The Bridge to Making
The bridge has a date, or close to one. I was about eight years old, and two things happened that year that changed the trajectory of everything that followed. I started private art lessons with a man named John Gordon. And I got my hands on the Return of the Jedi concept art book by Ralph McQuarrie.
The lessons came first — or maybe the book did, I can’t be sure. What I’m sure of is that both said the same thing, arriving from different directions: someone made this. Someone’s job is to imagine worlds and paint them. That someone could be you.
John Gordon’s studio was in the Doty School building, an old schoolhouse in the area that various tenants rented out. The same building, as it happens, that Green Bay Christian School would later rent from — a coincidence that seemed strange when I learned it, two educational threads running through the same hallways at different times, both shaping me without coordinating.
The studio was an old classroom repurposed. Lots of art and bric-a-brac, still-life objects hanging on walls and piled on shelves. A very filled-in space, crowded with the accumulated evidence of years of looking at things carefully and drawing what you saw. Rows of drawing desks. And an etching press — the smell of that room still haunts me, in the good way, the nostalgic way. Eraser dust and etching ink and the faint mineral smell of graphite worn into paper over time. It was the first art studio I ever entered. I didn’t know what an art studio was. I just knew it smelled like a place where things got made, and I wanted to stay.
Gordon had taken the Suzuki method — designed for teaching music to very young children through immersion and repetition — and converted it into drawing instruction. He taught technique, patience, resolve. He had us fill in little boxes with pen textures, mimicking Xeroxed close-ups of real-life patterns — bark, stone, fabric — zoomed in and cropped until the surface became abstract. I still think of those exercises every time I do pen texturing. The hand remembers what the eight-year-old thought was busywork.
He gave art history slide lectures too, clicking through masters and movements in a darkened classroom while we fidgeted and watched the clock. I didn’t like the lectures. But they were a break in the monotony of drawing, and things got in. One slide was Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son — the giant, wild-eyed, mouth open, holding a body like bread. It horrified me and delighted me at the same time, a combination I didn’t have a word for and didn’t know I was allowed to feel. I still remember Goya. Gericault. Velazquez. Looking back, I think they find a way of working themselves into my art whether I intend it or not. I’m glad for all of it. I’m glad he did it.
I credit him with a lot of my early technical foundation. But I found it too rigorous for that age. The discipline was real, and I was eight, and the gap between those two facts was uncomfortable.
What I didn’t know then: Gordon had designed the Packers logo — the oval G, one of the most recognized marks in American sports. I discovered that fact decades later. He’d also had a student named Pete Poplaski, who went on to draw for Marvel Comics and, as the story goes, shack up with R. Crumb. The lineage runs: John Gordon in a rented schoolhouse in Wisconsin, to Poplaski, to Marvel, to the underground comix world. I was sitting at a desk in the headwaters of a stream that ran all the way to the countercultural core of American illustration. I was eight. I was bored. I was absorbing it anyway.
The McQuarrie book was the other detonation.
I had the Return of the Jedi concept art book as a kid — the one with paintings of scenes from the movie, but not the movie as filmed. The movie as imagined, before it existed. The difference mattered enormously, though I couldn’t have explained why. In a movie, everything is already decided. In a concept painting, everything is still possible. The light could fall differently. The creatures could look like anything. The architecture could bend in directions the final film never took. McQuarrie’s paintings were the movie’s dreams — the versions that lived in someone’s mind before budget and technology and committee pulled them into their final shapes.
I knew McQuarrie’s name at that age, because it was on the book. This matters. Knowing an artist’s name as a child means you’ve crossed a line. You’ve moved from consuming to studying. You’ve understood that the thing on the page didn’t appear spontaneously — someone made it, and that someone has a name and a biography and a practice. The concept art said the same thing the etching-ink studio said: there are people whose work is to imagine worlds and render them visible. The difference was that McQuarrie’s worlds were the ones I’d already been living in, through the action figures and the sandbox and the farm machinery cockpit. He’d painted the territory I’d been exploring with three-and-three-quarter-inch Kenner figures in the dirt. Seeing his work was like finding an aerial photograph of a country you’d only known on foot.
