This week I have been participating in the “art challenge” thrown down on Facebook. I don’t know where these things come from, (likewise memes, where are they born? who runs the meme factory?) but this one seems to have started in the illustrator community and crossed over into the artist world that is my social media life. Unlike the chain letter of old in which a tattered mimeograph threatened karmic harm and financial ruin if you didn’t pass it along with five dollars to the next person, this benign version simply asks that you post three images for five days in a row, each time tagging a new artist. In the currency of the chain letter, five dollars is worth approximately one ‘like’, as one ‘like’ can, if you are fortunate accrue interest and become forty, and perhaps even lead to a comment. Which of course will not buy you a cup of coffee. [Read more…]
Finding Contemplative Time In Modern Life
“Joy is being willing for things to be as they are.”
― Charlotte Joko Beck, Nothing Special
I would also say that joy is seeing and delighting in things as they are, which can be an elusive concept when your life gets caught up in a construction project. Construction projects by definition require making things different. Better. Fixed up. Everything is most definitely not ok as it is, otherwise why are you going to all this debt and trouble?
As I approach the move-in date for my new studio I’ve become aware that for much of the past five months I’ve been completely not-here, now, at all. My tattered meditation practice [Read more…]
The Green Ladder | Variant Edition
I have been experimenting today with color. Lurid wild-child Aurora color, for an image that captured me as I was wandered the bleaker spaces of this territory last week. Hot midday sun, a lot of dirt, and the glory of green. Aurora, AKA Highway 99 is a riot of color theory once you get over bad taste, disregard, and what I used to think of as ugliness. Now it’s all just material, and life on the edge is looking good.
I am thinking of a new approach to digital printmaking. Instead of focusing on editions of 20 in which every print is identical, I am returning to the ancient analog idea of the “variant edition” in which the plate (the basic “file” or photo/image composite) is the same, but one makes subtle shifts to each print. The editions will be very small, perhaps 3 or 5. Here are some takes on the newest piece done in this mode. I am still proofing, so I am not sure yet what scale will suit these best.
Banksy Was Not Here: The Buddha Deconstructed, with Help from Keats
I am thinking today about Banksy and about Keats. Why those two in one thought you might wonder, the romantic English poet and the bandanaed vandal? The answer lies in the idea of “negative capability,” first expressed by Keats in a letter about Shakespeare:
“… Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ (And elaborated later in another letter): “What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the camelion Poet… A Poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity, he is continually filling some other body.’
I walk the waterfront in a cold spring rain, the water scuffed and gray, the Wheel paused mid turn and the roar of the viaduct behind me. The grind of traffic, the wind, the absent sun, the intense quiet within the noise. I look up, and there in the distance is the pale poet walking the daffodils and Lakes of England, and Banksy, spray painting a dark silhouette with a bright bouquet, or something darker with no flowers at all. A sly Rat, or a girl in windy skirt, holding the string of a balloon. Perhaps the beginning of a vine growing out of the sidewalk cracks. The poet disappears into symbol and reverie; the vandal tags walls with stenciled archetypes which look like “anybody could do it.” What Banksy has given us is a new appreciation of the wall as poet’s page writ large. We get to hold the irreconcilable opposites of fame and anonymity, of violation and communion, of alienation and mediation — offerings placed in front of the walker in the city, if we are prepared to see them.
I look back at the viaduct pillars and the empty parking lot. I look for the train tunnel, but it is gone, hidden behind a noise barrier put up for new condominiums. It is easy to become mesmerized by tracings in the concrete, the scribbles that seem like words but are not, the peeling banners, the errant sticker placed there for no reason other than that it was at hand height and the light was fading and someone had to move fast. I am distracted by a shifting memory of the afternoon when I last saw the tunnel, and the writing there spilling into the dark. Where is that photograph, taken with the Canon, was it 1998?
When I get home I find this among dozens of new pictures on my phone:
And then I walk out into my garden and look at my standard concrete garden Buddha and remember some other photos.
And then I paint some paintings for a day or so, thinking about rust and dirt and the city and the Seattle sky.
And look at a lot of graffiti and start moving things around on 44 layers in three different files:Which is how the print above, “Banksy Was Not Here: Street Buddha Manifestation” manifested. (In answer to the person who asked me “Where is that wall?”)
This and ten other transfer prints in a series about the Alaska Way Viaduct are available at Zeitgeist for the Month of April.
New Images About the Alaska Way Viaduct: Understory & Overstory
I have just completed several of the final new images for the upcoming “Excavations” show at Zeitgeist. One portion of the show will be a series of 10″ x 10″ transfer prints devoted to the ongoing saga of the Alaska Way viaduct. The images are created from my photographs of the viaduct layered with painted and drawn surfaces made in response. This is a place filled with industrial strength beauty: loud, dirty, sometimes hazardous but always provoking.
I have been photographing the viaduct for at least 25 years, and this iconic structure is an enduring object of affliction. Many of the collages are based on recent cellphone photos taken from a moving car. This is the glimpse, the rapture of the vista, the overstory. But this one, the most recent piece, uses as its backdrop an analog photograph I took over 20 years ago when the train tunnel could still be seen. I stood for hours one long gilded afternoon waiting for trains, and documented the graffiti as it changed color in the refracted sunlight of the bay. Now that tunnel is invisible, walled in behind condominiums. This is the understory. As with all of the images in this series reality has been subtly collaged and reconstructed.
Meanwhile, although the cracks are getting larger we still drive. Best view of the sky anywhere:
Each transfer print originates from the same image, but the transfer process creates a unique monoprint each time, with different surface qualities and subtle variations in color. I often make only one print of an image, but in some cases the variations possible are too interesting to pass up. This particular print has several variants, as I experimented with the grain of the ink and application of the transfer medium. In this version I “wiped” the paper as I would a zinc plate, to get the organic washed quality of the sky.
Mark your calendar for the opening, First Thursday April 3rd, 6-8 at Zeitgeist. A reminder will come closer to the date.
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