Illustration, How Do I Love Thee!
Illustration is literally all around right now. I just realized I’ve been doing it, living it, and breathing it non-stop for the last month. My talented kin, Mati McDonough, an artist, illustrator, and teacher visited Maine in November. She gave me a long, hard hug the day after The Election, the results of which were still sinking in. We went straight to the Portland Museum of Art, sure that art could lift our spirits. She signed her latest children’s book, How Do I Love Thee? an illustrative telling of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem. We then browsed the Matisse show,...
Read MoreSotto Voce
Of all the scripts I read in January for Portland Stage poster development, Sotto Voce by Nilo Cruz stood out as multi-layered, romantic, and evocative. In the play, a young Cuban man finds a German-born novelist living in New York who shares a connection to the 1939 voyage of the MS St Louis, a German ship that left for Cuba with German-Jewish refugees, only to be turned back. The elder writer, Bemadette, calls the young man Student. They don’t meet yet weave a romance built on memories and imagination via phone calls and messages. Like all the plays this season, the theme is about...
Read MoreThe Irish..And How They Got That Way
I have Irish blood, of course. My great great great grandfather, Patrick Hogan, left Belfast in 1817 at the age of 19 when he settled in Young’s Cove, Nova Scotia. But otherwise my childhood didn’t involve much in the way of Irish heritage. No Celtic music around the house, no Irish step-dancing lessons, no nuns. I found my way to Ireland in 1980 during my Wintersession at Rhode Island School of Design, traveling on a photography independent study. My photograph of Joe Malone’s captures only the composition of a typical pub exterior in Limerick in 1980. Portland...
Read MorePortland Stage Season Launch
Around a year ago, I was scrambling to finish all the posters for Portland Stage Company’s 2015-16 season. On the launch night, Social Media/Marketing Associate, JJ Peeler, and Executive and Artistic Director, Anita Stewart, happily showed my rough sketch for the final show, They Don’t Pay? We Won’t Pay! Called again to create a cohesive look for the 2016-17 Season, I scrambled ever harder to be ALL done. Two shows remain in the current season; I felt complete seeing this one on stage at last. Meanwhile, My Name Is Asher Lev is on stage. Based on the novel by Chaim Potok,...
Read MoreLost Boy Found in Whole Foods
Portland Stage’s production of Tammy Ryan’s play Lost Boy Found in Whole Foods is powerful, thanks to strong performances by Tyrone Davis Jr. as Gabriel and Jamil Mangan as Panther, young men from South Sudan struggling to bridge two worlds. I worked on the poster last year, around this time. Researching for any illustration project leads to discoveries, and this one broadened my awareness big time. Gabriel is a one of the 20,000 boys of the Nuer and Dinka tribes who were orphaned during the Second Sudanese Civil War (1983 – 2005.) He fled war to refugee camps to a job at...
Read MoreDear Watson
Whether you’re a Sherlock Holmes fan or not, the Portland Stage production of The Hound of the Baskervilles is one relentless spoof. When I read the script last year, adapted by Steven Canny and John Nicholson, it didn’t read that funny. But I attempted some hyperbole with my preliminary sketches for the poster. How about a towering fang-bearing menace looming over the Baskerville estate? Or the classic vintage pipe with a smoking title? A hound’s shadow on Holmes’ silly hat? Or the flashlight trope? A stalking hound of epic proportions? I can keep going…the...
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