It’s been a long time since I’ve written or posted anything here! and I’ve generally been neglecting my internets in general. (with the exception of Facebook, for what it’s worth…) The translation of this is that I’ve been working really hard & intensely on stuff in the physical world.

quick list:
new orleans …

• biking around, exploring
• teaching (two silkscreen classes at the Louisiana Artworks Community Print Shop)
• drawing (the falstaff brewery, in N.O.)
• taking lots of pictures

back in Providence…

• drawing
• printing (postcards, prints, posters)
• a little bit of gardening
• making zines
• mixing colors, printing infinite rainbow rolls that really deserve the name
• trying to get old projects printed so I can move on to new projects.
• building little block cities out of a bag of woodshop scraps from Utah.
• taking lots of pictures, realizing on return from new orleans that there are a bunch of things I like to take pictures of (hand-drawn letters, beautiful buildings, useful/weird customizations of things, falling-apart stuff) here as well! and that I should document it somehow, and that drawing just isn’t fast enough… that the speed of the camera doesn’t imply some kind of lack of moral grounding. I know, self-limiting thoughts, hilarious. !

etc?

Real briefly, big developments in my life & thinking have been these two:

— Realizing I don’t need to be an architect someday. This may seem like a no-brainer, but for me it is a big one. Since I finished school, I had had in my head the idea that at some point I would stop making prints and go work in an architect’s office and work my way up into that kind of career… that that would be when my “real life” would start.

Recently, due to a number of incidents & factors that all kind of piled on each other, I realized that a) I really love making prints and those challenges and sets of ideas and questions and things to explore (especially, hey, prints about buildings); b) as an artist who understands buildings, I can always work with architects and build off their deeper knowledge and learn more from them and add something to their understandings (even in traditional architectural practice, architects hardly ever work alone, they are always collaborating with other architects, engineers, specialists, etc!); c) that I can always work on buildings but under a collaborative and co-learning model, not trying to fit the way I work into the hierarchy of an office (very intimidating to me), and not being limited by “architecture’s” rigid separation between designing and building.

With the idea in mind that I was someday going to stop printing and change paths, I wasn’t really letting myself give all my energy to print stuff… now I sense a re-focusing and a shifting of my attention, and expansion of energy… it’s very exciting. We’ll see what comes out of it. !!

— A friend ribbed me that “For the past five years, you’ve been making the same thing!” Aha, a sensitive spot!

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

(Borges, The Secret Miracle)

Thinking about this, I realized that I have, for the past bunch of years, actually just been executing ideas that I originally had two or five or eight years ago… that I have kind of been a carrier-out of my own ideas, as opposed to an artist working in the present with what I am thinking about now… ideas I have now are pushed off till later (”till I finish the projects I already planned”) and sometimes get forgotten or shoved away entirely. Not the best of situations! So along with focusing my energy on printing instead of on a vague and not-really-desired future as an architect, I am finishing up long-standing projects and trying to get to a place where I can work more directly on ideas I have now…

Okay, so this could get into a much longer ramble about thoughts for the future and specific projects and etc. that I know you all want to know about… but I really need to get to printing!!! The upshot is, still working, still thinking, same projects, new motivation, new projects, new ideas pouring in all the time, can I keep up with them? Probably not, but I’m still trying.

[attempt on the left by me; drawing on the right by Lena, inspired by San-X, there is a singing worm from the worm-bin next to me; in background, new Industrial Trust Building postcards!]

I have started using an internet-based work timer called SlimTimer, which Arley-Rose told me about… I was skeptical at first, having had limited success with ’systems’ which are supposed to help you manage your time… but whoa, being able to know how long I actually spend on things is actually CHANGING MY LIFE.

Also, Meg Turner & I are gonna be selling our work at the spring RISD alumni art sale! Saturday May 1st, 10am-4pm, Benefit St, Providence. Directions are at the link… come by & say hi even if you’re broke! I will have cheap postcards/small prints and zines for sale, as well as some older/larger/more expensive work too. Meg will be bringing her gorgeous photogravures (some new & some old), as well as new screenprints, up from New Orleans. Hooray for ART!

