Red Herring
Yet another storm bears down, leaving us hunkered down in the studio. Around this time last year, I was sketching up a storm for Portland Stage’s production of Red Herring by Michael Hollinger. A fable about marriage in a pulp noir package, the script is loaded with detectives, dames, and a dead spy. My sketches are super rough, because I had about 8 weeks to do 7 posters, but you get the idea. Act one, scene 1 calls for a billboard of Winslow Homer’s painting, The Herring, to glow above the stage. Tried that in my first idea. Fishing themes and variations thereof…...
Read MoreBabette’s Feast
I worked on the poster illustration for Portland Stage’s world premiere of Babette’s Feast about a year ago. It wound up being a circuitous journey to the final piece, which can happen sometimes. I faintly recalled having seen the movie years ago, but didn’t want to see it again or color my approach too much by what had been done cinematically. I based my ideas on the script written by Rose Courtney and adapted from the short story by Isak Dinesen. Local actor and Affiliate Artist Abigail Killeen conceived and developed the play, which is set in the small town of Berlevag...
Read MoreIt’s a Wonderful Life
When I learned last winter that this season’s holiday show at Portland Stage Company would be It’s a Wonderful Life, I couldn’t WAIT to see the live radio play version. Joe Landry’s adaptation brought in all the vintage touches of a live radio broadcast, with applause signs, a foley table, and period commercials for cake soap and hair tonic. I worked on rough ideas for the theater poster last February. My first idea used a big radio as if it’s the pivotal scene on the bridge between George Bailey and his guardian angel, Clarence. Another composition, with a...
Read MoreComplications From A Fall
Kate Hawley’s script Complications From A Fall, triggered some heartache for me. Having walked that final episode of eldercare with my mother years ago, it touched a few nerves. I went looking for the walker that is still in the basement, don’t ask me why. That thing was a metaphor for my mother’s decline. I made it an element in all of my ideas for the poster for Portland Stage’s recent production. In one scene, Elizabeth, the aging mother, sets fire to some old letters. It seemed very direct to visualize the walker falling in flames. Maybe too direct. So I tried...
Read MoreLady Day in moonlight
These are just a few of the records I grew up with. My parents were into jazz. I heard Billie Holiday long before I knew her name. Sarah, Billie, and Ella were my mother’s favorites; Duke, Satchmo, and Coltrane were my dad’s. These were the faces on the records, but in fact I went all through elementary grades and high school without having a single person of color in my classes, or in my small world in rural New Hampshire. That changed in art school and beyond, but those soulful voices remain somehow elemental for me. The script for Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill by...
Read MorePostcards from the Rock
I have always been a snail mailer. Even when I was growing up at the Red Doors Motel, I cultivated pen pals. Creating post card promotions as an illustrator is one occupational hazard that I enjoy. These are just a handful from many years of mailing out samples. Here’s the scoop behind my most recent postcard, Summer in the Slow Lane. I’ve always hankered for little campers and the time to take road trips. I made a sketch on the ferry one day based on a photo I took a few years ago on the way to Stonington, Maine. Kirsten Cappy happily modeled inside this camper we spied for sale...
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