This is the story of Jack Crazyquilt's arrival in the desert.

If you aren't familiar with Jack, he is one of the main characters of the graphic novel, Journey to the West, that Barbara and I co-created between 1998 and 2001. Jack is a coyote and a Zen student, living in the Southwestern desert. His teacher, SIfu, is either Bigfoot or Sun Wu-k'ung, the Handsome Monkey King and protagonist of the Chinese novel from which our story took its name. Or, perhaps Sifu is both. Jack is certainly only Jack.

Crazyquilt was my master's thesis project at the Maryland Insititute, College of Art during the spring of 2001. It began as an exploration of the search for enlightenment, but it became a mythologization of my experience of MICA and an exploration of my creative process.

In addition to the seven panels you see here, which were originally displayed as 13" x 19" prints, there is both a musical and a motion graphics component of the project. The musical portion I have released as a CD; it consists of a handful of songs created for and inspired by the project. All of that is available on the "Crazyquilt" CD page.

And so, without further ado . . . .