Business Men

I've got a bunch of fancy events this month, so I needed to make some fancy new business card. The card can be cut up to make a little man, with four varieties: devil in tighty whities, sad guy, cat, and a blank so you can draw a face yourself.

Around around

Still untitled, two color relief print, 22 by 30 inches, edition of 20.

Liminal

Winter tan

Slender young women with cultivated winter tans walk past me, their foreheads dotted with ashen grey targets, as they walk past and away from me their pants command or entreat me with single words emblazoned across their ass.



On Friday, I give a demonstration to the students on simple relief printing, over enunciating the Japanese words and mentally pen an autobiography in 100 words or less. Entire years compressed into two words, influential portions omitted for the sake of propriety. I attempt to resist my natural inclination to come off as a bit of a wet blanket milquetoast.

Two faced

Monoserigraphy with powdered graphite and blind embossing. I made this after printing a series with the face, once, and then found a scrap of paper in the print shop and made this with it.

To leave and never return

Monoserigraphy and blind embossing, variable edition.

Graduate Shmaduate

I was awarded the Southern Graphics Council Graduate Student Fellowhip. The award includes a solo show at the 2011 SGC in St. Louis, MO, $1,000 towards creating a body of work for the show, and giving a presentation at this year's SGC in Philadelphia banquet dinner. Yay!

I almost hyperventilated from excitement when I found out this morning.

Graduate Shmaduate

I was awarded the Southern Graphics Council Graduate Student Fellowhip. The award includes a solo show at the 2011 SGC in St. Louis, MO, $1,000 towards creating a body of work for the show, and giving a presentation at this year's SGC in Philadelphia banquet dinner. Yay!

I almost hyperventilated from excitement when I found out this morning.

Oil Stick Monotype

One of my old studio mates got rid of a box of old oilsticks. Before recommending to the students that they try to use them for monotype printing, I gave them a quick try. They work pretty good, but still don't give a very fine point or much control. I've still found it's easier to get much detail and depth with reduction (wiping away material with tools) that with the addition step.

Oil stick and kitikata chine colle on buff BFK:


I drew the skull without referrence, which explains if not excuses the misproportion.

Print Survey Class First Assignment Demo: Monotype

Friday, I did my first demo for the Print Survey class I'm assistant teaching. Luckily for me, last week I spent hours making monotypes in front of a crowd so I was prepared to do it for the 26 or so students in the class. Though the crowd at the LA Art Show was significantly more enthusiastic, I still think I did a pretty good job.

First print: flat of color, reductive monoprint using oil based inks with a stencil made from torn paper and talcum powder.


Using the ghost of ink from the first print, I made an additive monotype with oil based inks and chine colle for the shirt:


Roxanne Sexauer, the professor for the class, showed the students tracing and then printed the traced plate. Finally, I showed the class an additive monotype using hydrated watercolors (the kind which comes in a tube) and aquacrayons:

Using waterbased materials is useful if you can't spend a lot of time in the studio. Since you have to wait for the watercolor to dry before printing anyway, you can make the painting on the plate at home and then bring it to school to print it.

Then, we let the class go, and while I was cleaning up all the inks and rollers and such from doing the demos, I made this final print using the ghost from the previous plate. I think this one is the most successful of the day.

Monoprints from the Show

A selection of the better monotypes I made at the LA Art Show:


1. mono14, 2. mono15, 3. mono13, 4. mono12, 5. mono11, 6. mono10, 7. mono9, 8. mono8, 9. mono7, 10. mono1, 11. mono2, 12. mono3, 13. mono4, 14. mono5, 15. mono6

This one is my favorite:

I mostly used sample paper that I've collected from various product fairs from when the economy was better and companies gave away all that stuff for free. I've run out now, so I need to stop being such a cheapskate.

LA Art Show, 2010

I returned again to the LA Art Show with my wee press, and did LIVE! printing of monotypes at the Los Angeles Printmaking Society's booth.



My little didactic speech about the process I mastered, and repeated the same set of jokes over and over. Thankfully, the only people who heard their repetition were the poor people staffing the booth with me. I didn't bring any referrence material, so some of the monotypes I made are rather poor as I figured out the right pressure for the plate and paper and got used to painting in front of people, but perhaps it's good to get used to embarrassing myself in front of of a crowd of people. It's practice for teaching.



