Here is my work. Here are some samplings of what I make. I am assaulting your provincialism with imagery and notions about being human and sexual. My art asks you to experience a spectrum of sexual enactments. And as it does for me, it allows you your responses — arousal, revulsion, esthetic interest — whatever. This art infers our having to make conjectures about it, bring premises to it. I visualize my drawings and art as actual happenings, as transactions, circumstances... and in so doing, this work bespeaks the person I am, and risks the vagaries of how others will see me. Ufemisms.com is my showcase for presenting selections of works of Norman Shapiro. The two very latest are a set of artist books done collaboratively with Guy Kettelhack, the gUY & nORMAN books. These and other Book Art editions are featured here. read more about Norman >> browse Norman's artwork >>   The 'gUY & nORMAN' set of 2 books is a collaboration in making book art. Each of these books demonstrates, to use Buckminster Fuller's term, a "syntegrity" of text and art — a serendipitously achieved harmony where poetry and illustration modify and affect each other in some of the ways that their creators affect each other as friends. Guy's poems pop differently because of the often audaciously 'pornographic' art that accompanies them; Norman's drawings breathe a different psychic air than they would solo — separate from the poems they illustrate. Get a closer look. Both books are, in essence, permutations of laying out poems on facing pages, choosing the fonts and the manner of their line by line, arrangements on the pages, Both are books that can be opened at any page, be read at the will, whimsy of the reader. The task of choosing images and where and how to juxtapose them, is rather surreal and intuitive. It is as though there were prescience, but it defies linearity, or even logic. Peruse the poems, the poetry, the sampling of the drawings collages, the effects of transparencies that overlay both words and pen drawings. Check out the prices, and how you can place your order for this pair of books... read more about the collaboration >> browse the gUY nORMAN books >>