Visiting Artist Matthew Tyson

Join us for a talk with Oregon College of Art and Craft visiting artist Matthew Tyson, co-sponsored by Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Painting, books, prints and installations. How they inter-relate. From the sublime to the ridiculous. Massive to the tiny. Monumental to the minimal. Controlled to the accidental.

Matthew Tyson has made works that always have a connecting thread. He has created stained glass windows for a cathedral in St Claude in the Jura region of France. A major public art commission that was directly related to a bookwork seen by one of the curators at an artists' book fair some years before. He has made installations that connect directly to bookworks, often involving new pieces/pages and lines, as part of the overall concept. Paintings take on the form and structure of torn paper, whilst referring to real and imaginary landscapes.

It is evident that printmaking and structure are integral to book making but it is also essential to Tyson's other artworks, and thus becomes the link between all his practise. Technically paintings are related to inking. Structure of installations are those of paper, that then become the subject matter for other pieces and the whole process of creation becomes circular.

Tyson has worked for the French Ministry of Culture. He has been artist in residence at the Birmingham City Museums and Art Galleries in Britain and the Edward Albee Foundation in New York.

He is currently professor of the "livre d'artiste" at the University of St Etienne.

Tyson will also be teaching a one day workshop at OCAC, "Printmaking Without a Press" Saturday, February 12th from 10am - 4pm

Visit www.ocac.edu for more information

or call (503) 297-5544

Oregon College College of Art and Craft

8245 Southwest Barnes Road

Portland, OR 97225

Well, I almost forgot about this! This little award was bestowed upon me by a really sweet blogger, New End Studio. Truth be told, I don't often participate in these types of blogging memes, but G. at New End Studio is such a lovely and generous supporter of the crafting community that I couldn't let this go by unrecognized. So thank you New End Studio!

So part of the deal is that I share seven things about myself. The trouble with writing this kind of thing on the fly is that I'm sure I won't think of the seven most *interesting* things about myself while I'm writing. Those things will come to me later and I'll slap my palm to my forehead suddenly and you'll wonder what's going on. But I'll give it a shot, here goes:

1. Before I was a letterpress printer and book artist, I was an offset press operator. The first print shop I worked in was an in-house shop for a community college. All of the press operators were men, and all of the bindery people were women. I started out doing bindery, stripping, platemaking and pre-press, but I wanted to be a press operator. There was one gruff, died-in-the-wool old-timer running the *big press* who was openly skeptical of my ability to do the job. He would make off-color remarks simply to see if he could get a rise out of me, but I always had a come-back for him. I slowly earned his respect, and he slowly started showing me ropes of the four-color press.

2. Before I got into printing, I worked with exotic birds, mostly macaws.

3. I've lived in two Portlands. Portland, Maine and Portland, Oregon.

4. I grew up in a ski town, but I don't ski.

5. I am eco-conscious and feel a twinge of guilt every time I get in my car to drive somewhere, but I have a deep and abiding love for old, gas-guzzling cars and trucks. I told the monkey recently to not be surprised if he comes home to find a muscle car in the driveway. My first car was a 1976 Jeep Cherokee. When you put your foot down you could see the gas gauge drop. A V-8 engine is a scary thing in the hands of a teenager.

6. I have also lived car-free. I used to ride my bike miles and miles every day, to places I now marvel at. I feel a little beholden to my car now, though, since Portland is so spread out and I like to be able to escape to the mountains on the fly. I still daydream about living with just a bike and making my treks out of town on two wheels.

7. My current dream destinations are Patagonia, Spain, and South Africa.

Officially, I should tag 15 bloggers to pass this award onto, but I am going to bestow it upon any one of you who would like to take this meme and run with it. Drop me a comment and I'll come check out your post!

Good Housekeeping

When I walked into my print studio this morning, my first, involuntary thought was "wow, this place needs a good cleaning." Type, type cases, spacing material, paper off cuts, polymer plate segments - everything has been kind of piling up. And piling up. And piling up. I've been so absorbed in my work that I have had neither the time nor the inclination to do anything about it.

This is not a sign of good studio housekeeping, I said to myself. Things had come to a critical mass.

I've been finishing the final typesetting for Allison's book, Open Sky, which I talked about here. She's recently returned from Peru, so we've resumed printing the colophon and a few other details before it's ready to be bound. In the process of setting the colophon, I discovered that I needed to re-distribute type from a project I had printed nearly two years ago, and that I had left standing, assuming I'd get around to it one day or another. Because that type hadn't been returned to it's proper home, I was short of sorts for Allison's colophon.

So, I simply tackled it. I scoured my little print shack from top to bottom today, vacuuming up cobwebs and stashing paper piles in a places where they will be found and used, and finally, re-distributing type from my galley trays back into their cases.

And here I am looking a bit smug and feeling thoroughly satisfied.

Food and Revolution

January has been, for me, slow and still. I've been awfully quiet lately, but that doesn't mean things aren't happening.

In the Pacific Northwest, in January, we peer out of our windows at the rain, at the gray overcast, and we know that things are turning over under the soil, warming themselves, beginning to germinate.

