things therapy

You know that old wisdom about not going grocery shopping when you're hungry? I think the same can be applied when you're starving for color, brightness, and the changes of late winter to spring and you cross paths with the local vintage goodies store.

Thursday was one of my studio work days, and after spending the first half of the day in correspondence with customers (I have awesome clients and customers!!), doing paperwork and rummaging through 2009 receipts and invoices preparing for tax time, I picked myself up and went for a walk. Temperatures are starting to mellow out here in the Willamette Valley, and while we still get a heckuva lotta rain we also have these mild, mellow overcast days where temps are in the upper 40s. Very walkable.

I needed to make a post office run and a trip to the library. This makes for a nice two-ish mile walk from my house. I had a beer date for a little later with an old, old friend from my Bend days, but I checked my watch and realized I had a window of time to step into Sabi and Friends, a local antique/junk shop in the quaint little downtown section of St. Johns. There's a basket of vintage letterpress cuts kept in the back corner of the store that I hadn't checked out in a while...and lately I've been a sucker for little porcelain or carved wood tigers. (I never used to be much of a knick-knack person.)


I also recently went on a bit of a fabric binge. Oh the colors! This time of year, along with my spring fever, I tend to start wanting floral-y, feminine, bright and colorful things for my studio. This sweet fabric will become the trim on a printmaking apron, hopefully soon.


For the briefest moment I thought about forgoing the commercially printed stuff and stamping my own designs onto fabric, but then I thought *when the hell is that going to happen?* Girl's gotta have some luxury.

push the reset button

The slacker's back! I haven't had much to report on over the last few days. I've been taking care of little bits of busy-work and doing some studio organization in preparation for a group of larger pieces I'd like to start working on in my spare time. I'll have another studio day to talk about tomorrow, but in the meantime, come down to Urban Grind tonight to take part in the next installment of the New Oregon Interview Series - tonight it's fashion night! See the link here.

Wednesday, January 27th, 7-8:30 PM, Urban Grind East, 2214 NE Oregon St., $5 admission.

The New Oregon Interview Series sits down with three Portland fashion designers to talk about their work and Portland's evolving fashion culture. A former Willamette Week fashion columnist and owner/designer of the English Dept., Elizabeth Dye has produced handmade ready to wear and bridal pieces since her first collection in 2001. Owner/founder of Portland Monthly’s 2006 Best Local Clothing line Sameunderneath for ten years, Ryan Christensen currently sits on the board of Caldera, a non-profit arts education and camp for underserved Oregon children. A collaborator in Portland’s The Collections and Fashion Week since 2001 and nationally distributed, Adam Arnold designs and creates two men and women’s lines of ready to wear and made to measure services from his Portland studio.

studio day

I try to dedicate two full days a week to exclusively Tiger Food Press projects (in addition to the hours squeezed in to the other days of the week). Today was a productive studio day. Not only that, it was sunny and nearly warm. I had the windows open in the late morning, bringing in the fresh air to combat winter stuffiness.


Projects in the works today were:
1. A repair/salvage project on a perfect bound book donated to the OCAC library. Conservation and repair is not my focus, nor is it generally in my skill set. But I have enough experience in production bindery to help make this paperback book usable for the general public, as it was on the verge of exploding even before going into circulation. With a no-stakes repair like this one I feel confident enough to do a suitable re-bind.

2. Valentines/sweetheart/LOVE cards are now folded, packaged, and listed in my shop.

3. I put the finishing touches on a wedding guestbook project that has been especially fun to do. The deep charcoal grey of the book cloth was made using cotton broadcloth fused with a backing material to make it suitable for covering book boards, and the off-white cotton wrap was fused to double thickness and then letterpress printed, also in a deep charcoal grey. This book turned out to be so elegant. I'll probably post more pictures eventually.

Tomorrow it's back to work in the book arts department at school, and then over the weekend I hope to start work on three, count them, three new exciting publishing projects. More news in that department will follow soon, as I'm really excited about all of them.

spring studio school classes at Oregon College of Art & Craft

I just want to take a moment to get on the stump about these two great classes at OCAC. Both of the classes below offer the fairly rare opportunity to get community based instruction beyond the beginner level. These ten week sessions offer once a week classes, and small class sizes!

