Art

Graditude moving us forward

2012-02-02T20:52:00.000-08:00

Filling up with lots of warm feelings from nice people lately. I feel like every time I reach out my hand -- nervously, tentatively -- someone new takes it and squeezes all the fear right out of me. It helps immensely as I try to move forward.

Moving forward isn't possible without a heaping does of maitri, which is a word I've learned from another new friend, Pema Chodron. If you haven't listened to the recordings of her talking things over with retreat attendees you must. True Happiness is a good one, but Getting Unstuck was the one I started with. I'd start there. It really gets you accustomed to the sort of listening experience she's offering.

2012-01-27T20:28:00.001-08:00

I had two neat things happen to me this week. The first was a splendid tiny art show with a German art student.

My friend Dustin the video artist had a little get-together after his most recent opening, and Liv had come, being an video artist herself and interested to find people who do things. And in that magical way that these things happen she and I got to talking about painting and art school and whether or not getting an art degree matters. I seem to know a lot of art students right now -- mainly post-modern types, which is, be fair, a very different school than mine -- and we talk about this a lot. I’m always curious to see what people are getting out of school. Liv has a delightful way of talking about her school.

My school...it is an old building, and it is filled with people...and that’s it! It is an old building filled with people..

We met again to talk about painting and she told me she’d been wanting to do a little show of all the paintings she’d made while visiting Portland. And she wanted to know if I’d like to hang anything with her. I said of course, and a few days later we sat in her Uncle’s garage-turned-studio while a curious little knot of people chattered happily around the paintings.

Liv’s paintings are very geometric -- mostly tiny shapes or lines scattered across a white background like tiddly winks. She’s been painting on linen and had a huge piece tacked slightly away from the wall, and when the wind blew it would roll gently and the effect was very good. Almost like the lines and triangles were dancing. My contribution was that gardener I just finished, and it was wonderful to see people crowded around it gleefully pointing out details. “Look! He’s planing leeks!” The show was very small and very wonderful.

This week I also had a brief phone conversation with Jenny Sue Kostecki-Shaw, an illustrator I’ve admired for years.

I had hoped that we could chat like friends and colleagues but unfortunately I was basically like Lucy in this picture and got quite tongue-tied. There was no cause for it because Jenny is as down to earth and generous as I’d hoped she’d be.

After our conversation my hopes and plans now have outlines and arrows. It helps so much. I feel like a little tiny kid setting out into a great big world, sailing a paper boat into a churning sea of unknowns. But at least now I have a map. It’s hand-drawn and a little winkled because I keep squeezing the edges. But I wouldn’t want it any other way.

.

2012-01-21T09:28:00.000-08:00

I've been in a very soft mood the past few days. Like a stick of butter at room temperature. Warm room temperature. I still have shape but it feels like I'd give way easily, and I've been very careful what sort of music I listen to in public. I feel like a teacup, overfull. Maintaining all right, but one little tap and the water could give way.

Some dear, dear, dear housecleaning clients of mine have sold their house and are leaving. The circumstances are extraordinary. I do not wish to go into details here just yet. For now let us just say this: is as though they are moving from a humble farmhouse on rough land into the gentle, loving hands of the creator herself. They will spend the rest of their days in comfort, entertaining people who revere them as honorable people, and shall want for nothing. And it is right that it should be so. They have done a lot of good and it is very satisfying, touching, wonderful that things take this turn.

The sadness comes from a purely selfish perspective. These people are my favorite clients. About the age my Grandparents were during the time I was around them most. The woman is an exquisite storyteller and told me so many wonderful things about her grandchildren, her own children, about the people she’s known over the years, and the strange and wonderful things she has seen.

This will not end by any means -- I fully intend to keep in touch with these people because they are dear to me. But what does end is the monthly ritual. The smell of their house. Watching their life unfold, the mundane delights that make a life a life. It's harder to share that with someone when they are long-distance friends. You tend to focus on the news, the larger picture.

I'm trying to paint all this and it's strangely difficult. The feelings are so huge, so raw. It's hard to really look at them objectively and sort out what would depict all this in the most satisfactory way. Should I go in a literal direction? The cup of tea we took in the living room, empty of everything, using a U-haul box as a coffee table, the cookies she bothered to put on a little plate, the teapot, the spoons, the four choices of tea. Or perhaps a more imaginative scene, inference based on what I felt. The three of us crying by ourselves shortly after I left. Me in my car, the mister in his car, and the madame at the kitchen window. The house abstracted and half-see through, the red geraniums in the window box. Or just this, the investigation of the feeling itself. This strange pull between happy and sad.

What works best and why? I will keep exploring. I'm not certain I'll find the answer, but it's not critical that I do.

.

2012-01-15T13:57:00.001-08:00

Just as swimsuits tend to arrive in the stores just when you are finally in the thick of hat and gloves season, seed catalogs seem to arrive during the part of the year where the ground is either frozen solid or a churning quagmire of mud and rain.

