From the introduction…
Poetry and painting—once called “the Sister Arts”—are both dear to me, so I have tried to help them get along as friends in my work. This book is a legacy diary, containing samples of both my writing and pictures, created over almost a lifetime.
As a boy I first took to drawing, since both my parents were visual artists, and I was surrounded by paintings on easels. I would eventually do cartoons, scenic watercolors, prints, and surreal paintings.
But I craved more narrative—time and plots and characters—not quite possible in still pictures. So I wrote short stories and a memoir. I self-published my book of etchings with words, Orlando Slocum—the Story of a Young Artist. In grad school in English Lit, I wrote academically about William Carlos Williams’ poems after Bruegel paintings, and how Laurence Sterne added lines and scribbles to his 1759 novel Tristram Shandy. And I invented my video drawing table, recording my drawing in real time to stories and music, as near to a performing art as I could get.
In my art, as in my life, whether I like it or not, there is a mix of the deadly serious and the humorous. I have tried to represent that range of subject and mood here in this book of words and pictures.