Check them out in further detail here!

Full Leather Binding
BA801 • FEB 8-APR 19 (10 sessions); MON 6:30PM-9:30PM
This course offers a thorough introduction to working with leather for bookbinding. Students will complete a full leather volume with hand-sewn end bands and simple decorative techniques including tooling and stamping. Adhesives, types of leather, use of tools, sharpening knives and leather paring by hand and with the Scharf-fix paring machine will be discussed in depth. No class March 22.
Prerequisite: Good hand skills and some binding experience helpful. Location: Calligraphy Classroom

Rory Sparks, Instructor
Rory Sparks has been printing and binding books for twelve years. She worked at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts for four years before moving to Portland. She has a BFA from St. Cloud State University and has studied bookbinding in England and throughout the US with various instructors and at the American Academy of Bookbinding in Telluride, CO. Rory was an Artist-in-Residence at OCAC in 2003.


Intermediate Letterpress
BA802 • FEB 9-APR 20 (10 sessions); TUE 7:00PM-9:30PM
This ten-week course will build on the skills learned in Beginning Letterpress. Using handset lead and wood type as a starting point, we will delve into the versatile world of photopolymer printing. Photopolymer is a light-sensitive material that can be used to print high-contrast images and text on the letterpress. Since a photopolymer plate is pressed into paper just like type, prints made through this process have the “bite” or impression that is so characteristic of traditional letterpress. Students learn how to design photo- polymer plates using handmade line drawings or computer-generated digital files, create negatives using high-tech or low-tech approaches, process their plates and ultimately print these photopolymer plates on the Vandercook letterpress. Registration methods, plate characteristics and paper choices will be discussed. Participants leave the class with a small series of prints using the media of their choice. No class March 23.

Prerequisite: Familiarity with the basics of hand-set type as well as use of the Vandercook letterpress. Location: Calligraphy and Printmaking

Kate Copeland, instructor
Kate Copeland’s work involves letterpress and 19th century photographic processes. She currently teaches at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland Community College and Portland State University. BA, Macalester College; MFA, Rhode Island School of Design.
www.katecopeland.com

chasing fear and finding genius

I woke up today thinking of this talk by Elizabeth Gilbert I had seen on TED close to a year ago. Gilbert is the author of the much hyped, instant success "Eat, Pray, Love." I still haven't read the book, and despite the mixed reactions to it by my friends, based in this talk I'll probably pick it up one day. In the meantime, I really appreciate what she talks about here. Check out this link.

I don't know a single artist who hasn't experienced some form of the fear and dread Gilbert touches on in this talk, whether it's self-inflicted or projected onto them. "What is it about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each other's mental health, in a way that other careers...don't do?" she asks. "Why? Is it rational, is it logical, that anybody should be expected to be afraid to do the work that they feel they were put on this earth to do?"

I get a sense that as artists we are expected to either exhibit superhuman resistance to the pressure to "live up" to our previous work, or that we are so delicate and fragile that we will certainly shatter under the presumed pressure. Like Gilbert, I often find myself asking why is this onus especially heavy on artists? However, thinking about fear and uncertainty as a nearly universal condition of being an artist puts my own fear and uncertainty into context, and helps me feel a little better able to sit down to do the work every day, knowing that I've got good company.

weekend of Portland book arts

letterpress printed poster by the gorgeous folks at Em Space

Last Saturday, in between recovering from a migraine and acquiring a cold, I dropped by Em Space to see some friends and to check out the show "The Power of the Press," which Em Space is hosting since its closing at Portland Center Stage. The show looks great above all of their immaculate presses. I wish I remembered to bring my camera.

The show will be up until January 31 and is free and open to the public. To learn more about Em Space, check out their website.

The day before I also made it in just before the closing gate for the closing reception of "The Assignment" at the 23 Sandy Gallery. "The Assignment" was a show for and by the CBAA (College Book Arts Association) to celebrate the assignment as a valuable practical tool for book artists as students, teachers, and working artists.

