2D vs. 3D

This print is in a suite of 8 that are apparently my break out hits of the semester. Three people want to buy this specific one, but I haven't told them the price I'm asking for it, and another would like one from the suite donated to a permanent collection. I think I'm going to shoot pretty damn high and just see who stays interested after that. Mind you, pretty damn high for me is probably rather low.

The prints in this suite are one BFK white with a first run with a simple collagraph, and then a few subsequent runs with inked plate.

Here's an example of an inked up plate prior to printing it:



The half of the suite that are 2-dimensional:


The half of the suite that are 3-dimensional (and my studio mate Tyler's legs):


I've been interested in subtle interplay in processing 2 dimensional aspects into 3 dimensional aspects without being overt about it. The whole intent of some of my prints lately is to get a viewer to understand how a 3-dimensional print is made without being didactic about process.

Well, my few and mostly disinterested readers, if I were to sell my prints online whigh venue would be better: Etsy, Cartfly, or Big Cartel?

Girl Twice

I will share a secret with you. The persons in the plate below are actually the same person twice.



Another collagraph, this one with fabric making up the background and my ubiquitous carborundum grit painting for the faces. I was uncertain about the fabric, it being so much taller than the rest of the plate. The embossing could have been overpowing, as could have the texture been. In the first inkings of the plate, the fabric was just way too obvious, but I think it worked out pretty well in the end.

The press at school is giant. I do big prints just because I can now, eating through paper with great rapidity, and seeing my savings dwindle in $2.50 increments with each print.



The image itself is 14 by 20, which only seems big because I'm a printmaker. Painters scoff at the miniaturized images in printmaking, the dictates of paper size and press ever present in the artist's considerations when working on a print.



I included this print in a portfolio for a grant application from the Los Angeles Printmaking Society, along with five other prints, three of which were three dimensional. So far, I only know that one of the graduate students in the program recieved the grant, but which one is still unknown. I hate hate hate waiting to find things out.

Glasses

A week and a half ago, I stayed up late making a portfolio case because my other case was in my professors office containing prints awaiting grading. I needed the case in order to apply for a scholarshop grant. I found out yesterday that I recieved one of the three scholarship awards from the Los Angeles Printmaking Society. I shall be buying so much fancy papers and great sheets of wood in only the finest grains with this money.



The LAPS requests a print, a flat one on paper, for their collection from awardees. I get to choose the print, and I've got till December to figure it out. In the meantime, I'm trying to find any images of mono-screenprints online. There are none!



Oh, and also, new glasses:

Mono vs. Mono

I'm feeling foul towards monotypes, but monoprints, my friends, those I adore.

A monotype is when you have no reproducible matrix. A monoprint is when only aspects of the print are unique to each impression, and a reproducible matrix is utilized in conjunction with it. For example, the David print below is a monoprint because the inking is unique to each impression, but the matrix is permanent and so reproducible. The prints of Cein below are monotypes, because they are paintings made directly onto smooth plexiglass in graphite etching ink and then printed.



But, they're still pretty good, at least for monotypes.

I also did two of Nate. I rather like his hat.

Print of the week

It's back up and running. I post a print every Friday, along with a little work history on it.

Print of the Week

I just spent way too long trying to track down the origins of the Lilith myth and just how apocryphal it is for my art history class, then I got sidetracked finding out that the story of Cain and Abel as I knew it, the one I was raised with, is not the traditional version at all. And then I read about Nephilim, which are not the offspring of my brother in law Nephi, but the angels who walked the earth and got it on with earth ladies. And now I haven't got any work done today at all and must make up for all of this tomorrow.

Men, print 1

Holy crap, I'm back!

I'm working slowly on a series of portraits of men I'm friends with. This is the first finished one, and it's a collagraph of David Bessent. There are loads more prints besides this one, but I'm going to try to stick to a schedule of posting a new print, and a pretty ok one at that, every Friday. I'm back in school as a graduate student at CSULB, so it really shouldn't be hard to keep up with.

Here's the plate:


and the history of inking before I arrived at the top image as the final print:

Men

I've been working, in a rather desultory manner, on this series of prints of men I know. This idea is a blatant rip off from a couple of friends of mine, who were doing paintings and drawings of women he's kissed and another of women with whom he's friends.

