happy Friday everyone!

I'm carving out an hour here and there to draw. This morning I grabbed that time by the horns, and in the shadow of the glowing green, yellow, orange world of an autumn morning, pencil was put to paper. I only have a minute of time today before a short print run, putting in a few hours studio managing at OCAC, and then on to print a set of announcements on one of the Vandercooks at school. Time is precious, but tiny steps eventually accumulate.

Hoping to have some designs ready for carving and platemaking by the end of the weekend.

and another week passes, part II

Still running to catch up. As usual, per my regular m.o., I am late, late, late with holiday work, as well as just pokey slow with the newer broadsides and prints that are underway.

This year there WILL be a calendar - a poster sized wall calendar with the entire year at a glance. I'm looking toward early to mid November for it to hit the shelves of my Etsy shop.

For now, I'll show you a little bit of the inspiration that's fueling my calendar design and other work that's coming down the pike.

I live in a part of Portland that's part urban, part nature, part industry. A short bike ride from my front yard there are lakes, sloughs, river channels, busy harbor terminals, abandoned industrial yards and wastelands, brownfields, greenways, bike paths, container yards, dumps, wildlife habitats, ghetto-like housing, fancy new construction...it's all a mishmash squished-together melting pot. I find it richly inspiring, and my place - my environment - heavily influences my art.

Lately I've been looking at color blocking, the abstract geometry of the landscape, and the basic forms of the industrial structures juxtaposed with nature reclaiming this peninsula. Hopefully next week I'll be able to show you more of what I mean.

This weekend I'm off on a little escape. I've reserved a cabin on a river in Central Oregon and I'll be drawing, drawing, drawing, jogging, hiking, drinking Martinis at a certain lounge, and coming home with a rested head full of ideas ready to spill out and tell you about.

and another week passes, part I

This week was a productive, odd, and busy; but not in any way that I had hoped or planned.

The Monkey and I are in the midst of an enormous garage cleaning project, and on Monday, although I was able to work in my studio for the first part of the day, the rest of the day was absorbed with fighting traffic while attempting to drop off various donations and recyclables at various drop-off sites around town. The amount of stuff we accumulate is startling! Most of what we found to be taking up space in the garage were half-full paint cans, bags of styrofoam packing materials kept in an attempt to keep them from the landfill, and *sigh* press parts, broken beyond repair and destined for the metal recyclers.

The rest of the week I focused on work at OCAC. For those of you unfamiliar with the school, or the changes happening there, OCAC is undergoing some major renovations. Click here to read an article from the PORT blog about the new buildings. In addition to the brand new building for drawing, painting, and photography, book arts has received a temporary remodel that's given us use of the old photo department's space. For the first time, possibly ever, our department is adjusting to the idea of having room to spread out. Reconsidering workflow is a major component to planning how we will ultimately arrange the space. A few weeks ago we moved in a new, (to us) second board shear, and we have a second standing press in the breezeway waiting to be moved in. All this is to say that I spent the week moving cabinets, shelving and storage around the studios at OCAC, leaving me exhausted, headachy* and dusty after every day.

*The building that houses book arts is also getting a new roof - which involves some sort of stinky glue - which results in migraines...

Punctuating this were extra yoga classes and an increased home practice, a lovely visit with OCAC's book arts resident, Heather Green, a beer made more delicious by the sunset view at the Skyline Tavern in the hills of NW Portland, along with some terrible, tragic news having to do with a good friend of the Monkey. It's been a strange, strange week, reminding me of how much I value my job, my colleagues, my loved ones, and the soul food that sustains our well being.

people who do it all

I am not one of them. They must get up at like 4 in the morning or something.

In fact, I feel like I'm constantly running to catch up. This weekend, I finally put away my camping gear from my desert trip nearly a month ago. I folded acres of laundry that surely didn't need to all be left for weeks. I had a mini-breakdown when I looked at my to-do list and all of the things as of yet un-checked-off. I'm sure most of us feel that way.

Also in fact, I find my time sitting on the deck in the morning when the light is just beginning to peak over the roofs, sketchbook in hand, freezing a little but bundled under three blankets, two hoodies and a hat, to be more important time spent than all of the bustle, the running around, the meetings, emails, and obligations.

