A new discovery for me is S  erge Bloch: A French illustrator with that certain something. Reminds me of a lot of people, but is his own person.

Then I discovered myths, wonder tales and fairy lore: ordinary life went on but I was diving to the bottom of the sea with weights on my feet to pick the flower of immortal life and then losing the magic elixir to a passing snake – for ever; I was dipping my finger in dragon’s blood and tasting it and then finding I could listen in on the conversation of the birds and hear what animals were saying; I was saving my numerous brothers who had been turned into swans by knitting them shirts made from nettles which I’d spun into thread with blistered, burning fingers; with Electra I was helping murder her father – I could go on, but these are the kinds of stories that kept me reading under the covers with a torch, stories that every culture created long before print or even, perhaps, writing itself.

Marina Warner

I’m illustrating a story in just two colors. Which is three in a way, since the two sometimes overlap. And four if you include the white of the page. Things are often a lot more complicated, but whether you are writing with the 26 letters in the alphabet or rendering with a certain number of colors it is all about finding the patterns and revealing them. Or so it seems to me today, as clouds float by the window.

woodcut in 2 colors

woodcut of a condor preening in two colors

Lately I have been feverishly experimenting with woodcutting. There’s a particular challenge when you introduce more than one color that bends my mind causing one plus one to equal 3 colors

Woodcut by José Borges

Right now these are my two main influences: a Brazilian artist named José Borges and the logo for Mount Sinai Hospital. Soon I will post a few.

logo for Mount Sinai Hospital

Mama and baby caught up in the web of life

I’m no sucker. I didn’t even have to buy that Japanese book about the “Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.” All I had to do was to inhale the first few paragraphs in a bookstore and the magic had already begun. A tsunami of putting things away instead of letting them lie about took over my life. Perhaps because the author had said this would be magical it was. I began to think about the value of less everywhere else. How a good story has distinct edges. How I make pictures by cutting out what shouldn’t be there. How writing gets better when you subtract words wherever possible. “Elegance is refusal,” as Coco Chanel once said.

Stitched together by groups of women in Uzbekistan, Suzanis make my heart sing.

My daughter and her intended are soon to wed! (Their cats are Rambo and Cricket.)

Hans Christian Andersen

Mr. Hans Christian Andersen?