Whoa, sorry for a long time of no updating — I’ve been vaguely overwhelmed by holiday times, business stuff, traveling to see people, and working!

Now… the holiday crunch is over, and I got sucked into working on writing and drawing a comic. I know, this is not a “productive” silkscreen-type project like I probably should be working on, but it’s pretty exciting to me. It’s an adventure story based on a comic book character named Scar, made up by a middle school kid. Andrew Oesch and Walker Mettling had the kids in their after-school comics classes (at public library branches) draw and write a bunch of characters, and their attributes and backstories, to then write comics about. Grownups (or should I say, “grownups”) also made up some of the characters, but this one was written & drawn by a kid.

Here is Andrew & Walker’s project blog with about ten of the many, many characters, and songs by Amil Byleckie to go with them!

The characters were all made into “rogues gallery” type books (as seen in the photo* above), which AO offset-printed at AS220. Using the books as reference, the kids made comics about and around the characters, which I mostly haven’t gotten a chance to read yet… and the character books were also handed out to various artists around town so they could also make comics & drawings based on the characters. (Here’s one: Mickey Z’s comic, and the characters it is based on.)

Upon seeing the full-color drawing that Alec Thibodeau (a dedicated vegan) made of “Tofoon”, a giant block-shaped warrior made of radioactive tofu, I said, “oh my gosh, I have to do this, what do I do, is there still time, I have to make a comic for this project.”

I looked through the books & to Andrew’s amusement, found a character that is maybe one of the more brawny / classic-superhero-y of the collection… at least as the kid drew him: so far I have drawn three pages that are pretty emo, and then there are two pages in progress that are more active… but I have a feeling there’s going to be a good deal of action eventually. Though, as AO said (in response to my worry that I wasn’t gonna get the action scenes done because all I wanted to draw was love scenes), “love scenes are kinda like action scenes.” ehhhhhh…

Anyways, I was trying to keep this update brief, and just say, “I’m making a comic & it’s really fun!” But now that I got into it, here’s the origin story of why I’m working on this comic that promises to be super epic, based on a little kid’s idea…

Thanks to the diligence and stubbornness of our mother, my brothers & I grew up throughout the 80s and 90s without a television in our house. Although we would go to a movie occasionally or watch TV at other kids’ houses, reading — books, picture books, newspaper comics, and Tintin comic books — was our main source of narrative and visual entertainment. When I went to college in Chicago in the late 90s, I drew a couple of comics & illustrations for the independent school newspaper there, and I was introduced to self-published zines and comics, but I never made anything long-form — I didn’t have any good ideas for what it should be about, and I didn’t want to make something just for the sake of making something.

Arriving in Providence at the end of the 90s, I was extremely inspired by the comics artists here, as published in the newsprint periodical Paper Rodeo and other small, hand-made formats around town.** I would dedicate hours of coffee-shop patience to deciphering what was going on in the tiny, odd-sized panels filled with scribbly lines. Stretches of narrative unfolded and then fell away, characters were introduced and then re-appeared, maybe, fleetingly, with a different name or years later, hardened and world-weary. Little guys got stomped on by giants, scrappy weirdos and machine-men fought against forces of corporate ownership, people tried to build structure and spaces and logic for themselves in a confusing world that was beyond their comprehension.

I loved how these stories created fantastical, imaginary worlds, filled with the adventure elements that I had loved as a kid & teenager — that at the same time served as metaphors for the world that we lived in in Providence, with its magic, struggles, and difficulties. Going to shows, making our homes in weird industrial spaces, and making art in Providence was the first time that I had felt like I was actually living in an actual place, living my real life — I didn’t have to live in medieval times or in an imaginary fantasy world to live authentically and experience exciting things. Biking manically through the car-clogged, snowy streets, climbing up dark, steep staircases to dance wildly at noise shows, exploring the city and meeting new people, staying up all night to finish making something important and beautiful — these were the real adventures of my real life in the broken, vibrant, difficult, actual world.

My ambitions to make comics continued to grow, but I knew that I still didn’t have a story to tell: I shied away from a personal narrative of my own life, because I felt like it wasn’t coherent or important enough. Translating things metaphorically seemed like the only way I could make a thing that would feel far enough away from me to be able to put it together as a story, as opposed to a shapeless, self-indulgent splurt of what my high school english teacher Mr. Reinke might call “logorrhea”. But what story did I have to tell that even merited translation?

