Illustrated Worlds

Alongside the client work, I build illustrated narrative worlds of my own: a tarot deck for an invented territory, an etched circus of the in-between, hand-lettered festival posters, cartographies of places that were never surveyed, a naturalist’s cabinet, machines salvaged from a vanishing farm, forty painted walls, and an almanac of a single year. I set the direction and I make the marks.

Plate I

The Widdershins Tarot

Illustrated cards & hand lettering · ongoing · carved, printed & mailed

A Major Arcana for the Widdershins world — twenty-two cards on the standard tarot spine, with my own invented inhabitants in the old roles. The cards arrive in whatever order they show up, and the seasonal ones are working objects: printed as actual cards and mailed out, around a hundred hand-addressed envelopes at the turning of the year. The Green Man holds XIX, The Sun, at midsummer; Krampus keeps the dark half of the year.

A tarot card is the strictest cover brief I know: one figure, one title, one world, read at hand size. Figure, lettering, and border are a single drawing.

Plate II

The Sideshow

Copper etchings · 2013 · Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis

Six seventeen-inch copper etchings of a circus that never quite makes the main tent: a crowned crocodile serving as a dirigible, an antlered giant carrying a fanged cat-imp, a carousel horse led through on small wheels. I etched the plates at Highpoint Center for Printmaking in my last Minneapolis year; the set first showed at Highpoint’s Threshold Gallery in 2013 and traveled on to print conferences and national exhibitions.

The earliest full company of my abiding subject — the performers at the margins of things, half graceful and half grotesque.

Plate III

The Posters

Illustrated posters & hand lettering · 2016–17 · Door County & De Pere, Wisconsin

Event posters where a title and an illustrated world share one frame. For Ephraim’s Fyr Bal Festival — the village’s Scandinavian welcome-to-summer, bonfires lit along Eagle Harbor — flaming bål torches, a hare, and a crow in engraving-weight line, with one hit of fire-orange in the lettering. For No Moon Theatre’s Box Store Bird, a moonlit pen-and-ink frame of owls, fireflies, and a salamander, the show’s name in a loose hand script at the center. Published under the Yonder studio flag; the illustration and lettering on these are mine alone.

This is the cover job at street scale: a single image that has to set a tone, carry the details, and make a stranger want to come.

Plate IV

Terra Incognita

Watercolor & drawing · 2023–24 · shown in Other Worlds, NEWArtSpace, De Pere WI

A cartography of the boyhood lands of Northeast Wisconsin, drawn in the voice of a natural historian who never existed. Ley lines, land wights, genius loci, and micro-seasons, all rendered as if surveyed from life. Shown by invitation alongside Jason DeMarte and Kristine Granger.

The whole series is an argument that an invented world holds together only when you draw it like a real one.

Plate V

Cabinet of the Wilding Hours

Installation & watercolor · 2025 · duo exhibition with Erin LaBonte

A life-sized field-naturalist’s wagon, twelve watercolor studies, and a full apparatus of field notes, built as one immersive cabinet. The wagon and a watercolor were acquired by the gallery.

Concept to object: the cart, the specimens, the labels, and the hand-lettered tags are all mine.

Plate VI

The Ruins of the Midwest

Salvage sculpture · 2006 · built at UW–Green Bay

In the year my family’s farm was breaking up, I built machines out of what it threw away. A trebuchet rebuilt from a burned harvest thresher that flung clay-and-seed balls out over a former field. A sensory-deprivation float tank welded from the horse trough my sister and I swam in as kids. Each one takes the farm apart and sends it somewhere it might come up again.

Made from what was already there, without asking permission. Half of what I built that year was made by not asking.

Plate VII

The Painted Walls

Murals & hand lettering · 40+ works across eight Wisconsin cities

Forty-plus public murals carried from concept to finished wall. The designs originate at my drawing table; the painting is a crew — most walls with Erin LaBonte under Yonder, with David Carpenter alongside on recent ones. Featured statewide in Our Wisconsin, 2026. Pictured: the Loodoo, a Lake Michigan water-wolf rising past a drowned shipwreck to meet a lantern-bearing diver, in an Algoma alley; the Mill Madonnas, a monumental wall in Oshkosh’s Sawdust District honoring the women of the lumber boom; and the harbor mermaid, her song composed around the windows of an entire building face. Where a wall calls for type, the lettering is painted by hand.

I research the collaborators, set the concept, and carry it to a finished piece on a wall. It is art direction at the scale of a building.

Plate VIII

Portage Year: An Almanach

Assemblage · collagraph, etching & found objects · 2013

A cosmological almanac built into a found doll’s case: a gilt dome and an orrery of clock gears and marbles over two lit chambers, skinned in my own older prints and pressure-fit together without a drop of glue. Part clock, part reliquary, part map of a single year of returning home.

Every part is the material of the ground the year was kept on. The dome of heaven is a dog’s ball, found in the street, halved and painted gold.