I suppose it makes sense in a certain way -- you'd want everything all ready to go when it's time to plant. This year I am going to do as my gardener here and try my hand at starting seeds inside. I've not much natural light here at Chez Kumquat, so I'm not sure how successful I'll be.

When I was working out the details for this painting I got a little bit obsessed with egg cartons. They aren't a huge point of focus here, but when you abstract and simplify as I do you have to work a lot on how to abstract and what to simplify. I spent almost a week with my big pad of paper and a big paintbrush playing with egg cartons.

I think egg cartons would be an excellent exercise for people just beginning to paint and draw. It's a relatively simple-seeming object (we see them all the time, we scoff and think Oh, this won't be a problem. Everyone knows what an egg carton looks like.) but has a lot of surprising nooks and crannies that don't line up the way you'd expect them too.

.

2012-01-13T07:42:00.000-08:00

My first two paintings of 2012 were these little commissions for a friend-of-a-friend's son and daughter. I was still on the brownish paper kick. It's quietly thrilling to put your usual colors on a new background. New colors will suddenly step forward and bask in the limelight, and you're never quite sure which it will be.

.

2012-01-07T15:48:00.000-08:00

I have been trying for what feels like years to get some pithy sentences together about what it is I actually do, or want to do. What makes me different from other illustrators? What makes me worthy of an art directors (or, most importantly, a reader’s) attention?

I feel differences, and I see them, but it’s very, very difficult for me to say them.

Specifically, I want to know what to say to people when they ask me what I do. They often ask me this when I’m drawing in an enormous sketchpad in a public place. What do you do?. Why, this right here! That makes it easier. It’s not finished products, but they can at least get a sense of style. But how about when I’m out in the world? If I have paint all over my fingers and the middle-aged cashier at the grocery store asks me what I do?

I’m an illustrator I’ll tell her. And the next question is always, always, always:
Oh really? What does your stuff look like?

And that’s the kicker. That’s what I’m struggling with most. When someone who has no Art Words asks you to describe your work. (And let’s face it, Art Words are not necessarily universal, and therefore I don’t think we can rely on them.) I’m always at such a loss. Everything you say sends them off in the wrong direction. You say “watercolor” and they think of pale seaside landscapes. You say “abstraction” and they think Picasso. You say “surreal” and they think of Dali. You edge towards something a bit more descriptive -- “blocks of color and linework” -- and they feel alienated. Though I don’t necessarily want to pigeon-hole myself I have gone as far as, “remember those illustrations in the old Golden Books books? Scruffy the Tugboat, that kind of thing?” and people have looked at me blankly and said, “no”.

I have to be honest and say that sometimes I just say to people, if I could describe my work than I’d be a WRITER, not an illustrator. But that’s a fairly anti-social answer. I need to come up with something. You need to get them within the ballpark. Illustration is so vast. People don’t know if you mean Norman Rockwell or Blueberries for Sal or those vectored atrocities accompanying the PSAs our bus lines have up right now. It’s all illustration, and it’s all really different from what I do.

Of course I am thinking of all this again because I am trying to psyche myself up to go to AIGA Portland’s meet-and-greet next week -- another thing I’ve been trying to do for what feels like years. I get a bit nervous when it comes to meet-and-greets, particularly if I don’t think I’ll know anyone. I am very capable of being open and chatty and social, I just tend to prefer to be at home, working.

But that IS work, part of me says, getting to know people in your field is really important.

And it’s more than that. I have been really hungering for other illustrators to talk to. I have a few artist friends -- a sculptor, a writer, a video artist and most notably a painter -- and we can talk about process. Catching whiffs of muses, getting in a groove, getting in stride, hitting roadblocks, the freedom we find in having rigidity elsewhere, balances. Technical things about the mental process of making things. But as yet I don't have someone to talk to about abstraction, simplifying, subjective perspective, color-mood, the relative merits of light and shadow in a given picture. And what the hell do they do with that darn “what do you do?” question.

Maybe that will be my ice breaker on Wednesday.

Every once in a while I’ll sit and brood over this “what do you do?” question. I’ll open up my enormous “what do you do?” file on the computer, open every document. Trying and condense some and make more in the process, write new lists on paper, make tons of sentences, try to string them together. At the end of the day, surrounded by stubs of smudgy writing, terribly assumptive words, stilted ideas, I always come back to some of the artists I admire.

Did Eric Carle write out an elevator pitch or a mission statement? Did Maurice Sendak or Tomie DePaula or Ezra Jack Keats? Of course not. They just went for it. They made little brochures, made samples, and made a go of it.

Or at least, that’s how I envision things for them. I envision them struggling but in the way we artists are supposed to -- with our pictures, not with words.

2011-12-25T00:46:00.000-08:00

2011-12-24T07:52:00.000-08:00

Scenes from our recent between-the-holidays visit to Colorado to see friends and family.

Things I considered painting but have not yet:

- The Southwest Airlines gate's decorations at PDX International, because it sort of typified the difference between the "high-end" airlines like Delta (very refined, subtle decorations like a single red bobble above every check-in station,) and the "low-end" airlines like ours (tons of paper-chains, construction paper stars and snowflakes hanging from the ceiling on strings, snowmen and reindeer taped to the back wall, and so forth, the whole area positively bursting with life.)

