ice and clouds

Winter here in Chicago seems ever so reluctantly to be exiting. It's still cold and gray, but less and less. So, I'm putting these pictures I took in Wisconsin late last year up before it gets genuinely warm and they become nostalgic. There are also a couple of pictures Heather took of clouds from a plane window. I have some more of those that I'll post in the next week or two.

portraits of passengers, groups of three, a rock show, a list

Other People's Pictures II

Todd Baxter is another of the artists who's shown at Lula over the last year or so. I've been meaning to post the above image for months now. I pretty much love everything he does, but this image gives me goosebumps. We've been friends for something like fifteen years and, I think it's safe to say, have influenced one another tremendously in that time. His collaged paintings and beautifully constructed frames were a revelation to me when we were both students at the University of New Mexico in the mid 90's. Not to mention his sketchbooks and incredibly delicate drypoint drawings. Here's another image, one that was in the recent show:


Todd is presently working on a large multi-image narrative photo project called Owl Scouts (those are the two models for the project, above) that I've helped him with a bit, sketching out compositions and drawing patches for the scout uniforms, which he's then had made into actual embroidered patches. Below are the gouaches he started with, you can see a bunch more of the progress of the project generally at his blog site, including comparisons between some of the sketches I did and the final pictures, as well as some of the sets and snapshots from shoots.

bones and rocks, shapes in red and black