The Last Bedroom

2011 ornament

2011-12-28T17:04:00.000-08:00

Back in the late 70s, we used to make Christmas ornaments as a girl scouts fundraiser. They were made from old Christmas cards, cut into circles which were then folded into triangles. The triangles were stapled together along the 3 edges, and 25 of these made a ball ornament. The bigger the original circle cutouts, the bigger the resulting ball. And of course there would be glitter on all the edges (to conceal the staples). We made huge ones and also little ones.

I hadn't made those in a long time, but decided to make another style of ornament from the 2011 cards. We don't get so many cards any more (since we don't send any...ahem). But there were enough cards with the right size images to make this. I used 4 cottage cheese container lids as the substrates, gel medium as the glue to cover the lids with scraps of decorative paper. With the plastic lids, I didn't need to worry about grain and I could use any little bit of paper scrap I had! Yippee! Wrapped gold ribbon around each of the segments and put one coat of GAC 500 over the decorative paper. The card cutouts were then collaged on after that. This is followed by gold paint along the edges...but of course!

The top shot is a star, from the Scarlet Star Studios.

Here are shots of a few of the segments. This is a snowflake from my mom.

Some Christmas stockings from a friend's mom.

From the famous Michael5000. Although I must say that, since he only spent 3.5 cents on this card, the paper is rather thin and weak, and it's not keeping the 2 halves open very well, against the push of the neighboring cards, which are clearly made of more stout stock. (OK, he might've said that he spent 35 cents on the card, but of course, I can no longer tell because the card is now cut up and glued to the ornament.) I even had to give it a little help by attaching another small piece of paper; but alas, it didn't help much.

And from a college friend and his wife.

Red Bean Paste and Apple Pie

2011-12-20T16:33:00.000-08:00

Hey, I got my 2012 RACC Project Grant for Red Bean Paste and Apple Pie! Here's the intent for this project proposal:

"I will create a series of paintings using food as a metaphor to explore my transformation as a first-generation American. Nothing is more personal than each mouthful we put into our bodies, but what we eat and how we eat it are both seen as cultural and political indicators. I will use this duality to explore what it means to be an immigrant American by examining the changes to my diet and eating habits since immigrating to the United States. The paintings will be small format diptychs in gouache and acrylic on paper mounted on panels. This is the second of a multi-part series on immigration and migration."

I'll be starting to work on these paintings pretty much immediately. I've promised a lot of paintings, and at the speed I paint, it's gonna be a full time gig.

The first part of this multi-part series on immigration and migration is, of course, The Laundry Maze. Here's the proposal for The Laundry Maze , and here's the webpage set up for doing the survey.

You should, of course, help spread the word!

The third part is a book. It will be one-of-a-kind, and pretty big. At least as I see it in my head right now.

Two hummingbirds

2011-12-08T23:36:00.000-08:00

Hummingbird of the Day, gouache & acrylic, 12"x12", 2011

Hummingbird of the Night, gouache & acrylic, 12"x12", 2011

Doing a commission is a lot different than doing something without a final client in mind, especially in this case where stories were provided, although I was able to add my own little twists to the basic premise. Definitely not the usual mode of operation around these parts where I'm making up the story as I go, and changing the rules as I go. The final images are above, here are some process photos:

Initially, I wanted the two pieces to be bolted together and so the rocks continue from the right into the left piece. But after I completed them both, I decided they were better on their own.

Two years and nine months later...

2011-09-25T18:46:00.000-07:00

We have a book!

This was the book I started with an elderly WWII vet back at the start of 2009. His wife heard about the project I did at Rose Schnitzer Manor and thought I might be interested in working with him. And now two years and nine months later, I have completed the project!

The book is an edition of 26, Gocco printed on Nepal Heavyweight, a handmade paper from Nepal; each also has 5 etchings on cotton paper handmade by Helen Hiebert.

Here's a stack of a few books. The cover paper is handmade mulberry paper from Taiwan. The image is Gocco printed and then brushed with a foam brush.

The front & back covers, and the back of the accordion. The back cover is created using the same method as the front cover.

Detail on the back of the accordion. It's the melody from San Antonio Rose. If you know the song, you can follow along. Otherwise, it might just look like a landscape or the water.

The opening pages.

The first trifold. The brown paper with the etching is made by Helen and contains soil from the South Dakota farm that he was born and raised in.

The trifold opened up.

The second trifold. The blue paper with the etching contains water from the Pacific Ocean.

The trifold opened up.

The third trifold. The green-blue paper with the etching contains water from the Columbia River.

Opened.

The fourth trifold. The gray-blue paper with the etching contains water from the Willamette River.

Opened.

The last trifold. The brown paper with the etching contains soil from his Oregon farm.

Opened.

The closing pages.

Good news on the "pillow books"

2011-07-29T15:08:00.000-07:00

Yippee! The University of Washington Special Collections just purchased all four of the "pillow books"! These were made at the beginning of my interest and work on progressive memory loss, and right before I started working with the elderly who are at various stages of dementia. I'm thrilled that they're going together to this wonderful collection. The UW collection also has a copy of all the books I created with the elderly.

So here are some images of the four "pillow books". There are more images and write-ups on all four books (and more) here.

Below, Random Cruelty

Tenuous Connections

A Dog's Tale

Cradles for Our Memories

More Relay Replay progress report

2011-07-24T16:32:00.000-07:00

Definitely in book mode now. I actually finished all the etchings for this book back in March, and then didn't make much progress other than trimming papers. But I've been working on it in earnest now for the last couple of weeks and here are some process photos. There are 5 etchings all together (solarplate etchings) on each of the 5 sets of handmade paper made with soils and waters collected from various places (see this link for more on the papers and also some mockup pictures).

The main text block will be Nepal Heavyweight (handmade in Nepal), and the papers made by Helen Hiebert will be laminated to that. Each page is a trifold. On this photo you can see one etching (brown paper in the back) is already laminated to its trifold (already partially folded), and in the front a 2nd etching that I'm in the process of attaching to the Nepal Heavyweight.

This photo shows another etching with a topographical map gocco printed on one of the sections.

On the drying rack --

A peek into the trifold. Different images/text will be gocco printed on each of the sections.

Another page with 1 section printed.

In and Out of the Box

2011-06-29T14:02:00.000-07:00

Woohoo, I got into In and Out of the Box exhibit with The Medium is the Baggage! You can see some process photos here. The acceptance letter started with (paraphrase) "there were so many qualified applicants and unfortunately...", so I figured I didn't get in, but then it said "I am pleased to let you know that the juror selected your work to be included..."! So woohoo!

Here's a shot right before I packed it all up:

This was the statement I sent with the piece:

The Medium is the Baggage examines the reality of product vs. the medium it is packed in by inverting the relationship between the two entities.

Practical or aspirational, the products we purchase often have limited live spans – they break down, wear out or we simply move on to the next new thing; they are, in effect, disposable. In mail-ordering, we have found something that will last generations. With the exception of biodegradable starch foam & paper packing, most packing materials are various forms of plastic that do not biodegrade and recycling is limited. When recycling is available, the materials are recycled into other forms of plastic.

In short, these packing materials are the heirlooms that we leave for future generations. By presenting 20 packing materials in a clamshell box packed in shredded mail-order catalogues, The Medium is the Baggage puts product and packing in their rightful places within the historical context.

Made mostly from repurposed materials that had previously arrived by mail - one Amazon shipping carton, various packing materials and mail-order catalogs. Other materials include recycled paper, repurposed mylar and packing tape.

Now lets work on books for a bit

2011-06-20T00:16:00.001-07:00

After finishing the last of those 7"x7" panels, I'm returning to books for a while.

Here's one that I thought would be a fun, quick project, but I sunk 40+ hours into it, most of that time was spent on researching the various packing materials that are commonly found in mail ordered products. I tried contacting materials scientists, I looked on the web, and I called a foam/plastic manufacturer.

Now I know the difference between polyurethane, polyethylene, polystyrene, expanded polyethylene and expanded polystyrene. Phew! I wonder how long that information will keep in my head...as opposed to how long the actual materials will keep, which is basically forever.

The book is made from mostly repurposed materials that had previously arrived to me via mail — an amazon box, various packing materials, mail-order catalogs (indirectly through a neighbor); and then there's also recycled printer paper, mylar rescued from the JWSC trash bin and packing tape.

I wanted to make a sampler box of packing materials. So here I'm putting together the tray.

Here's the completed clamshell box made from the amazon shipping carton. On the left is the index to the samples, and the samples in their little cubbyholes on the right.

The clamshell box will be shipped, packed in shredded mail-order catalogs.

29th & 30th panels

2011-06-02T21:40:00.000-07:00

Cosmic Bowling, gouache & acrylic on paper mounted on birch panel, 7" W x 14" H

These are the last of the 7" x 7" panels I got for myself as a 49th birthday present! A year and half later (almost two years), I'm finished! Yay! If I've been consistent, then clicking the tag shut up sit down paint will bring up the whole series. Of course, I've also worked on a few other pieces in between, and if you click the tag painting then you should see those too.

I started these two panels at the same time I started Lichen and Ancient History, and you can see that they started life more or less the same. (Although now that I'm looking, I see that I did not include process photos for Lichen...well, you'll have take my word for it.)

But pretty quickly, I turned it vertical and it became a very different beast, lobster claws and all. Here it is about mid-way:

I really wanted to get this done today, before I head to Seattle for the opening of the Gallery 110 exhibit, so I've been working on it pretty consistently for several days. And of course, the top image is the completed painting. It does not yet have the acrylic on it; I'll do that when I get back. I have several pieces batched up waiting for the acrylic and the edge finishing, all of which I'll do at the same time.

Gallery 110 exhibit, Seattle, June 2011

2011-06-01T14:14:00.000-07:00

Here are the four sculptural books I will be showing at the June exhibition at Gallery 110:

Clockwise from top left: Superfoodland!, Tenuous Connections, Random Cruelty and A Dog's Tale.

Exhibition details:

Past Journeys/Present Tense
Gallery 110, Wed-Sat, 12-5pm
Artists' Reception, June 4, Saturday, 5-8pm
110 3rd Ave. S, Seattle, WA 98104

You can read more about the three pillow books on my website following these links: A Dog's Tale, Random Cruelty and Tenuous Connections.

Process photos for Superfoodland! are here: gocco'ing the cards, painting the board, polymerclay utensils and polymerclay blueberries.

Process photos for the pillow books (among other things) are here.

Mr. Seahorse

2011-05-13T18:32:00.001-07:00

This is the result of a failed experiment. But yes, I like it. I see some possibilities for it.

Gouache & white pastel pencil on gampi, sandwiched between 4 sheets of gampi glued together with GAC 500. So there are 5 layers of gampi all together. Shot on a window.

In my previous experiment, I played with using Chinese mulberry paper to paint/draw on, and then attaching it to a gouache/acrylic surface. The mulberry paper is thin, but only slightly transparent (as you can see in this entry; it was also really easy to handle, and it dampened very easily and evenly.

So today, I tried doing the same thing with a gampi paper that is known as 'Japanese silk tissue.' It's not silk, it's a gampi fiber made into a super thin, fairly transparent paper. it's often used in conservation work.

So first, I made 2 sets of 2 swatches, one of the Koh-i-noor watercolor pencils and another of the gouache (I didn't bother with the pastel pencils this time). Attached it to a gouache/acrylic scrap using the spritz & dust method using wheat paste. For the most part, it's really hard to see where the swatches even are! And it was very difficult to dampen the paper evenly; the paper was also harder to handle after dampening. And with the paper unevenly dampened, it's not uniformly transparent throughout. It's pretty much impossible to see the Koh-i-noor swatch (on the left).

While the swatches were drying, I also started the seahorse with gouache. The paper puckered and stayed puckered. I started with a very watered down black+brown pigment and finished it with a white pastel for highlights. This is shot attached to newsprint.

At this point, looking at the swatches drying, I decided to not bother collaging the seahorse onto another drawing/painting. Instead, I decided to sandwich it between more layers of gampi, and the result is the top image.

I can definitely see some possibilities for this, maybe in a book, or in a sculptural work.

Ms. Potato Head

2011-05-12T00:52:00.000-07:00

My friend and fellow artist Catherine Alice Michaelis of May Day Press planted some potatoes. And she said that if it was true that you are what you eat, then she would be a potato. So this is the kind of potato that I think she might be:

Gouache & watercolor pencils on Chinese mulberry paper.

It's actually an Ernst Haeckel image that I've shaped into more of a potato shape. It's part of a new experiment that I'm trying. So here it is, earlier in the night, when it's mostly just sketched in with the gouache and I've just started to draw the 'blooms.'

Remember that drawing of a peony that I didn't use for the the 27th & 29th panels? I used it here. The larger drawing was a doodle I made a few weeks back in gouache.