After a friend of mine had a bad hand injury a couple years ago, I spent some time sketchily scripting ideas and scenarios for a comic about people in a world “not unlike our own”, where there’s a fascist military police force made up of people who’ve been augmented with metal/robotic weapon arms (with one thread of influence branching from Mat Brinkman’s Multi-Force comic epic, which is set in an underground labyrinth in which the monster/warrior characters have giant interchangeable battle arms…). The protagonist of my story was a young man who is recruited into the force and equipped with a weapon arm, but then deserts, thereby losing control of the arm. Removing the weapon leaves his own arm totally useless. He must figure out how to to hack the weapon arm and restructure its abilities from scratch, and how to use its weapon nature for good, or if that’s even possible.

So yeah, themes of physical vs. mental strength, the struggle with the body and its control, ability and communication, and a sub-narrative about neighborhoods and fascist urban planning strategies… also a love story between the young man and a nice lady who has a fiance who’s a legitimate member of the force, and the story of how she becomes politically radicalized… anyways! I have a bunch of pages of basically-illegible notes for this story in an old sketchbook… it was decent stuff, but I never made anything happen with it — partly because of time constraints & other projects, partly because I was self-conscious about the science fiction-y, comic-book-trope-y aspects of the story, partly because I was intimidated by having to make *so* *many* *drawings*.

When I read the character description of Scar (see the image at the top of this blog post), the parallels to my old story jumped out at me — all the old themes still tugged at me — plus the powerful idea of the flawed body & the search for completion. I was also psyched to try to write a tough superhero character, and to have the “trite comic-book-story” aspect of the character & the plot excused by its origin in a little kid’s imagination. I started writing a little bit of the backstory script — how he finds the arm, why Scar killed Black Death’s brother, what happened after his hands got cut off… and found myself totally thrilled and sucked into the process.

I’m way more compelled than I expected I would be by the demands of making drawings that tell the story, by figuring out how to do that. How to pace and time the action or sequence of actions, how to combine text and drawings in a way that leaves a lot to be filled in by the imagination, but sets up a coherent story for readers to grab on to. Still feel like I am totally ignorant of the “right way” of “how to do it” — but the first steps in figuring it out are very exciting. And — I finally feel like I have a story to tell.

So, the past couple of weeks have found me…

doing technical research:

conscripting my friends to be the photo reference for characters / people’s faces:

Ben as Brian/Scar:

Andrew as Time Stopper:

combing my past photos for other visual references (in this case, cityscape, wide street):

making an actual balsa-wood model of the robot arm (I know, crazy, but totally awesome — I like having things I can look at to draw them, and the arm is as much a character in the story as Scar is…):

early version of the arm, now it’s a lot cooler than it is here:

Okay, that’s what I’ve been up to, also new year’s was awesome, and things are generally confounding and beautiful and transformative. I want to write more, and there is more of the backstory of why this story feels like it demands to be told, why it demands that I tell it. But! I also want to draw & write new pages of the story itself! Time time time…

I’ll post complete pages on the website here somewhere, when I have some more done. The first five pages will be published in the anthology that AO and Walker are putting out sometime “soon”, along with a bunch of other work surrounding all these characters, by kids and adults. I’m worried that I will never be able to finish my version/vision of Scar, that the story will spiral out of my control and that I will never be able to tell all the parts of it that are important to me (or that I’ll get distracted by the love scenes and never get around to figuring out how to draw the action scenes…!). But I know I need to just keep working on it, moment by moment, piece by piece, and let it accumulate slowly.

Also, the lesson that I ultimately take from Providence comics-makers, and from my friends alongside whom I am delighted to draw, is to remember to let things be loose, to not worry about connecting up every episode, but to concentrate on drawing the parts I want to draw, the parts that are the most fun to draw, the stories that are the most interesting to tell. Readers will make their own connections between them, and create a narrative out of my stumbly efforts…

okay wait, I can’t write about comics without linking to a couple of friends:
Melissa Mendes who is going really deep & intense with her self-investigative comics work right now;

James McShane whose total dedication to the form inspires & intimidates me daily;

and Brynocki C’s comics review blog, which might be one of the best blogs ever.

