Author
Editor
Artist
Photographer
Graphic Designer
Publisher
Takes out the trash when the can gets full

IF you've landed here by accident or by search engine (same thing, really), this majorly disorganized, re-organized webpage is now peachier, and with extra copious whipped cream. No sugar added. The hot news from J-land is hot coffee in hot coffeehouses with hot Jay art right there in front of hot coffeedrinkers. Hot! Other hot artshow news is now on a cluttery page of its own.

The Cat Being in the picture at right is my long-time favorite, Puddy Tat (as in, "I tawt I taw a..."). A stray, he wandered up one day and kept me as his human for nine years. Here Puddy Tat sits by the fence contemplating his strategy for taking over the world. Or something. These days, besides petting other people's cats, I write books, create photographs, and design brochures, catalogs, and other stuff for clients. Also, I diet off and on. Currently:  off. Way off. I once wasted major amounts of spare (?) time playing classical guitar, but gave that up years ago in favor of playing CD's. I took up keyboards, too, and banjo. The banjo episode was the best. The neighbors paid me to go back to guitar pickin'.

Jay the Photographer

My favorite vocation and avocation is photography. Photos gratia artis. There's a whole section here where I show off, not even counting the Jay artshow pages.  As you might expect, the official online Jay Family Album contains lots of portraits by me.  Not much has survived the internal combustion of my dysfunctional family, so most of the album photos here are recent. In addition, my travels have yielded a trove of images for which the Smithsonian, or maybe the dumpster, will surely pine.

Photographically, I lean toward a group of interests that I've developed over many years. Some are at long last ready for prime time. Some should have been discarded decades ago, but... well, I have trouble deciding which is which. My series include a fashion shoot in the mountains near Helen, Georgia. High fashion in the lush forest: some for art, some for commercial porpoises, but all fun. Then there's the Bard thing - Shakespearean drama regarding March's Ides in the amphitheatre at a city park. And of course the zoo. Not much is finer than roaming around Riverbanks Zoo snapping away with the digital camera. Here's a page to show off. A downtown digital photo excursion recorded zinnias and a grasshopper (has nothing to do with martial arts). Check out the Summer Gallery.

There's also a new page from my commercial portfolios, a collection of product pictures for Calli Purple Soaps and Stuff. This is all fancied up in a Flash/Javascript/XML web app, so if you don't have all that functional in your browser don't even look.

Jay's raison d'etre

The lady in the picture is my mother. Without her I'd be nothing, to say the least. Alas, she's gone to that Great Hair Salon in the Sky. The man on the left in this picture is my step-father, James Logan. If you have a friend as good as he, then you are fortunate indeed. This is a portrait by me, natch. Snapped it with my 4x5 Calumet view camera in their den a couple of decades back.

Pictures of my late father are way scarce. For one thing, he was always the shutterbug, the one who yells "say cheese" and unleashes the Flashbulb Dots Vision Syndrome. At right is William Gross himself, photographed by moi with my Hasselblad 500c while he photographed me with his Kodak Instamatic. We clicked each other at dusk on the lawn in front of my photo lab. The Old Man spent most of the latter part of his life in Rochester, New York, annually revisiting the South to pursue the elusive fish of central Florida. Some of the time he took the car train, but when he drove the whole route he stopped off in town for a chat and a night's rest. Born in Rochester, he didn't mind the winters there. I was born in South Carolina and didn't mind the summers here. So... Well, you know.

Meanwhile back at the raunch, Jay's Unauthorized Autobiography is undergoing a massive makeover, morphing from static web pages to interactive blog. Have a look, if you dare. If you think it might help or even if you're sure it won't, you can email encouragement, magic potions, incantations, invocations, provocations, extra fonts, and the recipe for that celestial pudding (in case the escalating rent on this tenement comes due again).
Anyhow, what with the infernal diabetic diet that forbids all forms of anything edible, and a succession of late of guilt-laden desserts that blow the sugar counts to the stratosphere, but mostly out of mischief as usual, this site got updated yet even another one more good time again, December the 28th, 2009. Ever more revolting developments are indubitably yet to develop (Dk-50, 1:1 12 minutes), so please look in again to see what's new or scandalous or both.

Books by Jay Gross (so far)