This building, which faces onto the central bus plaza of downtown Providence, has been the home of three or maybe four banks, one after the other, in the ten years I’ve lived here. When I talk about the print I’m working on to people, nobody is exactly certain which bank is the current occupant… but everyone immediately knows the building itself. It’s generally referred to as “the Superman building”, because it supposedly gets leaped over in a single bound in one of the early movies.

In architectural history class years ago, discussing 1920s urbanism, the professor raised the crucial point that Providence didn’t ever actually need setbacks on its single, lonely skyscraper — even now, the downtown density doesn’t warrant them. However, it’s good that they did build this slightly cheesy, mini-Hugh-Ferriss-ian pile of limestone, because it’s the one building that receives unconditional love from everyone who’s ever lived here. Providence’s newer tall buildings (whether from the 1980s or the 2000s), with their flat curtain walls, tend to be universally detested.

I drew it from life in summer 2002, sitting on the steps of the downtown post office for days on end (becoming buddies with the post office security guard in the process). Watching the sun pass over the building during the course of the day, I gleaned some secrets about the uses of recessed and protruding facade elements to cast shadows, enhancing the heavenward directionality. (The photo above is terrible, by the way: it’s taken with my cell phone camera at the cloudy end of a day, so none of the awesome linearity of the building is apparent… I’ll update with a better photo on the next sunny day!)

I used the image to make the above poster design for Dave Cole, which the excellent Neil Burke printed (because I didn’t know anything about printing then, and was totally overwhelmed by the idea of printing 200 posters or however many Dave wanted). I finished cutting out all the super tiny windows totally last-minute, during down-time at my cousin’s wedding in Maine: I have troubled memories of sitting at a folding table, awkward in my fancy clothes, slicing meticulously with the knife, trying desperately not to be distracted by the fun happenings in the next room.

The transparencies, subject of so much precisional distress, are now in pretty rough shape: besides physical damage, check out where the non-archival scotch tape, stuck on to hold tiny straying pieces of rubylith, has actually bled the red color out of the rubylith! I scanned them a couple of months ago, and now I’m working in photoshop to repair some of the damage, and to re-align (more…)

… this is an interim update to let you all know that I have not fallen off the earth. The Plant Sale poster is done, more images soon. We made a garden at our house (building four raised beds and two planter boxes out of old stockade fencing scavenged from the empty lot next door!) and planted seeds, we’re getting more plants at the end of next week. I’ve been working on making a website for my brother which is not functional at all: problems have to do with Arabic/English language switching and I am in over my head. As Andrew says: “you really should not feel bad about not being able to understand a complicated programming language just by looking at it!” to which I say “but…. I want to understand everything!” All these things are not possible within our human timeframes, I guess…

In any case, I am stopping all of that stuff (for now at least) because I need to draw and print. Drawing! Printing! Yeah! There will be an update on the print series progress soon, it is all insanely late, I know.

In other news, I won a dirty apron contest.

Also, here is a cool picture of the plant sale poster being printed in the early, early morning. In the glancing light from the eastern sun, you can see the pale green transparent ink, just printed, lying over the other colors in a layer that has actual *thickness*. Click to see the large file. So sweet!

I know that sounds like a really good ice cream sundae: however I’ll leave it up to Scott and/or Jacob to describe what kinds of flavors & toppings something with that name would have, and instead talk screenprinting tech. Yeah!

This is something I designed and printed very swiftly the week before last: a going-away-party invitation for my friends. The sparkly/shiny blue paper stock that I got from Jim at Black Cat as a cut-off scrap dictated the size of the card, and I quickly decided that to take advantage of the many possibilities of the iridescent light blue, I would print on both sides of the paper.

[The sweet illustrations, by one J. Neumeister, are lifted from a 1960 French-learning phrasebook.]

However, this being a last-minute project with an immediate deadline, I had to print these very quickly: which meant finding a way to not have to do four pulls for each card. Here’s the method I came up with, basically printing the front and back at the same time, onto the two separate pieces of paper that are set up next to each other into a taped-down border (as you can see below).

I printed half the fronts and backs in the first color, then took the ones I had printed that were already dry, flipped them (carefully making sure they were lined up right), and printed the other half of fronts-and-backs in the first color. After a break, I set up the screen again with the second color: which was a sweet “rainbow roll” / “split fountain” / “bokashi” or whatever technical term you like*: it’s a gradient of different ink colors blending into each other. (In this case, utilized mostly because it would be pretty and make people say, “Ooooh!”). Again, I printed half the fronts and backs in the second color, flipped them, and then printed the other half. Done!