* apologies for all the blurry photos, I am reduced at the moment to using my cellphone camera since my old camera’s batteries seem permanently drained to the point of unusability, and I didn’t realized how much I depended on the macro-focus feature on my old camera. Acquiring a functional camera is on the to-do list…

** A small selection of this late 90s / early 2000s work, including Ninja and Maggots by Brian Chippendale, and Teratoid Heights and Multi-Force by Mat Brinkman, has been collected and re-published recently. Also, CF’s Powr Mastrs, though new work, is a product of the same scene/mentality… and Mickey Zacchilli‘s comics and print work are also in the Providence lineage of surreal, energetic scribble narrative…

Yesterday, the fabulous Muffy Brandt told me about her new tactic for artistic professionalism: “I can’t make anything new until I have taken a picture of the thing I just made and posted it on the internet”. I don’t think that that’s exactly the right strategy for me, but the conversation gave me the kick in the pants to finally update these updates. Yikes!

so…I’m gonna make a list of what I have been up to, maybe for a little bit of bragging rights, but mostly just to note or record for myself that I have indeed been involved in worthwhile activity! (and/or because of Umberto Eco’s rationale about why we make lists…)

Some of this stuff will get more elaborate updates, with more photos, sometime soon… but for now, here’s the brief rundown.

• came back from Pittsburgh to roll straight into a solid month of finishing the Dave Cole / Unreal City print. (Aug-Sept)



• visited New Orleans really briefly (early Sept) and was frustrated by my clumsiness at drawing things I saw around me. Time to get practicin’!
• curated & organized a print show of twelve Providence (and related) printmakers, titled “Pattern Factory”, at the Bushwick Print Lab in NYC. (Sept)



• finally bit the bullet and wrote the final report for the grant I got for the second year of the New Your City project… three years late! Interestingly enough, the long-term perspective allowed me to write a more interesting report — the kids at the library have been asking for the past three years when they are gonna be able to build a city again, so librarian Ann and another local artist have applied for another grant for the purpose! Cross your fingers for them! (end of Sept)
• went down to New York, hung the Bushwick show, went to Dave’s opening at Dodge Gallery (which the Unreal City print was commissioned for), then hosted (collaboratively with other Prov folks) an all-day art show opening which involved seven hours of live screenprinting…! (early Oct)



• participated in the RISD alumni fall art sale, with Meg Turner… (also early Oct)
• worked on stuff for the holiday version of Craftland, making a little bit of new print work as well as awesome tiny lined-paper notebooks! (mid-Oct)

notebook covers:


• after a year plus of discussion and distraction (on my part), the awesome Ann and Evan of “risd|works” finally tied it down: I’m very proud to have selected prints of mine available in their shop!
• gathered a couple of friends in my studio to teach a quick two-day workshop on multi-color transparent layer screenprinting, as a practice session for teaching a longer class in New Orleans. (late Oct)

working…


the final (or at least preliminary) results!


• celebrated my birthday with a backyard fire & lots of Yacht Club orange soda! (Oct 29th, scorpiooo!!!)
• flew to New Orleans and stayed there for almost the whole month of November, teaching what ended up being a six-day class on advanced silkscreen techniques, specifically rubylith-stencil making and transparent color layering, at the Louisiana ArtWorks Community Printshop. I was so proud to be working with a number of people who are active volunteer members / monitors at the printshop — these people are in the shop every day printing anyways, and so it was great to be able to seed their already prolific creative practices with some new techniques and strategies and materials… and to see them throw what they were learning immediately into action… delightful! (November)

preliminary pencil drawings, separating an image into layers:


cutting rubylith:


looking at different color versions of a final print:


I encouraged the learners to test print *before* their rubyliths were finished — this is a not-quite-finished but still awesome stage:


• while in New Orleans, I also:: worked on some drawings of letterforms for future text-only prints, participated in the New Orleans Bookfair, showed my work in “Editions At Dawn”, a group show of LAW printshop members and teachers, collaborated with Meg on a poster (finally)!!!!!, biked around a lot, drew, cut rubylith, built an awkward-looking-but-quite-effective light fixture in the printshop to allow people to do fine detail work, cleaned out a backyard shed for possible future inhabitation, saw some interesting performances, met a friendly letterpress printer, a neat illustrator, and an awesome painter of radical letterforms, helped out the Meg somewhat with all her projects, laid groundwork for future schemes, and generally stayed way busy. (also November)

collaboration with Meg (out-of-focus photo): “whoa, look at that sexy fire escape!”


