Martin Graff is an artist, author, musician, and extreme-chin-beard enthusiast living in Arlington, VA. He imagines and illustrates faces―human, animal, alien, abstract―and writes poetic prose to associate with each. His live spoken-word show adds original piano compositions to heighten the experience. “It started in childhood. To amuse the five-year-old me, my father drew a face on the inside bottom of a large water thermos that he used for tennis. When you looked into the empty container, you could see a deep, swollen, horizontal slit at the end where the halves of the plastic mold came together. With a long pencil, Dad drew two black circles above the slit, now a ‘mouth,’ and my imagination was triggered: the resulting expression was weird, cute, and mildly foreboding all at once. That simple, neutral water bottle became a sentient oddity for  ...