- The lights parade in downtown Colorado Springs, which we caught by serendipity while eating a slice of pizza at Poor Richard's (a bookstore / coffee shop / toy store / pizza place.) (Yes.) We even got to sit right up by the window. Front row! on one of the coldest nights that week!

- Everyone eating chili after the tree-getting, with the great heaps of winter clothing strewn about.

- My adventure on lightrail over to downtown Denver. The familiarity but the strangeness. The last remnants of what must be Occupy Denver, the steaming street-vents, the walls and rooftops just where I left them.

- Walking around Littleton's historic downtown. The spiral-lights up the trees, the snow, the shop fronts so earnest and hopeful.

2011-12-13T19:00:00.000-08:00

2011-11-30T07:21:00.000-08:00

One of the many interesting things on my desk is a little orange box filled with even litter wooden blocks. I got them initially thinking they'd be fun to play with -- because who doesn't love blocks -- but for most of their time here they've just sat in the little orange box. Then last weekend I learned that this box was the only thing I had that fit my new business cards. (Sorry blocks, we can't be going around handing out business cards all bent and bag-linty.) For a week now the blocks have been floating around my desk, and I'm lucky they have been becuase tonight I learned that they are the BEST thing you could ask for if you are trying to assemble a huge papercut piece.

Once you get much bigger than a single element putting something together like this is a bit daunting. This is a huge non-canvas piece for me -- almost 20" square -- and most of the things were just floating around on the desk. It was incredible comforting to have marks at the edges of where things needed to go, becuase once you start picking things up, layer by layer, once you get to the bottom things look very spare indeed.

But the blocks are there! And by and large you can place things back to where they're supposed to go. Excellent. Thank you, blocks!

And while I have you here, a little about this piece: it is essentially a take on the already complicated omnivore's dilemma. This is actually my personal beef with the movement. I love going into those natural markets becuase they are set up more like art galleries than like grocery stores. I love looking at the food and dreaming. But there is a weird undercurrent of these things are only for the rich when you go to those places. I can get brown rice for $2.99/lb at a boutique market, or I can get brown rice for $0.89/lb at my nearby supermarket. I'm not sure if there's a difference between those rices, they seem like the same quality of rice if you examine the kernels. It seems like it's just more expensive, as if purchasing rice for a dollar more a pound you are somehow fixing the universe with the power of your money.

I should also mention that I think it is totally possible to eat healthy while living under the poverty line. It is not easy to do it if you eat the way Americans are "supposed" to eat, meat-and-three-veg, but if you eat the way most of the world eats (stuff all mixed up in a bowl, legume+grain=a complete protein) then your dollar can get you pretty far. I talk sort of haphazardly about it over here. It takes a population willing to educate the portion of the population who is not fed this information constantly. It's hard work but worth doing. Because otherwise we are just stuck here, with the haves and the have-nots.

2011-11-14T07:49:00.001-08:00

I did a little digging around since last we spoke about turkeys and all. It turns out Benjamin Franklin was not necessarily advocating for the turkey as our national emblem. He was in fact dissenting, balking at the choice of an eagle.

Franklin wrote a letter to his daughter:

”For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly. You may have seen him perched on some dead Tree near the River, where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the Labour of the Fishing Hawk; and when that diligent Bird has at length taken a Fish, and is bearing it to his Nest for the Support of his Mate and young Ones, the Bald Eagle pursues him and takes it from him.”

He goes on to comment on the rough drawing of the proposed national seal as realized by the secretary of the Continental congress, Charles Thomson -- a Latin scholar capable of producing a good conceptual design, but unable to make it aesthetically accurate.

"I am on this account not displeased that the Figure is not known as a Bald Eagle, but looks more like a Turkey. For the Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America... He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on."

As a novice ornithologist I am here to tell you that there is visually very little in common with an eagle (a black and white bird that glides on air currents, on long wings that stick straight out) and a turkey (a brownish, mottle-colored bird that runs, short wings stuck out at angles, as though he were late for a meeting). So to make a drawing where one might mistake one for another is a pretty interesting feat. You must always use references when drawing from life, kids. You don't need to copy the realism, but you do need to make sure we can tell what it is you are drawing.

.

2011-11-11T08:03:00.000-08:00

Post-Halloween there are two groups of Americans: those who put up construction paper leaves and turkeys and dream of cranberries and gravy, and those who fast forward to Christmas. I am of the former camp. Ritual togetherness in our family happened on Thanksgiving, not Christmas. I’m also never too eager to bypass autumn for bare twigs, especially now as the maritime autumn is a long, splendid affair.

Like Columbus Day, Thanksgiving has a dubious history founded on exploitation of indigenous peoples. In these enlightened times I suppose I shouldn't be so surprised that in some camps it’s falling out of favor. One of the women I worked with last year was actually fasting that Thursday to commemorate the suffering we had inflicted on the people. And I understand that sentiment. For me personally it feels just a bit severe, and it also made me sad that she was denying herself potential fellowship. The year before the Thanksgiving meal was about the only big meal I’d had in months, the first time I’d felt full since I couldn’t remember when. And it was certainly the only meal I’d had all year surrounded by so much laughter, so many friends and family.

