Shambhala Pocket Editions

This work is a more recent use of my illustration training at Massachusetts College of Art from the late 1960s and early 70s. When I finally graduated from Mass Art, it was with a degree in painting and fine art, but to earn a living I made some half-hearted forays into the world of textbook illustration and technical manuals. In spite of my hesitations, I ended up doing a lot of illustration work over the years, gigs for which I am grateful. This batch of work came to me in 2017. Shambhala Publications is commemorating their 50th year of business with the printing of fifty “pocket editions” of some of their many books. They contacted me to do all of the cover illustrations. What follows is a baker's dozen of what these look like. I've been very pleased to be collaborating with Jim Zaccaria; he does the final cover designs. Jim is a very fine artist and designer himself. Go see his website.

Many of these cover illustrations are portraits of generally well known people, which presents the interesting challenge of making them recognizable. It is not known what some of the subjects even looked like, Lao Tzu and Rumi, for example. So I had in interesting time pulling them from my imagination. While many ot these are out in the world already, this project is still ongoing; I don't expect we'll be finished until fall of this year. Meanwhile, look for them in bookstores everywhere!