“termite-infested shed? or photoshoot from ‘Anthropologie’ ?”


“must… have… bright light… for drawing…. ”


chillin’ with Lentils the cat at Nowe Miasto


a beautiful and disintegrating city….




• Thanksgiving: with family in Philadelphia (reading Tintin books), and a too-brief visit with Erik Ruin… (late Nov)
• returned to Providence this past Sunday night; and yesterday (less than a week later) participated in the RISD alumni “holiday” art sale — a long day preceded by no sleep. (the present moment!)

In the meantime, I also was a volunteer work-share at Scratch Farm in Cranston, I’ve been compiling a list of (and then reading) young-adult books with strong female protagonists, applying for some fellowships, and trying to stay organized.

What’s next?

Specifically:

• December 8th, 6pm-9pm: I will be live-illustrating 100 very short stories by 10 different readers! at Knight Memorial Library, 275 Elmwood Avenue, Prov.
• December 10-11-12: Secret Door Projects (me) trunk show at the Eli Phant art/craft shop in Portland Maine!:: update Dec 8: show not happening, postponed till the spring! Eli & Ella Phant are on the brink of having their Ele-baby, and I have enough on my plate here in RI… as evidenced by the following…
• December 18th, 12-5pm: “Cardboard Pankakes” informal last-minute-before-holidays studio sale of a bunch of Providence artmakers/crafters, at Emmy & Andrew’s apartment (124 Chapin Ave, #2)
• holiday-zone self-promotion: my work is for sale at Craftland, Frog & Toad, risd|works, and from me right here on the internet!
• January and February: two months straight to spend in Providence and to draw and print. What is winter for? I know what winter is for.

and generally:

• drawing a short comic as part of a compilation my friends are making, based on comic characters invented by middle-school students…
• finishing prints, old prints and new prints… oh my gosh so many prints to finish. Trying to make that list shorter!
• making some bigger/ more abstract/ more complicated prints…
• working on the print series…
• planning to exhibit work next fall…
• helping build out an airstream trailer for my friend’s wife who has a chemical sensitivity…
• organizing everything, getting things shipshape…
• building things & fixing things…
• seeing friends instead of looking at facebook…

Okay that last list is pretty cursory but I gotta be done with the computer for tonight!!!!

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!

I am looking for someone to help me out with logistics, print organization, outreach, communications. This could range from schedule problem-solving to hanging out while studio cleanup happens, to doing publicity & helping put me in touch with galleries or publishers or people like that. If you’re interested in learning about screenprinting, meticulous analog art methods, and perspective drawing, I can help you out there! You could also have access to the studio here to work on print projects of your own. It’s unpaid, but perks of the position include bottomless coffee, good company, cookies and homemade bread… and of course prints.

… get in touch if you’re interested!

Anticipatory snapshot of the transparencies for the Industrial Trust Bldg prints.

(The postcard version, seen at upper right, is still un-finished…) These transparencies were made at Faces, which is a great graphic output place here in Prov; they can print transparencies that are solid black and perfectly aligned (unlike a photocopy or laser printout, where the blacks will always be slightly transparent and the image will always be a little distorted). With the small detail and close tolerances of this print, the fancy transparencies were totally worth it.

I printed the first color on the Industrial Trust Building prints, then took a break and did the second chapter of a screenprinting workshop for artist mentors at New Urban Arts. The awesome Emmy Bright (with squeegee below), who is a recent arrival in Providence and an Arts Mentoring Fellow at NUA, set it up, organized the logistical aspects, drove me (and prints) around town, fed me, and in general helped me out SO MUCH during the end of November/beginning of December! A million thanks!!!

At the workshop, we printed the postcard-sized skyscrapers on STICKER PAPER.

We ran out of time, and since the plasticky sticker paper doesn’t absorb any ink, a hairdryer was pulled into action to get these dry enough to take home.

Here we are achieving some good eye-breaking-ness!! (plus awesome clouds via rainbow-roll experimentation.) I was pretty exhausted & running on pure will at this point; pushing hard to get the larger skyscraper prints done before the Craftland opening on December 5th. This session of printing fun stickers — in order to demonstrate alignment using a hinged plastic sheet — gave me confidence that the prints would look good, and got me psyched again about screenprinting’s magical ability to create images that people love.

