Recent caricature piece for INX, the op-ed illustration syndicator.

Bush hands off the baton to Obama

Here’s a review of the Bush years utilizing the best of related INX stuff including many of my drawings. Also with work by Igor Kopelnitsky, Peter Kuper, David G. Klein, Martin Kozlowski, and that’s just the K’s! … » more

Libby Shapiro Brooklyn, NY introduced me to the photographer Primoz Kotnik. She responds to Wednesday’s post about him:

“Oh it’s great to see this David!!! What a great picture and what cool stories. I didn’t know about the bathtub- ooooeeeeeee-

I will send this on to friends here and in Germany who also knew and loved Primoz. It’s been years since he died and yet it really feels like he is not far away.

I miss him, he was a real great pal and uniquely faboo at cooking up fun stuff! As well as being such an amazing photographer. … » more

During my days as a struggling illustrator in New York I did a lot of odd jobs to make ends meet, including drawing caricatures at parties, running a carousel at a street fair, and even a bit of modeling. Never a glamorous GQ cover boy , I was more of a character type, and the high point of my modeling career was probably appearing as ”Randall Schwab, Jr.” in the ”O.C. and Stiggs” special issue of the National Lampoon (O.C. and Stiggs were two slacker teen characters who appeared in the magazine, and Schwab, Jr. was their nerd nemesis, eventually played by Jon Cryer when Robert Altman brought the characters to the screen).

My favorite modeling job, however, has to be this photo illustration from 1991 for a column by Anka Radakovitch in Details about getting fired. The photographer, a very creative Yugoslav named Primoz Kotnik, achieved the effect of me flying out the door by setting the whole composition up sideways- the door was mounted on the floor, the model playing the boss was lying on the floor kicking up into the air, and I was jumping up and down on a concealed trampoline, trying to stay in sync with the papers that were being tossed into the air. Turning the picture sideways should make it clearer.

I did another photo shoot for Primoz later in which I was pushed down 6th Avenue in a bathtub on wheels, like Peter Tork in the opening to The Monkees. Unfortunately, Primoz died not long after that. The story I heard is that he was out on a blind date when the van he was driving was struck by another vehicle. Both Primoz and his date were killed.

Spherical painting of New York City rooftop

There’s a new gallery of spherical paintings coming soon to the portfolio section, but in the meantime here’s a post about the first one I ever did:

Wooden ball with gridlines

Years before I wrote my own book about perspective, I was experimenting with pushing its outer limits. I was inspired by seeing Buckminster Fuller’s dymaxion world globe projected onto the sides of a twenty-sided polyhedron to try the equivalent in perspective- an entire 360° visual field as seen from one point in space drawn onto twenty triangles to form a continuous image. I did a couple of early drawings using this method, including a fold-up ornament sent out as a Christmas card in 1993.  Eventually I got tired of the difficulties involved- each of the twenty triangles has its own perspective, and it’s extremely difficult getting objects to line up over the gaps- and I figured out that it would be simpler to draw a continuous image on a spherical surface. I got a wooden ball from a crafts store and drew a 360° perspective grid on it- basically a picture of a cube with ruled lines on it, viewed from inside so that six vanishing points each line up with the center of a face. Here is an example of a ball ruled with perspective lines. Over that I did an acrylic painting of the garden on the roof of our loft building in New York and gave the finished piece to Eve as an anniversary present in 1994. This post shows the picture of the ball- as you can tell from nearby objects, it is quite small, only about one inch square. … » more