At the moment, I am transferring my ideas from a sketchy house plan to a dimensioned, scaled drawing. The original drawing was on graph paper, for two reasons (since Meg asked):

1. to make it easier to keep lines roughly at right angles to each other, without having to use a straight-edge and a triangle all the time

and

2. to hold myself to a uniform notion of the square footage and measurements across the drawing, without having to use a scale all the time.

Staying away from rulers simplifies and streamlines the drawing process, and keeps ideas flowing, not weighed down by details. Also, drawing freehand (even on graph paper) allows me to retain the sense of the building as a not-yet-completed design: once lines start getting sharp and precise, they start to feel like they are fixed and permanent, a construction document as opposed to an idea. With a ruler-drawn line, you tend to start thinking, “Okay, that’s where the 2×4s go!” as opposed to, “This is roughly where the structural wall is going to be.”

(This, to my mind, is the main problem with computer drafting — which Sketchup now seems to be offering a remedy for — it makes sloppy, badly-thought-out drawings look finished — even to the people who drew them, who should know better than anybody else how unfinished they are!)

As I sketched into and modified the drawing, I would tape on sheets of tracing paper, so I could change things without totally destroying what had come before, and try out new ideas on a clean slate while still keeping the underlying dimensions the same. As I added layers of tracing paper, the exact measurement laid down by the graph paper’s grid would get a little fuzzy and vague. So, now that I have a pretty good idea of what the layout is going to be, I’m drawing the plan again, with rulers, a scale, and specific dimensions.

I’ll write more about this house plan in a future update, but here is a hallways of varying widths, with a built in couch of some kind and lots of shelves.

One thing that putting a specific dimension to things lets me do is see where things do *not* work: in the detail below, the shelves in the hallway, where you walk in from the living room area (center left of the photo) make it too narrow to pass through. … Erase! Erase!

My big drafting desk is up in the 3rd floor studio; here’s the kit of essentials:

from top to bottom:

• graph paper / tracing paper drawing (attached to drawing board)
• adjustable triangle (for drawing angles)
• circle template (door swings)
• scale (the fancy one, that I can use now that I have soft floor pads under my drafting desk & am not worried about it breaking, since I drop it all the time!)
• wallpaper-wrapped brick (to keep the propped-up drawing board in place)
• toilet paper (to wipe lead dust off after sharpening)
• lead holder (aka pencil)
• non-smudging eraser-pencil (this is a great thing that I recently got, it totally solves the smudgy problems that beset me on previous vellum drawings)
• random ballpoint pen (I’m not using this, not sure why it is on the table)
• lead pointer (aka pencil sharpener)
• paper scale (made out of folded graph paper, I’m using it to take approximate measurements off the sketchy drawing)
• water cup
• POLAR ORANGE DRY!!!!!!
• compass
• two more lead holders (they all have different hardnesses of lead in them, though for this drawing at the moment I’m only using 2H)
• small piece of chocolate!

[This drawing is actually done now, and I’ve started a new one based on it, dealing with walls & doorways — this was mostly written, and the pictures were taken, a couple of days ago.]

Reading & reference:

• short comics from Will Krause, a new friend who is about to leave town… :(
• Complexity & Contradiction in Architecture by Robert Venturi (again)
• Understanding Structures by Fuller Moore, a basic architecture school textbook (again)
• Tomorrow’s House by George Nelson & Henry Wright, 1945: book for the layperson proselytizing modern architecture in home design. Sample quote, emphasis theirs:
  

  There is no possible way to turn the clock back. In designing houses today we have to be ourselves — twentieth-century people with our own problems and our own technical facilities. There is no other way to get a good house. No other way at all.

  BZANG.

