As a book illustrator, I enjoy combining images and words, relating them to each other and designing them into a whole. What better subject to write about than art itself? The creative process meanders like mycelium in the mind of an artist, sensing its way into fertile substrate, branching out and fruiting like mushrooms when the time is right. Images are like the elements of nature, unfolding like flower buds, trickling like streams that merge into rivers, rushing toward the sea of collective human experience. The journey is endlessly rich, and there’s always a story to share.
About the banner image for this newsletter:
Mountain Buck is a visual expression of the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, where I have lived since 1989. I love these forested mountains and the life they sustain. Here I was inspired by a magnificent 8-point buck that showed itself to me one autumn day at sunset on a high mountain meadow overlooking the Esopus River valley. He seemed to be an embodiment of the land itself, from which he drew the life-giving force that enables bucks to grow a whole new rack of antlers each year. Each rack is hard as bone, and uniquely curved. Here the antlers are exaggerated in the style of indigenous Asian art, becoming a container of the mountains in which the buck lives.