I spritzed the back side of the peony nice and wet (it's done in koh-i-noor watercolor pencils and it did not run when I spritzed it), dusted it with dry wheatpaste powder, flipped it over and pasted it down on the larger drawing. Since the larger drawing was not dampened, it is now slightly warped. The exercise was to see if the spritzing and wheatpaste powder would work as a glue for collage on gouache painted surface when I can't or don't want to brush on the glue. This was a trick Jane Pagliarulo of Atelier Meridian taught me for chine colle, and it works really well here too!

(If I were doing this for real, this would be on a board, or I would've dampened the substrate so it wouldn't warp.)

The experiment started with this -- I made 2 sets of 3 swatches with pastel pencils, koh-i-noor watercolor pencils and gouache. I pasted 1 set onto a scrap (painted w/ gouache & acrylic) using the spritz & dust method, and compared the result to the control set. None of the mediums had problems with being spritzed on the back side, even on the thin mulberry paper. The pastel pencils did rub off easily, but the water caused no damage that I could detect.

27th & 28th Panels

2011-04-25T22:39:00.000-07:00

Ancient History, gouache & acrylic on paper on birch panel, 14" W x 7" H

Another diptych, but this one actually started out as a vertical. I was playing around a lot with this. This was created with dripping a lot of paint onto the paper and then using a hard brayer to move the paint around. There were several iterations of this, each time with a different color, all fairly thinly mixed. Sometimes I would let the paint sit for a bit before I took the brayer to it, other times I'd do it while it was fresh.

I think I turned it horizontal fairly early on though. Having decided that it was a landscape, with a bit of sky showing down the middle. I brought out the land formations. Then the last issue of the Thursday Home & Garden section had a story on peonies. I saved the photos and was doing some drawings based on the photos. Heck, I might as well put the peonies right on the piece...

I was watching a video of another artist working and was inspired to try some of her techniques. She works in encaustics and makes drawings of individual elements and then collage them onto her final piece. I know a lot of artists use this technique, but her work was the first to really knock me over. Her pieces are cohesive, integrated and complex, all the while maintaining that luminous look. (See Lori Field's website.)

Although I don't use encaustics, I figure I'd try out the technique — not sure where I wanted to go with this piece at this point, I made a separate peony drawing on mulberry paper, cut it out, and was playing around with placing it on the image. In the end, the additional peony wasn't doing it for me, and I really wanted to see the land/rock instead.

I considered putting a couple of giant praying mantises on there, but in the end decided on some pre-historic looking ferns. And that's the top photo. If you click on it, you can see the details on the larger version.

Thumbtacks...a lot of them!

2011-04-21T22:26:00.001-07:00

I have no idea where this came from, but for a couple of weeks, I kept on seeing drawings and paintings of thumbtacks in my head. I tried to ignore them, but I kept on seeing them. I hope I'm not developing something weird. But anyhow, I finally decided that I should just do a drawing of thumbtacks:

Took me over 10 hours to fill up this sheet of 26"x40" Rives Lightweight with little drawings of thumbtacks; they're roughly life sized, although I would not say precise — some of them look just like the letter T, and some look like those tags you find on cloths. The color variations and color shapes are random. I mixed 3 colors: silver with red, silver with turquoise, and then charcoal gray, and just started putting down thumbtacks on paper. Now I suppose I'll have to count to see how many thumbtacks there are.

19th through 26th panels...

2011-03-25T23:40:00.000-07:00

Lichen, gouache & acrylic on paper mounted on panel, 7" W x 14" H

OK, yes, I'm still working on those 7x7 panels. Lichen was finished tonight, and they would be the 25th and 26th (out of 30).

These two below were finished last October, and comprised of panels 19th, 20th, 21st, 22nd (seen here, here and here), and also 23rd and 24th (in progress here).

I made 2 triptychs out of them.

Hummingbird I, gouache & acrylic on paper mounted on panel, 21" W x 7" H

Hummingbird II, gouache & acrylic on paper mounted on panel, 21" W x 7" H

I actually started two more hummingbirds, but they didn't make it. They turned into Lichen! See above.

Something about a peacock?

2011-03-16T16:15:00.000-07:00

Untitled yet, but might be something about a peacock. [OK, this really looks way more like a duck, so maybe something about a duck?]

Gouache on paper mounted on board (will soon have a coat of acrylic over it too)
12" x 12"

So this piece took me less than a year to complete! (Took about 12 days from start to finish, and I was up until 3am on many days working on it.)

I was inspired by this dress, called "The Wave", and you can see the ad I clipped out of the paper on the left. I'm obviously using the image in a rather, ahem, loose manor, as it barely has any resemblance to the dress. I really wanted to do a piece where the colors are not so intense (like the last piece); and I also wanted to do a piece where I leave some white space. I seem to be incapable of leaving white space, so I wanted to do that. And that turns out to be barely manageable—leaving white space, that is—but I left some. Maybe I'll do better on the next one.

I love the idea of looking at what seems like an infinite world, either through a microscope or through a telescope; I don't think I'll ever tire of doing that. Even without the aid of a scope, the world we can see through our naked eyes is so full of life known and unknown. I like the ambiguity of not knowing what I'm looking at, the juxtaposition of possibilities, of the microscopic, the cosmic, and of the everyday garden variety of life.

I also like the ambiguity of animate and inanimate objects...are those flowers or rock formations? Or maybe mushrooms.

At this point, I was thinking maybe this was a rock that was blowing fish eggs out of its mouth, but it really just looked too much like a peacock for me to ignore it. So a peacock it became. (See top image.)

They've Got Gold Trouble

2011-02-20T13:23:00.001-08:00

They've Got Gold Trouble (temporary title, still considering other options)
Gouache on paper mounted on board (it will soon also get a coat of acrylic on top)
12" x 12"

Apparently, it took me exactly one year to finish this painting. (Well, I finished it sometime after midnight, so I suppose technically it was a year and a day...)

Looking through my archives, this first photo was taken Feb 19, 2010, and this was how this painting started — a pour and 3 spritzes with a water bottle that created the 3 bulbous spots:

I didn't work on it again until October of 2010, when I needed a demo piece for Portland Open Studios and I thought this looked like a demo in the making. During the two weekends, I worked on this on and off in between talking to people. I really didn't have anything in mind, it was meant to be a demo piece, something I could do while talking at the same time. But I wanted to preserve the three bulbous forms, I really liked those, for whatever reason. And at the end of two weekends, I had:

It was January, 2011 before I got back to it, hoping to finish it in time for the PCPA exhibit, but I didn't finish in time. The bulbous forms turned into seahorses. I hadn't ever done seahorses before, although I've always love them and have a collection of images I've kept from my 30 years of Natural HIstory subscriptions (my 20 year old neighbor was really impressed that I've subscribed to a magazine for THAT long):

Betwen January and February, I worked on it on and off between putting together 3 other applications. And then I got pretty well stuck on it. I had decided that the three seahorses were really Rheinmaidens (I saw Das Rheingold at the Met Simulcast somewhere along the line in there), but I really didn't know how to proceed from there.

When I get stuck on something, one way I get myself unstuck is to do something 'drastic' in red. In the past, I've poured red over an entire piece, I've poured red over most of a piece, but in here, I've made red waves. It's just something that forces me to react and to do something other than to sit there, stare and wonder what the heck I'm going to do next.

From Valentines Day on until Saturday night, I worked on it pretty intensely, while listening to the BBC news about the protests in North Africa, Middle East (and Wisconsin). How much does that have to do with the finished painting? I don't know.

Although I managed to preserve the bulbous forms (at least two of the three), I lost the lines of drippy paint in the process. I wanted to bring those back...and so I did, in the final stage (top photo).

Zen or Frou-frou?

2011-01-23T11:48:00.000-08:00

Another month passes by and I've not documented. Not because I haven't been working. It's true that I don't have a lot of completed projects to show yet though. But I did kind of finish one thing last night—after going charcoal gray on my website for a year, I decided that I really liked the white background better, so I made the switch. (With some small amount of guilt, since the dark charcoal background consumes less energy...but really, how many people are looking at my website anyhow?)

While I was at it, I also investigated various javascript lightbox libraries and used one for the 4 Painting pages on my website. The Prints and Artist's Books pages still use popup windows, since they have a lot more information associated with them and some with multiple images and buy options. I'm still deciding if I can switch them over to the lightboxes and how to include all the necessary information.

Also while I was at it, I added some new images, and got a lot less wordy. I can never decided if I'm zen or frou-frou, that goes for the house and the website. But I'm probably something in between...boring, mainstream, or the Confucian way?

It's not a coincidence that I mention 'house' and 'website' in the same sentence, as I've also been working with an architect on getting some much needed work done. Case in point, someone who came to the paper sale yesterday told me that we REALLY needed to do something about the deck! And so we are.

I'm painting; just don't have a finished painting to show yet. It's gone from "love" to "disaster" and now I'm back up to "like."

I'm working on someone's website. Hopefully that will be done soon.

I'm also working on a proposal for a residency to create an outdoor installation.

So plenty going on, but not much to show yet.

The Laundry Maze

2010-12-17T17:26:00.000-08:00

I'm tempted to make a “laundry list” (ha!) of all that has happened in the last 3 months, but I think I'll just focus on The Laundry Maze instead for now; it's the latest development, the news from today.

This was a proposal I submitted early November before I left for a 3 week vacation in Taiwan. It's for a Portland Building installation. I just got the call this morning that my proposal was accepted, and I'm scheduled for early 2012. That seems far away, but not really so much. I am thinking about 2012 already as well. So here's my proposal for The Laundry Maze:

The Chinese laundry is an iconic thread of early China-to-US immigration story. It was a small business that did not require a lot of start-up capital or spoken English, neither was laundering seen as a desirable job, and therefore the business was easily passed on to immigrants without much controversy. Although the laundry business, the US economy, and the immigration patterns have all changed a great deal in the last 100 years, it is still a line of work that many immigrants find accessible regardless of their professions in their countries of origin. It is particularly true if one looks at the ‘laundry’ business in a broader sense—from dry cleaning to housekeeping of the hospitality industry, and also private housecleaning services. As our professions are such a large part of our identities, this transition in profession also brings about a change or loss in identity.

Starting with this connection between immigrants and ‘laundry,’ I propose to install The Laundry Maze in the Portland Building. Resembling lines of clothing hung out to dry, The Laundry Maze will document these profession transitions and invite the viewers to participate and share in this loss of identity.

Clotheslines will be installed in a grid pattern; clean shirts, blouses and t-shirts will be hung in such a way as to create an entry and an exit through a very simple “maze.” I will collect data from immigrants about their professions in their countries of origin and also here in the US. Each pairing will be inscribed on a piece of clothing that is hung on the clotheslines and will be readable from inside of the maze.

When viewers find their ways through the maze, they read & share the experiences in these transitions while their faces and identities are hidden by The Laundry Maze. Only their legs and feet will be visible from outside. As our legs and feet are our most basic methods of mobility, each person is reduced from the whole to an anonymous figure that moves from place to place.

Last two weeks before Portland Open Studios

2010-09-28T22:51:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure whether to be happy or sad, but Portland Open Studios weekends will finally be upon me in less than 2 weeks. I have spent so much time volunteering on the board (I've logged 570 hours so far this year) that I feel my own work has suffered. I've completed a bunch of the 7x7 panels and a couple of larger pieces, but that's it. I've not completed my senior's book, which I started on last year, yikes!

I know one thing, I'll be happy when my 3 year term is up. I will feel like I've made my contribution, and I can feel good about that. This is also my last year of participating in the event. Of course, never say never, and I might return in the future, but I'm definitely ready for a break.

So I got a commission from a friend, who wanted a painting of a hummingbird. Not having done humming birds before, and having those 7x7 panels that I can experiment with, I figure I'll play with some ideas here. I actually started 4 panels just as shapes and forms, without thinking that I'll put hummingbirds on there. But then, there they are, so I might as well.

I started 4 panels with similar ideas, and you see that on the panel on the right. All 4 had those seed-pod like shapes. I was thinking horse chestnut pods. But they also read like circular cages.

Over the seed pod shapes, I layered a landscape (inspired by my trip to the Steens...come to think of it, I got the horse chestnuts on one of our previous trips to the Steens too), and hummingbirds. This you can see in the left 2 panels. Then the panel on the left has been 'scrubbed'—I take a wet, stiff angle brush and I push the paint around. Before I do this, the left panel is much more like the middle panel:

Then I start to work on bringing out or pushing back the different forms & shapes that I want to work with. They're not finished, I hope to have them done this weekend though.

Steens 2010

2010-09-25T17:20:00.001-07:00

It's the annual trip to the Steens and Alvord Desert for the Moon Festival!

(It occurs to me that I did not post the photos from Steens 2009 last year; they're on facebook, but maybe I'll eventually put them here too. For Steens 2008 and beyond, see this.)

The Good Prince and I took it easy. Did a little driving around, watched the moon rise, took advantage of Sven's preparedness and went along on the Malheur Cave tour, napped, played pool, and ate. What else is there to do on a vacation?

All photos are point & shoot.