Later I found an old copy of the earlier movies’ concept art — Star Wars and Empire. Same revelation, deeper. The white-armored stormtroopers looked different. The lightsabers had different hilts. Darth Vader was leaner, stranger, more insectoid. The paintings showed a Star Wars that almost was, and the gap between the almost and the actual was where my imagination caught fire. The unrealized versions were more interesting than the real ones, because they left room for me to fill in the rest.
The D&D covers worked the same way, though I saw them at a greater distance. Larry Elmore, Jeff Easley, Clyde Caldwell, Keith Parkinson — fantasy illustration as fine art on a paperback. I’d see them at friends’ houses, at the edges of the forbidden zones, on shelves I wasn’t supposed to browse. The covers were paintings — not cartoon, not comic, not simplified for children. Full oil-and-acrylic fantasy scenes with lighting and atmosphere and a seriousness of craft that told you the imaginary world inside the book was being treated with the same respect a landscape painter would give a mountain range. Each cover was a window into a game I couldn’t play, painted by someone who took the game’s world seriously enough to light it like a Rembrandt.
The drawing started early and never stopped. I drew a lot, mostly from memory, because I didn’t have direct references. Material was slim, especially for a poor family. Not an art-supply household. The art happened despite the resources, not because of them.
It came in phases, each one total while it lasted.
Dinosaurs first. Every kid draws dinosaurs, but I drew scenes — volcanoes in the background, palm trees leaning in, a T. rex mid-stride with its mouth open, a pteranodon banking overhead. I was learning the tropes of the genre without knowing what a trope was: the lava, the ferns, the smoking cone on the horizon. What makes a dinosaur scene a dinosaur scene. Not anatomy — composition. Where to put the volcano so the eye moves. How many palm trees before the frame feels full. I was teaching myself the grammar of illustration through sixty-five-million-year-old subject matter.
Then whales. The blue whale was my favorite animal for a while. I think I was drawn to the biggest of things — the tallest building, the largest animal, the farthest planet. Top ten lists had a hold on me. I drew all the whales swimming together, pods of them, interacting, the way they moved through the water in relation to each other. Not isolated specimens. Scenes again — social worlds, communities, drawn from memory and whatever I could find in library books.
Planets and astronomy came in and out, never fully leaving. The solar system drawn to scale, or what I imagined was scale. Rockets. Saturn’s rings. The fascination would recede and then return, the way a radio station fades and comes back as you drive.
Then buildings. This was the longest phase, and the most obsessive. I drew the Sears Tower over and over, from different angles, in perspective, working out how a rectangular form that tall behaves when you look up at it from the street versus across from it at a distance. I drew it so many times, studied it so thoroughly through repetition, that my parents finally gave in and brought me to Chicago at a very young age just to see the thing in person. I drew all the buildings I knew of and ones I made up — skyscrapers, houses, imaginary and real, city skylines that existed nowhere but on the paper. Eventually the drawing graduated into crafting buildings from matte board and balsa wood, architectural models with actual walls and roofs and windows cut to scale, but that came later. The drawing came first. Always the drawing.
The buildings led to bases — secret ones. In second grade, if we finished an assignment early, Ms. Bugni would let us grab a sheet of manila paper, and I would draw military lairs in cross-section, the whole complex sliced open so you could see every level at once. A fake volcano with a chute down the center where a helicopter could descend into the hidden entrance. An underwater passage only a submarine could navigate. I drew the secret cannons and the bunker rooms, the inner layer impervious to bombs, the embattlements and decoys scattered across the surface to fool anyone looking from above. Tanks parked in underground hangars. Aircraft on concealed runways. The cross-section was the form — the same impulse that would later love Escher’s impossible architectures and the cutaway diagrams in books about rockets and warships. I wanted to see inside the thing. I wanted the walls removed so the system was visible.
