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.

Dream On

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

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

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

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

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.