Wandering around some of the little towns outside of New York City and we found this wonderful piece of public sculpture — a giant head laying on it’s side on a massive marble stone. It’s the first of an edition of six cast from a 38 ton marble sculpture from artist Henry Schiowitz. The name of the series is Homage to the Masters.

It’s truly impressive in three ways. First, the concept. It’s an idea I’ve always loved — the mystery of a forgotten past, a broken piece of an epic tale fallen and discarded just waiting for discovery. It triggers all the fantasy and science fiction stories I’ve read. It echoes the pyramids of Egypt and Guatemala and those past civilizations. It’s the concept of something bigger than ourselves reinforcing our short lives and the fallacy of ego against time. I want one in my yard. I need one in my yard half buried looking out at the forest.

Secondly, the scale. The bronze weighs over 2,100 pounds and the marble base weighs 14 tons. It’s just…giant. You can almost feel the weight. There is also a delicacy to the sculpture as all that bronze is balanced on the stone at only three points.

The third impressive feature (or perhaps mystery), is the location. It’s perched just off the sidewalk next to a residential house and in front of a parking lot. It’s claustrophobic for something so massive. Something so big needs more space to breathe. Perhaps the location choice was intentional — to put it somewhere unexpected, as if the town grew up around the ancient head to imbue it with a deeper sense of time and history. To magnify this odd location choice, it’s directly across the street from an small public park (and parking lot). One would think a park would be the natural choice for a public sculpture, but no, it sits…amidst the modern world somewhat hidden and diminished from it’s past glory.

Sparkill, New York.

Everyone is in a lot of calls these days. Phone calls, video calls, teams calls, zoom calls. We used to have meetings and now we have calls. The traditional way to stay alert (or to kill time) during a meeting, is to doodle. And for years, this was my preferred way to go through a meeting. I’m a prolific note taker, so doodling in the margins (or the whole page) was just another “note” in my mind. Like many designers, I’ve got notebooks full of doodles, some of which have revealed great ideas, cute illustrations or other worthy gems.

But now, my notes have shifted to text files, so there’s no more doodling. A sad side effect of never leaving my laptop behind for a meeting. In the before times, I’ve always preferred a hard copy notebook over any electronic device. It was a nod of respect to whoever was leading the meeting — sort of like leaving your smartphone face down (or never taking it out). It announces that I won’t be actively doing something else while I should be paying attention to the meeting. Maybe it’s generational.

So while I’m now no longer drawing in the margins, I’ve found myself — quite by accident — creating little mini sculptures during my meetings calls. After snacking on something at my desk, I end up chewing on a toothpick which acts as a kind of fidget spinner to distract part of my brain while I focus on design, coding or whatever is being said on the call. At some point, the toothpick will break and I’ll put the pieces down on the desk and start arranging them.

It all started innocently and unconsciously enough, but soon I was actively in the creative process and rearranging little pieces of wood again and again. It was really just an exploration of shapes and color in a sort of 2D/3D mix. I think the project has run it’s course and I’m done with these, but we’ll see how it goes. Maybe I should redraw the set? Here’s a video showing a bunch of the individual sculptures.

Note: No flies were hurt during the making of this film. The fly was not alive when I took the photo. I think it died of old age. I just found it’s corpse the integrated it into the sculpture.

Finally, I love toothpicks and could write an entire post about them, but let’s just leave it as: my favorite toothpicks are party picks.

On a recent cold December night, I was walking through downtown Dallas when I ran into this thing. It’s absolutely huge and lit up at night, it was a truly unexpected and bizarre sight. Adding to the mystery, is it’s isolation on the field of astroturf and that it’s locked behind large gates with multiple trespass warning signs.  It was so unexpected and arresting that I went back in the morning to take these photos. I recommend seeing it at night for maximum weirdness. You can read more about it in this article.

Dallas, Texas.