This was a project for the new Ochsner Pediatric Facility. Emery Clark, the designer, had created a treatment for calming the anxieties of youthful patients and their parents while they awaited appointments. The ingredients were ambient music, lighting effects (rainbows and verse faded in and out intermittently on a cloud wall) and flourishes such as sheer or opaque cloud banners and mobiles. There was children's art in the windows of the front of the building and throughout the facility and even the parking garage entrance was decorated with serene wall images and mobiles.

My role was to collect all the visual elements and assemble them in a way that would help Emery visualize the end result. It began with a consultation, the architectural rendering, a lot of digital images of clouds and selected children's art. In Photoshop, I created layer comps of all the elements and produced a multitude of variables. From there they could determine what worked and what merely sounded good in theory.

Although most of the comps were used just for artistic decision making, I did create the art for the projected images. Creating the final 2-story, high quality cloud wall image was a job for specialists.

This is a useful tool when working on a large project that requires a lot of costly resources. This is no prevention for unexpected challenges but provides a solid starting point.

Back in the nineties, when I had more time on my hands, I formed a very rewarding and occasionally taxing association with a group called Voice from the Deep Puppet Theatre. The troupe was a loosely-formed collection of community-minded artists and Bywater neighborhood folks who got together and created papier-mâché puppets with an eye towards street theatre. (These were not marionettes but were usually quite large, sometimes requiring two to operate). We performed at festivals, Mardi Gras parades, Earth Day and even had some paid (to the organization) gigs performed with Casa Samba.

We eventually crested on November 1, 1990 with our Day of the Dead Parade. While the event was a enthusiastically received, the massive, year-long effort required to pull it off resulted in a group-wide case of burn-out from which we never really recovered.

However, I found that I still liked working in paper, wallpaper paste and found objects, so I continued in the medium and after a time was contracted by WWOZ to create busts of New Orleans musicians. It worked out. I ended up making the five big heads for 'OZ and was also hired by the Vieux Carre Commission to create a parade puppet for the Sidney Bechet Centennial.

This was fun but not very lucrative so at a point I had to turn down further offers. Up until the recently, WWOZ brought the heads out for photo ops during Jazz Festival. But alas, papier-mâché is not very durable. Neither these, nor any known Voice from the Deep puppets have survived Katrina related events...