rough and tumble

some roughs for my totoro piece; style exploration via adrienne adams, peter mccarty, the new yorker, sempe, the princess and the frog and the great marc simont. have a good weekend!

m & n

i was surprised and delighted this afternoon to meet a fellow who'd purchased one of my paintings at a Maverix art auction last year. it was one of a pair: the first, a painting of naia who works at a coffee shop i frequent, the second, a fictional gentleman.

naia, i had hoped would be accepted for a group show at the society of illustrators in new york-- but it was not to be. now this little painting is cared for by a friend from work; she has a good home.

The Totoro Forest Project

Recently I was invited to contribute to the Totoro Forest Project, an auction of artwork by international animation, comic and illustration artists in service of saving Sayama Forest outside of Tokyo--the one that inspired Hayao Miyazaki's My Neighbor Totoro.

The event will be held at Pixar on September 6th, and a selection of the artwork will be displayed at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco; a catalogue will also eventually be available. The whole thing is headed by some of my good friends at the studio, so a round of applause for Dice Tsutsumi, Enrico Casarosa, Ronnie Del Carmen and Yuniko Pang. It's a great honor and pleasure to be involved, and I hope we manage to raise a lot!





My piece, about a moment of person-plant communion, was kind of an homage to Helen Levitt and Marc Simont--and of course to New York city: a place with a lot of concrete and a lot of green. It's based on a little plant I saw bowing out of an apartment window in NY; a little cactus, I think. This one's for that cactus.

third

reverend ike
k&m bar williamsburg
m. shing barber shop
kickerbocker village

second

manhattan from the air

the mta bus in harlem

subway at columbus circle

salad days 3 @ artists space

the NEW MUSEUM

first

my little books are terrifically inadequate in conveying the richness of my trip and the city. Thankfully I took about a million photographs, so hopefully those come through. I guess that's part of the appeal of the place though: its inability to be quite taken in.

spuyten duyvil, williamsburg

midsummer's night swing at LC

the subway south of 145th st. harlem

NYC

hey, just got back from ny.

above are some of my sketchbook pages, a few of which i'd like to share with you in the next few posts. i've been sort of absent from the blog for a little while, but i'd like to jump right back into it--there have been a lot of exciting projects on the go around here, and i'm looking forward to posting about them in the near future. check back soon!

b

a

old, old, old

Joseph Mitchell

I was recently invited to make an illustration of my favourite author for Hey Oscar Wilde! It's Clobberin' Time! and here it is! 

Joseph Mitchell was a newspaper reporter early in his career and a New Yorker contributor from 1938 until his death in 1996 (although mysteriously, though he kept his office and would show up to work every day, he never published another word after 1964).

Mitchell wrote the most incredibly intimate portraits of people about town and was able to evoke, somehow, all the delicate specificities of life in Manhattan and its environs. In his rambling and untiring prose he strings you along, with hardly any idea of what you're reading about or where it's going, and you find yourself laughing out loud and devouring tens of pages and growing curious about our little histories, here, and all the telling, wonderful, meaningful things around us, were we just to look around.

His work reads romantically about a time and a place now forgotten--some America more naive, more hopeful, newly built, already old, with sawdust on the floors and gypsy's packed in old cars and wild grapes on Staten Island and good old men always by the river--rich, vibrant, lively communities of regular people passing the time. Read him if you get a chance; and look around, I guess.