feather2pixels

Our newest neighbor is this pop-up restaurant taking residence in the Italian place downstairs on Monday and Tuesday nights. In the last month or two, I have been doing a bunch of graphics and signage work for the enthusiastic chef-owners Tony and Jonathan because I want to stuff my face with their delicious food for free in a neighborly spirit of collaboration and mutual benefit.

The logo stuff is hard for me. I suck at Adobe Illustrator and my sole success in this arena is soon to be obsolete. But I enjoy the challenge so I gave it the old grad school try. Jonathan and Tony wanted something typewritery with a snail–eerily reminiscent of the tried and true feather2pixel regalia.  The final ingredient was some Bernal imagery.  I was a little concerned about churning out a cliche but in the end I got to use not one but two of my beloved typing machines along with a silhouette of San Francisco’s most overlooked radio tower.

My first official physical creation was this screenprinted sandwich board, to be replaced this Fall when the HSC pop-up locks-up its stock-up by taking over all nights with a suitably permanent sign to talk-up.

I found an exciting new place to display my work.  Coyote Counter Collective is what we in the industry call a re-tail space and those who have ever seen a coyote know that motherfucker has one serious tail.  Upon reflection I guess it’s a little hard to imagine a coyote ever needing to re-tail so I am not exactly sure if we quite have that right yet.  Or perhaps that’s the Counter part.

Anyway it’s a co-op storefront in Oak-land, where the trees are green but the Occupiers are not,  and my first official duty as a member was to screenprint a fistful of signs for some to-be-determined guerrilla advertising.  They came out well I think–a rehash of my go-to sign in one afternoon design–featuring glyphs from my beloved Remington 333 (eternal thanks for that, Kristin Roeder):

And here’s what my inaugural hanging looks like in situ.

Remember Michelle Chandra?

She’s the photographer that individually shot all thirty of my screenprints of three cones in the woods at thirty different times of day.

I got the chance to return the favor last Monday by male-modelling for her new project.  She’s been folding butterflies from translucent vellum and theatrically suspending them in a series of portraits she’s shooting at the SF City College studio.

Even though appearing happy and standing on my feet for extended periods are two personal weaknesses, I was happy to endure this four hour light-rigging nightmare freewheeling adventure that Michelle shot on black and white film and will assiduously hand develop.I think they worked out as well as photos of me could probably ever  work out.

Here’s the best one out of sixty. (Erin’s turned out way better)

The twelve week screenprint workshop I have been teaching with the glamorous Angie Crabtree is complete.  We asked our nine high schoolers to print on nice paper for this show at Root Division, but some of the more exciting projects were their clothes and bags.  I wasn’t able to photograph everything, but I did want to record here the little I did get for the ages.  Nice work brahs.  And Angie thanks for everything. Especially the black eye.

Another fine showing at the Vallejo Chevy‘s by the students and faculty of the ET department can only mean one thing.  Summer is finally here.

There were eight people at my house not too long ago and we all fit around the kitchen table for breakfast.   That day a reoccurring thought was there have never been eight people in this apartment before.  And there have definitely never been eight people around this particular kitchen table.  I have had the apartment for three years and the table for ten.   So it was with no shred of hesitation that I blew half the strategic reserves of Polaroid peel-apart film (now made by Fuji).  These three snaps seemed compelling enough to archive via scanning machine.  EB took the best one, I thought, on top here.  It’s from the autoimmune death trail that is north Bernal Hill.