So you've got to have the standard I was at the Malheur Refuge shot...yeah, it's really blue like that:

And of course I can't resist the grass shot:

Still can't help myself:

Gotta have the cows shot too:

Grass gets two, so the cows gotta get two, too:

At one point, we came across some cows being loaded onto the truck and I said "well, we know where those cows are going." The Good Prince replied, "yeah, well, I can see that they're going into the truck..."

After our encounter with the cows, we arrive at the Alvord playa, right around dusk:

And the moon rises...as scheduled:

Here's an unscheduled visitor kicking up a lot of dusk:

On the beach? (Hand-held at 2 seconds, it was pretty dark.)

On Mars? (Hand-held at 3 seconds.)

In Oregon! This is a lava tube cave, owned by the Free Masons who hold a jamboree here regularly:

Bright Hill 2010 Book Arts Exhibit

2010-09-18T00:56:00.000-07:00

This is my lucky year! Exhibits have been falling from the sky and hitting me on the head, which is good since I've been so crazy busy with Portland Open Studios board duties that I haven't had the time to put my work out there this year.

So the latest is the Bright Hill 2010 Book Arts exhibit. I got invited to submit 2 books. They chose two, one of which was not available, so I was able to choose the other (which they accepted). I think these two work very well together. Although both are earlier work, I have always loved both and have always been sorry that they haven't been shown more. So here they are, brand new photographs from this afternoon.

Pocket Atlas for Travelers:

Left & Right:

And this was what I sent along:

Pocket Atlas for Travelers is the story of a 15 year seeing the world for the very first time, and coming to an understanding of the lies that we are often told in the cause of nationhood. Voices compete and contrast in different versions of this journey.

Left & Right documents a long civil war, most of which was fought in the battlefields of the mind. Having grown up on one side of this war, I was able to travel and see the other side as an American. Two decks of cards, 104 toy soldiers shooting at each other, each side telling their version of four stories, with a surprising twist.

20th and 21st, among other things

2010-09-10T00:22:00.000-07:00

Escape Velocity, diptych in gouache (and acrylic surface to be added later).

[These were really the 21st & 22nd panels.]

So these two, and the two below of the monkey king, were cut up from this piece from back in 2006, which went from bad to worse to pretty much given up for dead. Although now that I'm looking at these old photos, I think it could've been saved when I was about half way through. So I cut it up into these 4 pieces (plus there are scraps left).

I'll mount these on boards before I finish them.

On other fronts...

I'm recovering from a long streak of work, work, and more work. Between organizing and installing the Collins show, getting the iPhone app together (and the Good Prince had to get involved too), and installing For the Love of Food (opened this past Tuesday), I had my first day of 'holiday' yesterday since mid-July. I sat around and did nothing...it was bliss.

For the Love of Food!

2010-08-23T18:47:00.000-07:00

This started as an exhibit at Cedar Crest College last year. We've since then added to it and will be showing at the Arts Center in Hillsboro in September.

So, to our imaginary dining table set for four, I'm adding:

Food supplements or the variety of drugs that many of us have to take with our meals? I'll leave that to your imagination.

These are wooden plugs with about 15 coats of gesso that's been sanded and then polished with a wet rag. I'm going with the version without the cut line in the middle. The cut lines were incredibly time consuming to make, and I didn't think added too much to the effect.

Some real peach pits that I've cleaned and dried. They'll be on the table too:

There are other objects—reading materials, of course, and reading implements. Anne, Diane and Helen will also be adding their own things.

Our 4 place settings that we all made will also be on the 'table,' of course, along with a variety of other items that tend to pile up on our dining room tables.

Click the tag Critique group collaboration to see the making of my place setting, a game board with blueberry game pieces (those have been a great hit).

And now for something from the garden, a couple of days ago:

The Great Bike Project of 2010 commences

2010-08-11T16:01:00.000-07:00

Having said to many people that I would unpack Shu-mei's old bike after Andrew moved his press out of the garage (which actually happened on July 9th), and then failed to do so because the spot immediately filled up with cement and bricks for the Great Cement Project of 2010, I now feel absolutely compelled to unpack the bike immediately before the spot fills up with something else.

So first, I had to actually dig out the box, which had been hiding behind boxes of old books and gardening tools:

And here, according to the label on the box, it contained a "blue vehicle."

The Good Prince is examining the thang with a great deal more interest than he usually shows towards most of my other projects:

Various parts:

And voila! A Blue Vehicle:

It's probably about 30 years old. Three gears. A Summit Catalina 24...??? Couldn't find any information on it.

And I'm happy to report that turquoise is very much back in fashion this year.

The Great Cement Project of 2010

2010-08-11T00:56:00.001-07:00

So here are Phase 2 and Phase 3 (and Phase 3.1, yes, revision was already necessary!) of the Great Cement Project of 2010. This is what it looked like in June, 2007; and on July 13, 2010. And here was Phase 1, from June 22, 2010.

And today, we have a seat made from a slab of sandstone I've had for ages, and those infamous water meter rings that I have had sitting around. Plus, a few years back, I got these cement plugs somewhere, and they finally got used too, as part of the reflexology path:

I'll have to see how well this pebble path lasts. I don't think I did the best job with it. It might just fall apart on the first freezing winter we get.

So this was Phase 3.1. Despite my careful reading of the cement instructions, I didn't have quite enough cement, and so it got a bit thin when I got to this part. The next morning, I was full of regrets, of course. After careful consideration, I decided the next course of action would be to chisel out the pebbles, put down more cement on top and then put the pebbles back in.

Well, like hell I was going to chisel the pebbles out. I tried. Nothing budged.

So Plan B was simply to leave everything in place, pour more cement on top and put in yet more pebbles. So now the whole thing is kind of bulging out in the middle:

A detail shot:

So no more cement for 2010. I've returned the neighbor's paver mold. And now there's a open spot in the garage for me to unpack the bike...The Great Bike Project for 2010 shall now commence.

Collins Gallery exhibit

2010-08-10T13:55:00.000-07:00

This was an exhibit that fell into my lap 3 weeks ago. The original Collins Gallery exhibit for the time slot fell through; then the substitute exhibit fell through too. At which point, I was at the right place at the right time, and got the opportunity to put together this show.

We installed yesterday, and it all went very, very smoothly. I am very happy with how well it worked out, given that there was so little time to put it together. So in short—

I was asked if Portland Open Studios would take the slot. The board approved to do it that very evening. It took another week before we all agreed how to select the 11 artists (we ended up w/ first come first serve) and to send out the call. The slots filled in 24 hours and we had 10 different mediums covered. I ended up slipping in a 12th artist as well.

Then it was a matter of chasing down 12 artists for their statements and titles (which always turns out to be more time consuming than one might think), making a postcard graphic, putting together tour guide sales for the Friends of the Library store, scheduling installation times for everyone, writing up a contract for the artists and getting our PR guru to write up some PR materials. And installation.

We managed to wrap up early too. But of course, I forgot to take pictures. So maybe next week.

One of a gazilion natural wonders of the day

2010-08-05T11:43:00.001-07:00

And this one I noticed.

On my morning walk, I noticed two bees of different species, snuggled up together under the petal of a very pink rose. The rose is bright pink and very uniform in color, so anything stands out like a sore thumb. So these two bees were really noticeable. I walked up to take a look, and saw that there was a spider there, too.

Being a little slow on the uptake, I thought, hmm, what could've gotten 2 bees and a spider all interested...before it dawned on me that the spider had both bees in its grasp. A two fisted bee sucking, as it were.

By the time I made the round trip home to get the camera and got back to the scene of the crime, one of the bees had fallen down between petals and the spider had the other bee's head in its pinchers (you can click on the image to see a much larger view), and you can see a shadow of the other bee's body directly below:

And here's a shot of the spider:

Unfortunately, the lens is having some focus issues, besides the fact that I'm using a lens for a film back on a digital camera, so the image isn't so sharp. It will just have to do.

20th

2010-07-19T18:59:00.001-07:00

Rocks & Wings, gouache on paper mounted on board. Yet to be sprayed w/ the GAC 500.

This one has had a long wait. Here's how it started, as a pour, on Feb, 19 this year:

Then I started working on it again on July 11:

Then over the last few days, it went through several phases, including one in which a mosquito made an appearance. But I quickly swatted it out. The rocks went from pink:

To blue:

To spotted & lined:

And finally to marbled and it stuck:

The pecking order

2010-07-13T13:46:00.000-07:00

The black chicken is always the boldest, coming right up to me as I'm digging in the garden, waiting to grab something tasty.

So in this picture, you see the brown chicken & the b&w chicken having themselves a nice dust bath, the black chicken foraging. But before long, the black chicken would go over and join the other two, start pecking at them to make room for herself for a nice dust bath too, right in between the other two.

In the background, you see the progress of the cement path around the strawberry patch. Only did 200lb of cement today. Didn't want to over do it, I'm supposed to go to the weight room tonight. Since the path curves around a crop circle, the paver mold leaves gaps in between. I'll fill those at the end. See yesterday's entry on why there're bamboo poles all around the strawberry patch...

I win!

2010-07-13T01:31:00.000-07:00

In the battle of Shu-Ju vs Chickens to see who shall get the strawberries, Shu-Ju has won Round One. (I should note that the Good Prince placed his money with the Chickens.)

Remember that bamboo those unfortunate college boys had to remove last year? Well, they sat in a pile in the backyard until today, when they found their purpose in life:

And I did not observe the chickens going into my strawberry patch today. They walked around it, they walked by it, but they didn't walk into it. And as a bonus, it even has a slight Asian flair to it.

And please note that the chickens are walking around in a rose petal strewn path...what luxury!

19th

2010-07-13T01:24:00.001-07:00

Wet Spring, gouache on paper mounted on board

Again, have yet to spray it w/ the GAC 500.

Here's a shot from a little earlier:

And before that, see this entry.

Most of the 'spots' on the first layers got covered up; and then as a last step, I uncovered them by using a stiff damp brush to remove the layers on top, controlling how much of the top layers to remove and therefore, how much of the spot to reveal.

An almost perfect day

2010-07-11T00:07:00.001-07:00

One fine spring day earlier this year (and needless to say, it was pretty wet), I was walking somewhere SE, and the sidewalks were just covered, I mean COVERED, in maple seed pods. Bright chartreuse over wet, dark, shiny cement sidewalks. I've been waiting to paint that ever since.

So after almost 3 weeks away from the studio, I've started 2 more of the 7x7 panels, two different types—a paperbark maple and a vine maple. I'm not finished, but here are a couple of progress shots of each.

First one, paperbark maple. I created the background a few months back with some gray and bright color spots. Today, I added the pods, first in ultramarine. The pods are about actual size...you can see a real pod on the left:

Then I layered a light green and a yellow on top. They kind of look like bugs:

Then the vine maple. Until I decided to paint them, I hadn't really paid attention to how different the different maple pods are. Not only in shape, but also in color and texture, and some are really tiny. So these are starting out the same as the paperbark maple, but there's a lot more red in these pods. The wings are also a lot thinner:

This is as far as I got today. They almost look like peas. I guess they're rather similar ideas:

Harness the power of the Chicken!

2010-07-05T16:58:00.000-07:00

Still working on removing grass, but now I have 3 chickens helping me! Here's today's progress, and you can see the chickens resting in the hollow of the log after their long day's work!

A close-up...they're pooped from their hard work.

Here's a shot of approximately the same area from June, 2007. The grassy strip on the left is what I'm removing.

Always doing things the hard way

2010-07-04T15:13:00.000-07:00

Yup, that's my motto.

I've been slowly removing the grass from our yard for the last 20 years. When we moved in, it was probably close to 7500 sqft of grass (lot - house - driveway - a rather uninteresting border of mugo pines and rhodies). I'm figuring that I'm down to about 250 sqft of grass now, about half was removed by hired guns, rest removed by myself. (Oh yeah, that chair, it's holding back the rugosa rose.)

So after these last two days of back-breaking labor, I've removed (by hand!), what, another 30sqft? I'll be putting down a path to go around the strawberry bed and the sedum bed. Another week of work, and I'll be ready to put down the path, which will be a combination of red bricks and cement pavers. It will be very pretty, you'll see.

I haven't done all of the grass-removal the stupid way, of course. If it's an area to be planted, then I've actually done it the smart way—a layer of newsprint and topped w/ mulch. But since this is to be a path, all the organic materials have to be removed, so here I am, with my shovel...

Haven't seen the robin parents for a couple of days, but I'm pretty sure the babies haven't fledged yet. I'm resisting the temptation to get out a ladder and peek. Maybe I just don't get to see the ones that survive, but I don't seem to be having very good luck here with those birds nests. Last year, I had a bushtit nest; mommy and daddy were busy, busy, busy, but then I never saw the fledglings either.

On other fronts

I've been getting the Portland Open Studios website ready for our 2010 tour. It's almost ready to upload now, with new artists, new sponsors, new supporters, new community partner, new scholarship recipients. I've also been interviewing and profiling artist, with 5 interviews in the can and 2 profiles completed. See here and here.

How neglected is my garden?

2010-06-29T15:37:00.001-07:00

Let me count the ways.