The late Cold War was still running, and to a second-grader it was fascinating in a way that had nothing to do with geopolitics and everything to do with stuff. We still practiced bomb drills at school, filing into the hallway and crouching against the lockers with our hands over our heads, and I took it seriously in the way only a child can — seriously enough to believe my drawings were preparation. I was designing fortifications. I was planning for contingencies. If they ever put up the Berlin Wall in Wisconsin, I could navigate it. To me it was all a game, a design problem with unlimited stakes and unlimited manila paper. The tanks and aircraft and missile silos were toys of the imagination, thrilling and weightless. Later I would understand the horrors of war, even cold ones. But at seven, the cross-section drawings were just another form of world-building — the world sliced open, every secret visible, every system labeled and accounted for by a boy who thought architecture was a form of safety.
Each phase was a complete immersion — weeks or months of a single subject, explored from every angle I could think of, until I’d exhausted what I could do with it and moved on. Looking back, they were self-assigned courses. Nobody told me to spend a month on whales. Nobody assigned the Sears Tower or the volcano bases. I was building my own curriculum from whatever fascinated me, and the fascination was the only teacher I trusted.
The Star Wars posters were a major project. I made large posters for each of the three movies — assembled scenes from different parts of the films, probably inspired by the real movie posters but more primitive, more mine. Star Wars, GI Joe, Transformers. For some reason Mom didn’t outlaw these. She was too busy to monitor everything, and maybe the drawing itself, the visible labor of a child making something, registered as wholesome enough to pass beneath the radar. The content was space battles and laser guns. The activity was a boy sitting quietly at a table with paper and pencils. She let it go.
Materials were the constraint and the teacher. Manila paper, when we could get it, in limited supply. Then the computer arrived — a Vendex Headstart, embarrassingly not an Apple II, basically a paperweight with A and B floppy drives that cost Dad four thousand dollars. We played Jeopardy on it. I would look at binary code and think I could figure out how to program. I made quad-fold cards for my grandparents’ birthdays.
But the real value of the Vendex was its printer. The dot matrix printer used continuous-feed perforated paper — wide sheets connected end to end, tractor-fed, with holes along both margins. You could tear a sheet off, or you could not tear it off. You could unfold ten, twenty sheets and have a canvas six feet long. The infinite canvas. A kid solving a materials problem with whatever technology was at hand. I drew epic panoramas across the perforations, Star Wars battles that unfolded like scrolls. The computer failed as a computer but succeeded as an art supply.
I didn’t really trace. Again, the materials were slim. You couldn’t trace what you didn’t have a copy of, and we didn’t have copies of much. This was drawing from memory and imagination — the visual education from the television and the movies and the drive-in filtering through my hands onto paper, already transformed by the passage. What came out wasn’t accurate to the source. It was accurate to what the source had become inside me.
My first art show was at People’s Marine Bank in New Franken. Unlike the Last Unicorn free-ticket promotion, this was actually juried to some degree, even for a child. I did an eagle graphite drawing from a photograph — representational, careful, the kind of work that earns praise from adults because it demonstrates visible skill. People told me I was good. My parents told me I was good. The bigger family — aunts, uncles, Grandma — told me I was good. Uncle Ken told me I was good, and he meant it differently because he made things too.
Being told you’re good at something when you’re eight has compound effects. Not because the praise itself is nourishing — though it is — but because it creates a feedback loop. The child who draws is told he’s the child who draws. So he draws more. So he gets better. So more people tell him. The identity calcifies early: I am the one who makes things. It’s a gift and a trap. You get good at the thing you’re praised for, and the other things — the things nobody praises — atrophy from neglect. Helen drew too, probably more than most kids, but I got the feedback so I kept going. She got into other things. The feedback chose me, or I chose it, and the distinction stopped mattering decades ago.
Then there was a long gap.
I don’t think the work shifted away from kid stuff — purely representational, animals from photos, eagle drawings for bank lobbies — until I returned to college in 2007. The seed was planted at eight but didn’t get named as identity for almost twenty-five years. In between: high school art classes, which kept the pilot light on, and Deluvia, which burned in a different room entirely.
