Rebecca's Room on a globe

This 360° spherical view was painted in acrylics on a world globe I bought at a yard sale. It depicts my son Ben and daughter Rebecca in Rebecca’s room circa 2002. Here is what they and the room look like today:

Ben and Rebecca today

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Two panels from my forthcoming book Extreme Perspective! Curvilinear And Beyond.

Next stop, the army.

This topical piece from 2004 was my first job with The Portland Monthly- the trigger event being The Oregonian’s controversial decision to drop Hi and Lois from its comics page after 50 years (it was displaced by Berkeley Breathed’s brief revival of Opus; Cathy was dropped at the same time). Think about this for a moment. Imagine that in 2004, Frank Sinatra’s Swing Easy (released in 1954) had just dropped off the charts, The Pajama Game was finishing a 50 year run on Broadway,and a local television affiliate was catching flack for dropping Father Knows Best, which first appeared the same month as Hi And Lois, from its lineup (Cathy, a relative stripling, made its debut in 1976, the same year as Frampton Comes Alive! the musical Annie and Charlie’s Angels.). On the other hand, The Tonight Show and Face The Nation started that same year and are still going strong, so network television is hardly a paragon of dynamic change.

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Bruce Conkle of Portland, Oregon, writes:

Sorry to bother you and I won’t be bothered if you don’t answer, but I am trying to figure out the back corner of a box in 3 point perspective. If I draw a line from the top corner to the nadir, and one off to the left vp and one to the right vp, they don’t quite match up at one spot. Any tips for this? I have been making my students draw a table and chair in 3 point perspective, and this issue keeps coming up…
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The San Diego Comics Convention being held this weekend, that is. l have nothing against that gathering of the clan, but this year I am very busy working to get my new perspective book in on deadline and I have no new product to promote, so I’m staying home. In lieu of a report, here is an album of stereo photographs I took at San Diego sometime in the 90’s.
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For Independence Day, we have a new President, once more painted in black and white by Ben. James Garfield’s Presidency was short (shot in 1881, four months into his term, he lingered on for another two months before succumbing to infection), but he left a considerable mark on American culture: his death inspired a section of Sarah Vowell’s book Assassination Vacation as well as The Fatal Bullet, a fine graphic novel account by Rick Geary, New York stage actor Julius Garfinkle took his name to become the Hollywood star John Garfield, and perhaps most importantly, cartoonist Jim Davis also gave his name to the lasagna-loving cartoon cat beloved by millions. Would Garfield mean as much to us if he had been named Fillmore or Van Buren- or Heathcliff?

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