The trouble with my endeavour, I've found, is that most of the men that are important to me do not live in the same state as I. Because of this, I've been getting source material from the internet, but most of my male friends are apparently very virtuous in that they display no outwards indications of physical vanity. This dearth of photographs has brought my project to a halt for the time being, to be resumed when I can personally photograph the individuals. I did consider simply asked everyone for pictures, but what if they take terrible ones and I can't use them but they think it's personal? What then! For now, though, I've got three fellows all finished with. The above picture is the plate, after printing, for a collograph of David Bessent, done with carborundum grit and tape. It looks a little like him, though apparently it also looks a little like Lenin.



This week has been one of many packages. My new camera arrived (witness above photograph), as well as my new knives for relief print carving. Yesterday, bis for Veganerotica were left on the porch, which isn't terrifically exiting, but today an entire couch and chaise showed up, all wrapped up in plastic. My camera can perform its function underwater without any deleterious effect to itself. How wonderful is that? Very.

Did you know that a few months ago I got a tattoo? Despite it being significantly more painful than I had anticipated, almost immediately after its completion I wanted more. Like the reasons for which cigarettes were abandoned, financial reasons are an impediment.

Sternenfall

A little poem surfaced yesterday, perfectly preserved in the recesses of my brain, reappearing now as waters shift in there.

O Sternenfall
von einer Brucke einmal eingesehn--:
Dich nicht vergessen

Stehn.

Translation:

Oh, falling star
once seen from a bridge--:
to not forget you

to endure.

~Rainier Maria Rilke



I don't know any German, not really, but I'm rather good with remembering seemingly meaningless ephemera--foreign words; the precise dates of occurrences inconsequential to me, happening to strangers; someone's face, still puffy with sleep and the old narrow bed; tiny objects held only briefly.

Figure modeling is excellent for memorizing things. You scan through reams of text in your brain as you hold still, so still, and when you come upon something you don't quite recall, caught on a snag, you worry at it, like a bad memory or a bad tooth, thumbing that page over and over in your brain until you can resolve the inaccuracy. I don't know what disturbed that snippet and made me recall it so vividly and suddenly. I stopped working and said the German words aloud. Rather poorly, I suspect, but there was no one else there to hear me torture the language. After writing it, Rilke changed it a little and ended "Der Tod" (Death) with those lines. Rilke said that the last three lines (the ones above) burst in on his brain unbidden, and resolved it suddenly.


Just won an Arty award for being a super genius. Sadly, I probably can't attend the awards party, complete with tantalizing open bar, because I don't actually live in Utah. Maybe I will allow myself a rare beer tonight to celebrate and make up for what I'll miss.

Someone keeps buying things off of my wishlist on Suicidegirls, but sending the gift to themselves or it is lost and absorbed by the postal system. I keep expecting these phantom gifts, in a continued state of mild expectation, checking for little brown packages on my return from school. No packages ever arrive, no stop motion animation DVDs to fill me with the half poison nostolgia from when Tommy and I had a non-dialogue film festival just for us two and his cat, the three of us curled on his couch having thought better of sex and diverting it into obscure sensualities, no behind-the-times comic books for my niche friends to remark on how I just barely started reading that. Is the phantom the gift?

Ping pong

I played table tennis, or rather ping-pong, at the group studio of my friends. The men are kind, gentlemanly, with me when we play. They compliment a good hit, and fail to keep score, patient when I repeatedly lose the tiny white ball. With each other they curl back their lips and expose their incisor teeth as they serve.



On the airplane ride home, I surreptitiously watch Olympic women's single table tennis on my seat mates television. Young asian girls with manly, unflattering haircuts play an awkward and ungainly game, and for some unknown sportsman's reason, players must retrieve errant white plastic balls by themselves. Climbing over barricades, and scrambling around after the ball only serves to make the sport that much more undignified. These girls, however accomplished they may be, will never be the subject of the fantasies of men too old for them, the realm reserved for half realized Amazonian women like countless gymnasts and volleyball players.



