Activity Quest Adventure Challenge

This could very well be the most important self published zine style non comic book anthology you will ever be involved with.

Also:

Two legs

This is actually an old print sewn into a new composition. The fabrics and buttons are all re-used, mostly from the stuff my friend Brooks was getting rid of.



I'm moving away from the ungulate chimera shape a little, and getting more into just people shapes, and working with imperfect sewing. My sewing is entirely self taught, so I've tried very hard to disguise that by making things as perfect as I can. But right now, I'm playing with exposed seams, and running stuff through the washer to tangle and unravel them a little more before finishing.



Also, I'm organizing another print exchange. This one is very small and space is limited, so email me if you're interested.

Bleeeee-ACH!

Bleach screenprinted on procion dyed fabric, and then hours of sewing.

the dark

A cockroach in the hallway today displayed none of the behavioral symptoms of cockroach-ness. It failed to run away, it peered at the light, and it didn't crouch down when I did so to investigate it. Its antennae flicked lazily back and forth, tasted the air as I disturbed it and sent tiny molecules of myself, regarding me as I regarded it. It and its peers have survived unmolested by evolution for centuries because of their desire to be together in the dark.

To be in the light alone is to die for a cockroach, and not only the limited range of species who've moved to the apartments and restaurants of the urban undergrowth. In rotting logs and beneath fallen leaves moist with decay stoop the tiny millions of them, unrecognizable to us accustomed to only the date brown of the kitchen dweller.

The ant and the bee, the tireless metaphors for labor--the tiny women of work who have become so accustomed to their own task that they will pursue it regardless of the presence of their thread waisted siblings. Not so the cockroach, for whom solitude is anathema. The ant and the bee are marked and modified numerous times by the fractional change of mutation, but today's cockroach would be indistinguishable from one thousands of years previous and thousands of years hence.



Why, little cockroach, don't you want to huddle in the dark?






PS If you ever want to buy any of the art I post, please message me. All of my work is for sale as long as it hasn't been sold yet.

PPS I have a piece at the UAM in Long Beach, with a reception on the 14th of this month. You should come and pretend you don't know me, and then say something in an outside voice about how wonderful that one piece by Camilla Taylor is.

Camille not Camilla

This print is of my neice, Camille. I'm Camilla, she is Camille.

Monoserigraph with two passes.

In process photo:

Salt

Every year, they look smaller and smaller; their skin now appears like confection--the kind which must be eaten just after preparation, before it falls.

Salt

Hands and Face

Another demo, this one for Roxanne Sexauer's print survey class at CSULB. I stepped up my game and made an instructional flier for this one.



I spent a good bit of time painting this one for the demo, and since printing some people have been confused about the process, thinking it was photo based instead of paint based. These are indeed all from observational painting and drawing, with the signature look of the monoserigraph process.



Next demo: April 27th, 4pm at CSULB.

Hands were green, 2

Printed on larger paper and situationed differently. And also, hung with pants hangers.

Dice

Nate stabs at the wobbly coffee table with two fingers. "Two! Two to beat!" My friend transforms into a hustler as he teaches me to play Threes. He taps at the table with his two demoralizing fingers and I realize that if he had achieved a perfect score of zero he would not be able to perform this piece of intimidation theatre, but then, if he had achieved a perfect score there would be little reason to haze the other players. I perform a series of actions with the dice and come up with a higher score than two. Tom follows me, and with a worse score. Nate collects the three dollars from the center of the table while simultaneously convincing me to deposit another dollar in the spot my previous dollar had occupied. I'm suckered, and pull the bill out of my wallet. As the winner of the previous round, it has been explained to me, Nate rolls first. Finishing his turn with a perfect score, his gloat floats up through his barely structured imperturbability. Before the round is over, he and Tom are already reminiscing about previous games in which other such improbable feats were achieved. Tom and I take our turns more out of adherence to rules than to any expectation of winning.