• Ninja by Brian Chippendale: this is a huge graphic epic that I had read parts of in mini-comic form; it was published in a giant (12″x18″) edition a couple of years ago. I finally read the whole thing, in a concentrated manner, over the course of three or four nights, a week or so ago. I’m re-reading it now again, going slowly, trying to sort it all out and make all the connections… In some ways it’s a narrative of Providence, of a time that I also lived through, and it brings back to me very strongly the anger, emotion, and outrage of that time. Disjointed, hilarious, disturbing, and inspiring…

Okay, speaking of pencil-lead hardness, I’ve also been doing some just plain old observed drawings, which are really grounding and exciting, in a calm way. (That might make sense, or not.) Using a 4B (super soft) pencil is really fun, because it calls for a lightness of hand as you lay things out, but allows for real darkness if that is what is needed. The only problem is that if you are keeping the pencil sharp, it gets shorter real fast!

It is a view from the 3rd floor of our house, looking out over the Woonasquatucket valley… and will be in a drawing show at Stairwell Gallery that opens on Sunday.

The neighbors who live behind us have been playing the same romantic dance song over and over again, for a number of hours each afternoon, for the past couple weeks. Possibly they are rehearsing for a dance of some kind, or else they just really like this song. My housemates are slowly being driven crazy, I think, but for me, it’s not that bad: sometimes I barely recognize the song, then other times it brings the slow acknowledgment of half-recalled memories, of a distant past that might or might not be my own. The song, combined with the faintly heard ice-cream tunes that cross and re-cross the neighborhood at intervals, gives the audible atmosphere of our house a nostalgic familiarity. . . . . I’ll be sad when the rehearsals are over.

Summer is awesome by the way.

I have some work in a print show in Chicago, IL. There’s an opening party tomorrow, Friday March 27th, from 6-9 pm, at the Green Lantern Gallery.

One of my pieces looks something like this: cut-out-able kitchen plans. I think you will be able to cut my prints up yourself & mess with them at the show… I hope!

The show is called Without You I Am Nothing, has been curated by Anne Elizabeth Moore, and features a number of other weirdos and hotshots from Providence & Chicago, including my colleagues & friends Andrew Oesch & Meg Turner.

Here’s the one-sentence blurb:

Without You I am Nothing: Cultural Democracy from Providence and Chicago is an exhibition of works on paper that are not intended for public consumption but to create small venues for public participation.

and here’s how to get there.

Check it out, or forward to your Chicago friends! I won’t be there, I’m getting work done here in Providence… but the show might travel here, to the 5 Traverse Gallery, in the summer. Cross your fingers!

here are two fortunes I received when I was in Phila. with my family, showing the fallibility of the fortune cookie predictor logic. after I opened the cookie containing the bottom fortune, I claimed the extra cookie that my gran didn’t want, and it held the top fortune for me:

… thus, by the cookie’s command, I’m in that new years mode where you gotta change everything around: do the long-put-off improvements, buy things you’ve been needing for a while, fix the broken, sort out the old nameless piles, throw things away, and close the book on unfinished projects.

so even though I am making big changes, and each day brings a lot of transformation, it also feels like I am treading water: ever since I was a kid, I’ve had to de-organize before I could re-organize, and bigger transitions mean more time spent in the de-organized state. there’s also lots of logistics & organization necessary, which is not my strong suit. even when printing, which should be the straightforward part, I’ve been encountering technical issues… part of me thinks “I should know how to do this by now!” and part thinks “this is how the world is, always learning…”

here, extracted from an close-to-collapsing pile of stuff on the pantry counter of my parents’ house, is a key example of “where I got it from”:

I mean, come on, tell me a better way to keep track of little tiny hardware!

my friends Adam Ryder and Brian Rosa are having an art opening for their photography of high-tension electric power line landscapes: tonight, Saturday the 10th, 6-9 pm, at the Stairwell Gallery on Broadway in Providence. inter-urban wanderlust dreams. there will also be coffee by cafe intelligencia. don’t miss!

