Heather Joi, the artist who illustrated my latest poetry collection, "Poems For Lovers" was introduced to me via the Internet, and I became her patron on Patreon. Check out Patreon. It is a great way to support artists. In any event, she posted about doing the illustrations, and I am impressed by her work and insight to my work. I do tend to "snapshot" life moments, together with a "stream of consciousness" that leads to an insight about life. Here is her post:
"The illustrations i have been working on are finished! This was a fun project. I went through Rick's poems, he is a prolific writer, and selected poems that stood out to me for their illustrative quality. After reading and re reading... once i felt i had a good feel for the poems, i set out to create the illustrations. i opted for elegant ink drawings because the poems seemed to have a snapshot feel to them; a sudden moment of inspiration captured by a stream of consciousness. i wanted to create illustrations that reflected this feeling. after deciding on the poems and the style, i set forth to compose. i created thumbnails of each of the poems in order to work out the composition. once i had sorted that out, i set out to ink the drawings. now, the thing that is interesting about simple work is that it actually takes a lot of practice to get the image right. the images have to appear effortless while, in fact, there are hours of work put into them. the analogy i often use to describe this is Matisse. he is a master of creating simple works that take an extraordinary amount of work. for instance, his portrait drawings look incredibly simple... almost like a child drew them. their playfulness is what makes them compelling while one realizes that the whole drawing is an unbroken line, you become astounded. not that i am comparing my drawings to Matisse, by any means ha ha ha, but it is a good way to describe the effort behind simple work. it takes a lot of practice to make something appear effortless. so without further ado, here are the images!