There are so few holidays we Americans have left that focus not on commericalism but on simple things like making things and being together. I know there’s the consumer part -- the feasting -- but what good self respecting holiday isn’t about feasting? When more people that usual come together one can expand the usual fare, one can justify killing the fattened calf (or in this case, buying a large piece of meat, or making a stunning savory pie.)

In this difficult economic period stores and economists are keener than ever to push Christmas shopping season sooner. I worked retail in college and recall decorating a Christmas tree on Halloween night, which appalled me. Now as soon as October 1st non-craft stores are getting the tinsel and do-dads out. It’s hard to remain present and focused with so much external suggestion pushing you forward and into the future before you’re good and ready. There are no Thanksgiving songs, that I know of, no Thanksgiving stories other than the becoming-taboo pilgrim thing. We need more autumnal folklore. Stories about putting up the harvest and then celebrating with a feast. We need Ben Franklin to tell us all about turkeys and what he thought was so important about them. Stories about watching the leaves dance in the wind.

For myself, besides desperately wishing I had several months for those projects, I’ve recently turned to old radio plays broadcast around Thanksgiving. Something to keep me grounded while I clean houses and draw all day. They aren’t the greatest stories, nor the highest quality (unsurprisingly, my Christmas recordings are much cleaner sounding), but they’re a start. It’s nice to hear that even back in the 1940s Christmas was intruding on Thanksgiving’s territory. Stories about the whole family coming to the farmhouse interspersed with reminders that Elgin watches are really the best gift for any Christmas stocking. No escaping the sales people I suppose. If you cook of course, Thanksgiving will always be an important holiday. The other item in my audio arsenal is every Splendid Table podcast I have from past Novembers. These aural suggestions, and this handsome paper turkey I whipped together last night, help the season remain, help the season be celebrated. It all helps time stop slipping so quickly out from under my feet.

.

OCF: recycle crew

2011-11-06T07:39:00.000-08:00

Monday mornings are marked at Chez Kumquat by the recycling truck’s arrival. There’s a lot of truck noises as it maneuvers in between our building and the parked cars, and then a tremendous crash as the items in the blue bins get hoisted then dumped into the truck -- particularly the glass, which is a bright, unmistakable sound.

It’s the same sound one hears in the early morning at the Oregon Country Fair. The recycling crew starts collecting from the recycling kiosks at six in the morning, but they usually don’t make it back to the dock until the public starts to arrive. The first trickle of people at nine increases to a steady stream by eleven, and all the while that familiar sound of glass crashing can be heard echoing through the trees.

Because it’s the same sound I think people assume that a machine is doing all the work, despite the rustic nature of the fairgrounds. It’s what that sound makes us think of. There’s nothing in that sound to suggest otherwise. I think they picture big truck lifters, conveyors, and automated sorting by weight. Neat boxes ready for the reprocessing center.

But don’t you believe it.

What sounds like objects heading to a sorting-machine on a conveyor is in fact two people dumping a barrel full of cans, glass and plastic bottles onto a slanted grid. This grid sits over a channel, designed to catch all the wet and broken debris. (That’s the idea anyway.) This great pile is then pushed with a rake towards the waiting arms of the sorters, who stand along the sides of wooden chutes. And, armed with not much else besides earplugs and eyeglasses, the sorters pick through the mess and sort everything, one by one.

It’s a lot of material to go through. Material that has been sloshing around with leftover contents and whatever else ends up in the barrels. Soon the dock itself is covered in a wet sheen of “sloosh”, and it is for this reason sorters are outfitted with aprons, to keep at least some of it at bay. (Honestly I found working in a raincoat to be the most successful.)

Each kind of object that is sorted follows different rules. Cans are done by size, roughly, and until you memorize which cans are redeemable and which are not, you must read those little letters on the side. Glass is done by size, one box for this size, one box for that, a special box for sessions and a special box for corona and other Mexican style bottles. These boxes, when full, are closed up and handed off to the people standing up on the dock, who load them into the great big truck bed, to be hauled away at the end of the week.

All this while the surge of cans and glass is pushed towards you. More and more all the time. If you do not help and push the pile down the line things get backed up and crash to the floor, or roll under the dock to the dark inaccessible places -- later to be picked up by diligent individuals with buckets.

Meanwhile, plastics are sorted on the other end of the dock. Plastics are the least uniform and most incomprehensible of the sorted items. Sorted mostly by size (which is difficult to judge at a glance, for all the different shapes), but always driven by whether it is redeemable or not. Just about everything aside from plastic water bottles and soda bottles are not redeemable, with a few maddening exceptions. And until you've a sense for it, each item must be examined. And then thrown to the appropriate bag.

Aside from a few dedicated souls there is no specific crew for sorting. Everyone takes a turn. As each truck backs towards the dock, members of the truck’s team hop out to either dump barrels, rake things, or don glasses and earplugs and take their place in the sort line and get to work.