Well, [most of] my stuff for Craftland is done! If I didn’t explain Craftland before, it’s a seasonal art & craft store, that opens in December and features lots of (mostly local) handmade stuff, ranging from the OMG-cuuuuuute to the fine art/craft, and combinations/in-betweens of the above. You can visit their website here, and you can (should?) also visit the store itself: 235 Westminster St, Providence, RI, Dec. 5-24 (7 days a a week!) 11am-6pm. Yeah, that’s my one blatant shill: come buy stuff! it rules, it’s made by awesome folks, and it’s cheap (at least my stuff is). If (yes, “if”) you need holiday presents for people, this is the place in Providence to get them. I also just sent a bunch of stuff up to my friends’ store Eli Phant in Portland, Maine, so that’s another good place to look for rad prints (and other crafty/arty stuff). All right!… advertising moment over.

more of what I got done in a crazy marathon last week:

cat postcards:

cat print (only one layer, but hey, it looks good!):

little coffee maker print:

What I did not get done yet, but is gonna be done soon:

• reprinting the Mill City print
• printing more than one color on the cat print (or maybe I’ll just leave it…)
• printing the bread-making poster
• fully thanking the people that helped me out last minute in the rush time: thank you!!!!!
• responding to emails and calling people back from the many days when I was working in crazy mode, sorry friends and strangers!!!

In a brief hiatus from busy-ness, I’m helping my parents blow-in insulation to their attic, trying not to sleep too late while staying at their house, and trying to get some work done on finally filling in the missing years of the main secret door poster archive area (I’ve had the images for a little while now, there has just been too much other stuff making demands on my time…).

I also scanned in some process work which may or may not show up in the College Hill Independent in an article on artists’ processes. To usher in what I’ll be working on in the next months, here’s one of the scans; a drawing I made in… August? which was the beginning of the house that will be on the next print series print, as a way to show instances of different kinds of connections between spaces. I’m super psyched to have most of the other stuff out of my way, and be able to work on this again. It is very exciting to pull these drawings out again, to remember what I was thinking… and, um, to try to decode my own handwriting…

(click on the image for larger version)

. . . In the “tools” updates category, and making any and all computer image manipulation much sweeter, my major birthday present last month was a little wacom tablet. It was somewhat awkward to start to use, but now it just feels like my computer is (either) my friend (or just) exponentially more an extension of my brain/hand. Since I don’t really work on the computer all that much or do my primary work on it, to feel much more directly connected to it is really interesting… and great! Streamlined somehow, less interference blocking the way. Thank you AGP!

Oh yeah, and at the end of October I got to be 30 years old! Crazy.

This past weekend, at the Block Party! that Andrew Oesch organized (and I helped with) in Worcester, MA:

…and, a couple of days earlier, working on drawing (or rather, desperately trying to figure out how to draw) the display font for what became this poster:

The Block Party was collaborative, temporary, and chaotic. It had no tangible “goal” besides getting a chance to play, offering other people (kids and adults) the chance to play, creating a potentially transformative experience, practicing collaborating and facilitating with Andrew O, taking the chance to do something we had wanted to do since we were little (have an almost infinite number of giant blocks to build with), and maybe getting a little transformed ourselves (I’m pretty sure that’s me in the red shirt):

BONE ZONE at stArt in the street, worcester 2008

Despite its transience, this kind of project is very direct — you can see the results in people’s enjoyment of and immediate narration of the experience (one kid, as his mom pulled him away from jumping on and squashing boxes at the end of the day: “But… this is the BEST PLACE EVER!!!”). I have a bunch of persistent memories from my own childhood (a giant wooden dragon in the children’s section of the public library, walking through a tall maze of translucent plastic at an art fair, building forts in the woods, working on a collaborative clay castle-sculpture at a craft show) which convince me that Sunday’s memory of building giant structures out of boxes will stick with some of these kids for the rest of their lives. Andrew O and I are left with nothing except lots of photos and a couple of sheets of colorful paper — almost all the boxes got smashed and recycled — the experience was the important thing.

A poster like this one (computer-designed, computer-printed) is also temporary. If I’m lucky, someone will put a copy of the poster up on their dorm-room wall, maybe keep it as a reminder of the speaker that influenced their changing ideas; maybe it will go into the departmental archive, but most likely, most of the copies will become part of the massive pile of paper-waste that comes out of any university in any given academic year. Hopefully, it will get some folks to come out to the talk — maybe more people than if it was a simple flyer designed in a word-processing program and printed in black and white… who knows.

