Inifinite Loop, picturesque chickens, and gocco fail!

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!

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

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...

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

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

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

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

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!

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

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.