This was one of the best shows I've seen at 23 Sandy, and one artist's statement jumped out at me as being just what I needed to read at that moment: Anna Bunting of Oakland, California talked about how her piece was an assignment to herself. That once a week she set aside time to be in her studio, to write, set type, print.

Between my work at OCAC, my commissioned work for Tiger Food Press, and the work I put into ephemera for my online stores, I am always at work in a bindery or print shop, either mine or the school's. But it continues to be so hard to carve out time just to write for the fun of it, or draw just for my self, or make a few experimental prints to get started on the book I've had germinating in my mind for so long. So to read this artist statement, and to see the finished book next to it was a jolt of inspiration to me.

23 Sandy brilliantly always includes an online catalog of every exhibition of work. "The Assignment" is now down, but the work, including artist statements is online here.

so what's new?

2010 is bumping along. I can't put too much weight on these first two weeks, which started out with periodic migraines and then falling victim to the latest cold going around. Despite it all I've been having fun and enjoying my renewed sense of excitement and possibility for my work this year. Between spending hours laying about under warm blankets watching bad, bad TV, I've been puttering out to my shop in my fuzzy slippers and wool sweater, where I sip tea, pop in a book on CD, and mess around on the press.

What's on now are these extremely simple Valentine's Day cards. I'm using vintage ornaments, wood and lead type to create really bare bones designs that are nonetheless really fun to do. It's a nice break for me to just evaluate what I have in my shop to create a composition, and you know...relax and simply be a servant to the process.


The lightening bolts on this one are old cuts from an estate sale that practically fell into my lap several years ago. The tiny red bolts coming off the top of the heart were, I believe, hand-carved by the man whose small press was being sold. They're really tiny, you have to see them to believe it! I have other amazing artifacts from that sale that I'll surely talk about in the future.


These are still in progress. I love the texture of wood type.

to reflect is to move forward

I've been sipping my coffee this morning thinking about the potential of this new year. The foundation has been laid to make the next few months extremely busy, productive, and madly creative. But so far I haven't laid out any hard and fast goals for 2010 and I have yet to obsess over any of the lists I typically generate and dwell on this time of year.

Last January, I created a list of tangibles that I wanted to achieve. I even set deadlines. Today I'm laughing as I look at that list seeing that I didn't achieve ANY of them. In fact, I completely abandoned most of those ideas by the beginning of February. What happened was a much more organic and thoughtful process, with some synchronicity, good luck, and a few setbacks thrown in. I rather deliberately took a step back from shows or participating in large productions other than a few choice projects, and I didn't apply for any grants or residencies.

To put the future in perspective, I thought about what I DID do in 2009. It turned out to be a year not of major, ground-breaking accomplishment, but of quiet, small steps that I think have set me up to move forward much more boldly in 2010.

So here are nine things from 2009 that I feel will shape the direction of Tiger Food Press in the new year:

1. I stopped deliberating and made Tiger Food Press an official business registered with the State of Oregon. Which was a result of:

2. I stopped fretting over my press' identity and began to break my own 'rules'. I'd been extremely indecisive about whether to keep Tiger Food Press a private press that occasionally does job work, or if I wanted to be a small job shop that occasionally publishes small press projects. Some days the difference felt like a minor technicality and other days it seemed that I would never bridge the gap. I eventually concluded that I should set no limits on what I can or cannot do with my press, and I'm already moving into 2010 with a lusciously full plate with a wide variety of projects in progress.

3. Website! Up! Tiger Food Press went online in a bigger way in 2009. I finally (finally!) built a website and got it online. In the coming months I'll be refining and adding to it, but it is up and working well.

4. Tying into and playing a huge role in my finally designing my site is my new logo designed by Precious Bugarin. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Precious! With a new logo I felt like I had something to build my site around, and it also adds unification to my online presence. I felt able to revamp my Etsy store, too.