Designing on the computer opens up too many infinite possibilities for me. I like the limits of the physical, of rubylith and of ink drawings; I’m more comfortable with the irregularity, and the permanence, that are built into something you make by hand. Looking at a computer screen, I get wrapped up in minutely adjusting the anchor-points of lines or editing shapes pixel-by-pixel, saving endless versions of things so I can revert to earlier decisions if necessary.

Working on an analog object, if you erased something, that means it is gone (even if you might reach for the command-Z key instinctively) and you have to draw it again, or as close as you can get to it. In the physical world, there’s no perfectability: whatever you make might have problems or issues, but they will result from how it was made and be a part of it — not errors you have overlooked and might have fixed if you had just had another couple of hours to spend in front of the monitor.

[here are two parts of the middle of the “digital/analog battle royale” illustration process for the Labor Studies poster. on paper:]

[and on the computer. notice the ink-line tracing of the two politicians, which is in the middle of being re-sized to fit the photo-reference mockup:]

When I was looking at display fonts to use on the Labor Studies Dept. poster, I couldn’t find a computer font that I liked. I started to draw letters from scratch, but the initial sketches didn’t fit the need or style of the poster, and I didn’t have a lot of time and wasn’t feeling super-inventive at that moment. The letter-pantograph device (seen at the top of this post) was handed down to me by my grandfather, a retired engineer, along with his set of 1970s Rapidograph pens. Using it, I drew the letters above, then scanned them in, enlarged them and printed them out, photocopied them to the right size, and traced their outlines in ink, making them more angular, and changing them somewhat (to differentiate them from the dreaded Comic Sans!). The tracings were scanned again, and photoshoppified into something usable for the graphic title of the poster.

The whole poster involved so much work, so much finicky moving of text and images back and forth, so much consideration and discarding of various fonts, so much attempting towards perfection. I’m mostly happy with it, especially with the illustrations, but I don’t think it has the richness and interest of most of my screen-printed projects… and since I’m not part of the community where the event will take place, it doesn’t have an effect on my life, and I can’t see its effect on other people.

The Block Party! project also involved a huge amount of work (done mostly by AO, though I jumped in at the last minute). Collecting and assembling all the boxes was an almost-infinite task, printing the patterned paper, pasting it on, organizing volunteers, thinking about the philosophy and metaphorical underpinnings of the project. . . However, there was no pretense of perfection: our basic goal was to have enough boxes to really transform the space of the street — beyond that, we had no idea ahead of time of how it would actually turn out, and we knew that we would be figuring out how to do the project along with everybody else who was there that day.

Searching for perfection — ignoring the demand for perfection (even/especially when it comes from within myself). Either of these approaches could be applied to any project, any medium, that one might want to work in. At this point, coming off of these two almost-simultaneous projects, I think I know which of these paths regarding perfection I like being on the most.

However, it’s relatively simple to apply the “chaos is awesome” mentality to projects (like the Block Party) where the chaos is actually unavoidable. It’s somewhat harder to let it creep in to the screenprinting projects I really want to be focusing on, the areas where my meticulousness is more ingrained and more likely to take charge. Additionally, when life is overwhelming (as it usually is for me), it’s easiest to strive for righteousness and certainty, since those seem like the most secure options. One constructive strategy might be to take on less, leave more time for things, don’t put myself in places where I’m so stressed out that perfection seems like the only achievable goal, where I don’t have time to accept complexity and confusion. I know this is possible, because I’ve worked on more and more projects recently where I’ve had to slow down to allow for learning and chaos. . . they are harder and more difficult to approach than the ‘perfectable’ projects. . . . but simply remembering that the harder projects are more fun is a large part of the process. . . .

Here’s Andrew Oesch starring as Sisyphus in Werner Herzog’s new movie about participatory, community-based art projects:

… and a good reminder (from fomato.com) about how not to get bogged down by more projects than I actually want:

thanks, cute creatures, for your infinite wisdom.

