Axel or the devil dog from hell, Tara or Tish the tissue thief, Champion Skylark or Emily Lickinson, Ruby or Pinky or Rubicon, don’t cross her. #IWS #Irish Water Spaniel
Years ago in Hartford the six family apartment building next to our house was abandoned after a long decline. Very quickly the place was vandalized. All the windows were smashed and creatures of every description moved in. I started covering the windows with whatever scrap foamcore and cardboard I had. I also had a bunch of discarded Scotchprint leftover from billboards and bus wraps. The first idea was to add widow treatment like curtains, I then decided to illustrate stories that happened on our street, we lived there for more than thirty years. Here are a few.
Chester was the patriarch of a family that sold coke and crack out of this apartment. He would sit on a couch all day smoking a blunt at this window making deals. One family member would sit outside in a car waiting for a buyer to pull up next to him and hand him money, he would then signal Chester to bring down the drugs. Often the delivery was made by a child. Once we heard someone shout to Chester “Where’s the blow?”, Chester yelled, “In the garbage can!” After a year or so the police moved them out, they were the only people living there.
Once after gunfire erupted on our street a group of neighbors where standing in the street talking about the violence when one of them told me he was so scared of random gunfire that he made his son sleep in the bathtub.
My neighbor across the street had three sons, I knew the twins Kevin and Kerry quite well but I never met Evelyn’s third son, Elvis.
Our house was a two family and we once had tenets that were opera singers, it was fun hearing them practicing downstairs. The husband also sang the anthem at home Whaler’s games.
Pinocchio marionettes based on the drawings of Carlo Chiostri for Carlo Collodi’s book “The Story of a Puppet “.
16” acrylic on sign foam.
#pinocchio #carlocollodi #carlochiostri
When we first moved to Bugville I was sitting on the deck and a parakeet flew out of the woods, landed on a flowerpot and hopped onto my finger. Surreal. I called him Art. He stayed with us for a while and I finally gave him to one of my wife’s students who had a lonely parakeet. I’ve been meaning to do a painting of this for a quite a while, never been a better time. Acrylic and gold leaf on cast paper,13”x11”.
BTS, The Night Before Christmas, by Walter Wick @walterwickstudio is the first of the” Can You See What I See? “series that I worked on along with artist Michael Lokensgaard.