I've been making giant pots of lentil and beef stews, baking bread, and dabbling with new recipes, in the kitchen and in the studio. There are new works on the horizon. There are a few things about to be completed. I've finally caught up on my email and I feel like the fresh start of the new year is finally taking hold.

***

The other night there were, in my kitchen, at the same time, pork chops and apples. Having come to omnivorism (I don't think that's a word) rather late in life, the divine combination of pork chops with apple sauce is a rather recent revelation to me. But now that I've discovered it, I always feel it's a shame when I don't have the sauce to go with the chops.

When I can, I like to make the apple sauce. Even though the process is as simple as falling off a moss-laden, rain-soaked-in-the-woods Douglas Fir log, I don't make it often enough and when I do, I need to have my memory jogged regarding the number of apples to the amount of water...do I chop and boil or slice and simmer...do I add salt...do I mash or do I let the apples cook to mush...? Why don't I remember?

There is one cookbook on my shelf that will remind me - The Grub Bag by Ita Jones. Pulling this book out from between my newer, shinier cookbooks is a walk through history for me. I've carried this cookbook closely by my side since I was first living on my own, and I've become irrevocably attached to it even though I rarely refer to it.

I found it in a free box outside of a used bookstore in Concord, New Hampshire when I was 18. I was about to move from my very first apartment with friends to a different city to live by myself in a tiny studio apartment with a kitchen the size of a postage stamp and with a window the size of a sliver. I carried this already battered and falling apart paperback with me like a new age bible of food consciousness and philosophy. The blurb on the cover reads "An underground cookbook. The practical, philosophical and political aspects of food - with recipes and metaphysics." What's not to love when you are an 18-year-old living in the early 1990s, raised by hippie parents, wondering how to connect a deeply held cynicism about the world in general with practical ways to make it better - in your kitchen.

So I moved into that tiny apartment in that brand new, albeit tiny city, and absorbed this book like a sponge. The author speaks to us from her own apartment in New York City, a more southernly neighbor to the city I lived in, but the photo of her kitchen was nearly identical to mine. I took to sprouting avocado pits and stinging the long legs of my spider plant around the window frame of my tiny kitchen window which overlooked the tar roof of the building below. I sat on my kitchen counter and daydreamed and drew. I baked bread in the gas stove the size of a dorm room refrigerator. I worked as a cook in a health food store deli and learned to make things with miso and that apricots sometimes tasted good in soup.

There are times in life when we are busy, and we forget...we heat up soup from a can and butter a piece of store bought bagel and run off to meet our next assignment/meeting/deadline. That's fine. That is me a lot of the time. I sometimes need to be reminded, though. How do I make applesauce? How can I make my world better, in my kitchen?

OCAC Print Portfolio 20th Anniversary Exhibit

Hoffman Gallery
OCAC Print Portfolio 20th Anniversary Exhibition
January 20-February 23, 2011
Opening reception on Thursday, January 20 from 4:00-7:00pm

OCAC celebrates the twentieth anniversary of its Print Portfolio with a special premiere of the 2010 OCAC Print Portfolio and the previous nineteen years of portfolios. Exhibited as a group for the first time, the show includes 28 new prints by OCAC students, faculty, staff, alumni and artists-in-residence, and over three hundred prints from the College's archives. Images: OCAC student artwork

Gallery Hours: 10:00AM-5:00PM daily

I suppose it was about time. I've been evading capture by the super bugs and I've dodged and darted my way past the germs and beasties, but finally my immune system threw in the towel. I feel a little like this rusty old goal post that's been kicked a few too many times and has been left out in the rain.

But I'm mending quickly, and I've got a few new things to talk about when the fog finally lifts completely. In the meantime, I just wanted to say *hi!*

***

A commenter here recently asked about receiving a periodic newsletter or joining some sort of email list wherein I might send updates about the goings on in my studio, or other news and relevant links. To this I say: what a good idea! I have the tiny beginnings of an email mailing list, but to date I've only ever sent out announcements when I have an upcoming show. However, a more consistent and reliable newsletter is something I've wanted to start for a while now.

So please, if you are interested in receiving periodic updates via newsletter, go ahead and click the email link in the sidebar and shoot me a message with the subject heading "newsletter." Eventually, I'd like to create a streamlined "sign me up" link you might be able to click directly to, but for now I think this should work.

I imagine this would be a monthly thing at most, and you would always have the option to unsubscribe.

If you are feeling stuck...

You might want to take a

Or even go for a

But if you are feeling fancy, you might want to try to

I'm sure no matter what you decide, it will clear your head and help you along your path.

hello 2011!

At midnight on January 1st I was running across the St. Johns bridge.

I'm a night person anyway, so why not, I reasoned, take care of my last run of 2010 and my first run of 2011 all in one go?

Crystal clear, cold skies, air that bites just a little when it enters your lungs. Ship horns up-harbor bellowing the most melodious and melancholy horn symphony I'd ever heard, accompanying firecrackers, cowbells, shouting filling the night air.

I hit my stride after the day turned over, feeling as if my feet had wings. Midway across the bridge I broke out into a grin, feeling the perfection of the moment.

I sped home to a champagne toast with the Monkey, a fire blazing in the wood stove, and a warm black bean casserole just out of the oven.

Wishing you a new year full of hope, harmony, sweet delights, happy surprises and well-being.