feather2pixels

As part of printing this big 2×4 foot image, I am working on ceding some control and encouraging the art-making to take on a more natural course. I believe there is a hard fought balance to be found that negotiates two competing items I hold to be true:

1. The reality that without a high degree of control screenprinting doesn’t work at all.
2. Learning how to surrender to nature is part of my life work doing visual art.

For this project, surrendering control/embracing nature is taking the form of certain decisions such as working with old emulsion that blows out the image randomly.  Here’s some pictorial dispatches from the studio I wanted to record.  I think it’s going to look pretty cool when I print it.

This long image shall be my next screenprint.

It shall!

Perhaps you are thinking, pretty but not the most original image I’ve ever seen. My dear critical reader, how much I admire and respect you despite your near constant torments.  In principle I will concede your point.  However, the thought of screenprinting this image on a certain four foot long piece of wood is exciting to me, and since I have a day job that affords me if nothing else the luxury to screenprint things that excite me, screenprinting this exciting to me image is exactly what I plan to do. (I think I may have previously expelled some bullcrap about about experimenting with this four foot long piece of wood.)     Then there are the words on the sign.  They are not meant ironically.  In many ways they are the most sincere words that could ever be written.  When this is all through, it will be you conceding that to me.

At some point in December there was an attack on  Precita Park‘s spiritual overseer/resident homeless dude, Stephen Stymiest.  Shortly thereafter, Stephen died of wounds sustained during the assault, alleged to be a random act of gang initiation.  The whole story is just sad.  Very sad.  And it is staying with me.  I feel like Stephen was one of the best things this fast-changing neighborhood had going for it and I miss his reliable and comforting presence.  Stephen was always looking over the neighborhood but who who looking over Stephen? This got me thinking about how much more I could do as a neighbor, citizen, and fellow human.

Well there’s a lot more I could do.  For now, the immediate aftermath, since I am a printmaker, I am going make a print.  This one’s going to be for Stephen.

Here’s my image:

And here’s my stack of cardboard:

More soon.

Some good local coverage from the ever-vigilant Bernalwood blog:

• RIP Stephen, Familiar Resident of Precita Park
• Memories of Stephen Stymiest Wanted by His Family
• Precita Neighbors Gather to Remember Stephen

Correction: I am not part of a new gallery, the new gallery I am not part of  isn’t going to be on Larkin Street, and there most definitely isn’t going to be a show in February.

Anyone need twenty-four framed cityscapes ?

Another winter, another drawn out slog though ever shortening days.

This year, in addition to the usual pattern of increasingly diminishing daylight,  I have for whatever reason also been paying attention to the actual path of that low December sun.

And until recently I was doing a good job of keeping this new routine rooted in tangible, real life experience.  Then the internet seized hold.

Did you know that in these parts, the sun goes from reaching a maximum angle of elevation in the sky of almost a 70°  in June to less than 25° now.  Not only that, but the total travel of the east to west path from sunrise to sunset goes from well over 240° in the summer to 150° now.  (The sunset doesn’t even make it past due west after September).  All the details can be interpolated on this chart:

The positive trade off is the angular, more horizontal moving light.  The sunset lasts a lot longer and the golden hour is like an hour long, even if the hour in question starts at 4:30.  And of course one of the best things about the west coast is that the sun sets over the Pacific Ocean, the biggest thing in the world.  It’s been pretty striking to watch this year and I have collected some photos.  I suppose that’s the point here.

Cue the clickable content:

This Friday, Bay Area collectors will do battle in a grueling game of wits that will leave only one standing.  Having slayed his or her opponents, a lucky and no doubt skilled individual will emerge as the new master of this shiny new screenprint on trash.

That’s right, it’s time for the America SCORES Inspired Art Poetry Party and Art Auction.

America SCORES is an after-school program that combines soccer and poetry like so many Ronaldo strikes from midfield.  The auction benefits their programming and in a twist I like, sees each art piece matched with a kid poem.

I got excited about my kid poem by Xitlaly Martinez, which offers a compelling new level of meaning to this particular image.  In the print, an unusually placed couple (on the right edge of the frame) is intently snapping photos of something they see in the SF Botanical Gardens.   I’m not sure exactly what this couple is seeing and I enjoy that sense of mystery.  Xitlaly’s poem fleshes out a back story and I very much like the way the juxtaposition offers the act of seeing as something personal, sacred, and unknowable.

I See You

by Xitlaly Martinez, E.R. Taylor Elementary
2010

I See You
Inside my heart I see you
Up in the sky I see you
Shining in the sunlight I see you
Sparking with the stars I see you.
In love I see you.
In happiness I see you.
In my beauty I see you.
So when I see you I see a school teacher helping me out.
When I see you I see a lion
ess and strong on the outside.
When I see you I see a loving and caring person on the inside.
Everywhere I am anywhere I am I see you.
Right now I see you

An instant classic:

(Didn’t he read the syllabus?  I only accept cash.)

I just completed my fifth year teaching undergraduate engineering.

