“A man sets out to draw the world. As the years go by, he peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, instruments, stars, horses, and individuals. A short time before he dies, he discovers that that patient labyrinth of lines traces the lineaments of his own face.”

-Jorge Luis Borges

Walt Whitman

“God bless…God damn.”

-James Thurber

Flannery O'Connor

“Well, I hadn’t thought of my work in terms of Social Problems…I always think more about it in terms of Human Beings.”

-Carson McCullers

Allen Ginsberg

"People are strange: They are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice."

-Charles Bukowski

"The effort to educate the uneducable is hopeless. Schools for adults soon become kindergartens for adults. The pupils are quite unable to take in the education proper to their years. The gogues thus have to provide them with amusement in kindergartens. The hope is that they will somehow learn to think as an accidental by-product of playing, but that hope is vain."

-H.L. Mencken

Sketch for portrait of Hunter S. Thompson (originally commissioned by the Los Angeles Times)

"Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."

-Mark Twain

Edgar Allan Poe

William Carlos Williams

This past April I sent out a small batch of promotional mailers.

One of the postcards I included in the promotional packet was a sketchbook spread of Dirty Frank’s, a popular watering hole in south Philadelphia. The image was part of a 41-slide story I put together for Amtrak documenting my weekly commutes from New York City to Philly where I’ve taught in the Illustration Program at the University of the Arts for the past decade. The project was ultimately included in this year’s Society of Illustrators and American Illustration annuals.

The second card in the packet was a recent drawing for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Perhaps it’s because of my time in the classroom, but the Chronicle is a favorite client of mine and the articles are always interesting, often hitting close to home. This particular piece discussed the pressures on scholars to publish research as well as teach, and the paranoia this can cultivate among colleagues.

Finally, I included a portrait of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges because he’s one of my favorite 20th Century figures.

To round out this particular promo packet, along with a business card, I designed a greeting card that mimicked a pocket-sized sketchbook and included a little original drawing for each of the recipients, along with a short note.

These occasional promotional packets are sort of like Messages In A Bottle in the Digital Age.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is a favorite client of mine. As an educator as well as an illustrator, perhaps the articles they send through often hit close to home. In this particular piece, called "How Academe Breeds Resentment," the author considers paranoia, envy and over-thinking amongst academic scholars.

The brief summary the art director sent through highlighted some general themes: Paranoia, envy, academic over-analysis, etc. My initial ideas – looking over one's shoulder, hunkered down on a desk full of research – were Ok as starting points but were lacking any sort of graphic anchor.

Above the desktop computer in my studio is a framed sketchbook drawing I made of a banjo player and a young woman in a red striped dress at the Bedford Avenue subway stop on the L Train in Brooklyn.

I made the drawing based on a dozen cellphone photos I'd taken on the subway platform in Brooklyn. I liked the banjo player's set-up (kick-drum and high-hat strapped to Chuck Taylor sneakers, two harmonicas snapped into a holder that was designed for a single harp). It wasn't until I got home and began "drawing on location" from my desktop computer that I realized the woman in the red striped dress had been taking pictures of me taking pictures of the banjo player.

I cast the banjo player from Brooklyn as my paranoid academic.

Digitally, I cropped the banjo player's face out of the subway drawing, printed it out, trimmed it and taped it onto a few pages of a sketchbook, fleshing out some ideas. Here, he looks over his paranoid shoulder at what other scholars might be doing/who might be plagiarizing his brilliant ideas.

Here our scholar cranes his neck to see what the next scholar down the way might be up to.

This idea is the clunky one of the three, conceptually, but I may revisit it someday: A large magnifying glass balanced on the desktop of our scholar, but pushing our image of him further into the distance.

The Chronicle liked the first idea best so I transferred the sketch to some beefier paper and inked it with a steel brush and various other pen nibs (watercolor added as an accent).

Originally designed as a vignetted spot, the drawing ran as a full-page illustration, online as well as in print, always a treat to see.

Another piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education and another very interesting article, which I’ve come to expect from this client. Titled “Ovid Had No Trigger Warning,” the author suggests that most meaningful works of literature are in fact “post traumatic,” using Ovid’s work and exile from Rome as a jumping-off point.

