Our meeting was long but went well, we thought, and a cause for celebration.  We asked our concierge to book us a table at a restaurant on the nearby island of Gulang Yu, but as we were leaving for Japan the next morning we thought we should first find a gift for our host there, and having found it in the vast shopping mall of our hotel, made the mistake of agreeing to have it gift wrapped.  We were courteously guided to the hotel’s Guest Satisfaction Center on a different floor where we learned that in order to have our gift wrapped, we first had to to become members of their Guest Satisfaction Club.  Well, OK, we figured (wrongly) that that would be faster than finding gift wrapping paper etc. ourselves, so we started filling in the forms (requiring getting our passports), which then unleashed the staff of three to spend the next hour and a half of our all our lives finding and then presenting options in wrapping paper, ribbons and cards, followed by an excruciatingly immaculate, slow-motion wrapping of the gift.  By the time we changed for dinner it was already late, and by the time we caught a taxi to the ferry, and the ferry to the island, our restaurant had closed and, mapless, we roamed the steamy, winding walkways of Gulang Yu, lined with the moldy relics of British colonial mansions, until we found a place that agreed to still feed us.  We returned to our hotel room well past midnight and threw ourselves with our sweat soaked clothes into the jacuzzi.  The next morning came all too soon but was mercifully undemanding; a taxi ride to the airport and a flight back to Japan.

Weekdays on Yas Island, Abu Dhabi

In common with a lot of guys, I don’t remember the actual moment of conception.  My first recollection of what was to become Take One (click on the Arttickle 1 button above) is my describing it fully formed to a couple of fellow architects I was driving around Dubai Marina with at the end of 2008 who had asked me what I would do now that my job on the Ferrari Theme Park in Abu Dhabi had ended.

Weekends at the Dubai Marina.

That description worked well as a joke and stayed with me when I went to visit my mom in Australia in January 2009.  She’s an artist who lectured in and created architectural ceramics during her working career, but at 86 had moved on to less physically strenuous media, leaving her workshop unused but fully equipped.  In the back of my mind I think I had expected to describe it to her and have her execute it, but as luck would have it, she was down with a cold when I arrived and stayed that way for two weeks, long enough for me to realize that if it was to happen, I would have to sculpt it myself.  Fortunately, having grown up watching my mom at it, working in clay was not particularly a mystery to me.  I did some architectural drawings: plan, section, and elevations to accommodate the tissue box, and wit

h more than a little help and guidance from her (and to her credit, given the shock and awe she experienced finding that the fruit of her loins would dream of doing something like that), materialized the form I had described to my pal

s in Dubai. Then came a moment in which the single idea blossomed into an on-going concept. We needed to have a mold made of the finished female figure, and I had interrogated a mold maker closely regarding any religious or moral scruples that might make it awkward for him to execute the job. Having assured me that there were none, I brought out the model at which he expressed surprise that it was in female form and not, as he had expected, male. For my part, I had never conceived of the dispenser to be any gender other than female, but on reflection realized both the obligation and opportunity that evenhandedness on this issue offered, and that opened up the field from a single gender and purpose concept to a cascade of like-minded artifacts. Inciden

My mom, Regina, and me, and her workshop

tally, it was never my intention to fit erotic or pornographic art categories; I use genital forms in a straightforward and realistic manner because evolution has seen to it that we find them attractive and it seems perverse to ignore that.

I returned to L.A. at the end of February with glazed, fired prototypes in hand. The next couple of months were spent settling in with Carla, the girl I would have settled in with in 2005 had it not been for a two year job opportunity in Cincinnati and Dubai which turned into three years in Cincinnati (http://tinyurl.com/6ds84em) and another one in Abu Dhabi (http://tinyurl.com/6ds84em).  In May of ’09 I started building the website and looking for a commercial ceramics manufacturer.  It didn’t take long to come to the conclusion that China had taken over ceramics production. Through http://www.alibaba.com/, a website that allows buyers and vendors anywhere on the globe to find each other, we eventually found a manufacturer in Xiamen who was willing to manufacture Arttickle 1, and off we went to seal the deal.