I finally pulled up the Lawrence of Arabia rose (dead for 2 years...I was still mourning its deep brick red blooms I guess) and planted this daphne in the location thus vacated. This poor daphne has been sitting in a pot for 6 years. I know this because I bought it from Heronswood Nursery 2 years before Burpee closed the nursery & garden, and that was in 2006! Which would mean I've had the plant since 2004 and it's now just getting planted.

In another part of yard so long covered in weeds, dead and alive, I discovered a dinosaur had laid some eggs! Now, that's what you would call long-neglected. Looks like one has just hatched and is ready to go.

And I was blessed with a visit from the Three Graces themselves:

And here's a fairly respectable part of the garden...what a coincidence, it's the part visible as you walk up to the front door. And look! Looks like someone has mown the lawn...

A triptych in cement

2010-06-22T19:43:00.000-07:00

Voila! The cement pad/path. Done over 3 days (Sunday, Friday and finished today). Friend & fellow artist Anne helped on the first part (which is now the beige-y gray parts in the front), and then I did the middle gray part last Friday and then the rest today. Hopefully, they'll eventually all dry to the same color!

21 Bags of cement @ 50lb each. Just add water and mix in the wheelbarrow. That would be 1 bag at a time. Borrowed the neighbor's mold, but I was also able to form several freehand (a bunch of the ones along the edges are free-formed to make for a more graceful edge). I was surprised at how easily one could free form them. Although it took a little longer than just dumping the cement in the mold, and they tended to look like loaves of bread with a flat top.

Now I just need some topsoil to fill in the cracks and plant some ground cover, once it's all set and cured.

Inifinite Loop, picturesque chickens, and gocco fail!

2010-06-20T18:37:00.000-07:00

Infinite Loop

Acrylic, medical test strips, blood.

I couldn't stop making these mazes, and so now I have six. This is all six mazes stacked up, creating an infinite loop. I haven't permanently attached them to each other yet, but most likely will eventually.

The neighbors got 3 hens a while back and they seem to enjoy my yard quite a bit. I'm happy to have them around, hoping that they'll do a good job of eating my slugs and fertilizing my plants.

On the Gocco fail...

I've been wanting to try pressure printing on the Gocco for a while now. This is a very successful technique in letterpress printing that allows you to print with a fair amount of detail just by inserting something behind your paper and printing it against a flat sheet of inked plexi on the print bed.

I thought I'd try the technique and see if it works. So here's the setup—a simple design cut out in fairly thick fun foam, an open screen that has some texture in it, papers of various thickness.

I inked up my open screen, stuck the fun foam design on the print bed, and placed the paper on top of the fun foam and printed as normal. And as you see to the right of the fun foam design, what I printed was the entire inked up area. The design was no where to be seen.

I also tried it by placing the fun foam design between the plexi staging glass and the screen. That achieved more or less the same result.

Back to the drawing board...

A video!

2010-06-18T13:12:00.000-07:00

My friend Steve Messick made this video for me, the making of Dream On. Thank you, Steve!

I'm embedding a copy of it here, but the embedded version is chopped off. A full and better quality version is available on youtube.

On other fronts, I'm doing concrete work today...already mixed and set 350lb of cement pad/pathway this morning, debating if I should just finish the job today and get it done and over with, or if I should finish up another day. I have another 300lb of it to go.

The Spotted Towhee Fort

2010-06-14T14:36:00.000-07:00

It's a new fashion in spotted towhee housing!

I had been weeding and cutting back the dead sage bush when I suddenly discovered a spotted towhee nest, with 2 little spotted eggs in it. The nest nestled in the sage, about a foot and half off the ground. A bird had been squawking as I worked but it took me a while to see the nest.

Having removed much of its protection, I piled some rhododendron cuttings around the nest site for some protection. But I still stayed up half the night worrying, as I could hear the resident owl hooting through our open window. Plus, we get all the neighborhood cats roaming through our yard, not to mention the raccoons.

So this morning, I piled more rhododendron branches around it. Mama towhee sat quietly in her nest as I piled the branches high around her. She's better protected now, but I can still get a glimpse of her:

I wonder if there's a way for me to declare my yard a wild bird nesting sanctuary and weeding is now forever forbidden?!

And by the robin's nest, we have a new cement pad!

This area was very uneven (not to mention weedy), and every year, as I get up on the ladder to pick/prune the grapes and peach, I think, for sure I'm going to break my neck this year. So now I've graded the spot, and with fellow artist Anne's help, started putting in a cement pad. I'll fill in the in between areas with some topsoil and Corsican mint.

This is also in a very sunny location, so I figure it'd be a good spot for my parents to sit when they come visit. Unlike me, who likes to sit in the shade, they like to sit in the sun!

The plan is to extend the cement pad down this path, gradually narrowing the width of the pad until it's more path-like than pad-like. Maybe I should name the cement pad The Robin's Pad?

A mama to be! We hope...

2010-06-09T17:37:00.000-07:00

OK, sorry, that was slightly misleading. We're not talking about me here, we're talking about this here:

Do you see her? Her head is poking out between the two grape leaves on the upper right corner.

I noticed the nest a few days ago but didn't actually see a bird until yesterday. I'm pretty sure it's a robin. I did see a robin a few days back with a bunch of nesting materials in its beak.

It's definitely a robin sized bird, but I've not been able to see much of anything except the top of her head and flashes of orange. I can see that she's got white eyeliners on, and between the three choices of birds that size with black head and flashes of orange (robin, varied thrush and spotted towhee...anything else?), robin is the only one with the white eyeliner, I believe. Although, this seems rather late for a robin to be nesting? The nest is also not very high up, definitely within an arm's reach.

She's been sitting on her nest for at least 24 hours now. My coming and going don't seem to bother her, which is good, because I had long planned to work on a project right by that grapevine where she's put her nest. Plus it is right on the path to the mailbox.

At least this is better than where the finches put their nest two years ago—right by the front door! Everytime someone went in and out, the mama bird would fly off. Eventually, they never came back. I checked in the nest, and there was nothing there. I guess she never laid any eggs.

Earlier this spring, I noticed a finch checking out the nest they left behind, but thank goodness, they moved on.

More on mazes...

They are so much fun to make! I'm going crazy making them. If you call two more mazes crazy. I guess that's as crazy as I get. So Maze III and Maze IV are almost finished, hopefully by tomorrow night. I'm also thinking of screwing all 4 of them together. Their starting and end points already line up (I made III & IV with that in mind), so it's an option.

14th

2010-06-02T22:59:00.000-07:00

Maze II

Still just having fun, and still acrylic, medical test strips, and blood. Must do something about the camera situation here. This is terribly out of focus and colors are off. It's much more red-bluish in real life and less orange-y.

So all of these have been following more or less the same process—each panel is gesso'ed and gets several coats of paint (whatever leftover colors I have). After I attach the test strips, I either sand the test strips lightly or I take an X-acto knife and I peel off the black plastic off the surface. This reveals the paths that lead from the blood droplet to the little machine that reads the glucose (the faint white lines). Then I coat the whole surface with gel medium.

At this point, the panel is black & white (the colors of these particular test strips) and whatever colors the panel already had. Once the gel medium dries, I paint the whole thing with a diluted color. Because this paint is thinned quite a bit, the original panel colors come through this layer. Then I pull some of the colors off the test strips by laying down a wet rag and rolling the rolling pin over it. So I basically pull a relief print onto the rag:

Then I figure out what colors I want the open spaces to be, and start working on that.

I probably have another 2 or 3 panels worth of the black & white strips before I start on the black, white, and blue strips! I'm thinking that I should make a really big maze!

13th

2010-05-31T15:46:00.000-07:00

Maze

Acrylic, medical test strips, blood. This takes a bit more working out than I originally figured—not only do you need to set a path that works (which is easy), you have to remember to make some fake ones too (which I forgot). Not a very good maze if there's only 1 way to go at any moment.

But, it is still a pretty easy one.

12th

2010-05-28T18:47:00.000-07:00

Regularly Irregular II

Acrylic, medical test strips, blood. In reality, the colors are not quite so saturated and vary quite a bit from a dark red to an orange. This was a snap shot taken sideways with a flash that I then squared up.

11th

2010-05-27T17:22:00.001-07:00

Regularly Irregular

11th of the 7x7 panels. A slight deviation from what I've been doing with these, which had been gouache & acrylic on paper mounted board, this is acrylic, medical test strips, glass beads and blood. No, no, no, not the droplets you actually see, those are droplets of acrylic paint. The blood is in the test strips. Just miniscule amounts.

I've been accumulating great amounts of these and wanting to do something with them. The last experiment with them did not work out very well—I was trying for something more sculptural and it didn't work. Lots more test strips where these came from, so more are in the works already.

And about that book...

And I've been pretty silent on my current book with my senior, but I'm happy to report that some progress has been made. Here's a fairly full mock-up of the book. A lot of the content has been decided, I have all the papers, I know the final size. I'll probably start trimming the paper sometime in the next couple of days. I even went out and bought a much larger cutting mat in preparation. Now I have a 24”x36 ” mat and won't have to struggle with the larger sheet sizes. Tried it out yesterday, what a relief!

On other fronts

Lots of things have been happening—wrapped up one collaborative project, researching/discussing another for next year, working on a video with a friend, and thinking and writing about future solo projects. Nothing is set is stone yet, but hopefully some of them will wrap up or gel in the next few weeks or so.

Water meter ring overload!

2010-04-18T17:11:00.000-07:00

I thought for sure I had blogged about these before and tried to find the post and just put in a link here, but I couldn't find it. Anyhow, to make a long story short, courtesy of the Portland Water Bureau who went around the neighborhood replacing old water meter rings with new a few years back, I got a stash of these old rings. I've been slowly putting them in my garden as pavers. Of course, 'rings' by definition have holes in the middle, so I've been filling them with various things I've found, either for free or for very little, and using quick set cement to complete 'the look.'

This was one of the first completed, filled with some spotted beach rocks I picked up on San Juan Island when I visited Eliza for the first time after they moved to the island. The tile I bought for cheap at the rebuilding center. This meter ring came painted green (the rest were unpainted):

This one I just finished today, filled with Moroccan tile fragments I got from Shawn and Gretchin (thanks guys!):

Another one I did today, also filled with Moroccan tile fragments from Shawn:

Another early ring, 2 more beach rocks from my visit to San Juan Island and another tile from Rebuilding Center:

These next two were made in 2007 when my nieces were here to visit. They each finished a couple of the rings with glass marbles we found at the thrift shop and imprints:

This one has a hand imprint:

Another early ring with river rocks and a tile:

One with a tile and some rebar remnants I picked up from the side of the road on one of my walks:

This one has tiles from Taiwan. I picked them up at a garbage strewn site up on a hill when I went for a walk. That was probably 20 years ago:

These are a few of the completed rings; each one has its own little story.

What will I do when and if we sell the house? Dig them up and take them with me? These are probably not everyone's cup of tea, so will probably be dumped soon enough...

10th

2010-04-04T23:43:00.000-07:00

Peering In

The 10th of the 7x7 panels. (I'm still photographing with my cell phone. The camera lens turned out to be beyond rescue—the camera shop sent it to the manufacturer for repairs, who is returning it to the shop saying basically, haha, this lens is so old that they haven't serviced it in 10 years! So forget it.)

This panel was one of those that I 'poured' several weeks back. I was running out of the little clear film containers that I use to store paint, so I gathered up all the ones that had just a little bit of paint left and poured them on several prepared panels. So here was the original poured result:

And, again, doing whatever comes to mind, I decided to follow the poured lines. I've always loved the images from those electronic microscopes, and this one was inspired by that. The finished result is the first image at the top.

Dream On

2010-03-19T20:06:00.000-07:00

Dream On, gouache & acrylic on paper on board, 12” x 12”

My, it's been almost 3 weeks since I've documented. I have been busy, but one of the reasons why I haven't documented is that my camera is in the shop. It's been a while since I noticed that the focus was a little soft, but a few weeks ago (when I was shooting And Along Came a Cloud), half the time the problem was way beyond 'soft focus.' I finally took it to the shop, expecting to get it back in a couple of weeks, but they called yesterday and apparently they have to send the lens back to the manufacturer. So we'll see how it all works out.

So besides not having a camera (the image above was taken with my cell phone), I've also been busy with Portland Open Studios application period (through March 15), and then of course jurying. We'll finish jurying this week, and then the fun part of preparing for the tour itself!

Wait a minute, didn't we JUST do this...?

Anyhow, Dream On is part of the on-going collaboration with Artist X and is in response to her piece called Party On.

The piece started with my initial reaction that I'm typically the wall flower at the party and the lawn mower at the bbq. Then it devolved into this nightmarish scenario (parties do strike some fear in my heart).

While I was working on this, my friend Steve was also documenting it's evolution. Poor guy, all he wanted to do was to come over and make some portraits of me while I was painting, and I went, "say...how about..."

So the camera, lights, computer and disk were set up, a little script was written to remind me to run the camera every two minutes or so. Steve also took some videos. It will be a while before we get to see the end results, but whatever it is, it's been an interesting experiment.

