The Cartoon Kid is a collection of cartoons, my attempt to create a New Yorker style cartoon, a life-long ambition, it seems.
January 4, 2009
January 3, 2009
January 2, 2009
Cafe Life
Café Life is a character study of the “third place.” Not home and not work, it is the café, coffeehouse, neighborhood bar, old style candy store or soda fountain. It is the modern equivalent of the town square or the watering hole where all the animals come.
Café Life is a partial gallery of the characters of one such place, The Owl and Monkey Café, on Ninth Avenue, on the NJudah trolley line, in San Francisco, during January of 1981, just as the Reagan Presidency was about to begin, not long after John Lennon had been shot, but it could be any year in any similar place, where people gather around a watering hole or a fire to warm themselves or refresh themselves, to find themselves, or to avoid themselves.
Such a café is a clearing in the woods that’s safe and unsafe at the same time. Some people will stay too long, and some people will stay away. Eventually, almost everyone will show up. I made a decision to sit still, in one place, for as long as I could, to stop running, to see who would come to me if I didn’t move. Over several years, I met literally thousands of people. This collection chronicles a few of them.
I’ll be forever grateful to The Owl and the Monkey Café and places like it. They are wonderful places, and I celebrate their existence. I’ve been writing, happily, in cafés for nearly forty years.
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Big Head Theatre
Big Head Theatre is a collection of satirical cartoons, each one portraying a mini-drama. These drawings were done in 2001.
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December 26, 2008
Pardon My French
Pardon My French is a book of illustrated French colloquialisms, mostly having to do with sex and food, compiled by Kathryn Hyman, an ex-pat, living in Paris. She was certain this book would be published, but not so far. Lael Wertenbaker, who wrote the Hemingway bio for Time-Life, then in her 80s, loved the book and immediately called her old publishers at Little, Brown and Houghton-Mifflin. Both of them were as old as she and out of the business. I illustrated these expressions in the mid-Nineties, but many of them seem to be chronicles of another time. Here are the first fifty of ninety drawings.
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December 19, 2008
Beck & Call: Let’s Spend Some Time Together
Beck & Call: Let’s Spend Some Time Together was first performed at Intersection in San Francisco in 1972, with Gregory Vose playing my antagonist. It was later made into a movie, with Gordon Craig doing the cinematography and myself and Gregory reprising our roles as Beck and Call, although they weren’t called by those names in those earlier productions. They were nameless, intertwined characters. The artwork at left is by Gregory Vose.
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Let’s Spend Some Time Together (Revised Haiku Version)
December 17, 2008
Art Work
A sampling of several styles of artwork, generally in oil pastels, some oils, and watercolors. The sizes vary greatly from painting to painting. Generally speaking, the figure work is in the twenty-four by thirty-two inch range, and the landscapes are mostly small, five by seven inch, but there are pictures that break that pattern.
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Abhaya Paintings and Drawings Contents
December 11, 2008
I’m Alive
I’m Alive is a play, written in 1990, and performed at the Seattle Playwrights Festival, winning the highest prize that year for a full-length drama.
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December 5, 2008
Joni
Joni is an attempt to tell what it was like to live with a woman whose presence was remarkable to all who knew her or met her.
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November 30, 2008
Fleshy Blue Boat
Fleshy Blue Boat is a collection of light poems, written in the early 70s.
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Steve Brooks (Abhaya) - Poetry, Prose & Art 