If you know me, maybe you find that statement amusing.  I would guess you might think this is funny in the same way that it was funny when Bugs Bunny put on a tuxedo and conducted Wagner’s theme from Act III of the opera, Lohengrin.  Trust me, no one is as surprised as me. And I am me.

Amusing or disturbing, the completion of the academic year always means graduation.  It’s one of my favorite times of the year because I always feel very proud of my seniors.  And because it means summer is here. And because sometimes I get presents.

This year, before accepting any gifts from the class of 2011. I decided to strike first.  I thought that since the senior awards so benevolently bestowed by the university are usually a little boring, it would be fun to make my own.  One for each senior, construction paper and typewriting, a safety pin sewed on the back: that sort of flaunt-my-masculinity thing.

Anyway, I did it. I got all twenty-five made!  I was a little fretful about offending someone, but each fortune came from what I think Christians call a place of love.  Therefore I ultimately feel comfortable about all that was said.  We had a small ceremony on the last day of ET460: Automation and some people even wore their ribbons for the rest of the day.  Class of 2011, I will miss you.  (And thanks for the booze, Lamar)

click to enlarge:

This year I realized that something I enjoy about San Francisco winters is unpredictability.  This realization possibly has something to do with the the weather during the last few weeks, which has has consistently fluctuated between foggy thirties and sunny sixties.  Somewhere in that time, I convinced myself this is not too unusual and please feel free to tell me that my double negative dropping ass is full of it.  Also not unusually, I have tried my best to be in the SF outerlands to witness the city in all its messed up moods because I like to think that this is something we have in common.

Here are some pictures that came out alright.

Warm-ass wintertime haze on 47th Ave

The N-Judah turnaround.

Cold-ass wintertime fog at the Sutro Baths

Lost ghostbusters wallet in Golden Gate Park

I have a new nemesis and it has no name.  In fact the foe that torments me does not even possess life, for it is an inanimate object. What  anonymous item with no intelligence with which to outsmart me provides me with so much grief nonetheless?

The answer is an eight foot wall.

I am in my third week of constructing this simple dividing structure, quite possibly the simplest thing one could build, and yet it is still not done.  The reasons reveal too much stupidity to get into (for example: did you know that walls don’t not fall down on their own?), but the seemingly endless struggle to erect this wall is seeing all my other concerns slowly fall by the wayside and is contributing to a mounting sense that everything is a series of ever more futile tasks.  At this point, I don’t even care if the wall is a metaphor for life or life is a metaphor for the wall–I just need a god damned 300 square foot enclosure.

The wall frame

(Thanks to Vik [pictured above]for helping me out).

Mere weeks after printing this, I was in the mountains for this (scroll down to see the images–I don’t know why).

Coincidence? Fate? Or does the the motion of the moon and its resultant appearance from the surface of planet Earth follow some sort of regular pattern? The answer of course is impossible to know, but I spent the final week of summer ‘010 in the Sierra Nevada contemplating such sweeping issues.

See?  Pants-less contemplation:

Also I climbed a mountain with beloved companions.

And I witnessed interfaith love consecrated at the wedding of a Wohlwend. No photos of that so far, but I did purchase this panel painted with house paint at the Nevada City Crafts Fair.

And now I must go earn my keep. My day job starts now.

While I was away this summer I received an email that looked something like this:

Translation:  your workspace is gone.  This is just kind of how CELLspace works operates and that’s okay.  I took the opportunity to move my whole screen printing operation from the upstairs former craft loft to my downstairs studio .  Space is a lot tighter but if I open both doors and suck in my stomach it still works.  And I have really been enjoying coming to CELL during the long summer afternoons, working while the warehouse is sunny and artists are doing their thing.  Here is the new setup.

It is Tuesday morning in my bedroom.  The implications of this fact include but are not limited to:

• Loud machines pretending to clean the road will soon be terrorizing the Western end of the  mid-Bartlett corridor.
• The city-wide emergency siren system will fire up for its weekly test in a little bit.
• I am wearing jeans and drinking espresso instead of pants and coffee.

In consideration of the high probability of the following events occuring:

• The sun becoming too hot to support life on planet Earth in ~1×10⁹ years
• The Earth’s oceans evaporating in ~1.9×10⁹ years
• The sun shedding its outer layers, producing a planetary nebula with a hot core emitting 100 times more power than the sun today. in ~7.65×10⁹ years

…I thought it might be nice to recognize that right now  it’s early February in San Francisco city and therefore:

• Bernal Hill is green and the Ocean Beach tides are finally starting to recede.
• You could probably just show up and get a seat on an Alcatraz tour.
• The cherry blossoms are blooming.

In this brief moment of cosmic calm, I want to tell the world (i.e. Nowell, dad, Ben, Cat, Erin, Rachel, Erin) about a few things that are going on, divided in to separate posts to accommodate internet-scale attention spans, of course.

Reading an article on logistics management in the Haiti earthquake relief effort made me feel like a real asshole for that last post.  People in the capital are waiting hours in line for one bottle of water and I am complaining that it’s falling from the sky for free.