still life: shoes, altoids, socks & hanger
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the single shot that is now still life: shoes, altoids, socks & hanger is from a digital photograph i took by accident. it really is just a pair of my shoes, a tin of (empty) altoids), my favorite pair of socks and a white clothes hanger that should be in the closet. still life: shoes, altoids, socks & hanger is my triptych's triptych (the title too being nine syllables, one for each image in the finally image). it just came to me that my predilection for fractals and closure, or at the very least -- repetition, is so far the only consistency i see in my stuff. nevertheless, this image is 21" X 27"

turtles for susan
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the original photograph that turtles for susan is based on is not my own photo. it is, it would stand to reason, susan's photo. and it is. from ravello, italy. just one amazingly wonderful fountain, turtles, naked guys, an empty piazza and what appears to be the outline from the aol figurine from television. this picture and the one for permutations were both given to me by susan and this image, for a lot of special reasons, is dedicated to her. it is 8.5" X 11." this image happened quite by accident also, and on the same night that still life happened except that unlike still life, this photo was intentional; my futzing around with it to get this final image is what was by happenstance.

if by chance that the person now reading this is by chance the girl (with the geography trivia) who sat in front of me on the jet blue flight to nyc thursday morning (from oakland), this is what the image looked like before i colored it and gave it to you. i hope you enjoy it.

for you a pair of broken angel wings
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this is one instance where nothing i try does this image justice. for you a pair of broken angel wings is one of the pieces i am most proud of; the poem also, although there is most assuredly a disconnect between the image for this piece and the point of poem. the central image is actually a photo a friend sent a bunch of us by way of an e-mail of a single cherry blossom out his window. i really wanted to work with the photo, got his permission and about two months later, this is what emerged. there are seven pairs of images , in three columns, with the center column's pair being the same to its left and right, (to the left it has been desaturated; to the right it has been inverted). past/present/future... morning/noon/night... want/have/need... yesterday/today/tomorrow... before/during/after... memory/fact/revision... etc. seven pairs for seven days (a.m. and p.m.).

the image is really big. 3' X 4' the poem runs down the far-right side of the image, like a feather, like the greek myth, like sadness.

because i can't seem to get a good rendition of the whole piece here, below i have uploaded all seven pairs of the image that make up the whole. and, below, are two excerpts from my poem for you a pair of broken angel wings which is in, of, a part of and apart from the image...

(----)

When I wrestle control from my fears
That is when I succeed in redress
Your legacy still haunts me
Whereas I once had whole thoughts
I now cobble it all together in half-breaths,
These fragments only cohere because of commas and dashes.
Were my life spoken absent these I’d float
Float un-tethered I float broken. You stole wholeness,
You left me with my stuttering again intact.

(----)

If I could give you a gift my deepest hope would be this:
To be granted permission to hand to you in heaven
The wings that make you an angel
And as I hand them to you I break them,
Like you to me I snap their knuckles, like you to me limp
I’d make useless your wings, impotent and ugly
For you I would fashion a pair of broken angel wings
Unflinching I stand as you disappear out of my sight
Through clouds and wind and memory leaving me with silence.

angel wings (detail #1)
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10" X 14"

angel wings (detail #2)
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10" X 14"

angel wings (detail #3)
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10" X 14"

angel wings (detail #4)
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10" X 14"

angel wings (detail #5)
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10" X 14"

angel wings (detail #6)
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10" X 14"

angel wings (detail #7)
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10" X 14"

