The “farmers’ markets / mercados de granjeros” poster is done!

I finished printing the morning of June 4th, wrapped the posters up in paper and then a couple of plastic bags, and biked them across town in the rain. I arrived at the Farm Fresh offices with dry posters and wet everything else. By now, they are up around town (at least, so I’ve heard, since I’ve been away!) and the farmers’ markets have actually begun, so go check them out if you’re in RI… or go visit your local farmer & help them pull up some weeds! with all the rain, they will need the help.

last steps, from ink drawings on transparency to printed color stages, follow.

(more…)

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!

Yes, despite other people’s good advice and my better judgement, I went ahead and printed postcard invitations for the show on Sunday. These were done a while ago, but I didn’t get to put the picture up until today. It’s good to have something to hand to people. . . . A bunch have already been mailed out and handed out. If you would like to get one in the mail, send me your mailing address!

I’ve been printing a lot in the last couple of days. Most of what I was doing was of this nature:

Yes, this Black Cat job is over, despite the hassle that inevitably comes along with trying to print tiny, tiny little details at perfect resolution. I rushed it across town on my bike to Jim, he chopped the edges off the cards on his huge chopping machine (to make the blade come down you have to push two buttons at once, one with each hand, to make sure that you don’t chop a part of yourself off), then rushed it across town again to make it to the shipping company by 7pm. Done and done.

Can you see how tiny those tiny letters are? Smaller than a 16th of an inch. Yes, get out your rulers and look to see how small that is. It’s tiny! Such a thing should not rightfully be printable by screenprinting. Yet it happened, it’s done. Yikes.

(Note: I did not design the above material, it was designed by this fancy, fancy wedding-invitation designer. Their website is impressive, though the opening page is kind of disconcerting. The strange thing I constantly find myself remembering, while in the middle of printing these somewhat excruciatingly detailed and definitely high-luxury “unnecessary” objects, is that, despite whatever one might say about the convention of marriage and the ‘wedding industry’ in general — a wedding invitation is one of the few pieces of art or design that will actually have meaning for many people: personal, intimate, significant meaning. So — not completely unnecessary. . .)

[my printing studio. tool shelves and drawers near left. new printing table in the center, with Scøtt’s rolly cart in front to hold paper. right: homemade drying rack (the shelves pull out, it’s sweet), with light table on top (covered by black cloth & plywood). back: pile of junk. this is all in the former kitchen of an attic apartment: note corner of kitchen sink/counter at left]

So my friday-saturday-and-monday of printing a bunch of high-precision, long-hours print runs left me with some longstanding questions newly affirmed in my mind.

1) I need to not lock my knees when pulling a print. I kind of realized I was doing this, but now that I have finally built myself a new printing table (above) that is a) not wobbly and b) four inches higher than the old one (more-or-less the right height!), it has become imperative. In the middle of the first print run of the weekend (which was also the first on the new table) I tried to sit down to take a break, and yelled because I had totally strained my knees from not bending them forward with every pull… The rest of the weekend became a practice session for careful attention to non-locked-knees standing and print-pulling. A no-brainer — but it’s hard to change long-held physical habits…

2) I need to wear a respirator while printing. This should also be a no-brainer, I guess, but it took me a while. I’ve been noticing a weird itch in the back of my throat whenever I printed for a while now, and after I realized that I wasn’t just “starting to feel a sore throat coming on”, had begun to harbor (somewhat reluctantly) the idea that there was probably a connection.

The labels on the Speedball inks I use say they are non-toxic, so I had always thought that I must be wrong. However, yesterday, as I finished a five-hour, non-stop print run (pulling somewhere around 500 prints in that time!), my throat really hurt, and my lips felt tingly (and yes, I had the windows open, and no, I’m not licking the squeegee, or anything like that). Today, the croaky throat was still there, and by the afternoon, the tingly numbness in my lips had spread to the lower right side of my chin & face. BAD. ! ! ! So I looked up the MSDS.

It affirms the product’s supposed non-toxicity, and says this:

but it also says this:

1 pound per gallon is about an eighth of a gallon, which seems to me to be quite a lot. I guess I am just the one-out-of-however-many people that has a bad reaction to it. My housemate B has an extra respirator that I can use, and he already has the Organics cartridges (in his puppetmaking, he uses a lot of terrible spray glue to stick terrible foam together — which is obviously toxic, in contrast to this stuff I have been using for years…).