I attended the orientation for incoming graduate students three days ago in the courtyard between the college buildings. I don't yet know the better routes to take, and had to carry my bike up stairs in various places; sweat begins to gloss my forehead and back as I arrive at the half circle of unoccupied chairs, the little folding table of juice and chips. Early, I arrive early but am uncertain until I ask. Other people mull around the little galleries ringing the courtyard, filled with the artwork from other schools. I compare my age to their percieved age. Am I old, or young, in comparison to this group? The same question is better translated as "Am I accomplished or am I slow comparatively?" I do not come to a conclusion. My foot is trod on when I try to find a seat, and still I go unnoticed until I bring it to the attention of the person still standing on me. It's a photography student, which I find predictable in the way that personal prejudices are always noted when confirmed. Of course a photographer fails to observe her surroundings. I prefer to feed this dislike of people who have skills I don't have, rather than admitting that I'm the one who made myself omittable.



When the Olympic table tennis player serves the ball, she twists it in her hand, cupping it and turning her wrist around, concealing the action behind the paddle, flicking the ball out suddenly--graceful and deft, like a magic trick, like a promise. I doubt what it will be before the ball reappears, struck by the ready paddle and bouncing across the tiny taut net--perhaps this time it will be something else instead.

Graduate Student Open Studios
September 7th
2pm till 9pm

PS I just broke my camera. I was considering making some thing, like more teacups, to raise money to replace it and then realized that I now had no camera to photograph the items to sell to buy a working camera. Damnit!

Break

Consider this entry a break between the ridiculously overwrought and obtuse entries, because you know that's precisely what the next one will be.

Demon Tamer went live this morning on Suicidegirls.com. Take a looksie, should you want to and are in a place where naked girls are ok to look at.

Do any of you have pictures of the gallery during "Secret"? My pictures of it are predictably horrid.



Open studios this coming weekend at my new school. It's on the 7th, and by the 7th I will have been a graduate student for 6 days. Because of this, all of the stuff I'll have in my studio will not have been made at CSULB, but I'll also have the cleanest studio. Come and gawk at me and my stuff.
GLAMFA and Open Studios

All is Well Within the House

Years ago, before I moved to the terracotta dust storms of Phoenix, before I moved to the small big town Long Beach, when my life was still unpredictable, when two full meals a day seemed almost extravagant and cheap wine and gin weren't inconsequential expenses, I was spending an evening at house of a man whom I had known briefly, but in that sort of way that lets you imagine you knew them better than most. He had a beautifully preserved beetle in his house, hung on the wall in a glass case. I had taught a mutual friend how to re-constitute and move the limbs of dead insects without shattering their exoskeleton, slowly hydrating their tiny strange reverse muscles till it was possible to pose them. I saw the beetle, alien in its perfection, in it's completeness, and I wanted so badly to smash it. The desire to destroy to, to make it into tiny pieces no longer recognizable as perfect and wonderful or even as beetle bits--I could taste that penny taste in my mouth that you get in a fight when you know you will lose but you keep on anyway, because to run away, to leave and preserve yourself, is unthinkable in that moment.



I recall it now. And it tastes the same.

For the first time in over ten years, I heard an old family lie. Initially, I was so saddened and outraged by it, this false image of me. But now, I envy this fabulism, and I dream about that glowing, fictitious naked child, so strong with nascent victory, and feel the reality of me to be so wormlike in contrast, cowering as I am, and recieving unprotesting, where she took what pleased her and destroyed when she had tired of it. She is powerful and full, like a new butterfly over filled of potent new blood so that it drips out of the ends of its wings.



But so many, people who knew me the best I thought, believed in her, in that shining ideal evil, all bright eyed and deliberate. Believed, that at least briefly when I was pushing my nymphette years to their last, that I was her. In "1984," Winston is asked where the past is. He responds that it is in memory.

I did not destroy the beetle. I just saw it a few days ago while on a trip to Salt Lake City, in a different house but still owned by the same boy.

"You look so healthy." I told him.



"It is because I am full of poison," he said.

Far Below, post reception

The show which I have referred to often, in hopes that someone will praise me for the massive amount of work it required, as the show which was produced in one month. Thus far, no one has been terribly impressed, which leads me to believe that I over-estimate my own endeavours. Anyhow, the show looked lovely, a fact which was largely ignored by most of the gallery attendees.

