Self Portrait

Posting this picture is probably committing professional suicide, but what the hell, live dangerously. I'm they guy in the center, and no, I don't look like that naked; the other guy is Steve Chen, one of my favorite models, with my head spliced on his shoulders. This is one of a series of self portraits I've been doing with Steve, examining issues of body image, aging, sexuality, ego - all those uncomfortable things we don't like to think about. As far as technique is concerned, it's just a matter of taking lots of pictures, cutting them out very carefully in Photoshop and painting in a few critical shadows. BTW, Steve is a good deal taller than he appears to be; I was thinking about Egyptian tomb paintings and how people are sized according to their importance, and of course if you listen to my wildly inflated ego, I'm way more important than anyone else, even my much better looking alter ego...

:)

New work

Okay, I'm back - after a four month hiatus. No particular reason for the long silence; I just can't think of anything to say. But I thought you might be interested in seeing what I'm working on these days - both the weird stuff and the not-so-weird stuff.

These pictures probably aren't going to make it onto the website any time soon, so they're a little extra reward (or punishment, depending on how you look at it) for searching out my blog.

I have this enduring fascination with the borderline between recognizability and abstraction, and also between photography and whatever unnamed art form lies beyond it, between photography and painting. I've been playing with displacement maps and mirrors for several years now, and this is what it's looking like these days:





If that's not your cup of tea, how about these ones from my recent trip to New Zealand (and no, don't ask me if they're real or not. You should know by now...)

:)