Here’s the whole setup:

You can see the graded-color ink sitting in the screen at the top, the two lined-up cards that have just been printed, the squeegee with the gradient of ink on it at the bottom, the one-color-printed cards at the left, ready for their second color, and (faintly) the open areas in the lower part of the screen through which I printed the pink first color. And yes, Robin, I’m still using your screen… a year and a half later? The mesh still washes out almost completely clear, and it works great — thank you!

* I don’t like any of them. More specifically, I don’t like “rainbow roll” (it feels like it should only apply to prints about which one could say, “whoa man::: psychedelic!!”) “Split fountain” is a term from offset printing and doesn’t necessarily describe this kind of smooth gradient. “Bokashi” is a term from Japanese woodblock printing and is technically a layer of ink applied to the block in a gradated thickness, not two different colors of ink blending into each other. What I usually do with ‘rainbow rolls’ has a more atmospheric effect, like bokashi, but using a Japanese word feels opaque, jargon-y, and on the uneasy edge of cultural co-option. So… rainbow roll it is, I guess. . . . Psychedelic!

[The slightly sassy tone of this update is brought to you by my feelings of bummed-out-ness this evening... which I am trying to combat by putting pictures of shiny things on the internet.]

I use a thick piece of transparent plastic to align the different color layers as I print them. It’s taped down along one side, so I can print on it, line up the paper underneath it, then fold it back out of the way to print on the paper. If I do everything right, I only have to do this once for each color layer: I mark the table with tape at the corners of the paper, then just line each sheet up to the tape. Usually, I have to do it a couple of times, and adjust the marks somewhat after they are down, to get the color in the right place. The worst case scenario, and what happens for prints with tricky alignment or lots of colors: lining up the paper under the plastic every time. (not as bad as it sounds!)

The transparent plastic sheet gets many different layers and colors printed over it, and ends up looking awesome, making me wish I could make a print that would be as good as all the layers randomly laid down over each other. I used to stop using the alignment sheets when they got to a particularly nice state; at some point I got tired of buying new plastic, and I’ve been using the same sheet now for more than a year. Where I want to see through the sheet to check the alignment, I scrub off the old ink, down to the clear plastic; everywhere else I let be. The different layers of ink have different thicknesses and hardnesses, sometimes there’s clear tape on the sheet, protecting some of the colors… This time, as I scrubbed some of the ink off, these remnants of text and image appeared:

My cousin asked me for fiction reading recommendations. Oh boy! Whenever I am in Philadelphia, I go to the stupendous “Walk A Crooked Mile” bookstore, which is in my parents’ neighborhood (but would be worth a trip even if it weren’t). Here are two super-high recommendations, both from that source:

This christmas-time, I found the book Riddley Walker, by Russell Hoban, which I had been wanting to read for years and years. I bought it as a present for my brother, then promptly borrowed it and read it. The only thing that’s possible to say about it without creating all kinds of spoilers is that it uses language in a way that no other book I’ve ever read does. The language not only creates the atmosphere and setting, but also disorients and disturbs the reader, shocking them out of their ordinary mind-set and typical approach to reading itself… terrifying and magical. Don’t read anything about it on the internet, just go to the library and get it and read it!

Last christmas-time, I found Antarctica, by Kim Stanley Robinson. I had never read anything by him, but I’d been impressed by an interview I’d come across, so I bought the book for my father, since it seemed like it would line up with his interests in climate change and environmental technology.

In the late fall of this year, I read Robinson’s Red Mars, was totally blown away, and actually went back and read almost all of it over again right after finishing it. (Kevin, I still have it! it will be coming your way shortly…) I was offered the loan of the sequels Green Mars and Blue Mars, but refused, because I had to get work done, and I knew that I would get nothing accomplished if those books were anywhere near my desk. I did find Robinson’s Pacific Edge at a bookstore in Providence, and read that… but! it was short, so it didn’t hold me up too much work-wise, and! then I loaned it immediately to somebody else, so I couldn’t read it again.

Just now, over the christmas holiday, I stole Antarctica from my dad and read it, and while it might not be as finely tuned as Red Mars in its overall sequence and structure, I was thrilled, delighted, and challenged, and would probably have gone back and re-read most of it again if my brother hadn’t stolen it from me in turn.