In 8 AD Ovid was banished from Rome by Emperor Augustus for mysterious reasons. The only clue we have is in Ovid’s own words: Carmen et error (“a poem and a mistake”).

Isolation can be terrible. Isolation can be the most important thing in the world.

What if Ovid could look down from the mountains of the past and see a student blindfolded for their own protection? What would he say? “You are not alone,” the author of the article would seem to suggest. “We can cross this dark valley together.”

As an artist I often feel torn between loose drawings and tight drawings, Gestural versus Deliberate. The marriage of the two is a constant carrot on the end of a constant stick…

When this job came through from the Chronicle of Higher Education I was reading King Lear. I’d just gotten to the part in the play where the Earl of Gloster’s eyes are dug out of his head by the Duke of Cornwall. I wondered if that vision ought to be shielded from students in a classroom.

Is it the duty of an “educator” to so sensor the content of a text for a student?

This is Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Socrates. It’s in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York City.

I’d made a drawing of this painting in a sketchbook I was working on at the time. In the Chronicle of Higher Ed article the author speaks of Plato’s teacher, and his choice to drink hemlock and die rather than confess to breaking laws he did not recognize. Though not mentioned by name, we all know that Plato’s teacher was Socrates, and that this “traumatic” event effectively fueled Plato’s life of the mind.

I sent the sketchbook drawing to the art director in Washington D.C., suggesting that this might be a perfect pairing for his article on “trigger warnings,” David’s The Death of Socrates in my sketchbook.

Over the past several years, when a project permits, I've been experimenting quite a bit with different combinations of mediums (acrylic paint, collages elements, pen and ink, etc). The drawn pen and ink line tends to be the thread that runs through all of the work.

Malibu magazine e-mailed with an assignment that required a double-page illustration. The article was about Los Angeles-style traffic congestion creeping up the Pacific Coast Highway. Because of the magazine's relatively small budget, I decided to take the opportunity to do something more experimental in terms of final execution. As with most jobs, I began with a couple of pages of very rough thumbnail sketches.

The coast along the PCH is popular with surfers. My first idea had a surfer catching a wave of traffic headed north, out of Los Angeles.

Here a beach-bum halts the traffic with casual, super-human strength.

Same idea as the previous sketch, only this one's in stereo.

A more organic wave of traffic being less-successfully held back.

A pedestrian up the proverbial tree.

This sketch seemed to satisfy the requirements of the assignment pretty well, but I usually do one more sketch when I reach this point.

This little character was from a sketchbook. I plopped him down on the page, standing in-between a wall of traffic and the Pacific Coast Highway. Makes no real sense, conceptually, but maybe that's why I like it.

And then, because the project's budget was quite small, I offered to hand-letter the article's headline and credits, too(!).

Hand-lettering anything usually takes a ton of passes on the copy.

To be clear, the title of this article was "NO WAY OUT" (these pages weren't some sort of cry for help as my wife feared they might be when she came into the studio and saw all of these pages strewn across the floor)...

The part of the iceberg below the surface that nobody ever sees...

In this piece I tried something new...

...I scanned the simple drawings of the cars and trucks, added some simple color in Photoshop, printed them out on archival paper and collaged them into the final hybrid drawing/painting.

The finished traditional/digital hybrid on my studio easel.

As it appeared in Malibu magazine with the hand-lettering incorporated.

For portrait commissions I generally don’t do preparatory sketches anymore, usually just sitting down and banging out four or five ink drawings of the subject and submitting them all, letting the art director and editor choose which one they’ll ultimately run.

This approach began with a job I did for the New Republic in 2009. I was commissioned to do a portrait of the economist Nouriel Roubini.

I sat down at my desk with a sketchbook to begin doing some “sketches” and, as often happens, there was a looseness and spontaneity to the “sketches” that I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to replicate in a properly “finished” piece of art.

At that time in my studio, I had several large acrylic paintings on paper that had been abandoned. I gessoed over one of these paintings and tore the sheet into small pieces after the gesso had dried.

I liked the way the colors from the under-painting crept through the thin layer of gesso.

