Click on any image in Objects and Glassware, Puzzles, Books and Trellis Paintings for sizes and prices. New things are added frequently. 

     In Books, only the first four are currently available for sale by contacting me. The other books are available through the usual websites or, if out of print, through websites for used books.

The other galleries are shown for examples of my work, but not always with information as it is self-evident or irrelevant. 

For an article in Mission Village Voice, San Juan Bautista, California, I wrote this short explanation, if such a thing needs explaining, why I started painting barcodes into some of the small paintings:

I’ve been trying to remember when and why I first painted a barcode into one of my paintings.

After I started deciphering symbols that I found on tree labels, indicating whether the plant could be grown in full sun or shade, wet spot or dry, and so forth, I found them amusing. Most of them were easier to understand than the rapidly expanding collection of emojis, the meanings of which often elude me.

       But barcodes on products in stores don’t delight me. It’s a simple thing for which there seems to be an infinite supply as evidenced by my groceries at the store. And while everything has a barcode, not everything seems to have a price tag, the relevant information for a consumer.

       My first annoyance with the barcode came when my publisher had them affixed to the most beautiful of the books I had illustrated: Odes to Common Things by Pablo Neruda. The printing and production of the books were outstanding with quality paper, printing and binding except for the barcode/price tags stuck on the back of the book. If you try to remove the sticker it rips off the underlying board and the book is ruined. No matter how carefully you try to remove it the book will be scarred. Indeed, it was a battle.

        At the time I was illustrating books, I was making small paintings of objects and gold-leafing their surroundings. At first, they were images of birds, bugs, animals, and plants. And I started adding symbols on my paintings of goldfinches. I’m not sure why, maybe to differentiate one from the other, but they seemed funny to me. Of course, stickers and barcodes are intended to sell products, so I stopped resisting the obvious and painted a price tag on one of the goldfinches and a barcode on another.

        Once I gold-leafed the image of a leaf with a painted background on which I added “Real Gold Leaf” I recognized I’d entered full blown into the world of advertising or was it parody? And, of course, if I sell my art I am selling a product. This was never my original intention, but it is the reality. It’s a cliché but it is the artist’s perennial challenge in navigating a commercial world.

         The last small painting was simply an inscrutable barcode surrounded with gold leaf.

Please email if you'd like more information: ferriscook@gmail.com