It is the most chaotic, effective little operation I have ever experienced. In a way it’s indicative of how the entire fair works. Very analogue. We may have several powerstrips at the dock for cell phones -- and many of those are future-phones -- but all the real work is done the old fashioned way. With hands and arms and good music and camaraderie.

.

2011-10-31T06:20:00.000-07:00

This is my forth autumn in Portland, and it’s the first time I find myself missing where I was before. Friends back home are driving through the Rocky Mountains and posting snaps of aspen trees that just tie my heart in knots -- mountain autumn begins months before a maritime autumn -- and there were a few weeks when I had ripe tomatoes and basil yet still felt wistful for what wasn’t.

To my great surprise I've specifically found myself missing Greeley. Both the town itself and the features of my life there. The Mexican grocery stores out-numbering gringo stores downtown. The acres of farmland stretching for miles north of the town. I used to drive out there just to lose myself in that big open sky. There were hidden little ponds, old farm houses, surprising gnarls of cottonwoods clustered around flooded creekbeds. This time of year you’d head out to the little garden-farms and pick out a pumpkin. There was no thriving new-wave farmer appreciation there, no crowds of young families with expensive strollers jostling for room between the vines. Just the threadbare scaffolding of the real thing -- the culture that endures. A little wooden bench with a poster board with circles drawn on it -- a pumpkin-size-chart. (is your pumpkin small? Medium? Large? ) Next to this was an old coffee can where you put your money. Somehow that coffee can is pulling at me most of all.

Winter locked us into a narrow world of ice, sore ears and careful steps, but in autumn, feeling as we students did of life restarting, it was kind of a magical place. like something you’d read about in a story book.

I participated in life there as much as one could do. I did but one art show during college -- four large, simple paintings of crocodiles doing simple happy things. I showed them at the public library by signing up on a piece of paper at the information desk, and hung them myself with a ladder I borrowed from the janitor. It was great to see them every week when I'd return my books and explore more offerings, and to see the smiles of the librarians and patrons throughout the month. I was never called upon to explain what I was thinking by paintings them, was never looked at critically, just quietly appreciated. It was by far the most satisfying showing I ever had.

Though I have this fuzzy rear-facing notion of life teeming as though time stood still -- the indisputable charms of a small town America -- it was struggling just like every unfashionable town does. Furthermore it was an agricultural atmosphere of hard-nosed farmers suspicious of change, of migrant families scraping by, of the administration’s sudden and alarming ICE raids. A difficult place to be. There was a hostile energy that chased me all the way to the coast.

But lately I grow weary of the people who pay so much attention to each other, so much attention to clothes and where one shops and what it says about you if you happen to grab a fast food burger. People just pay so much attention in a city. Social consciousness! Heaven knows it’s a blessing to live in a city that has it. But sometimes it feels like too much. During this simple season of leaf-crunching and pumpkin carving I find myself thirsty for country folks’ unconscious authenticity. They aren’t doing something because it means something, they’re doing something because their mothers taught them to. It may not be the best way, but there’s something to be said for it. For starting at square one, for working with what you have and what you are given.

School season

2011-10-25T07:05:00.000-07:00

Oh September, September. I enjoyed you so much that I could scarcely bring myself to come indoors. At times crisp as a golden apple, at times sweet as peach juice dribbling down the chin. Now it’s October, soon to be November. And my cider is gone but there is more at the farms, there’s the orange dots of pumpkins in fields. There’s fog in the morning, and the leaves at long last are beginning to shift into their golden splendor.

There’s a line from The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe that really says it best about how I feel this time of year. How lots of people probably feel.

Girls like Caroline, who have just finished fifteen uninterrupted years of educational routine, find themselves still dividing the year into seasons the way they are used to, rather than by the calendar. January the first is not the birth of the new year; September is.”

When I became cynical and jaded about school I began to look forward to its end. I looked forward to having my own life and routine back. It’s a double sided coin. I don’t miss the squeeze of many neglected deadlines, nor do I miss the arbitrary assignments that were disconnected from my other lessons, because it made it hard to concentrate. But I do miss the thrill of new beginnings, the promise of new things to learn, of maps and animals and new words, new books to read, familiar faces to see. Construction paper decorations on the wall.

In short, I miss the idea of school. Of packed lunches and the School Shopping, the smell of thrift stores, fresh crayons, pencils, and that wide-eyed stack of empty notebooks all waiting there in the shopping cart. I miss the long hours I spent in college in that window-nook behind the stacks, looking out the window at people walking to their classes.

But then again, I incorporate so many of these elements into my life now. Coloring, cutting things out, exploring the world earnestly. And taking my sack lunch wherever I go.

The happy memories eclipse the jaded and cynical feelings. I am left with a complex impression of what was and what will be all at once in the present. How life was then, how it is now, how it might be later. I never delve too deeply in that how it might be later -- that’s a good way to get disappointed -- so instead of specifics my brain toys lazily with general things. Feelings. Past impressions. I compare ideas I've had to how they turned out.