5. I began working as a Studio Manager at the Oregon College of Art & Craft. This job, which is the perfect amount of part-time hours, has been rewarding to me in so many ways, not the least of which is being around so many hard working artists. I can't help but be driven to work harder in my own studio when I'm surrounded by the process of art making so intensely.

6. And speaking of process, being a part of a collaboration, again with Precious Bugarin, on her wedding line has been a blast and also extremely rewarding.

7. I became the chairman of the board of New Oregon Arts & Letters, which is producing the New Oregon Interview Series, carrying into 2010 - with more related projects in the works!

8. I was lucky enough to participate in three really wonderful print exchanges and donations, which helped me break my block around creating new work and also introduced me to many amazing NW print artists. I was also able to participate in some awesome local events like the Portland Letterpress Printer's Fair, Prints for Pica, and the Publication Fair at the Ace Hotel this December with Plazm and New Oregon Arts & Letters.

9. And finally - the most important by far - are the truly wonderful connections I've made and friendships formed in 2009 with more totally inspiring and enormously talented people than I've ever met in my life. More people than I can name have either come into my life in the last year, or strengthened the friendships already formed. I can't thank my friends enough.

Power of the Press at Em Space

Power of the Press, an exhibition of broadsides inspired by Ben Franklin in the digital age, has moved to Em Space for the month of January.

The opening reception is Thursday, January 7th from 6-9pm.
It is free and open to the public.

Power of the Press was previously on display at Portland Center Stage during the production of Ben Franklin Unplugged. Approximately 15 artists participated. The work and Em Space itself is a must see if you are a lover of letterpress, words, and works of art.

Artists participating in the exhibit include: Clare Carpenter of Tiger Food Press, Rory Sparks, Marty Brown of Letterary Press, Rebecca Gilbert of Stumptown Printers, Jean Sammis of Lark Press, Carye Bye of Red Bat Press, Iris Porter, Mette Rankin of Bureau of Betterment, Katy Meegan and Keegan Wenkman of Keeganmeegan Press & Bindery, Jeff Shay & Connie Blauwkamp of Buzzworm, Joseph Green of Mind your P's&Q's, Micheal D'Alessandro of Bedouin Books and more.

Em space:
Em Space Book Arts Center
407 SE Ivon St
Portland, OR 97202

the erratic sleeping patterns of the sun deprived

My sleep habits have been atrocious lately. Atrocious, weird, and unpredictable. I'm sleep deprived and sleep saturated all at once. Last week I got up at 6 am several days in a row. Last night I stayed up until 4 am before finally dragging myself to bed, where I lay until at least 5:30.

I got up a little late, naturally, and puttered around the studio a bit before heading up to OCAC for my first day back to work after a week and half-long break. The work study students and I are involved in a cleaning and organizational frenzy preparing for the College Book Arts Association conference at the end of the week. I drove home with dust up my nose and starving.

The fog had begun to settle in the hills when I drove to the school early this afternoon. I thought about the suffocating nature of wet, wool blankets, still insulating enough to keep you alive. In the just after dusk hours of darkness the fog lay across the road and reflected my headlights back to me and I sped a little.

Tomorrow evening I start my first Iyengar yoga class. I am hoping to bring a calming, clarifying, and unifying element into my life. Yay!

another little bit of press!

Better late than never that I make mention of this bit of news - Precious Bugarin Designs (printed by Tiger Food Press) has a small shout-out in the Winter Portland Bride and Groom.



The entire issue is really gorgeous, as well, so be sure to take a look!

thank you 2009 - welcome in 2010!

2009 was a challenging, productive and enormously rewarding year for me and my small business. I would like to acknowledge and thank all of the inspiring and supportive people who have stuck with me, sent business my way, talked me through low and difficult times, celebrated with me in jubilant times, and generally had my back in the last year. To my friends, new and old, in-real-life and long-distance via the magic of internet socializing, to my family, to my generously talented colleagues, and to the readers of this blog (however few!) - thank you and may 2010 bring you peace and prosperity, health, exciting adventures (if you'd like them), peace and stability (if you'd prefer that), and all the happiness you can possibly endure!