I'm feeling inspired lately. There are toasty, tasty things popping off the press. I've been drawing, doodling, tap dancing (not really) and finding that ideas for fun little things to make and sell for the holidays (around the corner and I'm always behind the curve...) are alight in my mind at all times of the day and night. I will show you soon.

In the meantime - the Monkey found this little guy in our backyard the other day. I did a little research and I believe he's a Western Tiger Swallowtail, or will be one day if all goes well.

type : specimen

Just before school began this year, I spent some time at OCAC sorting and organizing our letterpress and book arts related ephemera, literature, and reference material. At one point I was inspired to stop to photograph these type specimen booklets. They are works of art in and of themselves.

On another note, but related, check out this post by a fellow Portland letterpress friend, The Serial Machinist: Matthew Carter, MacArthur Genius award recipient, talking a little about type design.

this is simply a gratuitous post

wherein I marvel for a moment in the beauty of wood furniture, mid-century mechanics,

and words set in perfectly straight lines.

I'd like to switch gears just a little and tell you a story. Something that has to do with a moment in time when I was young and a tiny light turned on, or a latch was unbolted in my brain that allowed me to think that I would one day be an artist.

I grew up in a small Central Oregon town, and when I had just turned 11 my parents took my brother and I on a trip to Portland to hit the museums and to eat in a good restaurant and to soak up a little culture. One of the highlights for me during that trip, aside from staying on one of the uppermost floors of a downtown hotel and being giddy with the lights and thrill of the sounds of the street below, was the Portland Art Museum.

brother and sister, too cool to have their picture taken, on a cultural excursion,

taken outside of the old OMSI circa 1986.

A couple of things happened to me there, transformational experiences - the first of which was seeing the girls and boys with punk rock hairdos coming and going. I believe at that time what is now the Pacific Northwest College of Art was the Museum School, and students would have been milling around. I wanted to immediately go home and bleach my hair platinum like the black-clad girl in witch boots in line in front of us at the entry.

The other was that my parents had the insight to set my brother and I free to go our separate ways and to wander the museum by ourselves, to discover what we could in our own way. After a time and location was determined to regroup, the four of us broke apart and let the compass of our own personal curiosity pull us.

Eventually I found myself in a long hall lined with black and white photographs. Photographs of orchids, female nudes, and muscular, naked men. I don't remember specific details. I couldn't today, for the life of me, recognize what photographs I saw that day; but I later learned that they were the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, whose photography became the center of the public's attention when The Corcoran Gallery of Art in D.C. refused to show his more controversial series, The Perfect Moment, and whose name was frequently invoked when the spending habits of the National Endowment for the Arts were questioned.

I have a feeling that what I saw that day was a fairly tame sampling of Mapplethorpe's body of work, but it showed details that certainly made me curious; and made me slightly embarrassed to be looking at them closely. I honestly wasn't sure how I was supposed to react. At once thrilled, slightly titillated, and also engrossed in the beauty of the images, I felt a little unsure of whether I should be looking at them at all. I felt painfully aware of my age - was this appropriate? I was both assured and mortified when other viewers, adults, entered the room and looked at the images. I have a very, very vague recollection of a parent and child entering and quickly exiting again.

I circled the hallway and came back when the other visitors had left. I surreptitiously eyed the photos again and again, moving forward casually when others entered the space. I believe I left the area entirely, only to return a while later, lured by the graphic, secret nature of what I was viewing - but also its beauty.

What strikes me in retrospect is how lucky I was to have been able to experience that moment, alone, in an art museum. I feel as if museums can be, should be, places of safety and sanctity. By that I mean - where judgement is allowed to be suspended, and where we are given the chance to trust our own intelligence. By safety I mean - a place where a young person, or any person, can view something challenging, perhaps something altogether not safe, and consider its validity as art, or not. (I know that may seem to be a contradictory definition of safety.) The safety and sanctity of the museum that day allowed me the opportunity to have one of my first critical evaluations regarding "what is art?" and "how do I feel about this?" In fact, the way I felt that day was that art could be very powerful, and wildly different than what I might imagine, and that it could excite me to think about things in an entirely new way. This little moment seeded my desire to become an artist.