So I will start using it tomorrow and see how it goes. I’m kind of hoping the weird numbness goes away first . . . It’s a depressing reminder of just how long it’s been since I’ve been to the dentist.

[. . . I set up the next print run tonight, so I can print tomorrow, since I still want to have the windows open, and tonight it’s too cold for that . . . ]

I printed a whole bunch of these “kitchen kits” over the past week. The kitchen in question is, of course, the kitchen at Forbes St. — and these were made specifically for the residents of that house to cut apart and put back together as they choose. (The prints will also be a ‘bonus print’ for print series subscribers, and some will be floating around at my show ! in May.) Making a screenprint with parts that you can cut out & paste together (definitely inspired/spurred on by Jung Il Hong & Brian Chippendale’s silkscreen work in this realm, as well as Meredith Stern’s linocuts) was something I’d wanted to do for a long time, and this doesn’t totally fulfill that need, but it’s a start.

It’s also a start in experimenting with how to give people the tools to make drawings, without making them go through 5 years of architecture school training. An architectural drawing is a great way to communicate and transmit information, and even to facilitate a conversation about ideas for space, but access to that medium has always been limited by technology or specialized skills (even in the pre-computer era). How to communicate about design? How to make a tool that people can both use in group discussions, and take back to their rooms and mess around with on their own? How can we have a conversation that will produce a physical artifact that everyone present has had a chance to modify, that can be referred to in the future as evidence of the process or the decision? How to avoid being, once again, the one in the middle of the room holding the only pencil?

So, the kitchen kits are in the classic poster tradition of ‘large expendable multiples’, as well as in the classic dungeons & dragons tradition of ‘a gridded space over which creatures can move and adventures are had, facilitated by the imagination’. After getting done with the printing (and then sleeping) I kind of couldn’t keep my hands off of it and spent yesterday cutting them up & making a couple of different versions of the Forbes kitchen (past, present, possible future). It was a lot of fun. I had had doubts about the grid (which is 6" squares at the 1/2 inch = 1 foot scale), but in the end it functions pretty well as both a ground to denote what is the interior space of the kitchen, and as a instant measurement device: “wait, only 2 feet between this counter and the wall…. that’s not enough for someone to walk through!”, etc. (To all my architecture professors: Yes, it has the scale on it… you can also cut out the graphic scale and use it to measure things on the drawing!)

This, and hopefully more playful, game-like print/building projects to come, are inspired both by game designers like Jane McGonigal (whose work I barely understand but am pretty excited about), and by the book Housing Without Houses, by Nabeel Hamdi.

Here Hamdi talks about trying to make buildings which involve the users in their creation:

If the setting these buildings provided was to be an invitation to users to participate in creating an architecture of cooperation — a concept only primitively explored in the days of flexible buildings — then the size, position, and organization of space and materials would also have to perform in more than technically rational ways. They had to reference the choices available, promoting spontaneity and discovery, albeit within the constraints of the materials and systems employed and the legal and regulatory structure. The architecture of possibilities, in other words, would need to be legible and opportunistic, and yet remain technically rational.

Housing Without Houses, p.73

“Okay, roll the 20-sided die to see how much resistance you get from Code Enforcement….”

The Forbes kids get their hands on the kits this weekend, we’ll see what they do with them…

sticky-paper sheets printed from the same screens will also become coffee-cup stickers for my friend’s travelling espresso machine coffee shop…. yeah!

…that has nothing to do with any of the other projects, except that it’s pushing the photocopy-collage-for-generating-form strategy, and it’s an easy way to get back into sitting at my desk, drawing, cutting stuff up, and working quietly. The best part of tonight was when Buio (the cat) jumped up on the desk and knocked apart the careful, rectilinear arrangement I had laid all the pieces out in. I was initially frustrated, but then after he got down and I looked at the patterns again, I quickly taped everything into place just as he had skewed it. Cat! so much better of a graphic designer than I am!

The idea of using this specific pattern (a relatively mundane one, the origin of which I will not reveal here…) to make further patterns was stolen from Scott Work/Death. He’s been on tour for almost two months now, and when I found another box with this pattern on it and remembered our earlier conversation about how rad it was… I couldn’t resist. I am sure that when he gets around to making his own pattern out of it, it will be completely different, so I’m not worried about stepping on toes here.