One of the participants also said later that they were glad to get to print an image of mine, instead of a random thing that someone had just come up with as a demonstration… that it showed them the possibilities of what could be achieved. I know what that feeling is like from the learning side of things — when seeing an example of work in a new medium, you want to be inspired by awesomeness, kicked in the pants to get out there & make more awesomeness yourself. It’s eye-opening to me to realize that my work can play that role in people’s lives… I am flattered and touched and it’s super meaningful. Thank you, Sarah, Jadrian, and Emmy, for being part of this night! and also for having patience with my sleep-deprived wackiness.

Watch out for these guys around town, your eyes might get broken.

From here on out it was a race to the finish line, another day and a half of nonstop printing.

Born of necessity, innovation:

A drywall screw driven into the side of the screen frame, with paper rolled & taped around it, allows you to easily lift up a screen that is smaller than your printing table, and/or that can’t be positioned so an edge sticks off the table for easy grabbin’. The paper roll rotates around the screw, so you can handle it to move the screen up and down over and over again without wearing your skin off.

Printing prison…

I offered myself the possibility that I could stop printing these in the middle of the run, if I got totally exhausted. I decided not to — my track record with finishing interrupted print runs is not good — it’s generally taken me a year or more to complete them. So, even when I was totally beat, in the early morning of a sleepless night before the deadline for which I only really needed 50 or so prints, a couple more hours of pushing through the run looked a lot better than a year of an unfinished project hanging over my head. So, there are now 345 of these! in 5 different colorways. Man oh man.

After going through the process of mixing the transparent shadows for the Durruti prints, I had a real sense of competence with the transparent colors here, and got psyched about being super picky. This is the moment of the final color decision for the blue shadow on the gray-sky skyscraper (with rejected color variants lying below):

Cutting the ‘tails’ off at Jim’s shop, with the giant guillotine:

Emmy, still rocking hard as the “print caddy”, dropped me and prints off at Craftland…

… and I sat down and put the barcode labels on them just as Alec Thibodeau was beginning to hang the ‘print wall’.

I think I have accepted the fact that I live almost my entire life in the realm of the “Just In Time”. I could beat myself up about this under-the-wire, deadline-focused scenario every time that it happens… which is pretty often… but really I’d rather just be psyched about what I do get done, apologize & offer beautiful prints to the people who get inconvenienced, & keep going.

I’m closing in* on being done with these “superman” building prints. The “text on the poster” problem has been solved, courtesy of Stephen Brownell, who sent me an old postcard (date unknown, printed in halftones) that included the original name of the building: the Industrial Trust Building. Constructed, of course, by the Industrial Trust Company. Well, there’s no way I could have come up with anything more beautiful or poetic than that, so that is what is going on the poster: along with the word ‘Providence’; which made a lot of sense and felt right, ultimately.

In Italy, love of your home city or village, no matter how tiny, is called ‘campanilismo’, ‘bell-tower-ism’: the tower is what you can see from far away and identifies the place to which you long to return. As a proverbial generalization, Italians are said to be ‘campanilistic’ as opposed to ‘patriotic’ — devotion to the specific small place of origin outweighs any broader loyalty to the abstract, constructed idea of the nation. This building serves us pretty well as a bell tower.

After learning the name, I was able to find out some more:

• on Wikipedia (it has its own wikipedia page!)
• on “Skyscraperpage” (skyscraperpage? fascinating)
• … it remains the tallest building in Providence!

Here’s some more process. The best part? Possibly.

Here are the two layers close to complete in Photoshop. This was a snap with the cell phone camera the way the lcd screen looks gives it the gradient (approximating the rainbow roll in the sky of the finished print), and creates a weird, colorful moire pattern (which the finished prints will not replicate!). Looking at this picture on the cellphone screen is the impetus for making a gray-black-and-white ‘minimalist’ version…

Drawing letters; a sequence. Some pictures taken with cell phone camera so the focus & detail are iffy. Watch the C, D, and Es change.

Now it’s time for some kerning! (aka. figuring out how far apart the letters need to be in order to feel evenly spaced. The spacing doesn’t end up numerically even, especially with wacky letterforms like these, but ideally the positive & negative spaces balance each other out, nothing is crowded, and legibility is increased!)