I feel like my brain is not in the right place right now to describe what is great about these KSR books, but I’m going to try. They bring together a lot of disparate elements: combining landscape writing, science-fiction technology, earth-centric mysticism, anti-capitalist revolution, anarchist ideas about organization and cooperation, the local food movement, humanist theories of architecture, mountain-climbing adventures, actual research and scientific knowledge, very real and sympathetic characters (even the unfriendly ones), and utopian social structures. The theories don’t overwhelm the action, and the narratives subtly but clearly underline the philosophical and political ideas he’s working with. The stories are darn good stories, too, with action, suspense, romance, danger, cliff-hangers, etc, but that would not be enough to make the books excellent…

Ultimately I think what makes Robinson’s writing great for me is that he understands the connection between the personal and the political, the individual and the wider world, the physical body and the philosophical idea — that these things are inevitably intertwined, that they are what we all have to deal with in our lives, and that that is where the greatest adventure lies. He’s smart, he thinks about the world, he gets it, and he writes it in poetic metaphors and incredibly page-turney stories. He isn’t afraid to build utopias — in science fiction, sure, but in a world very close to ours — and to say, straight out to his readers, that yes, this could be real, you could make it real right now, what are you waiting for?

Along related lines, I’m also reading or looking at:

• Utopia by Sir Thomas More (the original one!)
• Open Marriage by Nena and George O’Neill (1971, not about sleeping around but about emotional freedom and individual identity: this book is making me think super hard)
• Posters for the People: Art of the WPA edited/curated by Ennis Carter. (This book just came out, I am very excited to own it!)

… upcoming in the queue (and also from Walk A Crooked Mile) are some books by Martin Buber, which also fall into the utopian category probably…

notes from the internet:

• Glenn Abanilla, a fellow Providence drawer-of-buildings, keeps this great record of the tools he rescues and repairs!
• My brother Rich is currently living in Damascus, Syria. His writing about his experiences there, as a tall blond Arabic-speaking north american, provides a different perspective from the suspicious and generalizing attitude that all of the U.S. news media seems to cling to, if you’re interested in what’s happening in that part of the world.
• My cousin Jonathan rides his bike around a secret city.
• I’ve been working my way through these essays by Paul Graham; they’re nominally about technology, but are relevant to wider questions of innovation and creativity, and how to work as a creative person.

and yes, I am feeling better! still avoiding coffee and alcohol till everything is totally cleared up… drinking lots of tea, though, staying warm in the snowy cold.

Today, having completely lost its ertia, is a good day to do random website updates and to put up pictures of what I’ve been re-printing recently. . .

These guys are originally from 2001.

… and:::

The original drawing for these simple prints was made in 2006, but I have re-printed them in various versions a couple of times in the intervening years. Here are the color-versions I have right now.

Re-printing stuff is always weird, because it makes me feel three strange things: 1) that I am subject to the whims of a buying public (which might be true, but isn’t, for the most part) 2) that I did the best work I’ll ever do X number of years ago (if the thing I am re-printing is really good, like the Mill City Gallery poster), and 3) that I’m standing still or regressing in time: because I get very physically pulled back into the emotions, desires, outlook, haircut, etc. that I had when I was first working on that print.

Occasionally, as with the Mill City poster, it makes me feel somewhat accomplished, since I have a much better command of the technology than I did in 2001; for instance, I can actually align the different layers more or less as I intend them to be aligned (as opposed to in 2001 where every print was a struggle and very likely a failure…).

So the cut on my finger turned out to be not that bad, but a couple of days later I had to stop working hard, stop ignoring my body’s signals of pain, and finally admit that I was actually seriously sick: a bladder/kidney infection (?! I know), plus some throat thing that made my voice disappear… Then the next day the whole region got covered with snow, in a storm that’s now lasted three days, off and on. Ordinarily I would be outside running around in the snow, but I don’t want to give my poor sore kidneys any more hassle than they already have to deal with…

So I stayed inside, and pushed my departure towards Philadelphia for the holidays back a day. I’m recovering, but still low-energy from being sick and from not going outside for three days, plus just the inertia of not really being able to do anything… then not doing anything… stuck in time & in space. Thus — re-prints.

Reading:

• The City in History, 1961, Lewis Mumford (good, but slow going, and so far I’ve had to ingest many many grains of salt as L.M. has been blatantly making all kinds of sweepingly gendered statements, based on little to no evidence, about the symbolic and actual roles played by women in the origins of the ‘primitive’ city…)
• The Baffler #7, 1995, edited by Thomas Frank et al. (classic stuff that shaped my mindset when I first read it in 1998 or so…)
• The Architecture of Japan, 1955, Arthur Drexler (also kind of slow going)
• Hope, Human and Wild, 1996(?), Bill McKibben (Curitiba: a city made by architects)
• “Reversals of Fortune in the Tea Industry” from the Upton Tea Imports catalog (aw yeah!!!)
• whatever else I can get my hands on to keep from going totally stir crazy.

