Tempest: First Look

     I'm in an interesting position as a chronicler of my creative endeavors.  I'm working on a big project (A full stage version of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" using puppets). It is a project that I'm very excited about and naturally want to discuss in great length. I'm incorporating all kinds of new building techniques and doing work that I'm extremely proud of for it. On the other hand, I want to avoid doing just that because I want my audience to come into the theater with as few preconceptions as possible. The more I tell you now, the more you'll know to expect later and the piece won't seem quite as fresh and new. I don't want to spoil the surprise.

    After a little internal wrangling, I've decided to carefully tip my hand on occasion, to give anyone interested the smallest peek behind the curtain from time to time. My hope is that I can keep everyone generally aware of what I'm up to without, as it were, giving away the gold. 

   So- without further babbling from me here are a few process shots which I hope you will enjoy. bear in mind that what I'm showing you are very much works in progress at this stage and will change a great deal by opening curtain.

This gull is a simple 3 rod puppet built out of polyfoam for simple movement. It can flap and turn it's head from side to side. It has a wingspan of approx 3 ft. 

Slightly more complex is this heron's head. It is also built out of foam with a latex and cheesecloth overlay. The beak is operated by a simple trigger mechanism. Learning how to make simple resin cast eyes was a real boon for this project and my work in general.

Most of the puppets for "The Tempest" are going to be in a modified Bunraku style. For ease of performance I'm going to keep my design of the rigging as simple as possible. In the human characters this means a nodding head rig rather than a mouth trigger. Few of my cast will have any experience in puppetry and I want to make sure that they learn the basics of lip sync without being wholly dependent on it.

 Trinculo is a court jester and one of Shakespeare's comic characters. I exaggerated his facial features to cartoonish proportions and gave him a vaguely worried and hangdog expression. I want him to be tall and lanky, in contrast to Stephano the butler, who I intend to make short and stout.This will hopefully suggest the classic "Abbot and Costello" comic dynamic for these two clowns.

Sketchbook Project: Inner cover- The Big Reveal

The more I thought about it, the more obvious it was to me which topic I should chose for the Sketchbook Project.

Dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs are cool.

Not only that they're a good conduit for some of my obsessions:
Birds
Bestiaries and field guides
Dragons
Comparative Anatomy

     To be honest during my childhood, I never had the typical all-consuming obsession with dinosaurs that boys are supposed to, but, then dinosaurs were much different back then. I liked them, to be certain and had my favorites, but back then dinosaurs were thought of as huge lizards, cumbersome slow and stupid. I was always more interested in behavior. Elephants and lions were more intriguing and tangible to me. Suddenly in the nineties,  dinosaurs were reshaped as though they were made of Plasticine. Lumbering cold blooded  prehistoric monsters became active, agile, well adapted animals with complex social structures. Dragging tails lifted from the ground to become elegant counterbalances. sprawling legs straightened and became muscular running limbs. Chest cavities expanded to make room for the big hearts and lungs of warm blooded creatures. Dinosaurs became beautiful and fascinating, more like birds than reptiles.

    Today with the combination of new technology and amazing recent discoveries out of the deserts of Mongolia and China, dinosaurs are wilder and more wonderful than I could have ever imagined. We've discovered astounding new species and reexamined what we believed we knew. There are answers to puzzles we thought unsolvable, and exiting new lines of inquiry to explore.
In my sketchbook, I intend to concentrate mostly on the most birdlike aspect of dinosaurs- feathers. This will give me a focus and the chance to investigate some of the most captivating current notions. I intend to be as accurate as possible using the most up to date information available, but inaccuracies are inevitable as new discoveries surface. Even the great Charles R. Knight couldn't avoid this.