You see, Pravus Gallery is divided into three spaces, and my show "Far Below" occupied the middle of the three spaces. The first space had a group show of custom vinyl toys (Moodys, actually), and was a great testament to horror vacui*, all tiny details and bright colors. The third space is occupied by Synthetic Compound, a vinyl toy shop and a similar description as above can be accurately applied to it. And there was my show inbetween, with big pools of space between the pieces and bereft of any colors besides the black and white of monochromatic relief printing.

Perhaps if my work cannot visually compete, then I should re-think my approach to art. I should do this, but I'm not going to. Instead, I'm going to assign the smaller crowd that my show attracted as the inevitable sifting that intellectually superior art must do. See what I did there? I took a situation which illustrated my artistic shortcomings and made it into the opposite. Because I'm deluded like that.

Because of the short notice of this show, I was unable to do much in the way of publicity for it. But my friend at the local weekly wrote a short piece on it, mostly about how I was shortly to leave Phoenix. And now everyone asks when we're going to move, and we respond with the reply, disappointingly lacking in urgency, that we leave in a month and a half. It's like putting on the turn signal blocks in advance of the actual turn.


That's me with the backpack. I have to wear gloves nearly all of the time for reasons that I won't go into. Suffice it to say, they are not fashion inspired reasons. So I'm up against the inability to dress reasonably well with gloves and not looking very gothy, or not looking like a pretensious nance, wearing gloves in a Phoenix summer. Do you have any glove wearing recommendations? They must be full gloves, no thug-ish looking fingerless nonsense.




The Fish. I'm most proud of the fish. It's the first piece I've made that skipped the intermediary step of making a blank of the pattern to test it, and then to draw the image on. For the fish, I drew the original pattern and the drawing directly onto the material before cutting, and didn't know if the whole thing would work until after printing it and sewing it together.



By the by, we're now accepting submissions for Super Fun Activity Challenge 2, Activity Quest.

Far Below

Ah, I've never worked so hard for so little before. Come and be disappointed in me! I'll be the mousey looking character trying to blend into the wall

Super Fun!

Last night was amazing! Not only was Super Fun Activity Challenge a great and wonderful success, but I then went home exhausted and had a sci-fi dream about terraforming Mars and inadvertently becoming immortal.



I had two entries in the book, and this is the finished product of one of them, "Make a Homeowners' Association":


My now super famous and successful friend Trent Call. Trent just had a two page feature in Juxtapoz, with full color and adoring interview. I was so jealous that it took me two whole days to congratulate him after seeing it. But, ever the opportunist, I invited Trent to come to APE and table with us in November, riding the wake of his success to sell comics and toys.



Do you want a Super Fun Activity Challenge? They are exceedingly easy to procure! All one need do is send me $5 for the book and $2 for the shipping, and I will send you a lovely copy, guaranteed to be chock-a-block with super fun. Message me for my paypal address. If you're in Phoenix, you can bypass the $2 shipping and stop by the Trunk Space, at 1506 NW Grand, and pick one up there for $5.

I've got another show opening on May 2nd at Pravus Gallery in Phoenix. It will be called either "The Ocean" or "The Deep." I haven't decided which, but I'd better decide soon as I'm making the cards tomorrow. All of the work for this show I'm making in the month prior to the opening. I've never done something so last minute before, so I'm both eager and terrified to see how I make out.

Long Beach

Ahh, Long Beach. The word "seduction" was mentioned more than once by the faculty and current grad students I spoke with while I was there, and I must admit that it was not inappropriate. The presses. Oh! The presses they had there sent me into such flurries of anticipation. What large and unweildy useless things I could make with access to those presses.

The Los Angeles area is so green. It's positively vulgar the amount of herbivorous procreation that goes on there on an daily basis. Having grown up largely in the desert, I can identify most of the native and nonnative plants that grow here, but there, I'd no idea what most everything was. It sort of all blurred together into a giant green mass, smelling strongly of unidentified lilies. My decision on school is still officially unmade, though I'm still terrified of the winter at the other option. Like most major decisions, this one is being made by a spreadsheet.

