feather2pixels

Here are some snaps from the set design of Down A Little Dirt Road to whet your whistle.  Have I mentioned that this is your one chance, perhaps ever, to see 136 corrugated boxes assembled together  in one room?  Have I mentioned the 600 square foot screen print?  Have I mentioned that this play opens June 9 and runs Thursdays through Sundays until July 3?  Tickets are available at brown paper tickets.

Like the ephemeral San Francisco cherry blossom, the beautiful flower that is spring open studios has come and gone. And to the extent that the passing of the weekend reminds us of the many mysterious cycles and rhythms of nature, spring open studios reminds us of the very meaning of life itself.  Where some may find no meaning in sitting around a mostly empty art studio for 48 hours, waiting for a tide of  approval that may never come, others will find illumination.  Through it all, the one unchanging truth is that all shall find free wine.

CELLspace studio artists populated the gallery space and I took the opportunity to set up one of the walls with collected works from the Two Feather Press screenprinting co-op membership.   In my mind, our unofficial motto is screenprinting improves everything and maybe that’s why I thought this spread looked so great.

…And when I arrived at the studio on Sunday morning there was a not insignificant pile of cash under my door.  Apparently some anonymous early riser–bless your soul  whoever you are–indulged in a small shopping spree through our highly affordable offerings.

Thanks to all my friends who stopped by in support.  I really appreciate it.  After the wads of cash, your encouragement always makes it worth it.

Beau walks into the gallery

surprise packs for $2 sold like hotcakes at a hotcake stand with three hotcakes available.

Step number two in developing the DaLDR set was exposing three screens worth of test stencils from my geology book imagery.

This printing day was a struggle from start to finish.

I produced film positives from my images, which went well enough:

Film Positives

Exposing the screens went fine.

Unfortunately with a manufacturer recommended shelf life of three weeks, my emulsion was long passed expired.   Screens coated with expired emulsion will usually expose, but the most magical step in screenprinting, washout of the stencil,  is near impossible.  This typically presents the printer with two options:

• Be smart and start over.
• Use force.

Of course a Born in the USA runaway train such as myself only has one speed: full steam ahead.  And I was pissed.  Not in the mood to relive my Tuesday morning, it was time to bust out the big guns.  That’s right, the hour had approached to unleash 1600 Watts  of heavy-duty aluminum axial cam pounding 1400 psi of unforgiving H2O through any weak-ass bullshit expired emulsion in its way.  And at 651 square inches of total area, these pissant screens were about to meet (651 in² x 1400 psi) 911,400 total pounds of punishment.  Ladies and Gentlemen, meet the Husky 1600 Power Washer.  I like to keep it handy for close encounters.

Note the difference in the washout before and after power washing.  Now I had myself some stencils.

Next post: Taking it out on the card stock.

To begin designing the set of Down A Little Dirt Road, I popped my head in the CMA Library.   From the visual perceptive, the particular theme from the script that gets me most hot and bothered is earthquakes, and I found several technical books filled with engineering imagery that had me licking my chops.  Even just two minutes with these books make me kind of sorry that I can’t magically change my job from teaching this kind of stuff to teaching how to make art out of this kind of stuff.  But everything is okay–did you know that as an engineering teacher here, I am allowed to borrow an unlimited number of books for an unlimited period of time?  That  gave me a great idea for a way to make easy money over the summer.

But right now I need to start making this set.  I decided that a healthy variety of technical figures from the fields of geology and structural engineering would be an interesting starting point for look of this world.

I compiled 30 pages of images into one humongous project in Photoshop, where I was able to experiment with sizing, juxtaposition, and layering (click to enlarge):

A peek at part of the compiled image project.

The result was a continuous image roughly 5 x 3 feet in area.   That’s 15 square feet of great ideas!  I have plans to use this image to produce three large silkscreens for stenciling.  Looking ahead, if I get my way I think I kind of prefer to pretty much screen print the shit out of the entire set.

I have a few new artists joining my CELLspace screen printing studio this month.  Consequently , I thought it would be nice to set shop up with a proper sign, so I unpacked a piece of very special driftwood I have been saving and set to work ruining it with my art.  I found this wood at Mile Rock Beach in San Francisco five years ago and really, nothing I could print on it could ever improve it in an aesthetic sense.  But that has never stopped me before and I have been saving this for a special occasion so tonight I fired up the old t-shirt press and threw down a simple three layer print.  Then I screwed in on the door.  Took me less than an hour. (Click to enlarge)

The t-shirt press allows one to adjust the height of the screen on the platen.

I secured the wood to the platen with tape during the printing process.

At CELLspace nothing looks junky!

Yo! Local Mission Eatery just won California Home & Design reader’s choice award for best designed restaurant in San Francisco!

I would like to think that my 30-foot long installation of geographically ordered screenprints on wood tiles that visually map the Mission District by intersection had something noteworthy to contribute to the execution of this concept, but alas there is no love for (nor even mention of!)  Valencia to Vermont to be found anywhere on the website’s otherwise triumphant press release.