The color of the cardboard cover reminded me of the sort of stone where you might find fossilized tracks. I liked the monochrome of the inner cover, so I drew  with coffee. The drawing is bisected by the pages so that you can't immediately see what is casting the shadow.
The dinosaur casting  a long shadow is Compsognathus. They were small theropod dinosaurs about the size of a chicken. He is following the footprints of a Greater Rhea, a South American cousin of the ostrich. Without giving too much away, this is not going to be my last bird/dinosaur juxtaposition.

There you have it. My Sketchbook Project is officially underway. More updates coming soon!

Crittercam: The new girls

    I've been remiss. It's been two months since I last posted anything here. the reasons for my neglect are complex and diverse. If you are well enough acquainted with my recent history, you may already understand some of them. I hope you will not take it personally that I chose not to describe them here. I'd just like to take a moment to apologize to the regular readers of my blog . Ill try to be more consistent in my posting habits from now on...for both of you!

    As you may already know I keep a small zoo in my apartment. It currently consists of a lizard,a tree frog, some fish and birds. I don't ordinarily write about them because quite honestly they don't do very much that's interesting. I also don't want this to turn into one of those bizarre obsessive blogs that catalog every detail of the lives of somebody's pets. I figure enough people already don't read this thing.

   Having said that, occasionally something cool does happen with the menagerie that I'd like to share even if I'm the only person who's interested. Such is the case today. Today I finally got a pair of female Lady Gouldian finches. I've had two males for a while now and have been looking for potential mates for my boys for a couple years (living in a small town in Upstate NY may have it's advantages, but it does make it a little challenging to obtain exotic birds). I thought it would be a nice way to ease back into posting to put up a few shots of my birds. The birds had different ideas about that. I picked out some of the better pictures of my uncooperative little subjects from today. Bear in mind none of this is what you'd exactly call "great photography" 

The breeder I went to had a lot of cool mutations and color variations available. I stuck as close to the "standard" variations as possible. I like holotypes. The black headed variety is apparently more common in the wild and the red heads are more common in captivity. Gouldian Finches are endangered in their wild habitat. It should be mentioned here that Australia has had a very sensible export ban in place for it's native fauna since 1959. Since finches in general only live about 15 years, and since the person i brought them from is extremely reliable and keeps flawless breeding records, I can guarantee that my birds are captive bred. 

 I like this one, I have no idea what they're looking at

 This is about 10 to 25 percent of what you wind up with when photographing birds: a blurry picture of where the bird was a fraction of a second ago

 Occasionally, and for no readily apparent reason, an animal will suddenly decide that they really hate photography and will do everything in their power to ruin every shot you try to take of them, even going so far as to spontaneously run into pictures of other animals just to make them blurry and unusable. This was the last good picture I was able to get of the black headed one for about an hour.

 Meeting their new cage mates

 A rare family portrait showing all my finches. There are a pair of zebra finches, spice finches and a society finch that share a large flight cage with my Gouldies.

 From left to right: My male Society finch (I'm trying to find a girlfriend for him), the new girls, a female Spice finch and my female Zebra (Her chest is bald because her mate plucks at it. I tried to remove her so that she could regrow her feathers once, but she sulked and was so miserable that I relented and put her back. I'd rather have her look miserable than actually be miserable. I guess that proves finches can be just as stupid as people!)

 Here is my redhead girl next to one of the males. You can really see the difference here!

 I managed to line up a good  picture of the black headed one... then she mooned me.

                                                                   Gotcha!

Sketchbook Project -Quandary

For my birthday this year, my younger  sister, Sarah, of the blog Sarah Draws Things (a blog everyone who reads this and likes great illustration ought to be following, by the way!), signed me up forThe Sketchpad Project . The way it works is this: You are given a small blank sketchbook to fill out and mail back to them by January. The sketchbook is then part of a traveling exhibition and becomes a part of Brooklyn Art Library's permanent collection. My sketchbook came in the mail last month along with a snazzy orange sketchpad sleeping bag, a strange pencil made out of recycled blue jeans and an information card complete with  a list of themes to chose from (see below)

