Happy Holidays

Holiday card, 2005, three-color linocut on card stock.

Inside the Snow Fort

Snow Day yesterday in NYC!  My son and I built a big fort in Prospect Park using a plastic food container to make the bricks.  Great day....

two days in brooklyn

Yesterday, a fresh couple inches of snow on the ground. Went for a run in Prospect Park in the morning and rediscovered how dazzling white and brown can be. The sun looked like a pearl, or the moon, in the overcast sky. Today, almost all the snow is gone and the light is crisp and sharp, the sky that unbelievable blue, the buildings in sharp, sunlit relief; and the real moon is faint and pale in the low western blue.

More snow to come tomorrow night. Probably enough for some serious sledding on Saturday.

Mush, mush, mush all the way

Good sledding yesterday, and not a single fused vertebrae to speak of, although I am a little stiff today. Afterward, my son slurped hot chocolate, holding the cup with frozen fingers, and ate his weight in marshmallows, and later that afternoon I nearly fell asleep while reading to him in bed, but hey, (finger pop) that all adds up to one grade A, killer snow day, cowboy. We also watched a little Noggin and some Looney Tunes, and I made a big pot of turkey sausage, black bean and quinoa soup.

Speaking of eating....

A new link to the right: a blog from a friend and neighbor about cooking, called "What's Cooking at Jerk Castle...recipes two amateur cooks are trying at home." They are great neighbors, and I will definitely be trying out some of the recipes my own self.

Holiday card, 2007

Untitled, 2-color linocut on metallic card stock.

I like this one, too, another one with snowfall. But cozier, with the inside point of view. And bittersweet again, because we had to put our cat Buzz to sleep that year. Very hard. And yes, that cat is definitely based on Buzz's cuddly, pear-shaped body.

Holiday card, 2005

Untitled, 3-color linocut.

This is a real favorite of mine. The three colors work well, the simple image is nice, and so is the polka dot snowy sky, which I'd used before and would again. And the hat. My son had a hat like that, and that's where it all came from. And maybe also from those baby bjorns, where you carry your kid in a harness on your chest, so he's kind of right in your lower field of vision like this. So if the 2004 card was a nod to my father, 2005 was a nod to my son, who was old enough that year for his first trudge in the snow.

Holiday card, 2000 [not to be confused with Deathrace 2000]

Snow, 2-color linocut on translucent card stock.

This was printed in two colors on two sides of translucent card stock, which gives it a little bit of depth. Looking back now, I wonder if that double-sidedness doesn't have something to do with my old friend and fellow painter Tim Litzmann's work, who works in acrylics on the reverse side of plexiglass. And who I need to get back in touch with. At any rate, I was also thinking about Japanese woodcuts because of an exhibition of Hiroshige's 100 Views of Edo at the Brooklyn Museum [a show which has probably influenced my holiday cards ever since, as a matter of fact]. I still like this one a lot.

By the way, Deathrace 2000.