I met Shane in 1992, and he was a year and a half older than me. I quickly looked up to him as a mentor. My senior year of high school was full of a lot of new and old friends and adventures, but sitting in his studio apartment while he painted, and chatting and bullshitting was probably the highlight.

When I moved New York adjacent, he was there for the first several months. He showed me around, including a method of buying weed that landed us in the middle of Louis Farrakhan’s Million Youth March. While I taught myself how to draw, he was my biggest cheerleader, and the first person to call me an artist.

He and his family moved upstate, which is where I spent my three-day weekends, working on two screenplays, one of which was lost to poor archiving and a then-sixteen-pound Newcastle sitting on my laptop. The other was completed, and because it was absurdly long, he and I spent a week last summer lengthening it into a five-episode series.

Our relationship had its ups and downs, and he’s not the best at long-distance communication, but we have stayed tight. An eternity ago, he was my Best Man. My ex-wife hated him and schemed to keep us apart, and it worked. However, we’ve reconnected since then, and I’m constantly sharing with him some of the many little drawings I’ve been doing.

I’ve prematurely written my memoirs, with each chapter representing an important character in my life, and you can bet Shane got one. With his help, I was able to correct a lot of the misinformation drilled into my head by someone I was married to, and now I have an accurate chronicle of our relationship until June 2022. I should probably update that.

The reason I’m calling you all here is because Shane is an accomplished painter, with shows across the US and a distinctive style I’m proud to say I’ve watched evolve, from awkward (but still beautiful) nudes of Sherilyn Fenn to the Cubist/Outsider style that is his brand, which seem to feature the same woman. I can’t judge because I frequently draw the same woman. Long story short, nobody paints like him.

As artists, we couldn’t be anymore different. His medium is oils and large canvases. Mine is pencil, ink, and watercolors. His subjects are deserts and cityscapes and surreal costumes. My subjects are characters from my writing oeuvre. He’s a painter, I’m more of a cartoonist.

Even though we see each other as equals and have been mistaken as brothers, I still look up to him, and I thought it would be really cool if I drew one of his paintings in my style. The result isn’t nearly as good as the original, but the process was fun and engaging and exactly the reason I’m an artist. (Mine’s on the right, in case you couldn’t tell.)