The new washout sink, next to the regular sink: previously there were two slop sinks (like the right hand one) in a different part of the studio — over a wood floor. The screens didn’t fit into the sink, water went all over the floor, and all over whoever was using the nearby sink for photo washing. (Now the photo darkroom has its own sink — in the dark! The photographers are happy [see below…].) This part of the studio used to be the kitchen for a restaurant that was here previously, so we took advantage of the tile floor to make a rugged cleanup area.

We also no longer have to pick up water in yogurt containers and splash it over the screens: innovation!

Inside the silkscreen darkroom:

New screen coating table, built by Pete. Squeegees have their own shelf, on the left.

Storage shelves for ink and other supplies (no longer in the basement!)

The light table, which finally has a table of its own.

Darkened screen storage is below this table, behind a dark curtain. The rack behind it provides storage for other screens.

Last but not least: one of the happy photographers, mentor Erik Gould! (if he doesn’t look happy, it’s because his hat is falling off…)

The prints are done — as of last Thursday night/Friday morning.

I printed the seventh color on Wednesday night/Thurs morning. After I’d printed about six copies, I realized that I had run into a classic transparent color problem, which I had expected to happen at some point along this process… but hadn’t looked for at the very end.

(background information: the previously promised transparent color mixing notes.)

It is especially hard to predict how the transparent colors are going to act when printed: what they look like is determined by the amount of pigment in the transparent base, and by how thickly it lies over the other colors. You can test solid colors by wiping them with a brush or your finger on a piece of paper, but with a transparent color you have to print it through the screen to see how dark or light it will be, and how it will change the color behind it. The transparent base I use also makes the printed colors a little bit iridescent, so they are darker or lighter when you look at them from different angles…

So, the ‘classic problem’ comes from the transparent color unpredictability combined with the hope of the printmaker that the color she mixes, at a certain density, will turn out to be the correct value to create a bunch of different effects in different places all over the print. In this case, the large text needed to be dark enough to be legible, but light enough to reveal what was behind it; the small handwriting text needed to be not too dark (so it wouldn’t show up as a blobby shape of its own) and not too light (so it could still be read); the small drawings of people in the rooms needed to be dark enough to be seen clearly…. and the wall in one of the upper bedrooms needed to be a light enough value to contrast with the wall of the hallway, and push the room walls a little further into the distance.

As printed, when the large text and the small people in the rooms were legible enough, the walls of the upper room were waaaaaay too dark. Since I was using the values of different colors in the print to try and create the appearance of receding space, this kind of value conflict — which actually made the room walls almost the darkest thing in the composition — was non-negotiable: it totally broke down any sense of space in the upper part of the print. After a couple moments of frustrated contemplation (post-midnight), considering various possible solutions, I decided that the best path would be to finish printing the transparent blue as planned, and then shoot another screen with just the wall shapes on it, and use that to print a transparent light color over the dark areas.

So I did end up printing an eighth color after all, Thursday night into Friday morning. It left me completely exhausted… and if I hadn’t written about it, you would probably never have noticed it.

However! the prints are finished.

I am working on a letter that will go out with the prints, that should be done tonight. Prints to out-of-town subscribers will be mailed out tomorrow (Tuesday) afternoon, and prints for Providence subscribers will be ready for pickup after that — I will also do some delivery runs around town.

Then it’s on to some more exciting stuff…!

The transparency for the seventh and last color is ready.

In the ‘morning’ (2:30 pm, when I wake up…) I will shoot the screen… and if all goes well, print it tomorrow night/today (Wednesday into Thursday).

Thursday: sort out, sign & number.
Friday: pack up some posters, head to Worcester to deliver the Worcester subscriptions.
Saturday & Sunday: back to Providence, address and prepare for mailing. Contact Providence subscribers and deliver posters around town.
Monday: mail out posters.

… there you have it.

Reading:
The Shape of Content, by Ben Shahn.

Essays about art and why it might be worthwhile to strive to create anything in the world. I read this book when I was 17 or 18, and coming back to it now I found myself thinking “Oh, I’ve read this one before, I don’t need to read it again…” Then a couple of sentences into the essay: “Hey, wait a second — I don’t remember this part!” It’s really thoughtful, down-to-earth, and unpretentious, focused on art’s connection to and meaning within life. Reading it now, it is obvious that this book was about 50% of the reason why I ended up dropping out of the the University of Chicago when I was 19. (the other half? attention deficit disorder.)