Processing very difficult things- Safety vs. Fear vs. Excitement
- Attacks, personal danger, rape, assault
- Homeless
- Drug abuse
- Mixed community: poor, homeless, addicts, artists,
Not Boring! - Not Boring!
- Pioneer Square: pioneers on the frontier of homelessness
- Protest!
- Don’t attack me!
- Don’t hurt me!
- Don’t bore me!
- Shine a light in the darkness
- Good & bad drug addicts!
- Good & bad people
- Protest
- Symbols & Diagrams
- Chalkboard for words about the neighborhood, recent attacks, etc.
- American urban pioneers…
Category Archives: My Art
Moving on …
Now that I have three new sculptures finished, labeled, and set to be entered to an upcoming juried show, it is time to move on to the next thing. I am not sure exactly what this will be. I took a one day “break” from art, working in the yard, walking, cooking (and eating of course, with wine for dinner :-).
Then yesterday the “next thing” started, with a visit from good friends Maureen and daughter Noa Piper. Such excitement! Noa will be coordinating/curating/designing an art display & event at the TK for the Seattle Art Walk in July. And I/my work may be included… this would be excellent. But this is quite short notice, and with not much information to work with yet! 
It is possible that I will have some interesting new work to do for that event! In the meantime, a sketch of Ratty, who lives in & about my yard 🙁
Further Evidence …
Just in case anyone needs this, I seem to have further evidence that I am very competitive at times. I had not really planned to submit anything to the upcoming art show at Northwind Arts Center. It has the theme: Fins, Feather, Fur. This did not inspire me, or fit any of my more recent work.
But the theme did inspire someone else: Maureen! My art teacher/guru/facilitator rarely enters shows, but she was fired up to enter this one, and working hard. 
Next thing I know, I am desperately working too, on new clay, wax & driftwood sculptures. Good grief!
I have one piece, Wanting to be Needed (see previous post), completed, and another called Looking for a Place, well in hand! My power tools & construction skills are proving useful, and I am having fun.
After many more crazy fun hours of work, I have a plan for, and much of the work complete for the interior of this found box. The hardest part may be the display: I want the box open, but the lid up in the air, not just sitting next to it. I have three sticks of wood, representing tree trunks, that I should be able to mount the lid on more permanently.
Thinking (& Doing) ClayShay & Wax
This is my work.
When I make my funky yard art it will seem as if I am playing, wasting time, or pursuing an odd obsession.
All of this may be true, but beyond that this is my work.
Nice ambiguity in the English grammar here, of course. Both meanings are good. My new screening panel is not a work of art or even a creation that I am especially proud of. It will soon be a fine privacy screen built from (mostly free) stuff, and I will enjoy the eccentric nature of this “fence” panel, and the visual balance I am creating here.
But my real intention with the above statement is to say that doing this is not mere play, or a way to waste time. I am doing the work I need to do in order to make art. This outdoor shaping, building and assembling serves to energize me, enhance my creativity, and train me to see and make on a larger scale and in three dimensions.
My seemingly casual assemblies of found objects and scrap often do serve useful purposes; they keep out deer, screen & anchor my trash cans, etc. But the work is as much about building my aesthetic, stimulating my creativity, and keeping me happily engrossed in making art!
Adding color to prints
With some color, then …
It changes to become this!
And here I added color to an overlay of two prints, but it isnot done yet…
Adding color to prints by hand, using paint or drawing materials, is an old tradition. Hand tinted prints, colored by the original artist (usually the printmaker was not the artist, but the skilled craftsperson!), may be more valuable than editions of prints untouched by the original artist. Of course the value of the print depends most heavily upon the following: the artist must be 1) dead, and 2) famous.
Northwind Arts Center painting demonstration
I enjoyed watching & listening to the last half of two painting demonstrations at Northwind Arts Center yesterday, when I arrived to sit the gallery desk. The two artists featured in the current exhibit, Kristi Galindo Dyson and Jackie VanNoy, were working and talking about how they work, in conjunction with their current exhibit, Creative Play. Nice!
Afterwards the gallery got quiet, so I did some drawing. Inspired by the demo, I used grid lines to get started and an idea from Maureen P.: the notion of compass points and quadrants to represent different phases of my life.This is my doodle, using my water soluble graphite pencils.
Is it about Art or the Perfection of the Print?
Or Why I will never be a Printmaker
Yesterday was another fun day at the print shop (Corvidae Press), but my results are not quite as pleasing as on my previous poly litho printmaking attempts.
I made two new plates, one directly from an original pencil drawing transferred to the polyester plate using a laser copier. The other plate is based on two original pencil drawings that I combined digitally in Corel’s PaintshopPro software, after scanning them. However I then drew further onto an inkjet print of this new piece before making a laser copy directly onto the polyester plate material.
So I printed from both of these two new laser toner plates, but I never quite got the darks I wanted on these. Laser toner definitely requires more charging than ballpoint pen on the poly plate, and I may not have used quite enough ink either. I printed only a few prints, none quite satisfactory as is. Almost true to the original drawings, though. My Gamblin Portland Black ink looks alot like graphite pencil in these prints.
But it will be quite easy to touch these up with colored pencil to get a bit more contrast, and color can be added in several different ways. Eventually I am sure that I will use all of these prints. And I expect that even the faintest, least satisfactory prints will become very satisfying artworks.
For me it is not about perfecting the craft of printmaking, even though I certainly enjoy and appreciate excellent printmaking! I am primarily interested in a desirable end result, and in enjoying the process of getting there. So that means I won’t struggle endlessly for perfect registration or creating the perfect plate. After all, once you have perfect printmaking technique you simply have a means of duplicating your fine work, and I don’t need that.
Soft World, two pass print
So I am an artist who used printmaking, but I will never really be a printmaker! The print showing a circle inside a circle, with lots of detail (Through a Lens 🙂 has grey colored pencil and water soluble graphite added to increase the contrast. The double “brain” image has had the background digitally “cleaned” of fingerprints & smudges!
