Portal

In one of the Avengers movies, Peter Parker, Spiderman, is on a school bus and the hair on his arm rises. He spins around to see a colossal spaceship shaped like a ring parting the clouds over the city. The Bad Guy is here. Great. Thanos. But, really cool ship, super cool. Maybe I should put that in a panel. Giant circular flying vessel...

When I was a senior in college I had a "gut" class, a filler to fulfill requirements that was supposed to be a breeze requiring scant attention, called Visvoc -- Analysis of the Visual Vocabulary. One assignment was to go to the Philadelphia Art Museum and sketch and produce a visual project. No big deal, ferris wheel. Monet, Rodin, Louise Nevelson, all blew me away, but I became obsessed with Ukiyo-E, "pictures of the floating world," Japanese art during the Edo Period from 1670 till around 1870. These were primarily woodblock prints and paintings in a strongly stylized vision, with techniques and a graphic complexity/simplicity unlike anything I had experienced being dragged through museums in Europe as a little punk with my brothers. Western art had nothing like this. My project took a couple of overnighters and some long afternoons ignoring the stuff for which I was actually getting graded, and copying and analyzing, and parsing and staring, trying to understand the codes, the tropes, the composition, the pure lines and colors that made these small pieces so compelling and iconic. I still have the little bound booklet I made on vellum and heavy paper with inks and colored pens sorting out the power that Hiroshige and Hokusai printed by hand a hundred and fifty years ago.

In 2012 in the Chinese city of Funshun, the local town leaders needed some tourist mojo to revitalize the waterfront. They built the "Ring of Life," a 515 foot tall circular skyscraper that looks just like my ring in "Portal." It's a slimmed down version of the spacecraft from the movie, but landed, with doors and elevators. Picture the St. Louis Arch as a circle. Circle of life on a grand scale.

You want to understand my vision, as in, what the hell is "Portal" all about, study Ukiyo-E. The bold flat line, yep. (My book "Random Order" is a collection of these panels with the "beam" anchoring everything, the power of the horizon). The gradient horizontals of dark to light, check. Rain, wind, radiant lines of a sunset, the organic and architecture, yep. Hokusai's most famous print from his series "36 Views of Mt Fuji", called "The Great Wave of Kanagawa" is a perfect example of monkeying with scale. Mt Fuji, the massive volcano, is tiny, much smaller than the boats or the waves. In my panel, a pyramid, which we know is enormous, is tiny. Want a sense of big? Put tiny elements in -- people, flying leaves, snow falling, an itty bitty house. One of my favorite pieces has a miniscule kite out of the frame of the print on a spiderweb-scale kite string. Nature and architecture, hats blown off, simple small bits, huge landscapes. Yep, I'm more abstract than those heroes but someone has to depict time travel, the warping of space, the portal to another dimension, or seven...

"Portal" is the mechanism of transport. It is the escape route, the coming home, the dreaded change, the moment of release. It is round, whole, complete AND a gate. This panel is meant to be science fiction and emotional fact. The Western art canon embraced Ukiyo-E in the late 19th and early 20th century. One can find blatant thefts or loving homage depending on your temperament in Degas, Manet, Cassat, Monet, Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. And, apparently, in the Marvel Universe. In high school I had a "Great Pacific Ironworks" t-shirt with Hokusai's "Wave" on the front, selling climbing gear to school kids continents away from the Himalaya. What did I know? It was cool. I wanted to be cool. High school, college, now... the circle of life. Pictures of the floating world...

Thanks for the patience my friends. I don't often explain what you are looking at. I barely understand it myself. Also, by the by, when I was 17 I bought a book of kimono patterns. Who knows why. They show up in my work all the time. I'm Scottish. Better look for tartans too.

And finally, we stand in chaotic times. Look for and embrace the order. "Random Order" is the name of the book. It's an oxymoron. It's where we live everyday. Wake up in the morning and there is the portal. Keep smiling. Love each other.

P.S. AND, look at Louis Nevelson's sculpture. It is what I make. Blatant ripoff, loving homage...