Do you remember the traffic billboard from the early 90’s film, L.A. Story? The one with personal messages for the Steve Martin character?  Last year when the world closed down in March I began to walk to the studio every day on a route that parallels the train tracks

There’s often a long line of boxcars there covered with colorful, interesting, often provocative large scale art work. In late March 2020, messages began to show up—jaunty, ghoulish, raw and bracingly honest—part Basquiat and part Jenny Holzer. In the middle of my shut down haze, those messages somehow felt like they were just for me.

Which made me start thinking about the Word/Art connection—a form of expression that has always eluded me as an artist. Somehow language and art must merge creating a sensation, an image and/or a revelation in the mind of the viewer—artist as shape shifter, connecting two sides of the brain. 

In the fall, casting around for an idea to illustrate the theme “Weaponry”, I found this word and made it into a small collage. A first, slightly tentative, step toward the magic of word art, but a step nevertheless.