look look... but first, some words about the pictures
as far back as high school, i was drawn to the graphic and fine arts; i even majored in art for a brief time. i got sidetracked into journalism and theater (where, as an amateur set and prop designer, i learned a lot about improvisation, playing around with different media and working fast), and more-or-less gave up the visual arts, partly because i didn't have the time to master any medium well enough to be proud of my work.
then, a couple of years ago, a friend introduced me to rubber stamps. stamping allowed me to play with image, color and design quickly and inexpensively, and it wasn't long before i was creating my own greeting cards and other gift items. from there (because, after all, how many greeting cards can a person make?) i've branched out into the whole realm of the paper arts: mail art, collage and bookmaking. these appeal to me for many reasons: they speak to my fascination with content as well as form; they let me work quickly, loosely and intuitively, and they're easy on my aging eyes and hands, which can no longer cope with the niceties of precise detail. in the summer of 1998 i turned what had been my breakfast nook into an honest-to-god studio, and began to speak of my "messing around" as art.
i owe a lot to the underground global mail art community. exchanging works by mail, sharing techniques through the rec.crafts.rubberstamps newsgroup, and discovering the wealth of great art in other people's on-line galleries has been instructive and inspiring.
a note about bandwidth: ah, the dilemma: high quality images vs. speedy page loads. thumbnails don't do it for me, so I've put relatively small (30-80K) but still legible versions of these images on separate pages with brief text descriptions. if something strikes your fancy, click on it for a bigger (and slower) version.
i've included stamp credits, where i have them, and some notes about the techniques employed. if you're curious about how i did something, email me and i'd be glad to discuss it.
these images were scanned with hewlett-packard's officejet r60 printer-scanner-copier (one slick machine), and then cropped, cleaned up and optimized with paintshop pro. i expect this new toy to find its way into other aspects of my work before long.
updated june 9, 1999
