Like my idol Saul Steinberg, I’m enamored of the beauty of the mundane and practical. Like him, I collect and perennially observe still life items like a paper coffee cup from City Bakery. This particular cup’s softer shade of navy blue, the way the graphics and typography integrate with its stocky form, and the deliberate cutting of the word,” Bakery” are an appealing combination. The cup is a permanent fixture on my table.
So for a new exhibit, “Coffee as Muse,” opening today, I created a series of four postcard-sized portraits of the cup, each in a different medium: cross-hatched ink, pen and ink, watercolor and colored pencil. And I also did a small abstract painting using concentrated French Italian dark espresso.
Forty artists have contributed to this coffee-fueled and inspired show. The second annual “Coffee as Muse” runs from now through April, at No. Six Depot, a café, roaster, art gallery and cultural mecca in West Stockbridge, MA. Come see the show and have a cup of Heart of Darkness with an orange olive oil muffin.
Berkshire Magazine, the New York Magazine of the region asked me to create an illustration for an article on the current state of telecommuting in the area. A mashup incorporating pen and ink drawings with collaged elements, this piece represents the dream: to be able to Skype wirelessly with colleagues all over the planet from a dock on Lake Garfield or the middle of an idyllic field in the Tyringham Valley.
Read the article.
I just completed a licensing arrangement with DQtrs, a cool San Francisco-based home decor company. Later this summer, DQtrs will be producing and selling a collection of limited-edition pillows, featuring illustrations I drew of my own collection of vintage bracelets. Initially, the collection will be five themes with bracelets on both pillow front and back, in luscious and subtle palettes. The first series of pillows are close-ups of the links.
After drawing them and observing the bracelets for a while, I began to personify them—as I am wont to do—which led me to seeing several of the illustrations as metaphors for hooking up. In Relationships and Courtship, the bracelets appear to be making attempts to connect, and link up as their clasps approach each other. Will they ever touch, embrace and lock in?