And since this piece was part of the collaboration with Artist X, we've also talked to Artist X about making a little video about her part of the collaboration.

And Along Came a Cloud

2010-02-28T18:07:00.000-08:00

And Along Came a Cloud, gouache on paper on board, 10” x 10”

(I'm done with the painting part, I still need to airbrush on the acrylic medium later tonight, after it dries.)

This piece actually started a couple of weeks ago. I always have containers of JUST A LITTLE BIT OF PAINT left over. Too little to do anything with, but of course I can't just toss it out. So I actually got several pieces started just by adding lots of water to each color and pouring them on prepared panels. So here I've brushed on some colors and while the paper was still a bit damp, poured more colors on the panel and just moved the watery colors around by rotating and tilting the panel. This was so beautiful and I almost didn't want to do anything else with it.

But I'm not that type of an artist...you know, the type that knows to leave well enough alone.

So here I've really ruined a good thing:

And before the Big Finish. I struggled for a while to figure out what was bothering me here—and I'm still not sure that I've completely fixed the problem—but I think the red, circular intestine-looking thing really needed a break (ie, so it wasn't a complete enclosure). The finished image is the top image.

As always, I had the radio on as I was working on this, and I was reminded of spending my summers at my grandmother's house.

She was a devout Buddhist, and in the afternoons, we would always have the radio tuned to the station where they discussed the Buddhist sutras. The program was a mixture of Taiwanese and Sanskrit (with a Taiwanese or Mandarin accent, I suspect), neither of which I understood (or understand). But I can still remember the sounds and the voices. Now, whenever I hear Farsi, I'm instantly transported back to my grandmother's house, with the radio on, she bent over her sewing and I lying on the bed taking an afternoon rest.

Thorns, thorns, thorns

2010-02-20T23:37:00.000-08:00

The rose thorns I collected and trimmed on 2/7 have been drying for almost 2 weeks. I figured they were ready. So here they are, sitting on some of that putty stuff. They started out very black, but now look more of a dull brown.

Here they are, after the first coat of alizarin crimson (acrylic):

And here half of them have had 2 coats of the gold and the rest just one coat. I'm leaving them varied like that:

I'm not sure what exactly what I'm doing with them yet, but I'm planning to use them for the piece that will be in the 10x10 show at City Hall in March.

About being a fraud, or a fool, or both

2010-02-15T00:04:00.000-08:00

Being the night owl, I'm still on Valentine's Day time, even though it's officially the 15th. I don't get philosophical here very often (even though I'm a real navel-gazer in real life) but a friend sent me a link to a blog that sent me off on a wee tangent. So here's a pretty entertaining write-up on No One Knows WTF They're Doing, and here was my email back to my friend (with slight modifications) —

I always felt like a fraud when I was working as an engineer; I never got over that and I didn't want to continue feeling like that. As an artist, I don't feel like a fraud, but I also know that there's no way that I can know that I'm not a bad artist. (Steve M and I just had this conversation actually, yesterday.)

The difference, I guess, is being comfortable with being an artist, even if it means I was a bad one. I'm willing to put myself out there and make a fool of myself, because it's worth it. But being a bad engineer, it's not worth making a fool of myself for that. (Although, it can also be argued, following the thinking of the original blog that Jo sent, being a bad artist is not so dangerous to others, in most cases, so maybe that makes it easier...)

I guess it's like being in love with someone, you love them enough, you put yourself out there for that person even if it means making a fool of yourself.

On that note, hope you all had a wonderful Valentines Day!

Coming up for some air

2010-02-07T13:57:00.000-08:00

January turned out to be Portland Open Studios All The Time...all day, all night, and all the times in between too. Since Jan 1, I've logged about 180 hours doing a variety of Portland Open Studios support, whether it's meetings, website, paypal, or just general chores and errands. Phew. Now I'm getting my life back, and the ants seem to be back too. Darn those ants.

Eliza brought me this little plant on her way to Santa Fe at the end of Dec, and now it's blooming happily. Bright magenta flowers on the bright orange window sill.

Got out and worked in the garden for the first time this week. Pruned a few of the roses and collected these gorgeous reddish black thorns. I've not been able to get the dark red thorns that I got a few years back, but these black ones are nice too. They are much smaller than the red ones from before. I have some ideas, we'll see if they dry in time.

Believe it or not, for an art project, I had to dig out my calculus book to look up a couple of things. I had forgotten that I had painted the inside cover of the book a few years back. I had been cleaning out my bookshelf and had a few books that I couldn't let go, not quite yet, and this was one of them.

So we'll just say this is an early Year of the Tiger greeting.

Solarplate intensive, relief, part II

2010-01-24T18:54:00.000-08:00

First, some pretty flowers. This was from a clip art book:

(Technical details on the flower plate/print are all the same as for the plate below.)

Yesterday, it felt like spring here—it was warm and dry, and I was stuck inside learning how to do webforms using php. Today, I'm done with that, and it's cold and wet, just like how it's supposed to be in the middle of January.

So anyhow, again, this was made as a relief plate; paper was Rives Lightweight, printed dry. Plate on the print bed and paper on top. Printed through an etching press w/ very little pressure and no blanket, just a cardboard. Pretty much the same set up as the last entry, just the paper is different.

Now, this is the same plate as from the last entry, but printed on Rives Lightweight dry. The details from both entries are all showing the same areas, so you can open up two windows and look at both at the same time and compare.

Detail 1:

Detail 2:

Detail 3:

Looks like the text printed much better than the solids, and there's less of the movement on the edges that you can detect. That would make sense as well, since the paper is slightly thinner, and I'm pretty sure we did not change the pressure on the press, so there was less pressure that would move the paper in that direction. Also, the paper is dry, so the ink isn't going to spread as much.

OK, now I'm all caught up on the solarplate documentation!

Solarplate intensive, relief, part I

2010-01-24T18:11:00.001-08:00

There are lots of pictures to show, so I'm breaking them up into two.

The plate was made as a relief plate; paper was BFK, dampened; printed through the etching press w/ little pressure, no blankets, just a cardboard. We tried both plate on the print bed and paper on top, and paper on the print bed and plate on top. This was printed with the plate on the print bed and paper on top.

So this plate was just lines of different thicknesses and text at different fonts and sizes:

Detail 1—look at how the 0.1 pt line wiggled around! The 0.5 pt line also has a bit of trouble:

Detail 2—8 pt line, a lot better. You can click on the images to see larger views:

Detail 3— good view of a solid area:

The edges are all definitely moving around some for everything—text, solids, and lines. I'm going to guess that's mostly due to how we're printing them—through the etching press with a cardboard on top. I can picture in my head how the way the roller moves across at a very slight pressure would create a subtle movement. And notice that the soft edges are mostly on one side of the solid lines in detail 2 & 3 above! So my guess is that if I were to mount this type high and print it letterpress, I wouldn't see those wiggly edges on the bottom of the thick lines and the square.

Solarplate intensive, etching

2010-01-22T23:16:00.000-08:00

OK, I was not very good about documenting my solarplate intensive. So Barbara Mason and I met two more times, once to run more etching tests, and once to run some relief print tests. Here are some of the etching tests.

These are 7” long test strips. If you click on the image you will get larger images. The left was created with a sheet of mylar that had been painted with acrylic (black) mixed with matte medium for various degrees of transparency/opacity. The right is a b&w copy of a color gouache painting.

This next image was from a 5”x7” plate (exposed from a b&w copy of a color gouache painting) that was printed twice. Once with a reddish brown, and again with the plate rotated 180 deg in black (I think?).

Ignore the stripe down the middle...have I mentioned how much I hate my all-in-one-printer-scanner before? This was from a b&w copy of a pencil sketch. This is printed just once through the press—I wiped the plate as normal for an etching (with water based ink), and on top of that Barbara rolled an oil based ink on with a brayer. Since oil and water don't mix, she does not pick up the water based ink on the brayer and she can edition without having to clean up the brayer in between each print (tricky)!

Another sketch from my sketch book, only this plate got wet in the upper right corner before we exposed it. We went on to expose, wash, harden and print anyhow, just so I can see what happens. So that's what happens. A big blotch. The gray squarish areas are from my original—this was from my sketch book so those are the pages/corners you see. (The sketch is based on a Persian miniature.)

One last etching. Again, a b&w sketch from my sketch book. Made the same way as the sprouted potato above. Horizontal line from my scanner...have I mentioned...

Next up, the relief plates, tomorrow.

Cosmic Laundry

2010-01-17T21:59:00.000-08:00

Cosmic Laundry, 2010, gouache on paper on board

What can be more familiar than having your laundry commingle? I can eat with a stranger at a communal table, I can sit next to a stranger on public transportation, but having my dirty clothes washed with another's dirty clothes implies some kind of a familiarity, intimacy, and friendship.

This is the 6th piece of my collaboration with Artist X. And although she has given me permission to use her name, I rather like the sound of Artist X. You can go to my website though, and see her name, right there in black & white.

I'm responding to her piece in which she had painted two faces. Two faces that can be interpreted either as merging into one, or that one is obscuring the other. The first thought that came to my mind was the Rumi poem—

I, you, she, we.
In the garden of mystic lovers
these are not true distinctions.

There are various translations of this poem, mostly in the first line—some versions go on quite extensively listing all pronouns.

I wanted to follow the composition of Artist X's piece, and here's how it started. You can see the two faces. This is a fairly faithful copy of her composition in terms of locations of features.

From there, I went on to a garden-like space in the clouds. But this failed to get across what I had in mind, which was something that implied the intimacy of “these are not true distinctions”, which then brought us to cosmic laundry.

Although there are details in the finished painting that aren't showing up in the image (there are lots of 'stitching' and 'patches' in the laundry on the line), I actually think this is kind of an ugly painting. But I'm fine with that.

What is rather scary though, is how similar this painting is to Trip, which is documented here. The same curvy line down the middle; the two panels of fabric attached at a single point; the way the space is divided up into clouds and landscape, although the two are reversed; the similar plant shape, although the plant shape in Trip was definitely meant as 'wheat'—both a symbol of the wheat-growing west and a symbol of prosperity and abundance—and the plant shape here was more dictated by following the shapes of lips.

The scary part was that I thought I was trying something different, but turns out, not.

Internet friend search intrigue?

2010-01-13T20:27:00.000-08:00

Completely unrelated to art—

As always, at Christmas time, my mom gets to reminiscing and asks me about my friends from high school and college. And as always, this gets me started looking for people between Christmas and New Year.

I have a couple of friends (sisters) who have been very difficult to find, but this year, I seemed to have found the tracks of the younger sister on veromi.com. We'll call her 'Lily Doe.' And according to veromi.com, she's now married to 'Joseph D. Smith.' (Not their real names, of course.)

Then I proceeded to find 'Lily Smith' on linkedin.com—the right college, a very reasonable location and probable career...terrific! I contacted her via linkedin. Then I never heard back.

So I figured, well, wrong person despite the good match, or she wasn't interested in renewing my acquaintance. That was that.

Today, I went to update the profile photo for my facebook fan page (yes, there is one...), and boom, I have a new fan, and it's one 'Joseph D. Smith,' middle initials and all!

Curious.

I have written 'Joseph D. Smith,' hoping to maybe fill in some of the blanks. We'll see what I hear back.

9th

2010-01-04T23:34:00.000-08:00

Putting It Delicately

The 9th of the 7x7 panels. The turquoise chains going across might be a bit hard to see on a lighter display...

Finally got back to painting again, and have been trying something different—working on several images at the same time. I know lots of artists do it successfully, and it seems like it's a perfect way to work when you have this wait time between layers drying. But I've never been able to navigate that.

So this last few days, I've been working on 3 pieces at the same time, but really, ended up mostly working on this piece and just dabbling with the other 2 pieces while I wait for things to dry. I suppose that's ok.

So this is how this piece started, and I almost decided that I liked it just like that—very simple and minimal. But I'm glad I continued on.

Beautiful New Year's Eve

2010-01-01T00:10:00.000-08:00

Dec 31, 2009, Hillsboro, Oregon, across the street from Diane's sister's farm. This was awfully close to sunset time.

And a little more context:

I love that little orange cone in the middle of a very blue picture.

The image that got away—as I turned onto Dick Road, the cemetery behind the church had a dusting of snow on the ground, mist in the air. And the whole scene was basked in the eerie evening light.

We couldn't see the blue moon, but that spectacular scene more than made up for it.

Feeling like a Real Neighborhood around these parts

2009-12-31T15:02:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year!

It occurred to me last night that our neighborhood is evolving to feel like a Real Neighborhood here. Just in the last couple of years, we've seen the opening of a skate park (Holly Farm Park) next to the library; it also has all kinds of play structures for the younger set.

And next to that, we now have a pho place (Korean-Vietnamese, painted BRIGHT lime green) and a good vegetarian Chinese place, both opened in the last 6 months or so. Both good additions to the existing Middle Eastern/Mediterranean place.