• Travelogue
• Memoir
• Narrative
• Atlas
• Almanac
• Chronicle
• Sketchbook
• Chapbook
• Documentation 
• Photo Log
• Dwellings
• Strangers
• Participate
• Diagrams
• Warnings
• Lists
• Creatures
• Dinosaurs
• Upstairs
• Mystery
• I'll classify my book later (Which I am currently singed up under)

The sketchpad has sat on my bedroom table since. Not much has happened with it yet aside from the occasional admiring glances from the residents of a nearby reptarium (an anole and a green tree frog, since you're wondering). I don't know what to do with it. I have entirely too many ideas and can't seem to commit to one. I thought maybe if  I wrote them out here maybe that would help me decide, or I could possibly get some useful feedback. So- here's what I'm thinking:

Travelogue- I'd like to do something with this, but my budget and schedule won't let me run away to Africa right now. Of course I could always do it based on my past travels (India, Guatemala, Professional touring, etc) but they aren't as fresh and immediate as I'd like. My sister is using this category and doing a beautiful book on Venice. I could always do a travelogue of a fictional place as well

Narrative- It might be kind of fun to tell some sort of visual story with the book, I just don't have any focused ideas yet. I've also considered doing illustrations for all of those recently discovered Fairy Tales they just found in Germany, but frustratingly, they have yet to be released in English.

Sketchbook- This seems the easiest option, but I'd still like it to be a little more concentrated, focus on trees or birds or something.

Dwellings:  An exploration of where different things live. Might be fun.

Diagrams- An unusual choice. I could do something in the nature of an instruction manual on puppetry, small animal care, tracking, woodcarving, or any of those myriad of other unusual and utterly unemployable abilities I have.

Warnings-This might be fun. A book of all kinds of ridiculous warning labels and signs, or possibly the rulebook for navigating Fairie

Creatures- This is probably the one most in my wheelhouse. I could do a field guide about my own versions of dragons or griffons or other mythological beasts, or a book of recently discovered species. Something like that.

Dinosaurs- Pretty self explanatory. Dinosaurs are cool.

Mystery: No real ideas for this one. Seems like it could be fun, though.

Well, that's what I'm thinking. I'd love to hear your suggestions
-J

The Saga of Log: A tale told through weird prop-building

    Every so often I get a call or e-mail from my friend Steve Monosson. Steve among his many qualifications is an independent filmmaker with a wonderfully skewed view of the world. Whenever he contacts me out of the blue I just know he's going to ask me to make something strange and fun. Past projects include a four foot tall totem pole featuring a poodle and pistachios  and a lot of bark-themed accessories. I could explain it all, but It wouldn't make any more sense and would probably detract from the wonderful absurdity of it all. Instead, witness the epic tale of the galaxy's near brush with and improbable rescue from Almost Certain Intrusion!
Ladies and Gentlemen, I Give You Log vs The Space Intruders!

I made the puppet version of Log, the space station,(this was accomplished by hot gluing a lot of random stuff together and spray painting it silver) Outer Space, (in all it's tinfoil glory), and the flying saucer (which is, as you rightly guessed, a colander and pie pan glued together). I am absurdly proud of this film credit. It may be one of the favorite things I've ever done!

Log has appeared in several different incarnations over the years. Steve himself offers some insight into his chosen muse and creative process:

 "Someone asked me at a screening why I used a log and I replied that he "took directions easily", And you can quote me on that for all your props- there's no back talk, they're there when you need them, and no complaints about working overtime."

Log's Journey now continues. I hope I don't inadvertently write any spoilers. Sorry in advance, Steve!
Log, after his intergalactic triumph returns home to visit his estranged father in the "Old Oaks Home" (No, I did not write that one, though I very well might have!). I was asked to costume the two principle actors. I first went over to take their measurements. Steve snapped this shot of me doing so. Note the  fact that the actor has been pixelated to avoid revealing who plays one of the key roles. I won't spoil the surprise, but would just like to say that he was gracious and a total pro to work with.

