I was at the Tulsa State Fair and came across this odd scene of a cheerleader in a casino display for the Creek Indian Nation. I see a lot of odd things at the fair, no doubt. But she was one of the most out of place! I asked her if I could take her picture and she immediately posed in this wonderfully unselfconscious way. She was happy and at peace with who she was and what she was doing.
The Cheerleader at the State Fair in the Casino Set of the Creek Indians
When I posted the photo on my flickr site I immediately got a comment from someone who said she knew the woman from high school and that she was one of the most beautiful and sweetest people she ever met. I loved hearing that about her.
Hello Everyone, Not too many people take in this blog as it is now organized. I like showing my work but much has been shown now and I think I would like to move this over into a more topical blog about ideas, working on my own, being a creative person in the world and art in general.
I will still be posting my work and talking about it, but I would like to also include other artists now and sometimes have no images at all.
Stay tuned! I might not have something to write every day, but I imagine it will be pretty frequent, at least 2-3 times a week.
If you have a topic or an idea you want to discuss, just drop me a line!
This collage combines two photos from a shoot I did with a fellow co-worker at the Restaurant where I worked. The color images in the background of the framed image are of the SF bay on one side and of the Nevada desert on the other.
‘A Woman Looking at Herself’, photo-collage
There had been a photo of a nude male on the wall in that location and I originally posed her to be looking at it. But it seemed tacky and I didn’t really like the photo of the guy so I decided to put an image of my own in its place.
Another in a short series I did using co-workers at the restaurant, Eulipia, where I worked back in the 80s and 90s in San Jose, Ca. This one was a result of a photo shoot with a few people who had freckles. I was in the middle of doing a series of pointillist photo-collages where I glued photos of freckles on top of full-color reproductions of pointillist paintings I had in a big art book.
A Snake in the Eulipian Grass
This collage came about after I saw the possibility of making the negative background space of the sky in the prior collage into a solid positive part of the image. In this case the grass no longer just acts as grass but now has a shape and symbolism that makes it into a real/not real object.
I worked at a restaurant named Eulipia in San Jose, California from 1981-1994 while I was going to graduate school and starting out as a college art instructor. I finally left when I moved to Tulsa to start a new career in Interactive Design.
This collage was a result of a photo shoot with three of my co-workers from the restaurant. We did the shoot in one of their backyards while they were sunbathing on a hot summer day. I had been creating a series of collages that used body part close ups combined with sky or other neutral colored backgrounds.
‘A Seldom Seen Stretch of the Eulipian River’
This collage resulted from having all the photos on my drawing board which was a large door actually attached to two drawing board bases. As I laid them out I started seeing a flow to the images. I originally had only one row, with the body below and the sky above. At that point it seemed like a landscape. But I had a lot of photos from the shoot and I laid out a second row to see if those photos might have a different rhythm and flow to them.
I got the idea to turn the top row over and the blue matched up and became a river in my mind. Then it was just a matter of finding the right place for each photo so the flow of the river was pleasing to my eye.
She was kind and sweet, with big eyes and beautiful skin. She was great at explaining all the items in the store. She told us she was from the middle of Morocco, in America to work and learn at Disney World as part of an advanced management program. She kindly let me take her photograph in the afternoon light. My wife was thinking I was taking too much time and she needed to get back to her work, but she was happy to pose for me. We bought some rubbing spices for food and they were yummy.
This week I am showing a series of collages from a trip to Disney World in 2007. Epcot Center was a great place to find inspiration.
“Portraits of Chinese Masks’
The Chinese pavilion at Epcot Center in Disney World had a door that faced the lagoon. The sun was setting on the other side of the lagoon and was streaming into the pavilion at a completely horizontal level. It is odd to see sun that low coming into a building. Usually there is something that gets in the way, another building, trees, walls, hills, etc. But in this place at this time it was filling the room as if it was a flood of water. I stayed there until it set.
The woman behind the counter was having a hard time looking at customers because the sun was right behind them, hitting her in the eyes. I asked her if I could take her photograph and in spite the blinding light, was happy to allow me too. I walked around the room finding other elements and came across the buddha. I didn’t realize it would fit perfectly with her, but I did feel it had the same dimensions. Later I was pretty dumbstruck to find that with virtually no manipulation the two faces matched up perfectly.