Here, the pink letters are the kerned ones. You can see the slight horizontal adjustments between the two texts, opening up more space or pulling it closer together… you can also see my final adjustment of the “N”, cutting it out of the tracing paper, moving it over a 16th of an inch, and re-taping with scotch tape! Here’s a larger version.

I do this by tracing the letters again, one by one, on a new piece of transparent paper. Starting with the first and last letter spaced the necessary distance apart, I work inwards making slight adjustments, moving the new paper around over the original drawing so I can visually judge the shape and amount of the space left between the letters. It’s kind of repetitive, sometimes involves a lot of erasing over and over again, and is totally not the fastest way to do it. BUT as David Gersten says when people ask him why he draws on paper instead of on the computer, “Why would I want to spend less time thinking??” Bzam.

Here you can see knife cuts in the rubylith where I’ve sliced through the softer red layer but haven’t pulled the red plastic off of the clear layer yet:

Here you can really see the difference between the kerned and non-kerned text. Compare the spacing of “OVI” and “ENC” in both sets of letters… (larger version)

A final layout, with the postcard from Stephen. It’s from the opposite side of Kennedy Plaza (obviously from before KP was KP; it seems to have been some kind of leafy park… any Prov. historians out there got information to offer?), but it’s surprising how similar the angle and the majesty are. Someone pointed out to me the asymmetricality of the building; it’s true, it’s totally weird.

Here’s a grainy closeup of the letters showing just how much they changed between tracing and rubylith. The rubylith letters are vertically shifted from the traced ones, but the horizontal shifting all came from the kerning decisions!

Okay, that’s it for tonight, time for BED.

Craftland put one of my prints on their online store, and makes a deserved comparison to science-fiction virtual worlds! Yeah, I couldn’t even keep perspective drawing out of this super-simple, gradient-on-black, print of the helpful cat Buio. Lots of other prints of mine (inc. different versions of the Industrial Trust Building print) are at their holiday sale, till Dec. 31st… as well as many prints by other awesome Providence printmakers. If you’re in Providence, check them out! Blatant sales pitch! yeah!

Oh, if you’re looking for yet more obsessive silkscreen process, I recently came across LesliePVD’s blog, where she’s documenting her artmaking & printing processes, including most recently: screenprinting on linoleum tiles to make patterned floors!! She’s got a lot of great photos & descriptions of technique, much is learnable! Providence does spit out some awesome dedicated maniacs, does it not?

* Actually, this update was begun almost two weeks ago (Dec 2nd?), but I was too busy working on finishing the prints themselves to have time to go through the process photos to post them here. So, this is totally way old news. An update with the completed print is next! I also just came back from New Orleans, with fewer drawings than I would have liked (it rained all week), a copper plate partially etched, some photos, and lots of thoughts, which I will try to sort out & write about in upcoming updates.

The preliminary single-color version of the Polish Home drawing, which Olneyville Housing will use as publicity for their re-dedication, is done.

The gray computer tones are useful for showing the shape of the building, & differentiating the bricks and the stone trim. They are little too clean, maybe, but when the image gets printed out, the texture that the printer makes — even though it is fine-grained — warms it up a little bit! And the final screenprint will be more complex & messy: the chaos will get its chance.

By looking at one of the pictures I took as a photo-reference, we can see what the real purpose and function of “Art” is in the world: removing awkwardly placed urban infrastructure!

I’ve been reading the great new book The Printed Picture, by Richard Benson, which is all about how images have been transferred to paper across the years, and goes up through the present digital printing technologies. It is super excellent, super nerdy, and right up my alley. It was a gift — thank you Rob!

I am working on too many projects at once but THAT IS OKAY.

This is for a commissioned print of the Polish National Home, in my neighborhood, that has been renovated by Olneyville Housing Corporation, the local community development non-profit, for use as their offices.

I got to see the original blueprints for this building, and even some preliminary proposal drawings for it. In the preliminary drawings, it had an art-deco style chain-hung metal-and-glass awning over the door… then by the final blueprints, there is this totally awkward neo-classical pediment thing going on. Why? I don’t know.

Ink is going onto mylar over the super precise pencil drawing. I forgot how much fun making this kind of drawing is.