I scanned one of these pieces of the abandoned painting along with my favorite sketchbook drawing of Roubini and combined the two using Photoshop.

The resulting image ended up being an early example of my using the computer to stitch together traditionally created elements, and a preparatory sketch being presented as Finished Art.

In January 2016 North Dakota State University's football team won their fifth consecutive national championship. This was a very big deal. And while I'm not an alumni of the school, I've worked with the University's magazine for nearly 20 years and was thrilled to be asked to contribute something to this landmark issue of their school's semi-annual publication.

My initial conversations with the magazine's editor suggested that we work on the idea of community, ie, behind the team's success was a vast and enthusiastic support system. One possible take on this idea was a football player assuming a sort of Heisman Trophy stance, with more than one arm cradling the game ball. 

Carson Wentz, NDSU's quarterback, was selected by the Philadelphia Eagles with the number two pick in the 2016 NFL draft.

Carson Wentz and I both graduated from Century High School in Bismarck, North Dakota.

I often find that working in small, pocket-sized sketchbooks when working up initial thumbnail sketches is useful. This idea involved a cheering crowd of loyal Bison fans riding on their school's mascot's back.

Perhaps something as quiet as a still-life, featuring a folded hooded sweatshirt with the school's logo on the chest, could be a poignant conceptual solution.

This idea had a smiling fan in the middle of a like-minded crowd, but the concept didn't work without a little hint of color...

With these thumbnails I applied fields of color to separate pages of the small, pocket-sized sketchbook and incorporated the color into the thumbnail sketches digitally.

In the Fall of 2000 I painted a large bison for the cover of the inaugural issue of NDSU's magazine. After further discussion with the magazine's editor, we wondered if revisiting this more straight-forward approach to depicting the school's mascot might not suit the current issue really well.

And so I began doodling bison, focusing solely on form and shape and not paying much attention to concept at all.

The simple addition of the confetti (in the school's colors) gave the image a graphic, celebratory feel. But we weren't quite there yet in terms of finding the right bison for this job.

So I tried a couple more. (This one felt too goofy.)

This one was nearly there, but the back leg came across as too spindly and the hump on the bison's back was a bit too pronounced.

Hump and legs were getting there. One more pass...

The legs looked good, but the hump needed to be tamed still further.

We did it! Sketch approved/time to enlarge, transfer to watercolor paper and draw.

Sometimes, finished sketches are so resolved that there is little variation from the sketch to the finished drawing. In terms of execution for the finished drawing here, I've used a steel brush pen made by Speedball (out of Philadelphia!). It's a pen nib of sorts, but wasn't built to make drawings like this. That's why I like to use it: It gives the lines character, sort of like a singer's vibrato, or the shape of a note blown through a wind instrument.

And because I wanted more control in terms of placement of the confetti, I made that with watercolor on separate sheets of paper which were then combined with the original pen and ink drawing in Photoshop. 

Best of luck to the North Dakota State University Bison next season!

AVENUES: THE WORLD SCHOOL is a progressive new private school in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood.

In the spring of 2016 I was commissioned to draw a class portrait, commemorating the first graduating class from the school.

Though this piece would ultimately be about the 55 individual graduating seniors, I thought I might give the group portrait a slight conceptual element by placing them all at a street corner crosswalk (alluding to the school's name, "Avenues," and hinting at the fact that the students were about to cross the street, metaphorically, in their young lives).

During their frantic end-of-year preparations I visited the school to shoot reference material of most of the seniors.

Not all of the seniors were available the day I was at the school shooting reference so I relied on simple yearbook photos for those portraits.

There was an extremely tight deadline for this project (about a week) so I had to be very methodical in building the group portrait. I began by drawing every student in the class based on the collected reference material.

I then scanned each of the tight sketches, selected the line work and dragged them onto a Photoshop canvas the same size as the final drawing would be (approximately 22" x 30"). Even chaotic crowd scenes ought to have some sort of rhythmic logic to them.

Once I'd established a design that felt good I printed it out and transferred it onto the 22" x 30" sheet of 300lb hot-pressed Fabriano watercolor paper to begin the final drawing.