This was my second year in a row doing this at the LA Art Show. Perhaps next year I'll plan ahead better and see if we can sell the prints I make for charity or something.

The Irritant

I also made it a gif, but I think it looks better as a video.



My knees hurt from crouching on the ground. Next time I'm going to do something on a table top instead of on the floor. Making something fall slowly is surprisingly the most difficult part of this.

These fellows are from my old series "Invisible Coterie," and I'm selling some of them in my website.

Panties

I drew this for the Copper Palate Press Panty Exchange. Each artist does an image and then they screenprint them on a variety of panties.

I was going for a vagina dentata feel, because all of my other ideas I thought were too phallic.

The Panty Exchange takes place Friday, 15th, at Copper Palate Press in SLC from 6-10pm.

Spin

My first stop motion animation! Made using the little dolls I make. I want to make an animation using much bigger things that is longer, so this is my practice to see if I can actually make a stop motion at all.

I sell these dolls at Frosty Darling in Salt Lake City, if'n you're interested.

Carrot Persons in their room

I got into trouble for using this campus gallery (every department is so territorial and it serves me right for forgetting about that part of academia) but I'm still glad I did just because I'm finally happy with this piece after seeing it as I had intended it to be.

Bunching up in the armpits and waist

Time and distance push you ahead and apart. We stand in a circle holding varisized tumblers, waiting for someone else to say something after the first gulp. Children are larger, and you're less prepared for the ice and snow each time, each year owning fewer and fewer of the things which made the season bearable. Bundle up in inadequate Southern California coats, one on top of the other, bunching up in the armpits and waist.





The sidewalks are roughened, salted, and won't let you easily slide across them. The air is thick from the atmosphere above it pushing it down, bowling it into a mass, refusing to allow it to waft away. The poison gathers up, bunches itself, falls to the ground with the snow and re amasses. Conversations are awkward and littered with self corrections--cuss words unsaid, recollections of what particular detail is appropriate or not--and suddenly an entire year was spent doing nothing worth mentioning.



I've added some old pieces to my shop.

Skulls

The night before I left for SLC, I made some last minute Xmas presents for family members. The photo emulsion was locked away, and the darkroom in a state of inoperability, so I used screenfill instead for my stencil. The outline of two skulls was pretty easy to freehand spur of the moment, and in case of any pinholes I might have missed I painted on two layers of the stuff.

Pillows

Not exempt to the commercial impulse, I screenprinted on shiny sateen fabric the silhouettes of animals and then made them into throw pillows. I did this solely for the purpose of selling them and making a little extra cash off of obligatory gift giving. So far, they have been a middling success (nothing close to the tentacles), but they involved such little effot to make that it has paid off in the end. I made the silhouettes by cutting the shapes out of paper, and then using those paper shapes to burn the screen stencil. These are available for sale at Frosty Darling in Salt Lake City should you be so interested.

Science!

I met Bill Nye the Science Guy. I immediately called my sisters to brag about it.

T-shirts: The Evergrowing Problem

Printing on t-shirts is the bane of every printmaking professor. Students always want to try it, it's messy, and you end up with mostly stupid looking stuff. And so, I contributed to this problem by teaching the printmaking class at El Camino Community College how to do monoserigraphy on t-shirts.









I also did some live printing of this technique at the recent CSULB annual Holiday Sale in the Werby Gallery. I should have photos of that soon, taken by my friend Salvador, but he's working on his finals right now so it might not be till next week.

A Great Horror of Buttons

This fellow is the second in a series of five. Two are made, but a group of two is a couple, three is a family, and four is two couples, hence why I'm going to make five in total. Five is a crowd. Five can be unrelated to each other but still occupy the same space.



They are made of the scraps and remainders from other prints--random pieces sewn together to make new cloth and then made into this ungulate sort of guy. Covered in a great horror of buttons and haunted by the reminder of when I was actually successful and people liked buying my work.

Globules of Ice

The painters I know have more blue eyes than any other group of people I can quantify and label. I'm taking a class intended for painters. Their eyeballs float around the room, suspended in their faces, little globules of cocktail ice. Clink clink.



