feather2pixels

Check out how good this tee-shirt came out.

It was done by Martin (with a little creative input from Banksy, who fully supports the appropriation), one of nine SF high schoolers in a screen print class I’ve been teaching at the nonprofit arts center Root Division this spring.

It can be hard at first to convince high schoolers that screenprinting in the age of mechanical reproduction is almost by definition not about technical perfection.  But then we get to magic moments like this that make more sense than me talking.  The shirt not only looks great but it maintains the trace of its maker: way cooler than a shirt bought at a store.  Creative high schoolers understand that.

My Silian Rail posters are complete.  Instead of settling on one way to print all of them, I decided to provide a few options for potential owners to choose from.  In forcing myself to be loose and more flexible (or, more accurately, marginally less inflexible), I felt rewarded by the compelling and vaguely playing card-like effect that flipping the stencil produced in some of these.

All posters are 14×17″.  An edition of 30.

Special guest blogger: Michelle L Fischer

I should chose between four ways to print this Silian Rail poster. Here’s the candidates I printed with the complete stencils (all posters are 14×17″):

Twelve hours after the biggest lightning storm I ever saw in San Francisco (rattling windows and car alarms going off), I took a picture of the morning aftermath to remember it by.  And now I am late for work.

Another year, another Silian Rail Poster.  In a good way of course.  I very much enjoy working with Eric and Robin who both share the highly fortunate personality trait of trusting their artistic collaborators.  I think this comes across in their music as a sort of highly complex  but refined sense of balance.   Even their sense of gender is equal in a way most music isn’t and not just the even number of boys (1) and girls (1), but something more along the lines of a harmonious male and female presence.

Anyway I am back into halftones, with some serious questions to be answered.  So this’ll help me.

The original mock up:

Printed layer 1: CYAN

Here is a big fat shout out to my main man, Frank Fernandez, who not only backs me up in the classroom on teaching days but gives me a second chance to raise one of his prizewinning orchids from the bulb. It can’t possibly die faster than the last one.

My latest series of prints on trash (three traffic cones in the park at thirty times of day), is up at Cafe LaBoheme.  This is my second showing at Boheme, one the great gathering places of the Mission District.  The pieces are a little misaligned and wobbly because we have to suspend all art from above, but this is basically my vision for this series.  Nice photos coming soon!

Cafe La Boheme (across from 24th Mission BART station)
3318 24th Street
San Francisco, CA

I am starting a bold new project.  I’ll explain more later, but it has something to do with motion, antique motion pictures, separation and reconfiguration, why birds sing, and wordplay.

For now, the Mark Bradford exhibition at SFMoMA among other things got me thinking more about surfaces and materials.  He collected fragments of his urban environment (South Central LA) and spend a decade reassembling them into monumental canvases that deserve to be in a museum.  And there they are.

For the purposes of large quantities of materials and surfaces, I like to start at stores that sell hardware, fabric, and junk.  After some test pieces, I began my first new surface by adhering some deliciously textured burlap to plywood, flattening, and working the nooks and crannies with acrylic medium and sandpaper.

Paradoxically and as we can all see, the challenge of producing the perfect 400th post contributed to minimal activity in these pages for the past month.  In the end I shelved my more reflective ideas for this largely irrelevant milestone in favor of something perfectly trivial.  Actually, it’s almost five hundred total posts if I claim the largely irrelevant contents of  proto-feather2pixels from 2005, when everyone had a unique blog, before the great internet creativity cleanse.   Zuckerman, you could learn lots from the example of these monthly slop feeds.

I did want to mention that in my very first post (April 13, 2005) having just started my very first art studio, I was directly pondering my creative process

I have no fucking clue what I am doing, I do seem to have very specific ideas about what is okay and what is not okay at art studio. Primarily ideas about trying to set up something realistic and sustainable… I just need to go.

I can think about lot of ways I could have maybe got farther along by now, but reading this seven years later compels me to give myself credit for mostly recognizing the most important part and mostly getting it right so far.   Of the aspirations of an artist, the pinnacle is not a practice that you sustain but a practice that sustains you.

Wow even though I just made that up I absolutely believe it.