Kipling series

A few weeks ago, I started several pieces bringing together images from some cool East Indian comic books and pieces of Rudyard Kipling. I took the comic books into my office and asked an Indian friend of mine about them. When she saw them, she practically shreiked with delight. "These are great comic books from my childhood. They are all about Indian folk heroes, mystics, gurus, and saints. Imagine comic books about George Washington and Martin Luther King" she said. They are used the help Indian school children learn about their history. She remarked "they are awfully violent though." I have four of them, all circa 1977 or so. The illustrations are done with rich, bold colors - warm golden yellows, deep purples, and blues that range from cyan to cobalt. I've paired them with scraps of Rudyard Kipling's writings from an old text titled "Maugham's Choice of Kipling's Best." It's a collection of Kipling wirtings as selected by Somerset Maugham. Using base pieces of oak and walnut stair treads, I've built up from there. This is the first piece. I'm not sure whether I really like it or not... it still feels like it's missing something. What do you think?

Commission work

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The Coast (top) and Indochine (bottom)

This is perhaps the most difficult work I've found so far, not because the artwork itself is hard to create, but more difficult because I have the end buyer and all of her wonderful style in my head. My friend Andrea recently purchased two of my pieces and requested a third to match the style of those she bought. Easy enough, right? (The two pieces - sold - are pictured here.) To match these two base will be a third piece of rejected stair tread. With the Indochine piece incorporating a rich yellow bamboo for the base and The Coast piece using a darker hickory base, I've selected an odd piece of hickory that was rejected because it has both strong yellow and dark brown hues in it. The base piece is the easy part, it's like choosing which canvas to paint on, now the hard part.

Andrea lives in Washington DC, one of my favorite cities. While there recently, I had lunch with Andrea and then stopped in at the National Portrait Gallery. If you go to DC, this place is a must-see. This is where the famous portraits of Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln are showcased. Those portraits - pieces of our American history - are amazing, but the lower levels of the gallery host some amazing exhibits of American Art that inspire in a whole different way. On this trip I found an amazing folk art exhibit, the center piece of which is the James Hampton piece titled "The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations' Millennium General Assembly." James Hampton was a janitor. Go to Wikipedia and look him up, if you can't get to DC to see the exhibit. The photos on Wikipedia don't do his work justice. It's really a wonderful example of folk art inspired by a greater sense of the spirit that moves artists. I'm using James Hampton as a partof Andrea's piece, in part because of the spirit that it captures, in part because Mr. Hampton was moved by what he called a divine inspiration, and most importantly, because Andrea inspires something greater in me, personally. So, Mr. Hampton's inspriation in Andrea's piece is really a "thank you" to Andrea for her faith and inspiration.