There’s a neighborhood in Denver, near and around the Esquire theatre, that used to beguile me when I was in college. Many weekends would find us driving down from the tiny college-farm-town we lived in walking the streets of this neighborhood as if they were our own. and We would park in neighborhoods and walk to our destinations -- all good simple things that we always did -- but to do these things in a city seemed unspeakably thrilling. I would consider the little houses -- urban houses! -- all standing close to one another like old friends. If I lived there, I would think to myself, this wouldn’t be just a once in a while thing. This would be my life and I could live it every day outside in this city, on these streets.

What would my life be like in this place?

I would WALK to the library -- go as often as I could. I would drink wine outside on those cool summer evenings with my comrade, and under a quilt on cold winter nights. Cheese, coffee, shopping more sustainably. Maybe I would even be lucky enough to have a plot in the community garden, where nameless things curled up and around the chain link fence. Kids would run around and yell during school recess and after school. The colors of the houses, the colors of the faces, the colors of the songs. Important people would come to town, then leave, the city would think about things together and have opinions about what happened to it, and I could be there absorbing it all and thinking about it all with everyone. Trips to the museum, to new restaurants. Stumbling across little city parks on accident. Picnic lunches. Music. Life.

It’s weird to get all this from a neighborhood. By just lurking outside and gently peeping into windows of people.

The beauty of it is that this is basically what my life is now. The truth is you don’t need a certain zip code to treasure your life and the people around you. All you need is that awareness, that appreciation for your surroundings, that hunger to live fully and openly. Denver appealed to me because it had an energy that I badly needed at that time. And I lived off of that energy vicariously -- by seeing and feeling -- until I was able to move to a city of my very own. I chose Portland, but you could choose just about anywhere. Wherever the bricks speak to you.

As I watch the tides moving in, all this uncertainty (economic and political) washes over and it makes one think. I worry sometimes about What Happens Next, what does life look like for people like us. I also find I admire different ways of living, living further apart, living lighter on the earth, living with more mobility. I know that this charmed life in the city may not last long for us. My life is simple and I try to live humbly. So much depends on so much that we have no control over. But in the meantime I reflect -- especially this time of year -- on how lucky I am to have my dreams of gardens and libraries come true.

2011-10-20T10:31:00.000-07:00

2011-10-08T08:06:00.000-07:00

For some reason my future-phone's camera is only taking pictures in a pinkish sepia, not the colors that usually cause me to whip out my camera in the first place.

But of course it also means that in reflecting on the images later I appreciate the light that much more.

This spunky guy lives at a client's house. I have had many fish in the past and I find them to be (fairly or unfairly) somewhat lethargic creatures. Yet this guy swims right up to me as I begin to dust the mantlepiece and opens his fishy little mouth.

Again and again. And he swims all around, follows me as I move, and apparently watches as I vacuum the floor below his lofty perch. He has a such wonderful energy that he makes me want a fishy friend of my very own.

And I suppose through the magic of drawing-on-the-easel, I do have a fish of my very own, in a way.

.

2011-10-07T18:42:00.000-07:00

This is my friend Careen Stoll's kiln, the Tin Man. He lives in her backyard and runs chiefly on waste vegetable oil. Meaning, he is carbon neutral.

I was lucky enough to visit him as you see him -- all glowing and aflame during a firing. It was quite an ordeal; three to five workers with handkerchiefs on their heads, safety glasses on their eyes and big, big heatproof gloves carefully taking heat measurements, sliding stones out, inserting fuel or checking flames, sliding other stones, taking notes, and moving all the time.

Firing takes a very long time when it is done this way. I think we were there the evening of day two, which is about the middle of the active firing process. Then there is the passive cool-down -- meaning, I think, that they just let him cool down in his own time. I think she said it took a week or two for everything to be settled enough to unpack him.

Slow and steady wins the race.

Her work has a beguiling simplicity to it. It is very lyrical, lots of smooth flowing lines. The pieces are not always immediately intuitive -- I would not describe her work as experimental, exactly, but something closer to soothingly minimalist. You can't help but pick something up as you wonder at it, and through this interaction all is made clear.

I think this interaction is crucial to her. She thinks a good deal about space and our bodily conversation with it as we move about in the world. She once gave a very memorable presentation of her work during an art critique I was facilitating by filling one of her larger vessels with water and asking us to pour water into various cups and bowls so she could see where our hands went when we picked something up. I think she -- like me -- is one of those people who sees the frenetic energy of the world we inhabit. The computers, twitter feeds, jumble of too many titles and not enough stories all rattling around in our minds. Our response to that is a reminder to people of the things you can make outside that world, outside the wires and glowing screens. Things you can see with your real eyes, and things you can touch with your real hands.

(In fact, things you could touch with your real hands for REAL if you are going to be in Portland this weekend or next. Careen is a brave one and opens up her studio to the inquisitive during Portland Open Studios.)

.

