art by Rick Kirkman
art by Jim Borgman
For nearly forty years I've co-created Baby Blues and Zits, two of the most widely syndicated newspaper comic strips in the world… without inking a single panel of either. My business partners, Rick Kirkman (Baby Blues) and Jim Borgman (Zits) did the art part, and I wrote the jokes. We were generously rewarded for that work and we're grateful for the love and support we've received from readers and newspapers.
Now, as print media takes a new shape, so do I. This seems like a natural point to flip my focus from writing to making art, an itch I've only partially scratched. I'm deliberately not settling on one subject yet, but exploring whatever interests me in the moment.
What stays constant underneath all of it is real light doing something specific at a particular moment — when a Central Coast hillside turns impossibly green in bright sunlight, or a cool, purple shadow cast by a dog's ear defines a composition. Not the way the camera sees it, but the way it strikes me.
I paint from my studio in San Luis Obispo, California.