240: Down, But Not Out

Welcome to the redesigned, re-purposed – and re-dedicated – Jeopopolis!

(I feel myself saying this as much to you, as I am to myself.)

So, how's tricks? I must say I found that without a blog to kick about, I started to get a lot of shit done. Ventures that took time and some patience, a virtue I was not expressing well in the assembly-line of posts being rung up here week in and out. I started to like not having to think about it; frighteningly, a little too much on some days. Other days, I forgot the site even existed. Sometimes people would ask me about it, but I didn't have answers. I figured the time would either come, or it wouldn't.

The blog, it was becoming an albatross around my neck – a neck neck-deep in a time-sucking, energy-tapping photographic opus and a desire to let this site sit as long as it took to become compelling for me again. Which, I'm happy to report, it now has.

And I've got an awful lot of catching up to do, a lot of work and fun to document. There's been a welcome infusion of freelance work. The launch of Kerry's second book, a major moment in her literary career that I shared, in my own tiny way, by living out my own professional fantasies as book jacket designer. And there was the matter of that photo-a-day project; it's no mystery by now I completed it, officially kicked its ass, displayed it to the world with my friend Karen in a gallery exhibition that closed up shop last weekend.

So for starters, I present a trio of spot illustrations I crafted late in the summer for placement on interior pages of Kerry's new book – titled Vs. – to help indicate chapter breaks. Using old-timey reference photos, I built five illustrations all told, to accompany five short poems detailing the sensations of five different boxing punches.


The illustrations ultimately didn't make it into the final layout. It was a downer at first; I was proud of knocking out pieces of work dabbling in material and a style I was quite unfamiliar with. The sketches gave me a good opportunity to attempt some fluidity in my stiff drawing manner (you can click on any of the three images, to view them larger).


I came to the same realization Kerry's editor/publisher did – that the drawings didn't gel with some of the book's central themes. They would have been window dressing at best, and distracting at worst. It was the right call. And mebbe someday in the future they can be rolled out for another use. You never know with these things.