Famine & Fame Collage

I often work in series (usually 3-5 pieces per subject), focusing on the theme of powerful, charismatic, famous people who led public lives cut tragically short either by assassination, illness, suicide, accident, or drugs. Many of these celebrities had untimely deaths at a relatively young age; some died later in life. My works manipulate images of famous people from past and present headlines, blending everyday news with abstract visions of controversial deaths in all walks of life: politics, activism, movies, music, fashion, royalty, media, business, etc. My subjects include Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston, Heath Ledger, Michael Jackson, Ana Nicole Smith, Prince, David Bowie, Lou Reed, Jimi Hendrix, Martin Luther King, John Lennon, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Che Guevera, Kurt Cobain, Jean Harlow, RFK, Abraham Lincoln, Harvey Milk, Jim Morrison, Malcom X, Medgar Evers, Janis Joplin, Princess Diana, Brian Jones, John Belushi, Billie Holiday, and many others. My most ambitious project is a 50 work series devoted to the 50th anniversary in 2013 of the JFK assassination. As in most of my works, the media and forms include collage, acrylic, water color, charcoal pencil, oil, assemblage boxes, dioramas, mobiles, sculpture, and conceptual pieces. In the JFK series, I combined familiar media imagery from the weekend of November 22nd1963 with abstractions of form, to make original statements about this iconic socio-cultural-political event. I am blessed with gifts of the creative spirit inherited from my beloved parents, Marie and Pete. My poetry collection, A Box of Crazy Toys, is dedicated to them. It's available at Amazon and Small Press Distribution My parents had a poetic way of seeing things, a special talent for understanding human nature. They never had the opportunity to express these tendencies artistically; they had to leave school and work when they were very young, to help their families. I was given the freedom and the opportunity to do personal, creative things. I am eternally grateful to them for giving me that freedom. Growing up was fun for many reasons. I had two different homes in two neighborhoods: my parents' apartment in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and my grandmother's building, from the late 19th century, in historic Little Italy/Chinatown, on Mulberry street, across from Columbus Park. We used to stay at my grandmother's almost every weekend.