Projects

A Denizen of Big Midwestern City
A Denizen of Big Midwestern City
A Denizen of Big Midwestern City

I’ve recently made a shift in my professional life to focus more on work related to my passion for comics and media by creating a series of short book length visual essays that explore the history that has led us to the current media environment (I’ve been developing these essays over the past 10 years with students and colleagues while teaching film, video, and visual communication at a small liberal arts college nestled in the hills of the San Francisco Bay Area). I plan to publish this work in print, but I’m publishing some material here – sketches, notes, short excerpts – as works in progress. Trying it out in the world, so to speak.

What I’m currently working on:

Major Arcana: Random Encounters with Celebrity

Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn walk together near the Whitney Museum. The image is meant to depict a torn up color image pasted together from a scandal magazine.
Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn near the Whitney Museum
A sort of abstract expressionist image of he Whitney Museum in NYC. This image is accompanied by art jargon cut and pasted from the museum's misson statement.
The Whitney Museum in NYC
A swirling Jackson Pollack style painting on the wall as museum goers stroll on by in pastels and charcoal outlines. Large Scale Heroic Expressionism at the Whitney
Large Scale Heroic Expressionism at the Whitney

Over the years I’ve met a few celebrities mainly because I’ve lived a large portion of my life in California with side trips to New York. I’ve used stories related to these celebrity encounters over the years in my teaching about media and it seemed like it might be worth writing them down and adding a few illustrations. It’s composed of illustrations, cartoons, micro-essays, and prose poems. It’s meant to evoke the format of television that I grew up watching in the 1960s and 1970s.

Big Midwestern City: Shocking Tales from the Avant-garde

A cartoon image of David Kowalski, one of the artist's depicted in the graphic novel, Big Midwestern City.
David Kowalski Cheers on the Avant-Garde
A cartoon image of David Kowalski, one of the artist's depicted in the graphic novel, Big Midwestern City.
David Kowalski Cheers on the Avant-Garde
A cartoon image of David Kowalski, one of the artist's depicted in the graphic novel, Big Midwestern City.
David Kowalski Cheers on the Avant-Garde

This is a graphic novel that tells stories from my days as an art student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1980s. It’s not really a memoir since it focuses on other people mostly, but it does function as a memory book of sorts and it seeks to understand the avant-garde as it was configured in a specific city at a specific time. I’ll be posting sketches and such from the project as I develop the pages. Right now, I’ve roughed out about a third of the overall page count.