Even the cross-walk signal was carefully incorporated into the final drawing(!).

The finished drawing up on the easel in my studio.

I take care with all of the commissions that come through my studio, but I'm not sure I've ever been quite as methodical with a project as this one required me to be.

Much like seeing your work printed in a newspaper or magazine, there's a satisfaction in seeing an original drawing framed and on the client's wall. 

Air Travel

A Momentary Rush To Judgment

Against the Wind, or Paranoia & the Storm

Ezra Pound's Bel Esprit

In-Between Floors at the Gym

Rembrandt Working Window #5

Playing Caddy for Payne Stewart in the Double-Vision Confusion of Eternity

Masks, or A Skirmish Line in Washington Heights (Apologies to John Chamberlain)

Nude Life Drawing Class

Summer Vacation, Where Wolverine Describes for Us His Cancer Scare

The Birthday Boy, Looking for a Seat at the Table

The cigarette boat was on fire. The guy running deliveries was distracted. Fresh from the gym, she had her eye on the donut in the plexiglass case.

In the afternoon Vladimir Horowitz made a cameo appearance at the Agony & the Ecstasy on 23rd Street.

The wheels in my brain were going 'round and 'round. Traffic on the Pacific Coast Highway was heavy. A seagull perched on the pier chewed on a chicken nugget.

J. Hood Wright Park (Upper Manhattan)

Internal Monologue on the A Train

Penn Station (April 20th 2016)

Here we are now. Entertain us.

Dirty Frank's (South Philly)

Riding the A Train with Flavor Flav

At the Post Office in Washington Heights

The D Train on the A Line

Foul Language on the A Train (October 22nd 2017)

Two Alone

A Woman on the A Train

A Starbucks in Washington Heights (NYC)

The Upside Down on the A Train

Rosemary's Greenpoint Tavern (Williamsburg, Brooklyn)

A woman pushed her toy dog across the Brooklyn Bridge in a baby stroller. A man’s skateboard was electrically powered. It was in-between seasons: Some people wrapped themselves with scarves while a young woman on roller skates wearing a one-piece bathing suit underneath faded denim jeans rolled confidently towards Manhattan.

-Walking Across the Brooklyn Bridge (March 31st 2018)

Much like the polar bear in the Central Park Children’s Zoo who, after being heavily medicated for what his handlers had characterized as depression, began swimming back-and-forth for hours on end across his enclosure’s small oceanic pool, the man on the A Train platform at 34th Street/Penn Station paced the platform in a series of never-ending circles, sometimes smiling sometimes not, allowing arriving trains to pull out of the station without him.

-A Train Platform, Penn Station (March 29th 2018)

An older man played an old instrument on Canal Street. He took a break to check his phone. He was hoping to garner “Likes” on Social Media.

Tastes change in music. Tastes change in technology, too.

Imagine this: The World Wide Web breaks down or is deliberately destroyed, like a fisherman’s net torn apart by a Great White Shark. All is lost – cellphone records, electronic correspondence, financial information, art, the written word…

A thousand years from now, archeologists will puzzle over this gap in the record of human history, this apex of Modern Man that left no record of its existence.

-Canal Street (May 11th 2017)

Parks seem to attract chess players when the weather permits. And hustlers. And pigeons.

-Union Square, New York City (May 12th 2017)

In the early buds of Springtime lie shadows and vanilla ice cream cones on Sunday afternoons.

-Washington Heights (May 21st 2017)

Renovations were underway at Penn Station. The big board was covered with a blue tarp. The room smelled like popcorn. A man peeled a banana for his breakfast. A tall, elegant woman turned heads as she parted the crowd. Construction workers headed for their shifts in steel-toed boots. (Almost everybody was walking in rhythm to their own individual tunes.) A dapper businessman with a shaved head was followed by two women wearing headscarves. I took a sip from a medium-sized French vanilla coffee as my train was posted.