Eh, that’s okay. It’s my friends friends Kelli Franz and Seth Pare-Mayer (architects),  Sterling Tougas (contractor), Yaron Milgrom and Jake Des Voignes (co-owners) who deserve the kudos for a thoughtfully realized project.   I was just happy to be along for the ride.

Check it out here.

Recently, some good people AIGA (the professional association for design) hired me to help throw a screen printing party at CELLspace.  The goal was to print 400 call for  entry posters for a design competition they are having.  So we burned a bunch of screens, set up five printing stations, and last Sunday a bunch of volunteers flooded the crafts loft with drying posters.  The whole thing worked pretty well and got me thinking of ways to transition the idea for my next birthday party.  Thanks to Kristen B. for being a great partner and and to Sarah  S. and Greer A. for the help pulling it all off.

Have you ever been to a zine festival?

Well I have.  And recently, too.  Seduced by a roomful of lovingly crafted publications of  varying aesthetic merit, I found myself inspired but only to take the laziest possible action: to spend money.   So I bought a bunch of zines and thought that maybe in the future I might like to print a zine, too.   My favorite of the lot was “Truck Face,” a memoir of a punk’s work as an elementary school teacher.

I suppose that experience planted the inspirational seed for Erin‘s Christmas present, an edition of her play “Tvá Kamila“ that I designed, screen printed, and bound.  Right now it’s my favorite of her plays, and possibly even the most zine-like.  That’s pretty much the entire story besides the part where I misspelled the name of the play on the cover, which did not even turn out being the stupidest thing I did all week (cue footage of me desperately speeding to the San Jose airport to catch a flight I forgot about).  But besides that I rule.

Here it is:

Apparently my solution for balancing my teaching job is…more teaching? Well here are three new workshops I have enthusiastically committed myself to.  Not just that, but a whole new DNS domain I have enthusiastically committed myself to.   If I were still seeing my psychologist, she would suspect that this is all a way to push aside the hard job of making my own work.  But make no mistake, these workshops are going to be nothing short of awesome.  Screen printing makes the world a better place.

At any rate, I am posting about it before it happens instead of after.  So that’s progress, I guess.

I recently rekindled an old habit and replied to a Craigslist ad.  Unlike 2006, however, this was no Casual Encounter.  But the experience did lead me to end up meeting Henry.  In the aftermath, all I can wonder is why Henry has not been part of my life for the last couple of years.

He accepted all the ripped screens I could find and re-meshed them for a scandalously low fee.  Not only that, but he did a great job and I returned home from Union City, California with a carload of new screens.  Literally:

Holy crap.   It’s like chanukkah in November!

If the public visited my website I would write:

Hey if anyone is interested in getting started with screen printing, you might be interested to know that I am teaching a two night t-shirt workshop through Rock, Paper, Scissors gallery in Oakland.  The workshop takes place last week, which means that  I’m an idiot and it’s too late for you to actually participate.

Good thing its just you and me reading this, friends and Nigerian hackers.

I guess I was laying low because the workshop was a test run of sorts.  Mostly I was a nervous about the ancient screens available for us to use.  You can’t screenprint without a working screen.  But hey, the screens worked fine and I dare say that the workshop really couldn’t have gone better.  I got to travel to West Oakland to spread the Good Word and four very cool people made prints that were way more successful than I dared hope.

Here’s some pictures:

Open Studios weekend has come and gone.  Aren’t you impressed with the power of my self promotion skills?  Well, don’t feel that bad if you didn’t know about it or weren’t there.   It was sort of a bad weekend for art.  My memory of it will forever take the form of me sitting alone in a 15,000 square foot warehouse, competing with the Blue Angels and Burning Man Decompression for the attention of San Francisco.  In other words, nothing is my fault ever.

On the positive side, the weekend was a welcome chance to hang up lots of work from the last year, create a bottomless wine and cheese plate and take stock of my practice.  I think it looked good.  It’s too bad you weren’t there, I was practically giving shit away.  If you look closely, you can see my t-shirt rack!

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.

People seem to be much more interested in my studio when I am working on t-shirts.   So maybe out of the goodness of my heart or maybe out of a pitiful need to be noticed, I printed a few tops for friends and family.

My secret weapon: H&M.  How are they able to manufacture garments in Bangladesh, ship them eight thousand miles to the West Coast of the U.S., and sell them at profit for $5.95?  Just a little thing called supply side economics you dumbass liberal apologists.  You jerks are so in love with regulation that if you had your way this rampant federal government would probably be trying to take over the delivery of everyone’s goddamned mail (and taxing me for it).

Anyway the series depicts three figures selected the from the city’s history.  I already executed a second printing, mostly because I carelessly failed to buy any large shirts the first time.

It’s a series of, I don’t know, twenty? Anyone want one? If so, I will heat set and drop in the mysterious blue container outside. It seems to seems to receive, sort, handle, and promptly deliver anything I place in it.