A Miscellany

My beloved old cat Max never made it into a book about his friendship with Mozart, but I made a few sketches.

In 1929 Brancusi was asked to make a drawing of Joyce for a book, and the result was suitably abstract. Then in 1932 Cesar Abin was commisioned to do a portrait of the author for his 50th birthday, and Joyce was heavily involved – he instructed Abin on every aspect of the symbolism that was to be included. I combined the two images in this portrait of my favorite writer in 1980.

This is some pseudo-Romantic-Gothic folderol I did when I first arrived in Amsterdam in 2002. They were meant to be illustrations to a non-existant poem by someone named Clarence Lord and called ‘The Paradise of Birds.’

Reine and I posing as the 14th card in the Major Arcana of the tarot deck.

This is a self-portrait, done in 2000, just before I left the US for Europe. The light is based on the famous light on Curtis Island, in Camden, ME.

Hard to describe this one; it’s a little reflection on a footnote I read to ‘The Divine Comedy’ which explained that there was a medieval belief that God signed his name in the face of his greatest creation, Man. Supposedly you can read OMO DEI in this way – the brows and eyes spell out OMO, and the ear, nose and mouth spell out DEI. The idea behind the picture was that He signed His work and then humanity spent the rest of eternity gazing upward, looking for a sign of His existence, not knowing that the sign was revealed in its own face. If I remember correctly this image and the idea behind it came to me in a dream, and I did the drawing the morning after I woke up.