Greg Cook (boston-area comics artist, art critic, and thoughtful dude) wrote up our art show at AS220 on his New England Journal of Aesthetic Research and reviews it further, in the Providence Phoenix. Some good comments and good constructive criticism. It seems that he falls more or less in the same place I find myself, in terms of what is unsatisfactory to me in the work I am doing, the areas I struggle with. hmm…

Now I’m working hard in the non-virtual world to a) take care of long-neglected logistical & organizational tasks, and b) to actually do the work and make the objects that are of interest to me, and possibly, to you! Summer is here, and in the past week I’ve somehow re-started planting stuff in my community garden plot, and am now cooking interesting food again (meaning: including vegetables!, as opposed to just eggs, cheesy eggs, PBJ sandwiches, grilled cheese, tuna fish sandwiches, beans & rice, and oatmeal). It’s hard to stay inside when the sun is out and the wind is blowing.

I’ve been putting work first for a while now, so this past week, I’ve been doing a bunch of things that, though not strictly necessary, have removed the burden of “oh crud, I really need to take care of that soon, it just gets worse the longer I put it off!” echoing through my head every time I think about them. These include: digging out my bed in the community garden and re-filling it with healthier soil, transferring the patient cacti and succulents into larger pots, being in contact with some old friends, emptying out the gross bottom layer from the worm-compost bucket, etc. Amazingly, there were still some worms alive in there, in a mass of their completely chewed through and digested soil — despite the fact that I got overwhelmed with managing the compost back in the late fall, and haven’t looked at it, at all, for six months! Now it has been replenished with new ripped-up newspaper and some fresh veggie scraps, from the leek soup I made last night. Building a new bin for the worms, of the right size and depth, is still on the list of “stuff that is stressful to look at and think about how I need to do it soon” — but, the fact that the worms are alive at all is a reassuring reminder that a) things get done and b) things will be okay.

Here are some previews of projects that students with whom I am working at NUA are getting ready for their final show.

This is a print about one student’s house, that was bought (and has now been demolished) by the developers that bought the mill next door, so the parking lot for their condos could be larger. The large building in the background of the poster will have tentacles coming out of it & wrapping around the smaller house…

Another student is working on this insanely complex, 4-color print that will go on T-shirts and maybe some posters. It started out as just a guy with a clock-face and some leaves on his head, and morphed into this awesome dude surfing, with multi-colored plant/pineapple hair that has a kite, flowers, and a hawk coming out of it… It rules.

“What Time Is It?”

“Time To Get Wild!”

The New Urban Arts end-of-year Art Party & Interactive Exhibition will be Friday, May 16th, 6-8 pm. Come and check out the finished versions of this work and more, plus a fashion show, zine release, film screenings, etc. — all by Providence high school students. It’s all free, open to the public, handicapped accessible, etc, at 743 Westminster St (corner of Dean & Westminster, right across from Classical & Central High Schools, just down the block from White Electric Coffee Shop).

For more info on NUA, and to download an art party invitation, here’s our website.

and it’s almost ready.

[The back room/drawing room mess pile. I will document the show & put up some better images — for now, if you want to see any of this in focus, well… you gotta come to the gallery!]

I finished the brand new “57-59 Curtis St.” print at around 4 am — printed a third color on a bunch of copies of the “Ruins” print (aka “Pierre Van Passen Interviews Buenaventura Durruti, Aragon, Spain, 1936″) — washed the ink out of that screen — now to take a shower while it dries. Out of the shower — set up the screen again and print the fourth color. Then — done! and, sleep.

There will be other logistics to think about (for example, it’s raining, so I’ll have to find a ride to get my stash of posters over to the gallery), but if I can get that last color printed and looking all right on at least one copy of the print, I will be happy and feel that my somewhat perverse last-minute determination hasn’t failed me, at least not this time.

Today, Sunday, May 4, 4-7 pm, AS220’s project space (on mathewson, off washington, downtown providence). map & street view here. Come by & see the multiple reasons why I am so darn sleepy right now.

[front gallery, friday, before adjusting the lights, obviously. Stephen’s work is to the left. This is the part that looks like an “art show”… as I guess it’s supposed to? no logic here, sorry, too sleepy!]

Oh and yes, it is 9 am, and yes, I’m still awake!