Blog Reorganization and Bravo cattle call update

Returning from work taking me so many months away from this blog I have started back by rearranging the furniture here (so to speak), an old, old way of getting control over my life. I used to do it so often I finally put everything in my studio on wheels – workbenches, couches, chairs, work stools, tables, easels. I even put myself on wheels, rollerblades, constantly rearranging myself, I suppose. I’ll look for some studio pics to post later.

I have added new pages:

my writing; for my own writing and painting.

Selected Collaborations; for submissions to the collaborative storybook which have particular potency for me. This page will grow as I comb through the year of submissions, and as you send me your favorites.

blog history, to explain what we are doing here. What began purely as a place to post works in progress grew more complex as people started contributing writing to accompany the images they responded to here.  I set aside a page I called the Storybook Collaborative to post the hundreds of contributions. It grew messy and confused by becoming a family and personal blog, especially when our newborn daughter contracted a serious illness. (She is strong and sassy now, just having celebrated her first birthday; but her illness was very frightening.) I wrote about her illness and the support from readers and contributors here touched and encouraged us. My return to work in the film industry blew away any hope of getting back to this blog, until this week, when I finished a year-long stretch in the movies.

tapestry; an evolving story about a blind child and his ability to read the past in the weave and texture of weavings and tapestries, and his startled recognition that he, and a mysterious woman share histories, the threads of which are woven into the centuries. They keep missing each other, naturally. Or maybe she’s avoiding him, or hanging with a drummer in a girl’s band, or they are just star-crossed, or working towards some ending, or some future, or some eternity, or something else. I haven’t figured out what yet. We have collaborated on everything else. Suggestions? Maybe Orson Scott Card can help me.

See? Now you don’t have to read it.

Storybook Collaborative; not intended from the start, but what this blog has come to be about. I supply the images, readers make up the stories. This is ekphrasis, telling the story found in a piece of art. Amazing the number of stories, myths, poems that people can find in the same piece of art.

There are hundreds here. Browse through them. As you find favorites email me and I will consider moving them to the selected collaborations page, or putting the matter up for a vote. Visit the blogs and contact the authors if you are moved to do so. Let them know you are paying attention. You may not know how important those words and visits can be to artists and writers struggling in isolation to remain true to their callings.

About, which just gives you a little more information about yours truly.

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Bravo’s Untitled Art Project

“It’s so wrong, it’s right.”

“We have all seen you make a fool of yourself, but not on national TV. Do it.”

“You are a casting Director’s dream.” (But you should get a haircut, buy some shoes and fix that broken tooth.)

Great response to the previous post concerning Bravo’s Untitled Art Project. Awesome. Hits shot through the ceiling. Most had nothing to do with me but indicate a high level of interest in the subject. Good luck, all you contenders.

My plan is to have fun with it, use the application forms and requirements to answer questions I need to be asking myself and to push myself to do things I need to be doing anyway: putting together a portfolio of current work and greatest hits, cleaning up this blog , bringing my resume up to date, thinking about my work in the film industry and my desire to move my career to the direction of becoming a rich and famous artist – or a self-supporting one, at least.

The wisdom of the ancients is that everything passes and my experience so far confirms it. If I had a turkey and a bucket of frogs for every time I have publicly embarrassed myself I would truck them to Central Park and release them, and then we’d really have some fun. So I’m not worried. Too much. If I’d gone ahead and shot myself, like sometimes I thought I oughta, well, there wouldn’t be much left of me, now would there?

So I’ll fly to Chicago Wednesday morning, attend the casting call Thursday morning, and fly back to Albuquerque Friday morning. Call will be held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. A place I have always wanted to see. Anyone want to offer a couch to crash on or suggest a cheap motel near the school?

I’ll be the guy in the clown suit, life in a backpack, pushing a shopping cart full of old newspapers, crushed carnival horns, rusted crap (I love rust), a sketchbook, a notebook, an ocean, a seahorse, marbles, some shiny hooks, snakes enough for two…  also a basket of frogs, a cornfield, a waterfall, a house big enough for all the family, and all the friends, and all the ghosts of our ancestors, the unborn, and everyone who never had a chance, and all those who got burned, and all who are frightened, and all who are alone, and all who search for meaning, and all who follow a calling, and all who know the gods, in all their many shapes and forms, and all who recognize them in the people around them, and all who don’t.

I’ve heard this somewhere before. Oh, yeah, here.