The miniature is defined by its physicality. The only ways to describe the miniature is through ratio and relationship to other objects: the story of Tom Thumb, the fictional tiny hero, who had a walnut shell as a cradle. We are given the intimate knowledge of Tom’s size through a gluttony of vivid physical description, but only of the size of Tom.



In the painting class, one of the students showed his recent work which included a miniaturized copy of a Franz Kline painting. The discussion of the piece was largely a discussion of ratio—the size of Kline’s brush compared to the size of the brush Jordan used, the difference in studio size, canvas used, etc. Everyone found the painting funny because it was small, a joke that one only “gets” if one already possesses knowledge of the large painting that was copied. The miniature is not only defined by its physicality, but also by its familiarity. You cannot see a miniature something if you have never see a normal sized something before. Without foreknowledge of the miniaturized item the miniaturization is undetectable. I am in on the joke of the miniature Kline painting, but my own experience with Kline’s work, I realize long after my “in crowd” chuckling, are of photographic reproductions, images that are even smaller than Jordan’s reduced painting.



The miniature is of the antique and the timeless, a tiny piece signifying timelessness, whereas the giant is most often involved only when his, and the giant is usually a male, death or defeat is predetermined. Cyclops was blinded by Odysseus, King Arthur and his cronies battled and killed numerous unnamed giants, and even London’s Og and Magog are defeated and chained, forced into servitude. In Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver, when in the land of Brobdingnag, home of the giant people, was perpetually confronted with the repulsive nature of humanity. The breasts of the giant women are mentioned at numerous intervals, the breast being the most idealized part of the female anatomy they are the perfect example of the horridness of the large. The color, the odor, and the sheer size of the breasts of the aristocratic giants are described in lavish disgusting detail, and just in case that were inadequate, Gulliver also throws in the tail of seeing a beggar beset with breast cancer. The breasts of the giants are so large that Gulliver can only see one at a time and only a small part of it--the nipple surrounded by downy hair a hideous furry hillock--this all encompassing experience is grotesque.

New Carrot

I finally finished a new large scale print. Sadly, it's been rather poorly received in crits and by friends, so I'm considered other ways to learn from it or to improve upon this piece.



Here it is stuffed, in front of the older carrot people:



I think the form of the older carrot people is more what I'm after, with smaller heads, taller, and with narrower bodies. I'm going to try one more like this, but changing the form somewhat and shrinking the head. I also learned that the eyes looked fine on the painted form, but mysteriously look too close together when printed, though the ratio has not changed. I think that in the end, I was attempted to cover the whole form and flesh out the entire piece (knees, hands, buttocks, etc.) when one of the stronger points of the old pieces was that not all of the questions were answered.

LAPS 20th National Opening and Panel

People actually looked at my print! Extraordinary!



I'll be part of the panel discussion on the 21st at 2pm, 4800 Hollywood Blvd, LA. Come prepared with uncomfortable questions to ask me.

LAPS 20th National Opening and Panel

People actually looked at my print! Extraordinary!



I'll be part of the panel discussion on the 21st at 2pm, 4800 Hollywood Blvd, LA. Come prepared with uncomfortable questions to ask me.

APE 2009

That's me! Table 242. I have specially screenprinted paper bags for putting purchases inside.



APE 2009

Saturday, Oct. 17
11am - 7pm

Sunday, Oct. 18
11am - 6pm

The Concourse
620 7th Street
San Francisco

APE 2009

That's me! Table 242. I have specially screenprinted paper bags for putting purchases inside.



APE 2009

Saturday, Oct. 17
11am - 7pm

Sunday, Oct. 18
11am - 6pm

The Concourse
620 7th Street
San Francisco

Monoserigraph of Filiz

Continuing my portrait project is a monoserigraph of Filiz.



At the open studios event a month back a few people asked to learn this method, so I organized a demo. I charged a very small fee so I could cover the cost of materials and afford to buy a beer afterwards. It ended up going pretty well, and was the third time I've demo-ed this technique and the first time I did not stutter from nerves. Ideally, I'd like to try to workshop it as it doesn't require much in the way of facilities and doesn't use anything toxic or dangerous, making it ideal to teach nonprintmakers. Above is the print I made to demo the technique, and below is one of the two made by the attendees (the other is going to China!)



I've recently run into the strange problem of my monoserigraphs being too precise, and people assuming they are manipulated photographs. Or maybe people just don't believe that anyone can draw anymore.