Deluvia started in spiral-bound lined notebooks. I would document characters, races, islands, their economies. I drew maps. I drew creatures. I built systems — not games, exactly, but the architecture for games that didn’t exist, worlds designed to be inhabited even if only by me. Part Time Bandits, part Dark Crystal, both seen in theaters, both suggesting that a complete world could be built from scratch if you committed to it.
The key fact: I built Deluvia because I couldn’t play D&D. The prohibition didn’t kill the world-building impulse. It forced it into a solo, original form. If I’d been allowed to play Dungeons & Dragons like the other kids, I might have spent those years inside someone else’s system, rolling dice on someone else’s map. Instead I made my own. The workaround became the practice. The practice became a world I’ve been building for thirty-nine years.
I can’t find any of the original notebooks. I hope they’ll turn up, but I doubt it now. The origin documents may be gone, but the world survived in my head. Whatever I drew in those spiral-bound pages — the races, the maps, the economies — it all migrated into memory and kept developing there, accruing detail the way a real place accrues history. Deluvia was never a game. It was a country I’d imagined into enough specificity that it stopped needing paper to exist.
Helen and others knew I was drawing, knew I had some world I was building in the sandbox and the notebooks. She played along when I needed a population. Mostly it was private. Not secret — I didn’t keep it hidden. But I didn’t excite anyone with the details. Shy about it. Afraid of judgment. The Enneagram 9 pattern already forming at ten years old: a rich inner world, held close, never pushed on anyone.
High school gave me three art teachers, each one a different kind of gift.
Miss Lapsley, freshman year. Classic foundational studies — paint in two complementary colors, use paint swatches to create a mosaic, learn to see value and hue. The fundamentals. The scales and arpeggios of visual art. Necessary, and I knew it was necessary, even when it wasn’t exciting.
Ms. Dillhunt, sophomore and junior year. The permission giver. She would let us do whatever we wanted. Class ran wild. Kids would occasionally skip and crawl through the labyrinth of the school, a behemoth of a building with corridors and stairwells that invited exploration. But mostly I took advantage of the freedom to make epic things.
The work I made in Dillhunt’s class was more contemporary than I appreciated at the time. I found a coconut that had been used for still lifes, cracked it open, filled it with paint, let it swing like a pendulum onto paper. Cut up the paper and re-collaged the results to make forms — an action-painting-to-assemblage pipeline that I didn’t have vocabulary for and wouldn’t have used if I had. I used the coconut in an installation that got into UWGB, Dillhunt’s alma mater. Big deal at the time. I built papier-mache beasts on armatures of two-liter bottles and plastic vessels, creatures that were clearly relatives of the ones I’d been drawing in the Deluvia notebooks. Paul Manke and I collaborated on a clay war scene — tanks, soldiers, an entire battlefield modeled at tabletop scale. I drew pictures of Grendel after reading Beowulf in English class. A lot of found-object work. The coconut, the plastic bottles, the scavenged materials — the pallet economy of the farm had followed me to school.
It was Dillhunt who took us to see the Norb Kox exhibit at UWGB’s Lawton Gallery. Cox painted vivid monsters in meticulous detail — kind of like Crumb, kind of like Bosch, very large canvases filled with fantastical and grotesque imagery. He was considered a visionary artist with a unique Christian perspective, especially on the Book of Revelation. For a kid raised in a household where rock music was demonic, seeing actual Christian visionary art that was dark, strange, fantastical, and spiritually serious — that was proof. Proof that the strange and the sacred weren’t opposed. That you could paint monsters and mean God by it. His paintings really spoke to me. I thought they were amazing.
Kox later became a teacher when I returned to school as an adult, then a friend. The connections loop forward. But that first encounter in the gallery, standing in front of his work at sixteen, was the moment the forbidden zones and the approved world overlapped for the first time in a way I could see with my own eyes. Dark art made by a Christian, hanging on a university wall, endorsed by my art teacher. It was possible to be both.