gambling w/ our lives he said (for mister man)
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this image is 3' X 3' and dedicated to mister man. gambling w/ our lives he said is a poem i wrote in 1996, the title being the response i got when i told someone that when we fall in love we gamble with our hearts. "no," he said back to me "we gamble with our lives." that phrase has stuck with me ever since. the image has about 30 separate photos nested in it -- like the disa orchid photo of mine in the lower right-hand corner. the central piece -- the swirls -- represent logan square in philadelphia. while not technically a square (it is a circle), the artist who designed the fountain -- calder (he is the father of the contemporary mobile artist and the son of the artist who helped design philadelphia's city hall) -- also has a shakespeare sculpting adjacent to the fountain. so, between the three nymphs in his fountain and the shakespeare sculpture, i figured it was a much a square as its name stated. if you stand in logan square and look behind you, you can see city hall (calder's dad's work) and if you look ahead of you, you see the philadelphia museum where the calder mobiles hang (his son's work). so there was a tremendous sense of lineage in that spot, the spot where i had my first date with mister man (i slipped and fell into the fountain, if you must know). that kind of familial fractal is the resonant theme of the image. each of the smaller swirls in the center of the image have a photo in them (each swirl standing for one of the nymphs and the fourth for the shakespeare sculpting). the other major, recognizable image is the transamerica building here in sf, where we moved (me back home, mister man for the first time). he loved sf. so it is only fitting that its icon be so prominent. the poem is there in the lower left-hand corner and it can be read clearly in its entirety even when the image is reduced to 50% its real size. the three line excerpt from wedding sonata is from this poem. one other comment – after glenn died and when we were cleaning out his apartment as well as going through photos of his, i came across a photo he took of me when we first moved here to sf. i had no idea this picture existed until it literally fell into my lap. if you look just above the poem, you can see that photograph.

bloom in dublin - primary image
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bloom in dublin is an 18-poem autobiography which i gave my mom several years ago. since then i have edited all the poems, added four addendum stories and now have completely illustrated the whole work. the entire work is 25 panels in all, and each panel is 21” X 15." i should complicate this right now by adding that within the actual "story" panel itself, there are 3 distinct images which make up that panel -- the core image from a photograph of mine of chinese scroll (see below), the poem nested into a smaller version of the core image, and a background collage of the various renditions of the core image. the exception in all of this, size-wise, is the poem nested into a smaller version of the core image (it's 12" X 9").

i've uploaded 5 panels from this piece. bloom refers to not just the flower, but also to james joyce's protagonist leopold bloom. ulysses is set in dublin (hence bloom being set in dublin) and having been raised proudly irish, on top of my one-day-with-out-a-map-finding-leopold-bloom's-fictional-home-when-in-dublin, it all just made sense. the half-way point of the 18 poems is the shortest poem i have ever written (2 lines, 11 words) while the final poem of the 18 is the longest of all of them in this piece (rewritten to about three times the original length).

the core image for all 25 panels is a photograph of mine of a 2-panel chinese scroll painting. i am sincerely indebted to mrs. ogata for allowing me the chance to photograph it. i would be remiss if i didn't acknowledge my mom's acquiescing and letting me break our agreement about when this poem/image could be seen by anyone other than the two of us. the subject matter of the poem (as a whole poem in 22 pieces) is personal, honest and at times not very pleasant, but it is the what it is to be human.

bloom - story 1
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bloom - image 4
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bloom - image 9
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bloom - addendum a
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half sonnets 1, 2, and 3 in a row (self-portrait)
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half sonnet I & half sonnet II & half sonnet III
half sonnets 1, 2 amd 3 in a row (self portrait) is the final displaying of the half sonnet poems that i wrote in 1997. each image is 8.5" X 11" so, the full, 9 piece image is 25.5" X 33." what is in the background of each of the self-portraits is actually cool: in #1, the poster to raise money for the legal defense fund for the white night riots is the yellow/red border, as well as the outline of the cat in the hat; in #2, there is a poster from paris, france. and my big chin -- (OK, that one is not so interesting, except the irish country sea is imbedded into the image too); and in #3 is of course dolores park, san francisco, along with a few tiny jewel weeds which run along the border of the bottom of the image. the jewel weed is an impatiens which is a great antidote for poison ivy. it's also called the "touch me not" flower as well as the "poor man's orchid." if you've ever seen them after they've bloomed and if you've touched the seed pod, you know why these guys are such cool plants. and yes, each poem is a half sonnet not by rhyme scheme but by virtue of being 7 lines (a sonnet is 14 lines) and they all have something to do with love (i always associate sonnets with love, although that is not always the case -- i.e. "dulce et decorum est" by wilfred owen).