- Penn Station (January 26th, 2017)

Good Friday in Upper Manhattan – Washington Heights – just before Eastertime, ham and mashed potatoes. A parade performed in Spanish, by way of the Dominican Republic. The young adolescent Christ stand-in is wearing a bad black Halloween wig. His two condemned criminal companion actors carry only crossbars of wood, heads held low, cheap sackcloth shirts over blue jeans and Addidas sneakers. Acting Roman soldiers slap cheap multi-tongued whips in the air and periodically bark out orders to the condemned young men. A city councilman walks conspicuously ahead of the Christ-figure. In the middle of the procession is a car with concert speakers strapped to the roof, blaring out some solemn, Sergio Leone dirge.

-Washington Heights (April 14th 2017)

It appeared as though a pigeon had shit all over the lower left pant leg of the young Mormon missionary. Par for the course, I suppose. He and his partner walked confidently along St. Nicholas Avenue, hands in pockets, smiling, not really a care in the world.

Luis was as old as Charles Bukowski. He was on break from the 7-Eleven next door.

A couple of Dominican gals considered paperwork on the sidewalk. Out in the street a Fed Ex Ground truck waited for the traffic light to change.

-The View from Taco Bell, Washington Heights (May 9th 2017)

In much the same way that many cultures have their own version of ravioli (pierogies, kase knoephla, Chinese dumplings, etc), most cultures over the course of centuries have devised effective exercises to pass the time.

-Dominoes Players on a Median, 163rd Street & Broadway (May 10th 2017)

A man leaned against the security desk. A large, red, paper shopping bag rested on the floor at his feet. The school’s logo was designed by George Tscherny. It was printed in red on one face of the security desk. Marshall Arisman, Kim Ablondi, Thomas Libetti – the names! It was a beautiful evening.

I walked along 23rd Street, back to the subway entrance at 8th Avenue, alone.

-Opening reception, Riccardo Vecchio’s WAR x ARTIFICE, School of Visual Arts (February 6th, 2017)

The patient young man walked through the galleries, patiently waiting for the work on the walls to come to him, and the woman he hoped to be with to come to him, too.

-The New Museum, Raymond Pettibon Exhibition (April 5th 2017)

It was cold. Cold cold cold. Beautiful people in a big white room, scarves and stocking caps and hands in pockets.

Two old friends met at the gallery and had an argument. The one who’d arrived by bicycle in such cold weather walked away, scratching his head. Everybody was dressed mostly in black.

-David Zwirner Gallery (January 14th, 2017)

In his early 20’s he came to New York City because he wanted to be an actor. He’d made the decision. He was committed to it. He took classes. He attended auditions.

All these years later he still loves acting, occasional cabinet-sized theater productions put on by friends-of-friends that don’t “have a budget” to pay the actors, hoping to be seen by the right people. Exposure.

The bagpipe gig at NYU was just a side-gig, to help pay a little bit of one month’s rent, and it was seasonal, anyway, each year on graduation day.

-Washington Square Park (May 11th 2017)

Asleep at the Wheel

The Persistence of Diner Coffee

The Young Man's Game

11 Just Wanted To Play Like The Other Kids

Latch-Key Kids Still Ride Skateboards

Insecurities

House Hunter

The Winter Olympics 2018

Opinion: Grocery Stores

(Self-Explanatory)

Indecision in the Age of Infinite Choice

Fishing For A Retirement

Self-Portrait with Beret and Turned-Up Collar (1659)

Self Portrait with Plumed Beret (1929)

Self Portrait as a Young Man (1628)

Self Portrait, Laughing (c1630)

Self Portrait with Gorget (1629)

Self Portrait with Two Circles (1665 - 1669)

Self Portrait (1642)

Self Portrait with Beret (c1665)

Self Portrait (1660)

Self Portrait at the Age of 63 (1669)

We've all got a lot of things on our minds...

Don't hold yourself back.

Fishing for ideas with Eugene Delacroix.

Arthur Rimbaud's Drunken Boat.

Resting on laurels...

Rembrandt in The Frick Collection, New York City.

The Death of Socrates.

Intermission at the Mind Game.

Mind over matter.

All boxed in.

Some kind of inspiration from some kind of cave. 

The Women of Algiers

Hamlet.

Isolation.

"Don't get up gentlemen, I'm only passing through."

Joseph Roulin, Van Gogh's postman.

KEEP GOING!

Coda: Above and below the tree line.