 Log was to be attired in a military-style flight jacket. I made this out of an old pair of olive green slacks.

All these costumes were 100% Hand-sewn for the aesthetic reason that I don't own a sewing machine.

Note that the "Air Force" insignia is actually an acorn and two maple wings. I love throwing this sort of detail into my work. It's part of why I'm good at what I do, and why I'm particularly worrying to be around for nay length of time

Log's Regimental emblem would obviously be an Ivory-billed woodpecker

Log's Father (my suggestion that he be addressed as the Logfather was vetoed for some reason...) would be dressed in a tattered institutional bathrobe. I tried to convert an infant onesie for this purpose, but I couldn't conceal the adorable duckies and teddy bears well enough. I used a beach towel instead.

The reunion is apparently a very touching and emotional one. Log's father is brought to tears. I was asked to make a miniature syrup bucket and tap for that scene. The bucket is about 2 1/2 inches tall. It took me four or five attempts to get it right. I used aluminum flashing, galvanized wire and a small piece of dowel. The aged patina was done by several layers of paint and sandpaper.

The tap itself is mounted on an eye-hook so that it can be attached for the scene (Log's father is a method actor).

Steve sent me this image to let me know my work had arrived safe and sound

...And this one to let me know I had some more work to do!

The Double Tap

 Last  year I was commissioned to make a tap handle for Cooperstown's largest and best loved Belgian-style brewery for their annual event Belgium Comes To Cooperstown. This year In celebration their fifteenth anniversary, Brewery Ommegang asked me to carve two more for them. My instructions were that the handles should be Mayan in theme (due, doubtlessly to the impending apocalypse), incorporate the Roman numeral "XV" and possibly look aged. other than that, I was given complete autonomy and a more or less reasonable deadline. Here is what I came up with:

 For the first one I thought that I'd play with the idea of hieroglyphs.I designed a series of abstracted symbols for beer ingredients, the brewing process and Ommegang itself.

 The piece is crowned with the Ommegang "O" and a version of the Ommegang Lion. I was hoping it would look a bit more like glyphs of Jaguar

 The Ancient Mayan Glyph for Hops:

 Side View:

 A drop of water Glyph:

 Ommegang is a bottle conditioned ale, so I commemorated that with a pouring bottle and cork:

 The four Mayan faces around  the bottom panel symbolize the fact I needed something cool looking down there:

 Back Top- This one depicts the fermenting tanks of the brewery, A goblet (which is the only way to enjoy a fine Belgian ale!) and the Ommegang double diamond.:

 The Roman numeral for fifteen. I wanted to work it into the shaft of the handle rather than crowning with it so the whole piece wouldn't look so blocky

 It's hard to tell but this is brewer's yeast. I defy anyone to come up with a better made up Mayan glyph for yeast! i'ts much harder than it sounds:

 Barley, on the other hand was easy:

 And finally the glyph for sugar. Yeast eats the naturally occurring sugars, and thus fermentation. I am well aware that sugarcane isn't involved in the process it's next to impossible to represent that abstract a concept in wood relief.. I claim artistic license!:

Here's the whole thing again the finish is done by my smoke process and accented with gold paint:

 For the second tap I wanted to create one of those terrific blocky figurative carvings. I settled on Quetzalcoatl the feathered serpent because he's probably the most iconic of the Mayan symbols. Also, I think he looks cool. to age this piece, I first painted it with acrylics. I then sanded away most of the paint and smoked it up. If I had the time I might have also buried it for a month.Quetzalcoatl is always depicted as having five plumes or tails. I couldn't find out why.

Here is the "XV" on Quetzalcoatl's headdress. If I could have  done one thing differently, I would have repainted the numerals so they stood out more. I told the good  folk at Ommegang they were free to do so. I hope they have.

 A close up of Quetzalcoatl's face:

Well there you have it! Hope you enjoyed