We are at the party held in an illegally occupied loft because of a promise of wildness. I arrived with two girls who I had met only an hour earlier, and upon arrival I immediately set off to explore the premises. My exploration was significantly shorter than I had hoped it would be, as I was locked in a stairwell suddenly--the door shut behind me as the proprietor of the establishment was securing the more personal spaces in the loft, such as this stair well packed with bike parts and assorted items stacked in milkcrates. Instead of being frightened, I'm instead excited by what I perceive as the element of the unexpected materializing. But I'm quickly retrieved from the locked room, and the musicians in the main room start to play a slow dirgelike jazz. The dice came out in an effort to engender some seediness into the otherwise staid and respectable party.

Girls I knew in the past have disappeared, unfound despite the vast wealth of interconnectivity offered by the internet and its promised destruction of mystery. They've slipped away from themselves, from the selves I knew, like an insect moving into its next phase of life, leaving behind the empty carapace of yearbook photos, emails sent form a defunct address. They've changed their names and passed into a new identity and all accept it with the ease of habit, as unremarkable as a haircut.



We leave for another illegally occupied loft, this one with promises from one of the newly met girls of a much greater degree of illegal occupiedness. Yes, this is the sort of place one could get stabbed in. I attempt to explore again, investigating a couple of pup tents in a corner and a cursory look reveals that these are in fact the bedrooms of the occupants. The veneer of childishness slips from us and we resume our spot next to our box of gas station beers and sloughed off layers of coats.

It snowed

To Chicago I went, where I learned things which can only serve to contribute to further failure to get to work, returned home feeling like someone had spent the duration of the previous night in attempts to kill me by slow throttling. THe blame for this sudden onset of sickness I place upon the great masses of children I came into contact with while in Chicago. Children are filthy and carriers of disease. That is an accepted fact.

At an Arial Pink show (or Oral Pink, or Aural Pink, I was never quite sure which), Nate, my new Chicago friend Akasha and I danced like 5 year olds and got yelled at by other more staid music appreciators. A hairdresser told me that I had a great haircut, and I embarrassed myself with my enthusiasm for the complement.

The conference I was ostensible in town to attend I spent as little time at as possible. After vainly attempting to attend the overpacked demonstrations and panel discussions, I ended up spending the majority of my time with my resident Chicago friends and getting cold walking through weather I'm not well suited to.

Carts

Ahh, I'm such a lazy. I'm working on some big new things, I'm getting all packed up for Southern Graphics Council Convention, but in the meantime I fiddle away at little trivial projects like this.

Discharge screenprint on tights:

(those are shopping carts, by the by)

I dyed the tights using acid dyes, then stretched them over card and screenprinted using bleach mixed with transparent base. The bleach broke down the trans base pretty quickly, so some of the carts aren't as crisp as the others. I've since made another pair of tights using a different method which worked much better and I will post those later.

In more actual art news, I have a print in this show:

haircut

Every time I'm about to leave on a trip, I always have this desire to call it all off. I've had disastrous travel experiences: fights in subways, robbed, sexually assaulted (by a professor!), lost, temporarily homeless, etc. But I'm going to go to Chicago anyway. I'm certain that now I won't be getting drunk in public, I won't resort to fisticuffs, and I certainly won't carry all of my money in cash and on my person.

This sort of Depression era habit of poverty has me perpetually cutting my own hair, despite being able to probably afford a $35 appointment every few months. But why pay someone to do something well that I can do poorly for free?



What's in Chicago? Cold and printmakers at the Southern Graphics Council Convention and for a short period of time I will be in Chicago. I bought a winter coat just for this trip, as I haven't really had a need for a winter coat in the last 5 or so years I don't own one. Printmakers reassuring each other that our medium is not dead, is still relevent, is still viable, and maybe even believing it, too. My friend and his daughter; she is 3.5 years old and I've never met her.



http://printoftheweek.blogspot.com/

Hands were green

I did a doodle:



Took a photo for drawing referrence:



And then spent an eternity carving out tiny specks of linoleum until I finished and printed this:

Lost

The post office sent me a letter, alerting me to the fact that they had misplaced a couple thousand dollars worth of prints. The real kicker is that these particular pieces are ones that have sold extremely well, and and some of them were the very last of the edition.

