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Words. Language. The exploration of the visual identity of language vs. the conceptual nature of language. Can words and phrases issue spontaneously in a manner analogous to the Abstract Expressionist “action painting”? Can language be “used” in a way that is not primarily communication, poetry, or logical, yet inhabit a physical existence apart from a conceptual one?

I have identified five types of triggers that lead to the words you see in the images on this site:

1. Associative: I see or hear a word or phrase, which triggers a variation or a new word/phrase.
2. Causal: I have an idea, which leads to another idea, which leads to something else, etc. Cause and effect, or cause and affect, if you’d prefer.
3. Derivative: I see or hear something I like and I steal it, pure an simple. I don’t much care where an idea comes from, if it interests me I’m interested in why (or better, how) it interests me. The source could be an ad, a poem, a piece of trash, a song, an old movie, a talking squirrel, anything. Often these things get manipulated through the Associative (see #1, above) pump and become something else entirely. Other times it’s just blatant plagiarism.
4. Overheard: Derivative of Derivative, above, but specifically overheard snippets of conversation, transcribed sometimes morphed and mangled, sometimes verbatim. A shooter of earshot. When I was in college, a few years back, I published such overheard conversationals in the school newspaper in a column I called Life Out Of Context. Just another instance of what’s going around is also what’s coming around, as is the reverse.
5. Spontaneous: This is what interests me the most, when ideas just appear in my mind unbidden. I don’t bother to judge such ideas as “good” or “bad” (”obviously, judging by the results here,” the critics among you may scoff, but no matter), but merely write them down as quickly as possible, because spontaneous eruptions of new phrasings are evanescent, ethereal, mercurial, and fleeting. Like exotic subatomic particles created in an accelerator, such spontaneous language can disappear as quickly as it is born, and I have lost many of them while scrambling to find a pen and paper. At times, say on a long car drive with nothing to write on, I repeat over and over, like a mantra, phrases that pop into my mind, adding new ones as they come and sometimes mixing and mashing them into new bits before I can pull over and write.

However they come into being, most smudges of text are drawn into one of several notebooks I have going on at once (such as these small Snarkbooks), or directly into drawings. Then they gestate for awhile before a small selection of them — some intentionally, some by chance processes, some at random — make their way into paintings. Then the words may hover like lazy bees in a painting until ultimately surviving to the end, mutating into other words, or disappearing entirely under the weight of stains.

How to use this site to navigate my work

Through this website, my intent is to link together via language the disparate strands of my work over the years, though the focus is on word-bearing work.

The home page, AKA ALL WORKS, displays thumbnails linking to all of the works added to this site, in reverse chronological order based on date of completion, forty per page. So as new works are completed and added to the site, they will appear at the top of this home page grid. Works are also subdivided by genre and year of completion — see the navigation links in the left sidebar.

Each image page is tagged with the words and phrases found in that particular work, and each tag links to a page displaying thumbnails of all other images that contain that word or phrase. The Lexicon page lists all the words and phrases used in all of the works that have so far been uploaded to the site.

There are a few minor bugs. The Lexicon entries are followed by a number, in parentheses, denoting how many works contain that chunk of verbiage; when you click on a link, however, you might see more than the number you were expecting. That is because the results page functions the same way as the search box does. For example, the Lexicon might show display “(3)” for the entry “cat”, which is the number of images that specifically have the word “cat” in them, but the cat results page might display six images, because it is showing all of the images with text having the letter string “c-a-t”, such as “applicator” or “indicate“. Someday I’ll get one my more code-savvy friends to hack my hack and make the numbers match. It’s still useful, however, for anyone insane enough to actually get off on this stuff.

You can subscribe to various RSS feeds, and you can also leave comments on specific images or blog posts. To reduce comment spam, all comments are moderated before posting.

You can contact me directly via, you guessed it, the CONTACT page.

Jay