wedding sonata (for pam and judd)
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while a few years late in the giving, this piece, wedding sonata, is dedicated to my friends pam and judd. this image (which is only a mere 20" X 25") contains a 3-line excerpt from a poem of mine (gambling w/our lives he said which is also the title of a poem/image in memory of mister man). the three line excerpt fit these two perfectly. the image is based on a photograph from their pre-wedding preparations, except i only kept the outline of them, since their silhouette is what moved me to write the poem wedding sonata which only pam and judd have. this image was 1/2 the gift and is the public displayed image -- the poem, a sonata, is the other 1/2 of the gift and is separately and privately illustrated for them -- and of which they have the only copy too. you can make out a smidge of the 5 poem gift -- it is the line running down the left side of the image; the wedding invitation is what runs down the right side. and i did get permission to use the small image of pam and judd playing from the cartoonist. this is one of my favorite images that i've done.

the three lines of the poem read:

hands that hold are hands of god
tears fall rolling down my cheek
you kiss the tears out of my eyes and they are gone

halfpound4brenda
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halfpound4brenda is 8.5" X 11" and is basically 1/2 of my other poem illustrated, for ez. i halved the image as a gift for a friend and this is dedicated to brenda. the chinese ideogram in the center of the image translates into "plum blossoms resemble bright stars." this image by the way is entirely hand-made, no photos at all. this phrase and portion of this image is also the same image from the saturday flower from the week in flowers. my poem for ez (ez being ezra pound) runs along the left side of the image while one of era pound's last-recorded cantos of his life is in the lower right hand corner.

the penultimate moment (for nora)
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the penultimate moment is a very daunting piece, both in terms of its creation and its final size. full size, it measures 30” X 54” (2.5’ X 4.5’). the poem and illustration are both dedicated to my grammy, nora. this is not the only version of this illustration; the original can be seen in this final piece. months later i returned back to the image and realized the scale was wrong, too small. however, the simple process of resizing and augmenting this image was not to be simple at all. my lap top died. then the loaner lap top died. on top of all of that, the image was just too big for my memory on the lap top, so a few times even my photoshop program crashed. all in all, this illustration took over a full working month to finalize. the celtic knot that can be seen throughout the image is not a celtic knot at all, but a fractal of my mom, nora and her husband, my grampy, walking into the church for my grandparent’s 50th wedding anniversary. the photo one set in rows with itself and morphed becomes a very wild celtic know, often intimating a celtic cross. when i wrote the penultimate moment it was really after hearing my grammy’s voice, clearly, even though she had been dead for years. but things like that happen in our family, at least with nora, con, leller and ger. in the final image i have nested a photo of my mom and aunt, ages 5 and 3. suffice it to say the photo tells a lifetime in a snapshot. there is also a great photo of my grampy standing next to his truck when he worked for the city of chicago. he was a proud, tough, lucky and bedeviling man, as she was a soft, quixotic, mysterious and devoted woman. and as it turns out, my penultimate moment with my grammy was at her 50th wedding anniversary. it was a traditional irish wedding party. to the nines. nora and i danced. she said something to the effect of “i’ll lead but it will look like i am following. just follow what i do.” and with that, we danced. i can still remember her glasses, hands, voice (she did almost sing her greeting), her eccentricities. while i have a fairly good memory, when it comes to my grammy, i draw a very mediocre hand. she is my achille’s heel when it comes to my photographic memory. but, i try the best i can to at least approximate what i felt transpired. she always seemed more in-between what was said and what was expected, anyway. it is indeed that moment just before the last one that either haunts or calms. i miss her dearly.