1975-76: transforming b&w into color

April 30, 2015

“He who binds to himself a joy, Does the winged life destroy. But he who kisses the joy as it flies, Lives in eternity’s sunrise.” – William Blake (1757-1827) In the frenetic two-year period from October ’74 to September ’76 I was kissing a lot of joy on the fly, so to speak. The Weiser […]

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Inspiration by Whitman & Vaughan-Williams

April 23, 2015

In 1903, composer Ralph Vaughan-Williams (1872-1958) started working on A Sea Symphony, his first – a composition for orchestra and chorus, inspired by, and incorporating, poetry from Walt Whitman’s masterful anthology, Leaves of Grass. Vaughan-Williams chose select verses from one of Whitman’s longer poems, Passage to India, to use as his text for the symphony’s […]

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Courting the attentions of Birgit Nilsson…

April 15, 2015

“Imagination creates reality.” – Richard Wagner (1813-1883) My obsession with the great Wagnerian soprano Birgit Nilsson (1918-2005) was set in motion in 1969, my first year in New York, when I heard/saw her as Brunhilde in Die Walkure as guest of music critic Alan Rich, whom I had met through a mutual friend who lived […]

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Out of Darkness, Light

April 10, 2015

“In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.” – Graham Greene (1904-1991) Spring 1975: Paintings on black velvet? No, but they are drawings done with colored pencil on black charcoal paper, that I worked on for my own edification. That spring I became a commercial artist again after a year of doing […]

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The Wisdom of the Bottle Caps

April 7, 2015

“Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.” – John W. Gardner (1912-2002) Ever wonder where those one-liners I’ve been quoting come from? A number of them were printed on the inside of Elliott’s Amazing Apple Juice bottle-caps. I happened to save eighty-eight of those caps back in the mid-80s before I moved to […]

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Reflections on the theme of Resurrection

April 6, 2015

“Creation is a late fruit. It grows best when one changes from receiving station to sending station, ceases to expect wonders to be delivered and takes on the task of creating them.” – Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) The sources of artistic inspiration are myriad. Western civilization has nurtured an amazing array of genius, particularly in the […]

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Madam I’m Adam & The Birth of Athena

April 6, 2015

“The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.” – The Buddha Madam I’m Adam • oil on plywood panel 48″ x 37-1/2″ • collection of the artist. 1978: around the same time […]

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Moon Magic

March 31, 2015

“Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” – Gautama Buddha 1978: Dion Fortune’s Moon Magic, the companion volume to The Sea Priestess, provided the inspiration for what I consider to be my finest illustration published as a book cover. Certainly it was the most challenging airbrush project I had […]

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The Novels of Dion Fortune (1890-1946)

March 30, 2015

“You must do the things you think you cannot do.” – Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962) In the late 70s Weiser published five novels by Dion Fortune, pen name of English occultist Violet Firth. In three instances I had the opportunity to create full-color air-brushed art for wrap-around book-covers: The Goat Foot God, The Sea Priestess, and […]

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The Weiser (pronounced ‘wiser’) Experience

March 23, 2015

“True friendship multiplies the good of life and divides the evil.” – Baltasar Gracián y Morales (1601-1658) Samuel Weiser Publications catalog cover, spring 1975. 6″ x 9″ Working for and with Donald Weiser was life-altering, a Jupiter-cycle of twelve years from February 1974 to April 1986. This is not the medium in which to explain […]

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Airbrushing in Full Color

March 22, 2015

“Things do not pass for what they are, but for what they seem. Most things are judged by their jackets.” – Balthasar Gracián y Morales (1601-1658) So what is air brushing? “An airbrush is a small, air-operated tool that sprays various media including ink and dye, but most often paint by a process of nebulization. […]

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Evolution of a book cover and a work of art

March 19, 2015

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players…” – William Shakespeare (1564-1616) In early 1978 I was handed an assignment to create a full color illlustration to be used as book cover for a paperback entitled Evolution Through the Tarot by Engish writer Richard Gardner. The author had supplied a […]

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1970s: Weiser book covers in 4 colors

March 18, 2015

“You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.” – Vernon Howard (1918-1992) Tthere were two kinds of 4-color book covers that I designed while working for Samuel Weiser Inc., book publisher, in the late 70s. The less-expensive variety used any four colored inks chosen from the Pantone […]

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Life on the farm, early 1900s

March 14, 2015

“If we succeed in giving a love of learning, then learning itself is sure to follow.” – Sir John Lubbock (1834-1913) 1) In a photograph from ca. 1905, great-aunt Helen Cole Waterhouse (1875-1927) tries her hand at riding. The recently erected barn behind her hasn’t even received its finishing touches yet. 2) The barn is […]

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They called me the Screamin’ Angel

March 10, 2015

In the mid-1940s – my early years – frequent summer visitors to Dayton were the family of my mother’s 3-year-older sister Thelma Augusta Crouse Ames (1910-1977) with her husband Merton, aka Phat, and their children David, Sally and Steven; first cousins I’ve not seen since the latter of these family-picnic snapshots were taken. 1) The […]

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