2011-09-25T08:14:00.000-07:00

I had the blissful pleasure of attending a work party at the Gabriel Community Garden Demonstration Orchard yesterday morning. It meant picking apples and pressing apple cider, right there in the parking lot.

Apple cider. Fall. It's coming. I have so many warm things to say about September and autumn and apple and golden light. For now I will let the memory of apple pieces stuck in my hair and the sticky sweet smell of the juice fill me.

.

2011-09-24T08:15:00.000-07:00

To you, these merely a lovely pale yellow, a gentle powder blue, and little palm trees. And really, that's enough. It's enough for them to work in this piece I'm putting together. It's exactly what a little whimsy like this needs.

To me though, these fabrics have enormous sentiment. They are: my childhood security blanket (yellow), my brother's childhood security blanket (blue), and the last little bits of one of the shirts Mom wore so much during that time in my life (the trees). My brother, my mother and me. All in this painting.

If you watch the Reading Rainbow episode with "The Patchwork Quilt" by Valerie Flournoy, you learn about how a REAL quilt is made, with fabric from people's lives. What always stuck with me was the ending, when a piece of the old quilt was put into the new quilt. Somehow this activates the new quilt to me -- it gives it that extra spark of needed life. It gives the new quilt a soul of its own.

It reminds me of other things made up of pieces of existing things. Making new plants from a cutting, or the seeds from last year's plants. Sourdough bread starters that are fed and kept alive rather than made from scratch. Fire lit from a burning stick pulled from someone else's fire. Lighting a whole room by touching one candle to another's flame. Somehow there's comfort in that reliance on what we already have. We took care of it so well that it is still around to give to others. And the more we give it away, the more of it there is.

If I keep using these dear pieces of fabric in paintings, they aren't going to be more, they will be less and less until they are gone. But on the other hand if I put them on canvas then they are out in the world instead of stuffed into the milk crate on the shelf, so in that way they continue living. Especially if I tell you this story. Then those colors up there are more than just a lovely pale yellow, a gentle powder blue, and little palm trees. They have weight and depth and soul all their own.

As time goes on I get more meaningful fabric (sleeves cut from a button up, those unmendable pajama pants, fabric we used to make the lunch bag) and use it alongside the older fabric. An overlap develops. The line between the fabric from before and the fabric from now blurs until everything I have to work with has value and meaning in an vibrant, pulsing way. And I pour that onto canvas and make pictures of things I love with things I love. And the feeling grows and grows and grows.

.

2011-09-14T08:11:00.000-07:00

I went on a photo-safari for gardens and cities not long ago, and found a common shape along the way.

2011-09-06T21:43:00.000-07:00

Here are some things I learned and saw at the Oregon State Fair on Sunday:

(Not to be confused with the Oregon Country Fair)

- Sheep tails go down, goat tails go up.

- Pigs appear to uniformly sleep on their sides with their legs sticking out rigid, presumably because they are too fat to do anything else comfortably. This makes them look like they have fallen over due to the bad pun of a fellow anime character.

- Pigs also have creepy sneer-mouths.

- Goats do not climb out of their pens, even though they seem very capable of doing so.

- Golden pheasants are the bird I would like to be in my next life. (Purely for looks.)

- Horse competitions are wonderfully incomprehensible. We sat in the pavilion for a long time and saw first Clydesdales, then tiny ponies drawing tiny carts, then sleek racing-type horses, then little Peruvean horses with their riders in neckerchiefs and sarapes. They all had to line up while the judge made judgements, and then The Ribbon Lady would come out of the paddock behind them, arms filled with all sorts of ribbons and occasionally a garland of flowers that had to be placed around the horse's neck. The horses tended to be jittery and pointedly despised the neck flowers. One in particular began rearing once they affixed them.

- There is a strict dress code for horsing in general, and there was a lot of absurd cleanliness and primness surrounding the horse stables that one did not see in, say, the cow building where I saw an old lady fast asleep atop an ice chest, a deck of cards splayed from her hand and spilling onto the straw floor. I liked that the ribbon lady was basically in a black t-shirt and jeans, with a backwards red baseball cap.

- We brought snacks to keep things economical. We did end up buying lackluster chicken wings, which were not nearly as delicious as the BBQ smelled, but there you go. I was tempted by ice cream but was instead delighted by frozen orange juice in a skinny ziplock bag.

- Watched glass blowing.

- Renewed my interest in the shapes of people, resolved to go on more people-safaris in the near future. I'm having a size-and-shape problem -- I'm not spicing it up enough to make things interesting, or even believable, really. Certainly not for the State Fair crowd. These people are essentially my demographic (or at least, the most vocally responsive, aside from personal friends) so I need to get on that.

- Angora rabbits would make hilarious house pets.

.

2011-08-28T21:24:00.000-07:00

2011-08-24T16:47:00.000-07:00

This was my morning crayon warm-up from the other morning, and I like it so much that I've been having trouble taking it off the board. In fact I keep moving it back on after I mess around with some other piece of paper. I don't know yet if it's destined for another big painting -- I think for now it can go into the big picture frame on the wall above my desk. I want it to be in a place that I can gaze at from the couch or the reading chair.

