Illustrations for a Red Cross Annual Report 1993

When I lived in San Francisco, I was a Red Cross volunteer. I worked under a fellow named Andrew Rose in the public affairs department. As head of public affairs, one of his responsibilities was producing the annual report for The American Red Cross, Bay Area. I guess I had mentioned to him that I was trying to be a real artist and so he asked me to put together some sort of a visual theme for the project. I had just moved there and had nothing, but I got ahold of some chipboard and spray paint and did about fifty variations from these hand and cross stencils I'd cut, working out on the fifth floor fire escape of my building on Bush St. Andrew said he couldn't use the cross images (for legal reasons) but liked some of the hands and used them to illustrate the piece. I have to admit that this application of my work is not ideal but I am, nevertheless, proud to have been a part of any Red Cross project.

My Favorite Things No.1 2008

Stencil & Spray(1986)

Here are some pages I found in an old sketchbook. I wish I had more of these from what would've been around 1986 or so. They got a lot more involved after a while. Bigger, tighter... they evolved, don't you know. I do like these, but these were just the seeds for greater things that have since sold or been gifted, worn or who-knows-what-happens-to-all-the-crap-I-make?

Budapest Spray Cards(1989)

In 1989, after some long, difficult months in Budapest fraught with dislocation anxiety, sadness and self-medication, my best shot at pulling myself together, I felt, was to get busy making things. Anything. But in Hungary, at that time, there wasn't much to work with. This was near the end of that year and, as you'll remember, Soviet Communism. Everyone was overjoyed to see the Russian military filing out of the city, but it would be a while before any consequential economic changes would occur, so anything to do with shopping was always hit-or-miss. There was an art supply in the city center, but their stock was unreliable. One day they'd have what you needed and then it'd be gone for the rest of the year. But one item they did have in abundance was spray paint. And they had some very cool spray paint, too, the likes of which I'd never seen before nor since. They had this beautifully saturated flat red, a very cool gunmetal thing and stuff with really chunky glitter in it... So I got a bunch of that and a few hand fulls of these randomly cut bits of chipboard, or thin, brown cardboard, that they had for free in a basket by the door, and I went apeshit. I turned most of them into postcards and mailed them off, but I found a few in a box the other day - leftovers or rejects, I suppose.