Barcelona is one highly-concentrated example of the built environment as a living organism. Everywhere you glance is something textural, structural, and tectonic to behold, and often that something presents the essential riot that is that city’s history.
Chaperone is a composite of three individual portraits collaged together into a single panel and sealed in pigmented encaustic wax. The two adults are Rogier Clarisse and his wife, Sara Breyll, painted by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) in 1611.
This piece is a reconstruction of Dante Alighieri’s early 14th century Inferno using his lines of verse to create a text spiraling in all directions.
This small piece, Manuscript I (2010) is made from silver leaf, wax, and collage. The tiny page from the Koran is a found object–no kidding. I found 2 loose pages on the sidewalk in San Francisco about 17 years ago. It was right around the time I was taking my first Arabic class …
These are 3 very small encaustic collages in a series called Domestic Madonnas. Each one is 5.25 X 7 inches on wood (2010). The source images are from a catalog of early Flemish and Italian painters from the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts. It was in the $1. bin at the Salvation Army Book Shop in downtown Eugene.
One aspect of Jewish texts that fascinates me is the graphic integration of commentary in the Hebrew Bible, or Torah. Jewish texts, especially the Midrash, use different font sizes, or sometimes even different types of script.
I hadn’t given a whole lot of thought to Lilith. But I had given her a little thought over the years and I never really understood how she and the Serpent were connected.
I spent a lot of time in and around Austin, especially as a teenager. I would go to Austin for weekends, stay with friends, and explore being a restless young person who was, otherwise, bored and frustrated with life at home. South Congress Avenue was the edge of my universe.
Recitation is fundamental to the Quran’s reception. As in Judaism, the distance between the book and message is the voice of the reader reciting. Jews murmur their sacred texts to themselves, Muslims recite them to an audience.
Ephemerarium 
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