Across the street, a new coffee shop that serves Stumptown Coffee and Kettleman's bagels (REAL bagels, not the round bread variety, started by a fellow with the name off Jeffery Wang). The Domino's pizza next door to the coffee shop closed, so I'm hoping for something interesting to open there.

So now I'm thinking—somebody should do something with that huge commercial building between the skate park and the pho place. In the almost 20 years we've been here, it has been unoccupied more than it has been occupied, it seems. The last incarnation had a professional yard tools place, but it's been empty for maybe a year now.

Maybe something that can house a yoga/dance/exercise studio, a small exhibition space, and..whatelse? Right now, it's ugly as sin, but it backs up to a lot of trees and has parking. Seems like a great opportunity for the neighborhood.

On other fronts—working hard on Portland Open Studios website update, getting ready for the 2010 application season. We're going to try to have some animators in our mix this year, so look forward to some fresh and new artists in the lineup!

Frosty Christmas of 2009

2009-12-26T23:39:00.000-08:00

December 26, Tumalo, Oregon (although it was just like this on December 25 too), my mom's garden:

Washing the dirt

2009-12-19T23:46:00.000-08:00

What a strange concept, huh? That you need to wash dirt. But the Sauvie Island soil has a lot of organic materials in it—bits of half composted leaves, needles, roots of weeds, etc. And remember those 2 worms I rescued out of the soil before I baked it?

So that's what you see floating on top there, all the half composted vegetation. As it turns out, I have a serendipitous tale here. When I went to the Vietnamese grocery to get a mortar and pestle set for grinding the soil, I also picked up a set of wire mesh sink drainers. Ours didn't work so well and the Good Prince's solution was simply to not use it. Which of course causes the sink to be all plugged up which then means I get to clean it out when I come along to use the sink next.

So I used the largest drainer in the sink and had 2 small drainers that I had no use for. And of course, today, they were just the perfect tools for scooping out the organic materials that floated to the top!

So here the vegetation had been scooped out. There were several iterations of stirring up the slurry, letting the vegetation and minerals separate, scooping, and repeat.

As it turns out, although I got a huge amount of the Sauvie Island soil, it was so rich in organic materials that, after washing and grinding (and removing small rocks), I only got a little more usable amount than the South Dakota soil, which surprisingly had little organic materials in it. Nor rocks. I wonder if the person who got me the South Dakota soil had already cleaned the soil?

The other surprising thing was how different the two soils feel—the South Dakota soil created a very creamy, very dark paste, rather like a dark chocolate sauce. The Sauvie Island soil resulted in a lighter and grittier paste, which I suppose makes sense, as there's probably a lot more sand in it.

And Helen Hiebert, the artist who's making the papers for me, sent this photo the other day. These are the Pacific Ocean sheets, made using water from the Pacific. Here it looks really bright—the sheets are wet. Once dry, they'll be a much paler blue.

I have some paper samples!

2009-12-16T22:31:00.000-08:00

OK, I finished grinding the South Dakota soil and made a nice, smooth mud pie and took it to Helen today. We made 4 paper samples, one with the SD soil and the other 3 w/ just plain water. The purpose today was to find the right combinations of pigments to color each of the paper sets. The “bodies of water” papers will be 3 different shades of pale blue, with the Pacific being a fairly light, pure, turquoise, Willamette being a bit grayer and the Columbia being a bit browner.

We added the SD soil to the pulp and then added some pigments to augment the pulp so that the colors will be a better match to the actual soil itself. We got really close on the hue! It is a bit lighter, which is fine.

And on the science lesson of the day—when you add the pigment to the pulp & water mixture, both the pulp and the water turn that color. Then you add this stuff (and now I've forgotten what it's called) to the mixture and it makes the pigment bind to the pulp. But the magical part of that is that it draws the pigment out of the water and the water actually turns clear again, and only the pulp is colored! Well, I'm sorry, I just thought that was the coolest thing.

I'm also teaching a bookbinding class at PNCA this week. It's for Horatio's printmaking class—they got through their syllabus early so Horatio asked me to come teach a couple of book structures that might be useful for printmakers. So we're doing a Japanese Stab Binding and a Leporello. I have to get on the bus at 6:45am!

More pop-ups

2009-12-07T23:32:00.001-08:00

The pop-up cards have been very popular with the seniors that I work with, so we're doing another pop-up tomorrow. And naturally I waited until today to make a model. So this was my model...not as 'gardeny' as I really would like, almost looks more like a fish tank. Maybe that's what I should have them make tomorrow, a fish tank. The individual flowers are attached to a cut and folded base so that they open up when you open the cards.

This came out of a book model that I made years ago but never developed fully. There's way too much tension and the pages do not open fully, neither will they stay open. Here I'm holding it open with my feet while I take a photo. The card above has a similar problem, but maybe because there aren't quite as many flowers pulling the pages closed, it's not quite as bad.

Here it is again, but not fully opened:

"Someday, I'm going to be a REAL book," says the model.

Floating plum blossom...

2009-12-06T22:59:00.000-08:00

Well, that's what it looks like to me anyhow. It actually looked a lot better before I had to run off to grab the camera. I had the brita filter turned up side down and was rinsing the outside when I saw the suds on the bottom on the inside. By the time I grabbed the phone camera, I had lost half of the blossoms.

So probably the biggest 'excitement,' if you can call it that, was that I taught my last beginning Gocco class yesterday! At the Atelier Meridian, as a fundraiser for Print Arts Northwest. It was in a giant warehouse style print shop. Lots of large presses of all kinds. It was a cavernous space.

I am actually pretty happy to be finished with teaching beginning Print Gocco—it's hard to teach it when I know the participants will not be going home to make more prints. I used to hand out copious amounts of class notes, templates, etc, but I haven't done that ever since the supplies became harder to get and more expensive.

And today was the all day Portland Open Studios planning retreat, which happen twice a year. So that was a long day.

The other big excitement was that I delivered several pieces to 23 Sandy this week. Laura had had a couple of my artist's books in inventory for a while, but now she has some paintings too!

I'm still slowly grinding dirt for my senior's book. The papermaking isn't going to happen until Jan (as Helen's schedule dictated), so that kind of allowed me to relax a bit too.

Chocolate?

2009-12-03T22:30:00.000-08:00

Another artist, Nancy Pobanz has been very generously sharing her knowledge of grinding soil for my project. She suggested an Asian grocery store for finding heavy duty mortar & pestle. And yup, I stopped by at an Vietnamese grocery store and found something for $10 cheaper than what I had been looking at. So here's the South Dakota soil. It looks and feels like a very dark, very thick, very creamy chocolate frosting! I find it hard to not lick my fingers when I'm scraping the bowl.

And of course, I got some junk food too. It's the only time I succumb to junk food, when I'm at an Asian grocery store. "Hey, I used to really like that!"

The cat secretly likes to have her teeth brushed?

2009-11-29T17:47:00.000-08:00

The E. Coli scare in west Portland has us all brushing our teeth out of bottled water, although I do wonder if that's really necessary. Since it's trouble enough to brush my own teeth with bottled water, I decided to skip brushing the cat's teeth today, and just give her the wipe-down part.

This is our normal routine: I scoop out her litter box, and as soon as I do that, she starts to run around wild, because she knows what comes next. Then I chase her around the house for a few minutes, playing hide and seek, until she lets me catch her. I wipe her down with a hot washcloth; this part she likes.

Then I brush her teeth. It's true. I've done this since she was a kitten. They even make kitty toothpaste with whitening formula, which I think is a little strange. But I digress.

After I brush her teeth, I put her collar back on, open the bathroom door and she zooms out of there like a speeding bullet.

Today, I wiped her down with the washcloth, put her collar back on, and opened the bathroom door. She sat on the counter, looked at me, looked at the door, and didn't budge.

I left the bathroom, stood by the door, she just sat there on the counter, looking at me. Did you forget something?

Boiled Sea, Baked Earth

2009-11-23T20:24:00.000-08:00

That's kind of dramatic sounding, isn't it?

I finally got my act together and started preparing the materials for my senior's book.

The soil from his family's S. Dakota farm (in the foreground) and the soil from the Oregon farm (in the back). There's a pretty dramatic difference in color between the two!

I tried pulverizing the soil first, but because it was damp, all I was doing was making lumps by pounding on it.

So I decided to bake first. Here are two trays of the Sauvie Island farm soil, ready to go into the oven. But I'm not sure if that was the right choice or not, because after baking, they turned into very hard granules.

Here I am, trying to pulverize after baking, using an old cookie sheet and a chunk of granite. I was making clouds of dust all over the room. And I still have lots of little hard granules. So now I'm wondering if I should soak the soil to make a slurry? The baking part isn't to dry the soil, but to maybe kill off whatever microbes are living in there.

I was glad that I broke up the soil into bits before baking—I found 2 worms!

While the soil was baking, I was also boiling and filtering the sea and river water. So here are the jars of boiled and filtered Pacific ocean, Willamette river and Columbia river. See how yellow the Willamette looks compared to the others. It also had a very different smell from the other two.

Fruits of my labor, labor, and more labor

2009-11-22T23:45:00.000-08:00

Despite losing half of the persimmon tree last year and another half of what remained this fall, I was able to harvest around 100 persimmons today. There are probably still 30 left on the tree, I'm waiting to see if they'll ripen some more. I'm not sure the tree will survive this winter though. The branch that broke off this fall left a pretty significant wound. Last year, the wound was pretty clean, this year, not so much. And we'll see if these persimmons turn out to be any good.

the 2nd and 3rd batches of quince paste! This was basically the quince paste weekend. I peeled, cored, cooked, pureed and baked yesterday. And then baked some more today. The little toaster oven was going all night last night and all day today. It really just doesn't set like the recipe says it will, although after cooling in the fridge, it's set enough for me. I also tried something else today—the top half of the paste seems to set more during baking, but the bottom half really doesn't want to. So today, I flipped the paste over and returned it to the oven, and the paste did not seem to suffer from it. So I think I'll revise (further...not like I didn't revise it already from the original) the recipe as:

Peel and core lots of quince; cover in water, add lemon zest from 1 lemon) and boil for ~20 minutes until quince is fork tender. Drain. Puree. Return to pot. For every cup of puree, add 1/2 cup of sugar (this is half of what the original recipe calls for). Add the juice from the lemon; add vanilla extract (1 Tsp for every 4 cups of puree). Cook and stir frequently for 2 hours. Line baking dish w/ parchment paper, pour quince mixture into dish. Back at barely warm oven (I had mine set to 150F) for 1.5 hours. Let cool. Flip the paste over. I did this by pulling the paste out by the parchment paper onto a plate, putting the baking dish over the paste and flipping the whole thing over. Return this back to the oven for another 1.5 hours. Let cool. Refrigerate. Cut into pieces, wrap and store in fridge. The 2nd round of baking (after flipping) doesn't seem to require another sheet of parchment. The finished paste lifted out of the pan very cleanly and easily. [Added Nov 24—I think a little ginger would be really terrific!]

I think I'll make this a new Thanksgiving tradition. Not that we had any old ones.

Stories about color

2009-11-18T23:42:00.000-08:00

OK, so this is a mishmash of stories about color.

Story #1, Quince Paste

I have a quince tree that produces prodigious amount of fruit every year. I've always given most away and then kept enough to put in cooking. I like to braise pork chops or chicken with it.

Last year, my critique group buddy Anne made quince paste from the fruit I gave her, and it was heavenly and looked beautiful, like a bowl of rubies! So this year, I decided to make some quince paste myself. Here's the basic recipe: peel & core 4 pounds of quince, cook and puree, cook for 1.5 hours, then bake for 1.5 hours. And enjoy the ruby red quince paste!

Here's what happened—2.5 hours to peel and core enough fruit to make 4 pounds (they're hard as rocks), another 0.5 hour to cook and puree. Cook for another 1.5 hours and bake for another 1.5 and...it's not done! So back into the pot for another 1.5 hours and bake for another 1.5, at which point, I really had to go to bed. Pulled it out of the oven and left it out to cool. It was not ruby red, just a dark shade of orange. This is now 9 hours later...I should've started much earlier in the day, of course.

And to my disappointment, the fairy godmother did not show up and a miracle did not happen—it was still not ruby red this morning. It still tasted good though, so I'm calling it a semi-success.

Story #2, My New Gloves

The Good Prince is red-green colorblind, a fairly common affliction. I bought these new gloves, bright magenta. I mean they screeeeam magenta. As we were going to the Met's Simulcast encore showing of Turandot tonight, I had my gloved hand on the stick shift, and the Good Prince noticed the new gloves and said "Blue gloves."

The Pacific in my peanut butter jar!

2009-11-15T17:47:00.000-08:00

The iconic Haystack Rock, above, and a couple and their dog, below. There is a dog in there somewhere...

The weather through the coast ranges was not pretty—raining cats and dogs in places and very foggy in the others. I wondered if it was really a good idea to go today, but figured that it wasn't going to get any better for another 6 months and so pushed on. When I got to Cannon Beach, it was actually relatively dry, just some mist.

