The quote above is posted for entertainment purposes only, and is not intended to poke fun at those who might have tragically lost their fedoras to a gale.

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said "An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of humanity." Right on, brother Martin! Truer words cannot be spoken, as our modern world becomes mired in turmoil. Yet, as inspiring as that quote may be, I'm just here to display my artwork and promote my little art film, and to try to raise some cake selling t-shirts and mugs. I'm hardly addressing the broader concerns of humanity...but if you buy a coffee mug I promise to try and do better.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said "Scatter Joy." Here again, who could argue? But should that really be attributed to Emerson as a quotable quote? When I was eighteen I rented a live-in studio from an eccentric, artsy older woman named Joyce. Joyce used "share pleasure" as a euphemism for smoking a joint. It raised eyebrows among my friends when she would poke her head in the door and invite me to her room to burn one.

The illicit connotations aside, "Share pleasure" seems at least as quotable as Emerson's "Scatter joy." And with all due respect to the Rev. King, could a hundred words better advance the broader concerns of humanity than do these simple four?...

Scatter Joy. Share Pleasure.
See this on shirts, mugs and cards!

Vital Statistics

"People include lots of deeply personal stuff about themselves on their web sites. Is any of it relevant to whether or not you like a particular artist's work? I suppose it could be. A painting of a basket full of big-eyed kittens might be viewed as over-the-top satire if the artist presenting it is wearing nothing but leather chaps and a spiked dog collar. So I hesitate to offer too much of the personal stuff in the way of a dossier. Check out my work, spend some time on my site. Hopefully it will enable you to learn about me in the context of my art."

With but a couple of minor edits, I wrote that previous paragraph quite a while ago. October 4, if I am to believe my own site log. Then I wrote all of the stuff that follows this paragraph. I point that out simply because in rereading, it struck me as kind of funny that I assured a brief dossier devoid of over-personal details. Since then I've written several new paragraphs for my narrative resume and I am barely past 1978. So much for being brief.

So, if you just have to know something about me, here are a few factoids;

• I was alive when JFK was killed, but was too young to remember it
• I was a Vietnam-era teenager, but I missed the draft.
• I haven't received an AARP mailing yet, but I've had at least one mid-life crisis.
• I know a web press from a web site.
• I can handle a #11 X-Acto like a surgeon.
• I still have a box of Press-Type laying around somewhere.
• Home has a three-Mac LAN, used for analog and digital audio and video, illustration, design, music, photography, and everything.
• I eat granola and yogurt.

You can stop here or go on to the long version...

A Resume in Narrative Form

Cartoon Years

I am an artist and have been self-employed as such for most of my life, with the exception of a four-year stint in a corporate creative & marketing department. Artist is kind of a broad term, and I use a small handful of the definitions over the course of this resume.

My "professional" career began when I was twelve years old in the town of Cocoa Beach on Florida's Space Coast. At the urging of my mom, the editor of the local weekly paper asked to see a couple of my cartoons. The first one I drew was about a girl friend's dad, a prominent local doctor, having a temper tantrum on the golf course. I was a little young to understand the nuances of the inside joke, but this cartoon was a big hit in Cocoa Beach "society" nonetheless. My career was born. I was even invited to play golf with the doctor-dad. Once.

I submitted a comic strip almost every week for the next five years, and even managed to get paid for it! At 16 I was invited to exhibit some of my cartoons and drawings at the Mai Tiki Gallery (GO), which I still consider the spiritual epicenter of my creative development. Shortly after graduating high school in '77 I stopped the weekly comic strip, moved out of the house and rented a small live-in studio. I would spend the summer doing art shows and design projects for small businesses in town before starting school in the fall. Or so that was the plan.

I found out my father had lung cancer.

My dad had remained in New England after my parents split, and after several trips between Orlando and Boston, I decided to move back to be with him during his final months. I worked a couple of minimum wage jobs while my father battled the smoke-fueled cells ravaging him from the inside out. About seven months later The Marlboro Man finally kicked my dad's ass and I returned to Florida. I rented a fleabag in Cape Canaveral and drew cartoons and tried to figure out what to do next.

"Wave Riders from Planet X." 1978 Click image to view comic.

Publishing 101

I got my check for $300 ($150 per page, if I remember correctly). That was big money for me at the time, especially sweet since it was my first color cartoon in a glossy newsstand mag. While I calculating how much change I'd get back after I traded the check for a six of Heinies at Bernard's Surf liquor store, Reggie Hodgson told me of his plans to move to the North Shore of Hawaii. He was assembling his last issue of Wave Rider Magazine.

He asked if would be interested in taking over his job as art director.

I was barely 19 years old. What I knew about printing was limited to spot color work on my high school newspaper and a few small client jobs. But this was a "real" four-color magazine! I was sent home to think about it, which I had pretty much done before shaking Hodgson's hand goodbye.

I recall telling people about my new job offer. Cocoa Beach was self-annointed "Small Wave Capital of the World" and as such had a visible surf-town feeling. Most of the people I know had at least heard of the magazine. The reactions I received were largely like my own; kind of dumbfounded. Why me? I hadn't been to college, and I didn't even surf. More than one person I talked to about my new job asked me if I was aware of who I was going to work for. It was spoken in that tone suggesting that I damn well should be aware, yet I wasn't. The Chuks seemed cool enough to me. (Okay, so they had just presented me with any graphic designer's dream job. But I was a goddam cartoonist, not a graphic designer! What the hell did I know?) I returned a couple of days later and accepted the job.

I was told the first order of business was to get me up to speed in the finer points of color web-offset printing. At any rate, as up to speed as I could get in a week's time, for $500 cash, which Chuk peeled from a roll of similar presidential portraiture and laid across the palm of my hand, like crisp...well, hell, like crisp hundreds and fifties!

I don't even recall what the salary was. Possibly because in the nearly four years I worked for Wave Rider, paychecks were about as rare as juicy overhead barrels at Fourth Street North. Still, if they had asked me to pay them for the job, I just might have done it, such was my youthful exuberance. Fortunately they didn't, and I took my $500 expense account and hopped a plane for Miami where I was met at the airport by a white-shoe'd guy in a big caddy.

Frank was his name. He could have stepped right off the set of the Soprano's; think actor Steven Van Zandt's Silvio Dante character. We drove across the tracks and under the freeway to a dingy industrial park and the large corrugated steel building of Universal Printing. I spent a couple of days there, my brain like a sponge soaking up the ammonia-heavy air of the press room. I learned about four color theory, plating, stripping, color separating and typesetting, papers, inks...I couldn't wait to get back to Cocoa Beach and try out my rapidly-infused new knowledge -- in a real office, in a real job!

Last update: 12-14-03;
Next: Four years to life