Ms. Dillhunt gave me permission to do anything, which served me well those two years. She didn’t teach technique. She taught latitude. The difference matters.
Ms. Dallaire, senior year. A friend of Mom’s — Mom had babysat her kid — so I had to behave myself now. The wildness of Dillhunt’s room gave way to something more structured, more studious, and it turned out I was ready for it. I took on MC Escher, mimicking his style, studying the impossible architectures and the tessellations and the way he made geometry do things geometry wasn’t supposed to do. I drew cathedral ceilings as if lying on the floor and looking straight up. I did an independent study on perspective — buildings, cities, house renderings, imaginary places — and a separate independent study on Escher. Plus normal senior art class on top of that.
She was a sincere, nice, encouraging woman. She bought me an Escher print as a graduation present. Tower of Babel. Impossible architecture, biblical hubris rendered as geometric obsession. I still have it. The fact that she chose that particular print tells me she understood what I was reaching toward better than I did. Not the Bible story. The architecture. The obsessive construction of an impossible structure that insists on its own logic despite being obviously, beautifully wrong.
Dad’s sci-fi collection was its own hidden curriculum.
He had a huge collection of paperbacks from his college years, stacked in the house where a different family might have kept Reader’s Digest. I would go through them when no one was looking — the Lensman series, the Barsoom books by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Asimov’s Foundation. At a very young age trying to read these, but mostly fascinated by the cover jacket art. The paintings on those paperbacks were another gallery, one I visited in secret. The artists weren’t credited on the front, or if they were, I didn’t notice. What I noticed was the worlds: starscapes, alien architectures, figures in space suits striding across landscapes that could not exist on Earth.
There was one book in particular. A series, actually — the Terran Trade Authority books by Stewart Cowley. Mostly illustrations. Sci-fi empires, warships, planetary systems, and one image I couldn’t forget: a man riding on a sea serpent with a saddle, very Syd Mead in feeling. The books named factions and empires — Arco, Phalen — that existed only in those paintings and their captions. A world built entirely through illustration and short prose. No novel. No game system. Just images and the space between them, which the reader’s imagination was expected to fill.
The Terran Trade Authority books were the first thing I encountered that did what Deluvia was trying to do: build a world through art, not narrative. I didn’t make that connection then. I was just looking at the pictures. But the form was the same — paintings as portals, images as world-building, the artist as architect of a place that existed only in the seeing.
Books weren’t censored the way TV and music were. Dad brought home Asterix comics from his college French travels. I “read” them at age three — meaning I absorbed Albert Uderzo’s dense European linework without understanding a word, which is the purest form of visual education there is. I could bring home Roald Dahl and Choose Your Own Adventure from the library without trouble. The printed page was safe in a way the screen and the speaker were not. A dad who didn’t advertise his inner life but had Barsoom and Foundation on the shelf. The forbidden zones weren’t just outside the house.
The Escher studies and Deluvia were separate tracks. Deluvia was purely my desire to create my own world, running since before I was twelve. The Escher work was about how — perspective, structure, the architecture of impossible spaces. Both fed the same appetite but through different doors. Deluvia asked: What world do you want to build? Escher asked: What does a building look like when it breaks the rules of building?
The line from childhood visual education to adult art practice doesn’t run straight. It runs through the hedges and the sandbox and the Saturday morning cartoons, through the action figures on century farm machinery, through the forbidden D&D covers glimpsed at someone else’s house, through an etching-press studio that smelled like eraser dust, through a concept art book that revealed the painter behind the movie, through dot matrix paper unfolded into scrolls, through a coconut pendulum, through Norb Kox’s monsters, through Escher’s Tower of Babel given as a gift by a teacher who saw what I was becoming before I did.
Not an art-supply household. Not a household that encouraged the imagination — not deliberately, not on purpose. But a household that couldn’t stop it, either, because the visual world was already inside me, put there by antenna television and holiday specials and drive-in movies watched through half-closed eyes, and the only thing left was for the consuming to become creating.
The bridge was always there. It just took twenty-five years to walk all the way across.