Asphalt and Air did an email interview with me, and reading through it I sadly realize what poor editing skills I have. But I take solace knowing that I'm a visual arts major, and being able to spell with any degree of literacy is an achievement.

Emily B, a wonderful fiber artist, featured some of my work on her blog.

And Found Object did a little feature, too.

All of this blog-related exposure convinced some poor sap to buy this fellow, of which I, of course, could only take only take the worst of photos before mailing her off:


Figure modeling, that old standby of wellpaying and extraordinarily dull work that I find myself regularly swearing off of and then returning to whenever I'm at all hard up had produced these two paintings, or, more accuratley put, David Alvarado and James Buck produced these two paintings marginally related to me holding still for too long.

Tentacle

Yesterday was Pi Day, and I'm certain you're already familiar with it. It's the sort of made up holiday that I find not nearly as insufferable as the others. On Pi Day, what does one do? Calculate the diameter of various circles, and see how far you can name off its various digits? Far less irritating than saying "Arrr" after every phrase. My friend Kevin's birthday was also yesterday, and never before had he realized that his birthday coincided with a made-up holiday. He's the one who bought he monkey, so I went to his party, even though I usually find most of his friends about as sufferable as Talk Like a Pirate day. We visited the monkey, hung from the porch rafters and bestrewn with ropes of LEDs. I'll admit, that despite my better self, I was worried about what would happen to this, my largest of all creations, once it was in Kevin's possession, and I was pleased with what he was doing with it. I cannot ask for anything better than being well lit and with no severe damaging.

All schools have written back, and I've not been rejected to a one. The letters of acceptance are hung like trophies from the print drying rack. From a school in the great Frozen North, a letter came describing the various grants and scholarships of merit that they had awarded me, the total of which was somewhat more than I had made last year. The amount stared up from the paper at me, beseechingly. A great wadge of institutionalized money, just waiting for a kind hearted person like myself to spend it. But I must remain strong! I steal myself against the sad saucer eyes of the Minneapolisian money, and decide to see if the school in Long Beach might see their way to giving me some sor of similar amount. Truth be told, I'm terrified of living somewhere as cold as Minneapolis. My personal insulation isn't much, and I don't know well I'd function at those temperatures. Next weekend the boy and I will travel to the coast to wheedle and coax, and perhaps there will then be an additional chunk of institutionalized money whose feelings I must consider.



A few Phoenicians, some Chicagoans, a distant Argentinian, a couple of Los Angelinos, an affianced San Franciscan, a homesick New Yorker, and a great variety of Saltines have or shortly will recieve a single disembodied tentacle. For the sake of my wallet, I restricted the list to only those whose company I have physically been in the presence of. I envision a small town's worth of people, having consternation clearly read on their faces as they empty package's contents to find that single tentacle. Because, my darlings, I love you, but in a way that is best expressed through the language of perverse fetishism.



If you were an attendee at my last solo show, ages in the distant past of last year's Autumn, you may have remembered these blank fawns that I made. They sold out within the first 45 minutes of the show, mostly because they were evidently the least disturbing and lowest priced of my extensive scion. But now, they can be had at the Frosty Darling Boutique in Salt Lake City, and The TrunkSpace in Phoenix. But if you aren't in either city and still want one, you can get it from my website just as soon as I find my way to updating the damn thing. And if you aren't one of the lucky few to be counted as among my most best beloved, then you can pretend you are by buying a tentacle from Synthetic Compound.



Phoenix is host to particularly fine weather right now. I don't have any delusions about how long it will last, but I'm rather pleased that I get to see the city with a smattering of green over the dust and brown. It still isn't half as pretty as most places I've lived, but it's tolerable for now, and I'll be leaving in the next couple of months while it's still pretending that it's a habitable place.

A great pallet of Lorica arrived last month, and orders that had backed up for weeks and months were suddenly addressed. I've beening doing nothing but make belts for what seems like ages now. And now I'm nearly done, and I don't care with what you keep your pants aloft, so long as I've nothing to do with it.

Wasps

Reduction style relief print, on a tetrahedron kite, edition of 20. Made for the Kite show at Trunkspace, and the kite part is made out of old chopsticks.