketry Album

This album contains some images of new weavings, hoops, mobiles, and installation art.

Like Rumpelstiltskin, I am creating objects of art by weaving together the ubiquitous, the quotidian, and the ephemeral, instead of his straw. My work is sculptural basketry. Tatlin meets the Appalachian Craft tradition and beautiful organic forms take shape.

As art work goes, there is little I like better than settling into a nice photo restoration or photo montage project in photoshop. I use the tools of commercial art (disposable art) to help people build personal history. This work is about helping to create new artifacts. The original artifact gets to remain intact and the image is freed to live again.
There are two components to this work. Restoration which is more precise, takes forever, and is about healing. And the photo montage which is faster, more fun, and makes great gifts.
I think about a line from a Laurie Anderson song where she talks about history being like an angel being blown backwards into the future. She goes on; “and the angel wants to go back and fix things, to repair the things that have been broken. But there is a storm blowing from paradise.” . . . And this storm is called Progress.
So for me, the act of restoration can be like a miracle and it can be a blessing that I can bring into someone’s life. Photo restoration is about helping people with healing. It is about giving them back something that they had thought was damaged (a connection to someone really important) that is beyond repair.
An example of this is a photo from the early 1960s I restored of a woman as a small girl sitting on Santa’s lap. She was with her dad whom she never knew. It had been found in her grandmother’s house, crumpled and broken in a drawer. It was a tiny 3 inch print that had been kept in the dark so the colors were beautiful, and the optics on the camera that was used were great, so it was a beautiful little print that was incredibly important to this woman, and it was in 5 pieces. I was able slowly build the image back to give her a beautiful 8 x 10 in a little frame.
Photo montage, layering in objects, frames, and borders, and combining images and text is really fun. Just imagine picking out a couple small prints from a forgotten old album and scanning them and maybe cleaning them up a little. Then I can create a new artifact where I have layered in two or three images of the same people and given it a nice border or background, and other fun elements. 
One of the things I have learned in this work is that every body I speak with about this interest has a picture with a story. And I enjoy hearing about each of them, because everybody loves to tell you their story, and I enjoy listening. “I have this picture” they start, and they weave together the lives of their family and friends, the oral history tradition alive and well.
All lending to our permanence as people. Contributing to the pile of things we leave behind that say something about us as people, and making connections.

It is interesting to see all the ways computers enhance the process of photography. In days past, it was the moment when the film was exposed that defined so much about the image. In the digital world, once the photograph is taken, the real fun begins. I work sometimes very directly, by putting objects right on the scanner. Again, the moment of the exposure is just the beginning. The image comes about from what happens next. 
My three sons & I spend time in the summer with nets in hand walking around our pond. We find numerous species of dragonflies which we have taken to scanning at upwards of 2400 dpi. Looking at them at that level of resolution is like viewing them under a microscope. 
Now that I am shooting in RAW format, I am finding a great richness to digital photography. I like the spontaneous feeling of being out for the day with my camera. Other than missing the SLR experience of looking through the lens, it is great to be able to just shoot as much as you want.
I have been printing with an Epson 2200 which uses 7 pigmented inks and can print on a wide variety of papers including Arches Watercolor paper. I am exploring ways this can be used for portraits.

In this series, I bring together many aspects of my work. The postscript drawing, the montage of objects, resourcing up of found images, mixing graphics and photography. 
I start with little 28k files from Weather.com. I generally grab them when the weather is exciting. I turn them into 50 mg files (I make them 300 dpi 11x14s) and filter out the rasterizing. There are layers of line work, art, and photography. In the pink one with Venus, I drew out the lines of barometric pressure from the weather map to use graphically in different parts of the composition. 
I like the idea of turning the map of the United States on it’s side. It really pushes the map of the US graphically. It becomes a backdrop for a delicous drama, highly abstracted and juxtaposed with an all star line up from the world of art, photographs, and icons from the 20th Century. 
I see these evolving to become the base layer in shadow boxes. There is so much that could be done with sculptural layering out and with graphics and painting on glass.