The past couple of days have been spent mostly seated at the computer… but now there are a bunch of new images on the website of new and old work! Missing posters from 2004 and earlier still haven’t been added, but there are finally some prints showing up for:

2005 . . . 2006 . . . 2007 . . . and 2008 . . .

(I know, just in time for 2009!)

I’d been putting it off for a while; glad to have it done.

Last week I also did the long-put-off step of (gasp!) buying 8-oz containers at the restaurant supply store. This allowed me to clean out my ink shelves, which had seemed totally crowded. In actuality, they were just packed with more than 30 pint- or quart-size containers that had less than 8 oz. of ink in them (mostly because we buy more earth balance and yogurt than we do hummus). Here are some (but not all!) of the new containers:

I also fixed my glasses: copper wire and superglue.

So, all this stuff is getting done, great! . . . . . then yesterday I cut the first finger on my right hand, pretty deeply, on my friends’ pinball machine… Now all I’m good for is 9-fingered typing, I can’t even hold the stylus properly, and the printing that I urgently wanted to get done this weekend is getting put off another day or two till I can heal a little bit. . . . some things are seemingly ‘under control’, other things are totally messed up. .. and I can do nothing about them except wait with time & patience .. . . . . .

Bread and Puppet posters are printed, Jim at Black Cat cropped the edges for me, and they are going up around town.

stages:

[that horse!]

finished poster (in a sloppily composited image) after the break. (more…)

This took less than 45 minutes, was extremely simple, and was all accomplished with stuff I already had around the house.

It works perfectly: reducing the weight of the screen when I lift it up, and (after I adjusted the amount of water in the bucket) holding it up at an angle so I can get the print out, and don’t have to walk around the table to pull the screen down again.

It is not clear to me why I didn’t do this 2 years ago.

Thanks Mike T. for the practical inspiration.

Right now I’m working on quickly printing a poster for Bread & Puppet, the legendary puppet theater company. They will be performing all over Providence during the third week in October…

I was initially commissioned to draw this poster myself, but the decision was made that I would adapt and print a drawing by Peter Schumann, Bread & Puppet’s equally legendary founder/patriarch. (As one of my housemates put it, “He’s a 70-plus-year-old guy who gets up on 12-foot stilts. Is there anything more to be said?”) We had already ordered the paper, so we sent Peter a sample sheet and he sent us back a rough line drawing in a single thick weight of Sharpie marker. When I opened the tube the marker was still fresh; the smell of the ink was strong. His note on the back: “Have fun! Put colors as you like!” I’ve been excited about the chance to match his messiness with a little bit of carefulness, but also with my own messiness.

First step: to the photocopier to transfer different parts of his drawings to transparency. Next: chopping them up ruthlessly with the knife:

I inverted some of the photocopies, because I want the shapes inside the lines to print, instead of the lines themselves. These letters have been cut out of their backgrounds:

[the paper is behind it, it's more or less this color!]

After another trip back to the copy place (to fill in stuff that I had missed the first time), the poster layout has been taped down to a board, and (more…)

“Oh hmm, what would happen if I did… this… or like this… maybe that would be cool. Would that even work?”

…and if you give it a chance, it does, to a certain degree at least, and turns into something relatively rad, or at least something that offers interesting possibilities for the future. I was trying to use up some empty space on a screen… and I thought I needed to come up with an idea for an upcoming printing job. It turned out that I didn’t have to come up with anything for this job, I just need to show up and print something on people’s shirts from an already-prepared screen… so I get to save this idea for myself! I printed these anyways, to test and have some more nifty paper to write notes on, before washing the stencil out. (if you want one of these thingys, write me a letter: po box 244, providence, ri 02901, and I’ll write you back using the print for stationery.) You get extra points if you can tell me how I made the stencil for it!

Everything here has been pretty chaotic: I was out of town for a week, jobs and projects are turning around and changing up on me, our housing situation has been in flux since our new downstairs neighbors turned out to be worse than our old ones (wouldn’t have thought this would be possible, but I guess it is), and… I got a 10th-hour email from Dave Cole‘s gallery asking me to finish printing the Truckmobile posters.

[here, with three colors printed. finally.]

This is exciting, since (more…)