It was great to figure out the geometry and composition of the front door corner facade: reminding me again that even a strange little building like this one has a proportional rhythm to it. The perspective looks wrong because the building is on a hill: the street to the right goes up steeply, but it looks like the line where the building meets the road is receding too sharply. Any suggestions about how to solve that problem?

The blueprints have great hand-lettering on them. At some point soon I’ll try & post some pictures of them and of other old blueprint lettering that Rob C. & I found recently…

… on the sad end of the spectrum, I suspect that the George C. Arnold building, aka “the skinny building”, is about to be torn down. The owner was grudgingly beginning to address its structural issues, and had put up some scaffolding along the back wall (which is windowless) when there was a suspicious fire. Last week, the scaffolding was taken down… which, to me, seems to bode ill for the building’s long-term survival.

It’s on the corner of Washington & Mathewson streets, in downtown Providence. Go visit it, pay homage, take some beautiful pictures, ask yourself again why the heck they ever built a building that is only ONE ROOM WIDE, maybe call the preservation society even though they are generally kind of ineffective these days… I don’t know what course of action to recommend… If it is demolished, a lot of people will miss it greatly.

If I had more time and was less project-schizophrenic and in a super-intense emotional state all the time, I would sit out there downtown, even in this cold October weather, and make some awesome drawings of it, probably crying giant tears the entire time… Things being as they are, I just took a bunch of pictures (crying giant tears the entire time) that will hopefully be able to serve as photo-reference for some drawings and prints in the future.

BLAAAARRRR

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…)

… such as finding cool old drawings in the flat-file. Here’s a detail of one that I was psyched to come across a couple of days ago, complete with tea-stains. Clicking will take you to the full image.

I made this, as far as I can remember, at the request of artist, animator, and friend Dave Fischer for inclusion in his “soulless publication of the arts” Providence Machines. PM was a PDF zine, which means that it had no paper distribution, nor was it intended to be read on-screen: you download it, print it out, staple it, then read it. Dave did the layout by hand-coding PostScript (a language that computers use to describe pages to their printers, which humans are never really supposed to lay eyes or hands on…).

The issue that my drawing appeared in (download here) was about cities and the future. Dave had asked me to draw a vision of a future city (to go along with the Italian Futurists’ manifesto which he was planning to reproduce in the zine), a little while after the 2004 Oak & Troy mill-space evictions.

Nadav Benjamin, one of my then-housemates, put together this slideshow of his photos from fall-winter 2003-2004. The photos are mostly of people in their rooms/studios/spaces, as well as some pictures of shows, and one of snow seen from our fire escape. I’m in there, once with an awkward haircut, and once behind a mouse mask (identifiable by my trademark habit of grabbing the edge of my shirt at shows, to stop myself from nervously picking at my hangnails…).

After being evicted, we all were really scattered and thrown to the winds. This poster also comes from the months after the evictions: it felt like we were all just eking out our existences with corners and scraps of spaces. People were definitely dreaming about having a giant building/city where you could live with all your friends, and which you could take anywhere in order to avoid zoning laws, fire codes, and any kind of municipal control… so this drawing definitely comes as a product of that collective dream.

Also, Jacqui had just given me a box of hard colored pencils, which I think is where this red/pink one came from, and I was way psyched on perspective. Obviously.

This post is also an apology for erroneously posting my to-do list to this public page… then retracting it in a fluster 7 or so hours later when I realized what I had done.

My to-do lists are absurdly extended & ongoing, and as Jacob commented, every one of them could well begin with:

• make to-do list

which would then be crossed off. (and, uh, I actually do do that on some of my lists. sometimes it seems like just sitting down to make the list is an accomplishment in itself.)

Making them on this ‘updates’ page, then putting a bookmark to their category in the bookmark toolbar, is mostly a trick to get myself to a) look at the list when I am sitting at the computer, then b) remember that I need to get stuff done, and c) get up and walk away from the computer! Working well so far (one week in).

The lists I make are a pretty informal and unprocessed look at my life, and would probably actually be more interesting, in some sense, than what I do write about here, which is relatively filtered… But if I’m going to write lists that have any kind of usefulness, they need to be private. whoops!

Edit: a sample to-do list is now posted as its own page. Yes I am thinking about all of that stuff, or the same amount or more of different stuff. Yikes.