However, it was very windy. And I had on the Good Prince's rain coat (the only rain proof coat we have between the two of us), which was of course giant huge on me and very billowy in the wind. I had images of me sailing through the air into the waves with the next gust of wind.

It must have been low tide, because it felt like I was walking and walking forever to get to the water, which seemed full of REALLY HIGH WAVES. The whole time, I was thinking, I hope my last thoughts are not going to be “what a stupid idea this was...”

Finally, I got out to where the water was and with the next in-coming wave, I scooped up the Pacific Ocean and quickly retreated back up the beach. My ankles got wet, but thanks to my water proof boots, my feet stayed dry, which was very nice. I was smart enough to bring extra shoes, socks & gloves, although what I really needed was an extra pair of pants. But it wasn't bad at all.

My plan had been to turn north towards Sauvi Island to pick up more water and soil at my senior's farm on my way back. But it was pretty dark already, and I knew no one was going to be home. The idea of rummaging through their barn in the dark seemed like a pretty bad idea—even though they knew I'd be there, their neighbors wouldn't necessarily know so. So I'll do that tomorrow in daylight instead.

So ta-da! The Pacific Ocean:

It's official

2009-11-13T23:42:00.000-08:00

The new website is up, at the usual location.

If the weather permits, I go to the coast on Sunday to get some Pacific ocean water. I'll be stopping by my senior's farm where his wife has collected soils from the S. Dakota farm, their Sauvi Island farm, water from the Columbia and from the Willamette, all ready for me to pick up. I haven't heard from my senior's son yet...he was supposed to get me water from the St. Claire. Not sure what's happening on that front. May have to call or find someone else to get it for me.

I've gotten really good feedback on the book arts list over using the ocean water, river water and soil for the book, so that's been great. I've been forming a lot of different ideas in my head in the last few days, imagery-wise, as the website work was winding down and I could focus on the book more.

Tomorrow is my 2nd to last beginning Gocco class. Got a good deal for one of those 6' long folding tables at Office Max today so now I have a bit more table surface to work with. It will be better, I think. This will be the first time I'll have 5 students in the space (that'd be 6 people in the space including me); I'll find out just how spacious it REALLY is.

It's #&%*$ brilliant!

2009-11-11T00:51:00.001-08:00

And Jim C says so, so it must be true.

Can't remember if I've already mentioned this, but for my senior's book, I want to include water from the Pacific, the Willamette, the Columbia, and the St. Claire, and also earth from S. Dakota and Sauvi Island.

I've been looking around for small vials for containers and trying to figure out ways to contain the vials in such a way that, if they should spring a leak, break, or some such thing, the water would not damage the book or other books near it.

I also wanted the water and the earth to be accessible such that you can 'hold' the water in your hands, or the earth in your hands, and not feel too removed from them.

I've gone through so many different iterations on this theme (including using diaper filling, or some other form of water absorbent material), and even when Jim finally said that he thought the containment method would be acceptable, things just never quite felt right. I suppose that's part of the reason why I've been procrastinating getting started on this book.

But NOW I'M READY!

As I was riding the bus today (there's nothing else to do on the bus but thinking up brilliant ideas), I finally figured out how to do it, and I can't believe it took me this long to think of it. Especially since one of my buddies is a papermaker.

So, drum roll please -- I'm going to have papers made with water from the 4 bodies of water and earth from those 2 locations. When you hold those pages, you will be holding the water and the earth in your hands.

It makes me want to jump up and down and shout IT'S #&%*$ BRILLIANT!

Putting things on the back burner my foot!

2009-11-09T23:31:00.000-08:00

I am apparently unable to do that. So instead of shifting focus to start working on my senior's book, I've been putting in 8-10 hours a day for the last 10 days finishing the website redesign. It's almost all done, I just have 1 last page to do.

So of my original goals --

1. Learn to do layout in CSS
2. Learn PHP
3. I can't even remember what the 3rd goal was

I managed 1 1/2. I've got the CSS layout down. I got the gist of PHP, although without knowing a lot more javascript, I can't accomplish what I had in mind. So I'm leaving that to another time. (Just to clarify, quite a bit of those hours are spent reading the CSS and PHP manuals/tutorials. It wasn't all spent on developing the new website.)

But, I did make it so that if people don't have javascript turned on, everything should still function just fine. Maybe that was the 3rd goal...

I have the mostly done new website uploaded in a test spot, if you should want to take a look.

Website redesign

2009-11-01T00:05:00.000-07:00

I've been needing to update my website forever but haven't had the time. My original plan was to do it this October after Portland Open Studios and before November, at which point I'm going to be working full time on my senior's book so that I can finish it by the end of the year.

But, between getting sick (I'm still coughing like crazy) and being on a grant review panel, the end of the month is here and I'm just getting started. So that's not getting done but I have a mockup for the homepage. Rest of the pages will follow the same style.

The grant review panel—what a blast that was! I met one of my favorites (Kay French) plus 3 other really terrific artists. Now that our part is done, I figure I can talk about it a bit. It was an amazing experience, although it did take a lot of time. I figure it was probably 30 hours of work by the time I read 29 applications, viewed the supplemental materials, and we had our whole day discussion.

So the website redesign will be on the back burner while I get started on my senior's book. But the plan is to get serious about learning to use CSS to control layout, The home page is completely laid out using the proper methodologies...not that it's that complicated a layout, but it did still take some trying. Next, I need to learn php so I can do a better job displaying artwork images.

But like I say, that will be on the back burner as I get ramped up on the book.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, I'm going w/ a darker background to save energy!

Dorkfest '09

2009-10-30T23:22:00.001-07:00

Goodness gracious, looks like there's scant competition for it this year, so it looks to be my chance!

My qualifications:

1. If I win this year, I shall use up the remaining Starbucks card! No socially-well-adjusted buying 1 cup of coffee and leaving the rest of the card for Dork '10! No Siree! Previous Dorks who did such things were ninnies.

2. After entertaining art lovers for 7 hours a day during Portland Open Studios, I relaxed in the evening by reading my O'Reilley Web Design in a Nutshell book, updating my CSS knowledge.

3. I've probably been on the net for longer than most of M5K's readers have been around on this planet. If they were on Mars prior to coming to Earth, that doesn't count.

4. This is Friday night, and I'm listing my dorkitudes for millions to read on the web...need I say more?

5. All my previous entries still stand...

OK, got to submit this before the last minute deadline rush!

My good name is being sullied

2009-10-22T22:47:00.001-07:00

Way back when, we used to laugh at people who used their own names for domain names. Then it became the expected thing for artists. By then, [insert my name here].com had been taken up by a Chinese software company selling math related tools. (You'll see why I'm not using my name for the reference shortly.)

But after a few years, they went away and the website [insert my name here].com just had ads. So I carefully marked the domain expiration date on my calendar, and as the day approached, checked and double checked whois to see if they renewed.

Well, they didn't. So the fateful day arrived. I checked as midnight approached. Nope, not renewed. So immediately after midnight, I checked again, and aaaargh, it had been renewed. Bots!

So I didn't look there for a long time. And today, I looked. And oh, I really shouldn't have.

[Insert my name here].com had turned into a very naughty place. Although there are no photos, the links all supposedly point you to some rather 'interesting' places. (But all in Chinese.) Although, I certainly wouldn't click on any of them, no matter how interesting they sounded. I was reading the links off to The Good Prince, and he was going "whoa, too much information!"

Certainly if I were on a PC, clicking on any of those links would probably be an extremely bad idea. And on a mac, still not good.

So there you have it, do NOT go to [insert my name here].com. (But of course you will.)

I'm still around

2009-10-20T23:33:00.000-07:00

I seem to have fallen down on the job of blogging. I have been working hard on a variety of art related work, but not much studio time in the last couple of weeks. Portland Open Studios ended last weekend, but being on the board, that means we're now planning for next year. We've already had out first meeting tonight, not only wrapping up for this year, but starting to think about next year.

The first weekend this year was very slow for many people. The good weather, Wordstock, both had an impact. The second weekend—Saturday was just the craziest weather we've seen in a long time, and Sunday afternoon, it seemed like everyone was finally out doing Portland Open Studios.

On Saturday, when I was doing my first Gocco demo of the day, I got to the part about flashing the screen. I pushed down on the Gocco (with the lamp unit in there, but with old bulbs) and said "...and at this point, the lamps would flash."

And KABOOM! LIghtning and thunder went off, just as I pushed down.

Now that's Gocco Power!

Portland Open Studios, week 2

2009-10-16T23:18:00.000-07:00

The second week is always so much easier to do than the first week. I didn't have a whole lot to do—made a few changes from last week, dug out some old photographs from my photography days, prepared a new demo, and got the giant huge pizza to last us through the week. Yes, we survive on pizza during Portland Open Studios.

The old photographs from the late 80s and early 90s were fun to see. Portland has changed a lot since those days and a lot of the things I photographed are not there anymore. I'm putting out a few of the silver gelatin prints and a few of the RC prints and see if there's any interest.

[Oct 18: and the answer was no.]

Taking it easy for this week

2009-10-14T23:08:00.000-07:00

This is in between the two Portland Open Studios weekends, and I'm determined to take it a little easy this week. I got caught up on making various appts that I need to make, finished writing a profile on Susan Gallacher-Turner for the Portland Open Studios blog, and tomorrow, I'm off to see a few exhibits! Yay!

I've also been working on a mock-up for updating my website. Not sure how far I'll get with that. I was originally thinking that I'd finish that before the end of October and then I can focus on my senior's book for November and December, but that was before I was asked to serve on a grant panel, which was just too good and educational an opportunity to pass up. So maybe I won't get my website updated before the end of the year after all.

Here's a photo of the 7x7 panels installed in the front entry. I'm pretty sure that I damaged my camera last year when I dropped it on the driveway. I don't think I've taken a photo that's in focus since. I guess I'll have to take it in.

I've joined Etsy

2009-10-12T23:33:00.001-07:00

OK, I resisted and resisted, but I can't believe that I couldn't sell a single bat print during Portland Open Studios! I figured that little baby would just fly out the door like those Austin bats at dusk. So I've listed 2 prints on etsy. We'll see how they do there. Here's the etsy page.

2009 Portland Open Studios, day 1

2009-10-10T22:45:00.001-07:00

How does one get by on 4 1/2 hours of sleep? With lots of leftover pizza and coffee I guess.

I was up until 3:30am this morning getting ready for Portland Open Studios, and was up again at 8am. It was a pretty slow day though, probably the slowest day I've seen yet. We'll see what tomorrow brings.

What was funny—I had set out Superfoodland!, the board game I did for For the Love of Food earlier this year. Part way through the afternoon, I mentioned to some neighbors who had stopped by that I was surprised that no one seemed impressed by the blueberries. There was a short pause, and he said, "they're not real blueberries?" The Good Prince thinks everyone just thinks I've put out a goblet of blueberries on the table and they're not sure why.

Now it's time for me to catch up on my beauty sleep.

All's not quiet in the studio

2009-10-07T01:19:00.001-07:00

Well, ok, so I was gone for a few days celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival out on the Alvord Desert (see a few photos on my facebook, even if you're not on facebook, I think you can see them), but outside of that, I have been working hard.

I'm still finishing the paintings (airbrushing the gouache pieces with the GAC500 mixture), painting the edges of the panels, and having my 3rd solarplate intensive with Barbara Mason. We did relief prints in the 3rd session, and I have some nifty prints to scan and show, I just haven't had the opportunity yet. At this point, it will have to wait until Portland Open Studios is over. Speaking of which, I was up until 3am this morning finishing up this profile on Jason Kappus, a very young and very talented artist.

The new 8th

2009-09-28T23:30:00.000-07:00

Slightly better than the old 8th. Maybe.

There's very little difference, actually. I thought the old 8th was just a bit too dingy, and so I added a bit more spectrum red and ultra marine to the edges. Although I have to say that now it looks less desert like, which was what I sort of had in mind before, the desert colors. I'm also wondering if it's a bit too red-white-blue-ish. I guess I'll sleep on it some more.

I actually got to this point last night/this morning around 2am or so. Spent most of today doing Portland Open Studios stuff (preparing to ship some tour guides, meeting minutes), and also getting ready for my 3rd session of the solarplate intensive with Barbara Mason tomorrow. I have some etchings from our 2nd session that I haven't scanned in yet. I'll do that sometime. Tomorrow, I want to do some relief prints.

8th

2009-09-28T00:17:00.000-07:00

Am I done? I'm not sure yet. I'll sleep on it.

2009-09-24T22:49:00.000-07:00

For those of you who don't facebook—I figure this means that the gods think I'm flossing and brushing right. And for Shu-mei, who can't believe that I noticed this—I just spat out my toothpaste, I had my face in the sink, I was staring right at it, how could I NOT notice?

Unfortunately, the last couple of days have not been productive in the studio. For some reason, I had bouts of stomachaches all day yesterday. On and off, and through the night. Thank heavens it didn't continue today. And today was mostly a Portland Open Studios day. Shipping out tour guides, picking up tour guides, incremental updates on the website. I still haven't finished Kate's profile.