Being an only marginally successful artist is fun and exciting, every little sale a victory, but then a loss like this is so terrible. Materials and hours and hours of work is gone now and I'm considering copying my own old art just so that I can replicate those prints, to regain the sales.

"I Never Left"

My friend organized a print exchange for Ballet West's 100th anniversary. The theme, coinciding with a ballet being performed at the same time, is "Prodigal Son," and participating was only open to Utah artists, or those from Utah.

For mine, I did a monoserigraph with blind embossing and hand applied ink. Here they are with the mono and just after the blind embossing:







Here they are all finished, after applying the ink:





The show reception is March 20th at the Salt Lake Main Library, 6-9 pm, coinciding with gallery stroll. If you go, take a picture for me of the gallery, eh?

Sugar

The first time I went to the restaurant, I noted a particular desert on the menu. Cotton candy, spun maple sugar. But, the menu noted, it was only available when Miss Dingle was working, as she was the only person who knew how to use the machine. I opted for something else instead, though, an unglamorous chocolate cake, perfectly serviceable and unmemorable.

The second time, I ordered the spun sugar. A woman carried it out, Miss Dingle I assumed, wearing a winter hat with earflaps and a flannel shirt dusted with flour. She held it up high, at shoulder level, and it floated towards us through the tables. The few remaining people eating made little sounds, sighed as the desert passed them. She set it before me, a great mass of sunset colored cloud that swayed with the little movements of the air. I pulled a bit of the fluff and ate it. And I remembered the last time I had cotton candy, nearly twenty years ago. At an elementary school fair, with the little booths staffed by parents and older students, the plastic games that they had played when they were our age. Easily won, the prizes cheaper than the cost of the ticket to play them. After collecting numerous worthless little treasures, a plastic elephant with a slit in its back for coins, a tiny cup holding even tinier monkeys with interlocking arms, most of the gamestands were being taken down, the blacktop being swept.

The man, some father of a child or retired teacher, who brought the cotton candy machine every year still had a long line before his big metal cauldron. It was late, so much later than I had ever been out before. I joined the lined that extended up the grassy slope behind the playground, and the sky darkened above us as we waited. The stars burst out in tiny explosions of light, covering the sky with a brilliance. The cotton candy was spun around and around in the machine, wrapped around the coiled paper handles, tiny wisps of pink fluff caught in the air and floating away, flying up in the sky towards the stars.

LMU

Thursday night, I did a demo on monoserigraphy for my friend's class at Loyola Marymount. The likelihood is that not a single student will actually do the technique now that they know it, but Gretchen, the teacher, said that she was excited to give it a try now, so there's that at least.

I did the painting earlier in the day, so the image I printed would be a little more impressive than the regular demo doodle one usually sees at school. Because, what's exciting about printing a squiggle? Where's the incentive to try this technique out if the first example of it is some crappy demo drawing?

So, here's the Nate Martin print:



I got four pulls out of the screen, but I messed up one of them. I'm going to see Nate Martin when I go to Chicago for Southern Graphics Council next month, and hopefully by then this entry will have changed his Google results somewhat.

Second time

More from Lou O'Bedlam. These were shot just before the Los Angeles Art show at the Marriott.



I was all jittery and nervous for the demo I was going to do at LA Art, so I don't think I was really working at my best, but I really like how these came out anyway, but that's probably more due to Lou than me.

Blind Embossing, cont'd

I listened to "Bluebeard" by Bartok while I made this print. I like that it is organized by the story, each piece titled as simply "Door" with corresponding number, each number inexorably bringing the plum voiced heroine closer to that last and final door.





Monoserigraph, blind embossing, monotype, and then corrective blind embossing.