Many things

ON|PAPER opened. I calculatedly made and wore an elaborate necklace as I figure it's always good to stand out at a reception and give people a reason to talk to you. It's sort of a financially motivated form of "peacocking."

David taught me how to spot weld with a MIG set up, and while I am not very good at it yet I'm good enough for my purely structural purposes.

I have new pieces up at Twentieth Gallery, in the front window, in one of the back rooms, and a little doll brooch that's probably at the sales people's desk.

HNCB III

This is the third in a series of five prints, entitled "He Never Came Back, III." It's made from printed scraps--the bits of the print I cut off when sewing together other work. I saved all of the black pieces, sewed them together, and then added bits of white buttons.




Here's one and two:

Castle

Dreams of finding new unexplored places in familiar houses are like the locked chamber in Bluebeard's castle: the empty unoccupied places never offer actual habitability.

Unwitting Collaborator

It gives me great pains to throw something away that is still useful. This proclivity to hold onto things is constantly on the verge of A&E Hoarder territory that I rationalize away as my inclinations are towards usefulness, not sentimentality. This is willful self deception.

In the printshop, people discard old prints, old paper, and test proofs. I collect these, and layer over them each time I print something else. I print multiple times on a found piece until it's become something new, unrecognizeable to the original artist, and perhaps better, perhaps not. I have a drawer full of these in progress, but here are a few that I deemed "finished." Mediums include lithography, screenprint, monoserigraphy, letterpress, etching, relief, monotype, and hand drawing.

B-sides

screenprints in moleskine sketchbook:



The term "b-sides" in referrence to art process ephemera is shameless cribbed from Cein Watson.

Commercial applications thereof

Today I made a two color screenprint as the packaging for some barrattes. Medusa, a mermaid, and a man with just one big curl were the three motifs for the cards. I used discarded prints collected throughout the semester from other students and printed on the backside, then mounted them onto another sheet of paper before cutting them down--making a cardstock that, while laborious, has the added benefit of being for free.







I made a grid of six of the cards, two of each design, and burned it on the screen. But I was distracted while spraying out the screen after the initial exposure and ruined the second mermaid. I kind of liked the look, though, so I used screenfill to block out the text and outlined the mermaid's body, making this:


I'm going to use those as postcards and finally send some snail mail to my many long distance friends.

No music dance

From the GLAMFA photoshoot. I'm the rat.

Apogee

I'm in a show at DDR projects in Santa Ana with Rob Brown and Tyler Ferriera.

Apogee, Cont'd

At the opening reception for Apogee: Drunk guy stabs at one of my sculptures accusingly and says "WHO is THIS?!" gets a beer from the cooler, and stuffs a second beer in his pants. As he leaves, he pauses by the door and whispers "There's a second beer in my pants."



The three of us screenprint on t-shirts and paper in the back of the gallery for $10, but end up doing them all for free, too grateful to our friends for driving out to the event in the middle of finals to charge them.

Apogee

All the way over in Orange County, I have a show opening this Saturday. It's myself and two other artists. Sure, I could tell who who the two others are, but this blog is about me, me, me!

(Tyler Ferreira and Rob Brown, who are both, like myself, printmakers.)


It's in Art from the Hive in Santa Ana.
Pluses: open bar, next to the Amtrak Station for easy getaway, LIVE! screenprinting on stuff
Minuses: far away from other stuff that isn't Santa Ana, and maybe you just aren't awesome enough for this show.

Anyhow, should you be so inclined, it would be nice if you stopped by.

Angela

Portrait of my friend Angela H. Brown, done in monoserigraphy with powdered graphite and water. Currently in the show "21 Days" at Pravus Gallery in Phoenix, AZ.

This Weekend

(images aren't mine, but are from the showcards)
Tomorrow night in Phoenix, AZ, at Pravus Gallery:



I have a single piece in the show: a powdered graphite on paper portrait of my friend Angela Brown.

And then, on Saturday in Long Beach, CA at Phonebooth Gallery:



The piece in this show is a portrait of Filiz Osman.

Two more shows the following weekend which I will post about later.

I've reduced the prices on some of the old pieces in my shop, so stop by and have a look.

Litho

I've gotten vastly behind in my weekly printing posting duties, so I'm just going to pretend I'm not and resume now.

This is a lithograph drawn and printed for the print survey class's litho demo.

Everyone in the class drew on the stone for the lithography demo, and we used litho crayons, litho pencils, rubbing compound, stopping out with gum arabic, and spray paint. It was started with a drawing by Tyler Ferrera, who is the resident litho expert at CSULB and he was in charge of showing the class how to do all of the finicky stuff required by litho. I was largely in charge of retrieving stuff and tearing down paper.

High School

High school is different in big cities. The school is massive and an impenetrable fortress, with guards buzzing you in and out. I arrived early, but ended up late to the classroom because I couldn't figure out how to get inside of the building.

Anyhow, these lucky students have a printmaking class, and I was a guest artist earlier today who showed them monotypes with waterbased inks.





This made me realize that I need to expand my go-to images for demos. Frontal view portraits and skulls are well and good, but I've got way too many images of them from demos now. Trouble is, they're the easiest thing to draw upside down.



I really like the way watercolor pigment can shatter on the plate before printing. It's not something I've tried to play around with before, but I want to give it a try now:



The students were wonderful. I really expected a group of mostly apathetic adolescents, more like the way I recall art classes from high school, but they were engaged and interested, excited about the process and art in general. Teaching is pretty fun, but I always end up just exhausted from it.

Morsel

Walking to the bus stop after spending a day watching the gallery, a man stopped me on the street by tapping my shoulder. He looked into my eyes, pulling his brows together slightly. "You belong to me," he said. I've just returned to LA from the other side of the country.



I can see it there, and I know it's not intended to be mine. But even so you have so much, so very much, that surely you won't notice when I take only a little bit--wrapped in tissue paper, placed carefully in a breast pocket, or tucked into an used jewelry box in the decaying cushioning foam while your back is turned, your attention diverted. Just an imperceptible amount removed to store away and take with me.



And the next time I see you I will take just a bit, each time nothing more than a tiny fraction. You won't notice it's gone, but I'll get home and add it to a small pile accruing on a shelf, hidden behind the books. Perhaps sometimes you will give it to me even, offer it up or nod agreeably as I take a pinch. You won't know what you're doing, what you're really giving away slowly, bit by bit, is everything, not just that portion of it.



It will take a very long time, but eventually there will be a critical point and it will be mine instead of yours. You won't have noticed, but at some point, and not for a very long time, I will have more than you. I don't know if you will take it back or not; I don't know if you can.

"John"

"John"

In the "Liminal" print exchange showing at Kayo Gallery in Salt Lake City till April 13th.

Smith portrait

Portrait of a Joseph Smith from a potato. This is one of two prints I'll have in the Liminal show opening at Kayo on Friday in SLC. I cut my thumb while carving this, much to embarrassment, and my brother in law suggested it was blood atonement.



Print on washi with Akua ink, and then chine colle-ed onto Rives BFK.

I used my couch as a drying rack:



This is one of two prints I'll have in the Liminal show.