Tonight was the China Council's annual membership meeting/dinner, so that took up almost 5 hours! For a meal! Well, ok, there was a talk too, and this year, by the Portland Art Museum director, about the new exhibit China Design Now. I'm sure it was an interesting talk, but unfortunately, I did not have a very good seat—the last table, close to the rest of the restaurant which had diners not involved with the event, and the other Chinese patrons at my table kept on talking to me through the talk. Yes, this is always a problem—while the speaker is talking up there, half the Chinese people in the audience are having their own conversations. I can't exactly just ignore them when they say something to me, and if I respond, it just keeps the conversation going. What do you do?!

7th

2009-09-22T01:11:00.000-07:00

Queen Bat and Her Royal Jewels

Going to Bend knocked me off my painting track for a bit so I had a chance to catch up on some Portland Open Studios chores. You can now buy a tour guide using PayPal, and I'm also working on another feature, and an artist profile.

Got back to my bat this afternoon (see this entry for where it was last I worked on it). I'd say this is a worthy facebook picture alright!

For those keeping count, this was another 5 1/2 hours of work. That makes the total 10.5 hours, excluding preparation time. I prepare the boards a bunch at a time (3 coats of gesso then mounting paper), so it's hard to track how much time it takes per board. I'd guess maybe 15 minutes. Of course, I'm not done-done yet—I have yet to spray it with the GAC500 mixture. Again, I'll batch that step of the process too, so we'll say it's another 15 minutes. Which brings us to a grand total of about 11 hours.

Half a bat...

2009-09-16T00:10:00.001-07:00

I was hoping to get my 7th panel done today before I head over to Bend to see my mom tomorrow, but well, it's past midnight and I must go to sleep now.

I've wanted to do a bat image for a long time now. The other day, I was going through my books of images with Susan (who's doing a bat pin for me), and I got inspired by all the bat photos all over again. And after my 6h panel, which was very red, I wanted to do a blue image. So a bat at night seemed like the perfect antidote to panel #6.

Here's how it started this afternoon:

And here's where we're at tonight.

This is a fantasy bat. Some fruit bats do have extremely fancy noses and others (the ones that hunt) have extremely fancy ears. So I've combined the two. I think it's looking very Balinese, which is not intentional. It's also looking a little grimlin like, which is also not intentional.

For a change, I'm happy with how the panel is going, and I don't see any major revisions in its future. But maybe that's bad?

[And people always ask, so...it took me about 5 hours to get to this point, which does not include the preparations part. And for the most part, I'm painting with a size 0 brush.]

6th

2009-09-15T00:23:00.000-07:00

Going Around in Circles

This piece has had a rough life. It started out as this (you can still see this pattern in the finished piece above, sort of):

Which I decided I really didn't like. So I brush an earthen red all over it:

Before it finally arrived at its current state, which is the 1st image above.

Another fairly labor intensive piece. This was a 4-part repeating image, created using the same basic method as the 6-part repeating image here. I have to say that the 4-part repeat is a lot easier to do than the 6-part repeat—the 4-part repeat is at least symmetrical, which is a lot easier to deal with.

But as you already saw above, I did not care for the resulting pattern, it looked kind of crudely done. Even though it wasn't finished yet, I had the nagging feeling that I could put 10 more hours into it, and I'd still see it as kind of 'crude.' I'm not sure why, maybe the pattern was too large?

5th bir...

2009-09-11T23:17:00.001-07:00

I'm getting tired of typing out the whole 'birthday present to myself' thing now.

But anyhow, of the 5 panels done, this was the most time consuming. Not because it was difficult, but it was labor intensive. I'm figuring that this was about 12 hours of neck-cranking, carpal-tunnel-damaging work. Here's how the piece started:

I divided the square into 6 parts and did whatever I wanted in one of the parts, and here it is:

Then I took a photo of it and used photoshop to replicate the other 5 parts. I printed this out in black & white and trimmed it down to size. Then I took a charcoal stick and blackened the back side of this printout and taped it to the painting. Then I used a pencil and marked some of the key spots so that I can replicate the image. The charcoal transfers to the painting, sort of, at least enough for me to locate where things are supposed to go. Then I remove the printout, keeping it taped to the edge of the painting so that I can always flip it back on the painting to locate myself again, as necessary. And it was often necessary.

I am undecided about the orientation at this point, and the Good Prince has been pretty busy so I haven't asked him for an edict on the subject matter.

[I should add that the background colors you see in the beginning stage photo—that was put on there days ago, before I had an idea of what I wanted to do. It just so happens that I'd been itching to do a 'kaleidoscope' piece for a couple of days, and here was this panel that was already kind of divided into 6 parts with the bright center spot. I also want to do a 4-part and an 8 part image. I kind of think the 6 part image looks a bit like a face, probably unavoidable because the way the repeating happens, it will just always have that '2 eyes and a mouth' look.]

4th birthday present

2009-09-11T00:38:00.000-07:00

This is searching for a title. And I'm having too much fun.

Solarplate intensive with Barbara Mason

2009-09-08T22:25:00.000-07:00

This is a 5"x7" test solarplate intaglio printed on Rives Lightweight. The yellow stripe down towards the left is from the scanner (I despise this all-in-one scanner/printer/copier).

I got a RACC Professional Development grant to do 20 hours with Barbara Mason, and today was my first session. For the first session, I prepared several tests—

1. The above, which is collection of various line thicknesses from 0.5pt to 20pt, various fonts (serif, sans serif, italics, etc) at different sizes, ultra fine sharpie, fine sharpie, black oil pastel, brown oil pastel and gray oil pastel.

2. A sheet of mylar painted with ivory black at different density levels. We test printed just a small strip of this.

3. A sheet of mylar painted with an image in bone black (which is more transparent than ivory black). But this was NOT dry after 12 hours, so we did not test this today.

3. A high contrast photograph. We did not test this today, as the laser printer output showed a visible grid, which would image on the solarplate.

4. A low contrast photograph. We test printed just a small strip of this.

5. A B&W positive and negative of a painting. We test printed one of these, although I don't remember which.

Here are a couple of details. Again, the yellow stripe is from the scanner.

I'm pretty sure the fuzziness is from the wiping (this is intaglio and not relief printed). The Rives Lightweight gave the 'cleanest' print as far as the fine lines and texts go. Rives BFK was a little fuzzier (both of these were printed dampened). The Arches 88, printed dry, gave the fuzziest result. Although, both the Lightweight and the BFK showed the slight 'woven' pattern that is visible on the backs of these papers when unprinted, ie, the 'weave' became visible on the front of the paper in the print. And the ultra fine sharpie is barely visible at all.

I love the lines drawn with the oil pastels!

We're scheduled to meet next on Sunday, that will give me a chance to create a few images to print for real (rather than just tests). I'm thinking that I will do intaglio for the first half, and then relief for the 2nd half. I'll be trying the relief plates on the letterpress and also the sign printer that Catherine loaned me. (Yes, I just have all kinds of presses here, on loan from other artists!)

In either case, there's trouble

2009-09-05T14:48:00.001-07:00

That's the statement the Good Prince made about the piece, and I decided that it made a good title.

So this was the 3rd of the 7x7 panels. I was up until 3:15am working on it this morning, followed by another 30 minutes of just staring at it. At one point, I poured brown paint all over everything. Finally gave up and went to bed. Got up at 9:30am, and after my morning activities, went back to work.

When I finally decided I could do no more, I asked the Good Prince which orientation he liked. He chose one, saying that the other made it look like the 'thing' was trying to escape from fire. I said, but this way it looks like a comet is about to hit the house.

He said, well then, in either case, there's trouble.

But I learned something—if you put down a layer of brown, after that, doesn't matter what colors you use, everything looks kind of Indian-ish. As in India Indian, not Native American. Everything gets an ochre undertone, maybe that's what makes it feel Indian.

And after days of sitting for 6-8 hours a day, painting, I think I need a rest.

2nd birthday present

2009-09-03T23:25:00.000-07:00

In honor of Shu-mei, who thought the last one was about slugs. I think I'll call this Dude, They're Serving Free Beer!

Ooops, I just now realized that I forgot to put in the stars. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow. But then again, maybe I'm done.

First birthday present to myself

2009-09-03T00:47:00.002-07:00

Remember those 7x7 panels I got for myself for my 49th birthday? I finished the first panel today. [Now titled "Angelita Sluggyfish," after Angelita Surmon who came up with the name 'sluggyfish.']

Time to start thinking about Portland Open Studios

2009-09-01T13:01:00.000-07:00

Not that I haven't been thinking about it all along. It's impossible not to, having to do the website and the secretarial duties and the Portland Open Studios blog. (Just finished this profile on Kamala Dolphin-Kinsgley a couple of days ago.) But now it's time to start thinking about me in Portland Open Studios.

Helen Hiebert, Diane Jacobs, and I (three from our foursome critique group) are all participating, so we decided to do coordinated hands-on demos for the event. Make paper at Helen's, letterpress print at Diane's, and silkscreen print at my studio.

And we made a little postcard. Got it off to psprint yesterday, in time to take advantage of their 1/2 price postcard sale.

Seasons & projects in transition

2009-08-30T22:28:00.000-07:00

Along with summer, several projects are now wrapping up (or have wrapped up):

Roof, check.

Gutter, check.

Studio remodel, mostly check. I still need to paint the other half.

Write Around Portland broadside, check. Diane and I printed the colophons today, so we're done. They're just missing signatures and numbers at this point.

And I'm ready to start on some of my 7x7 pieces—I mounted paper on 6 panels today. I'm planning to mount paper as needed as I go along, rather than mounting all 30 of them right away. In case I get other ideas for what I want to do with them.

The struggle may (or may not) be over

2009-08-28T23:25:00.000-07:00

So there it is, the text printed, the leaves printed. I'm not sure that I'm so happy about it. It took me three ink mixes before I found the right color for the darker color of the leaves. I wanted the colors to move, ie, to not be so perfectly registered, so that the leaves looked like they were quaking in the wind. I don't think I like the result though.

So I made 2 more screens today, to give the leaves a bit more definition, and after printing up a few more, I decided I liked that even less. So here I am, leaving well enough alone, for now. See this entry for where it was before I added the text and the darker color of the leaves.

Now I'm back to finish prepping my 7x7 boards.

Shut up, sit down, paint!

2009-08-25T17:25:00.001-07:00

Turquoise and Lime Green Fight to the Death, gouache on paper on board. Although I might call it Woman and Cat. Or maybe After Our Conversation.

The stars have been aligning for me to come to this point.

As a 49th birthday present to myself, I bought 30 panels (7"x7"...) to do whatever I want with. No agendas, no themes, no influences, no worries. Just me and paint. And I can do whatever I darn wish. And make a mess, if I just can't help myself.

And when Artist X and I met to exchange our last pieces, we had a conversation about whether it was necessary for paintings (and art in general) to have any meaning at all.

Then of course, on Saturday, I spent all day trying to gain some control over the letterpress and not getting very good results at that.

Came Saturday night, I was ready to throw all cautions to the wind and just do whatever I wanted. No agendas, no themes, no influences, no worries. No meanings.

This is done on a 12"x12" panel. (I'm not finished prepping the 7"x7" panels yet. Most of them have been gesso'ed, but none have paper mounted.) I'm not quite sure if I'm finished or not. Time will tell.

(Credits: the wonderful panels come from Art Substrates; the 7x7=49 is inspired by gl's 6x6=36 birthday pastry last year...)

We have progress on the broadside

2009-08-25T17:00:00.000-07:00

After printing my first pressure print layer on the letterpress at Diane's last Wednesday, it took me 3 tries before I had a plate that I was happy with for the 2nd layer. In the process, I completely destroyed the plate for the 1st layer, so that's officially cancelled.

My first attempt, using pva on cardstock, buckled the paper. My 2nd attempt, again pva on cardstock only this time I pressed it between release paper under bricks, I tried to lift up the release paper a bit too early and completely peeled off a layer of the paper. The 3rd time, I left it under bricks for overnight and that was ok.

I printed this layer at home, and had a heck of a time achieving any kind of a control over the situation. Everytime I changed the packing, things changed in ways totally different from what I was expecting. Everytime I inked up (with very little ink), the next print got way darker, and then 2 prints later, it seemed like I needed to ink up again.

I went through my 56 sheets of paper and it wasn't clear to me that I was going to get 40 good prints for the edition. But at this point, I really can't start over again.

I took a break from the broadside on Sunday, then on Monday I added the leaves and the white in the bark. So now there are 2 layers of pressure print on the letterpress (1st layer—gray & yellow background, 2nd layer—blue & orange over that), 2 layers on the gocco (the leaves & the bark).

Today, I looked at the bark and decided it needed to go white still, so there are now 2 layers of white over the bark, and here I'm printing the gray areas in the tree bark. The paper size measures 20"x13", so it's hanging over the edges of the gocco.

Now this is 2 layers of pressure print and 4 layers of gocco. I still have the text, patterns over the leaves, and maybe a rabbit to print.

The print is too large to dry on my drying racks, and I do like seeing them all lined up like this: