This piece is composed mostly of photos I took that day at his grave and those of his (and I guess my) ancestors who were buried in the same plot. I don’t know that I’ll ever fully process this experience but working on this was an attempt to make something of it.

A few years ago I saw his obituary but had no idea where he was buried or much else about him. My mom is now deep into Alzheimer’s, anything she might’ve told me is long gone. There’s no way to know him more than this, it’s just a void.

My mom never really seemed like she wanted to tell me all that much about him, other than his name. A handful of times she would abruptly share something, most memorably a newspaper article during my teen years about how he was struck by lightning not just once but twice.

I was raised the only child of a single mom. My father was never part of my life. When I was very little this didn’t really register, but as I saw how other kids lived with different types of families, I started asking questions.

It was a grave covered in Florida Gators regalia, not something you often see in Georgia Bulldogs country. We walked over to check it out, and nothing really could’ve prepared me for whose grave it was: my own father’s, who I never met.

It’s spooky but beautiful & scenic, and in the very hot summer the trees provide a thick, shaded canopy that makes it one of the nicest places to spend time in Savannah. We decided to find the grave of the great songwriter Johnny Mercer, and on our way back to our car a strange sight caught our eye.

A few months ago, my wife and I took a walk around Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah. If you haven’t been, you’ve probably seen it in movies or the cover of John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

Not even exaggerating, seeing these at his retrospective a few years ago made me start making art again: hilarious, angry, simple and direct.

Thanks so much!! Love your work!

This looks awesome, can't wait to read. Got into this stuff last year when I made an illustration to accompany a piece about Mr. & Mrs. Bridge and used some Veiled Prophet Ball imagery in it.

I used textures uncovered from a recent trip to the the Tenement Museum, styles and patterns popular from the period of Smith’s life, to tie them together.

#art #newyorkart #nycart #nycartist #collage #collageart #collageartist #graphicdesign #vintagedesign #vintageartwork #history @bsky.art

I was surprised and happy to draw Judgment since it strangely corresponds to more than a few things going on in my life. I incorporated lots of recurring symbols from esoteric and spiritualist art in the piece, and snippets from the work and life of Pamela Colman Smith.

Though she’s not a household name, Smith’s work lives on in the collections of the Whitney and Yale University, not to mention the bedrooms of every goth teenager on Earth.

...Bram Stoker (for whom she illustrated projects including the first edition of Lair of the White Worm), and many more.

I wanted to help resurrect Smith & her work a bit in this piece, and also reference other ideas & traditions from the golden age of the occult & spiritualism in which she lived.