What I can't gaze at are those great big paintings I just finished, becuase they are currently down at the Collective Agency, waiting for the first Thursday show. On the off chance you will be in Portland next week and want to see them in real life, now's your chance.

(Well. Next Thursday is your chance. You know what I mean.)

In addition to the big things, you would also be able to see four illustrations from a (SOMEWHAT) SUPER SECRET PROJECT that I will tell you about just as soon as I can really believe it is all happening.

Yes indeed.

Stop by, won't you?

2011-08-20T09:27:00.000-07:00

Whilst reading Leif Peng’s blog, Today’s Inspiration a while ago I saw a title that grabbed me: Forty Illustrators and How They Work by Ernest W. Watson. It was, I assumed, the inside scoop from mid-century illustrators and designers. Yes please.

The library didn’t have it, but they did have another book: Creative Perspective for Artists and Illustrators.

The first night I had it home I positively pored over the thing. Watson writes about perspective from the angle of a designer-illustrator, which is not often the angle one receives. It’s lovely to read about, since illustrators have a unique place somewhere in between reality and abstraction.

In reality, no picture -- photographic or otherwise -- can duplicate what our eyes see. For one thing, the camera picture is recorded on a flat plate of film; the retina of the human eye is concave.

(the illustrator’s) function, usually, is to depict the facts and events

Illustrative skill involves considerably more than the training of the eye and hand to see and record the correct appearance of things observed, essential as that is. There are those who can make reasonably good drawings of things they are looking at, but who are lost when they try to construct objects “out of their heads”. They have a photographic eye, but they lack imagination.

it is this conflict that fascinates me most about the problems of perspective. I have been particularly taken lately by the cubism-influenced illustrators, who stretch things flat and let one see as much of the scene as possible.

Yet when I stumbled upon Peter P. Plasencia’s pictures in that book, I was dazzled by his brilliant use of space within his little tiny box. And, frankly, I was a bit dumbfounded. How did he do that? He’s clearly obeying rules, but when? In what circumstances?

Conflict between design and perspective in picture-making ...his picture actually may be more convincing when his lines do not conform to photographic reality.

What’s clear to me is that what reality looks like and what actually works in an illustration are two very different things. You do HAVE to stretch that road flat sometimes to fill up the picture. You do need to show something from an impossible angle occasionally to keep something interesting.

I’m not sure if this is where Watson is going with “creative” perspective, but he is at least coming to this stuff in a non-traditional way. He, like everyone who knows what they’re talking about, writes endlessly about the need to just sit down and draw. Technique is taught quickly, but executing that technique in an effective way is something nobody can teach anybody. It all comes from drawing. Drawing, drawing, drawing. Drawing every day.

I recently got back in touch with a high school art teacher and I have been trying for three weeks now to articulate why it is that I am so hungry for this stuff. When I knew her, I wanted nothing to do with the color wheel, perspective, the elements and principles of design. At the ripe old age of fifteen I felt I’d mastered the basics. I had plateaued. It’s what happens when you stop exploring, when you refuse to grow. When you decide you don’t need any more learning. I once without a trace of humility informed a drawing teacher (this same drawing teacher) that I couldn’t think of a single thing to improve on.

I had no goals, but I had no shame either. That’s not a good combination.

I think part of this was the vast difference between having confidence and assuming you are The Greatest Thing That Has Ever Lived. One is that drive to push through the hard stuff, the other is deciding you don’t need to go through the hard stuff because it’s beneath you.

I was too firm in thinking I was The Greatest, and it took a portfolio rejection and essentially being barred from taking art classes at my University to make me realize my mistake. No. You are not the greatest. In fact, you have a lot of work to do.

Rather than fighting the system I took a step back and got an English degree. I don’t regret it. I think I needed to jump into a completely new field to learn to be open to ideas; new and old. To learn how to learn again. And anyway at that art department, I could not have learned. What I wanted to learn was the stuff I was learning from this book the other night -- about the hinged box and doors and how to measure proportions with squares. What they were teaching was two point perspective. Rigidly, I might add. Frustrating to the observer in me who was, without realising it, seeing things with many, many vanishing points.

Distance made me hunger for more. I started collecting fragments of design, keeping track of things I liked and why. Slowly but surely I was developing my own weird pathology of How To Make Pictures. Noting what details to pay attention to. Pushing the perspective. Pushing the colors to certain family groups I’d grown fond of. Now when I find books on topics I’d previously snubbed as being beneath me I pore over them with a fanatical zeal. Anthony tracked down a book on color theory a few months ago and I’ve been devouring that book just as eagerly as this one on perspective. Maybe moreso. Something about scholarly writing on the qualities of certain colors is just electrifying. It’s like finally taking preschool 201 (Or really, more like preschool 988). Colors! Shapes! Interaction!

These books lead me to things I may or may not already know, and they get there on paths I’d never heard of. And once these paths are taken, they are much easier taken again, and can lead to even more places.

There is a peculiar feeling that I have now. The more I learn, the more questions arise. The more facts I find, the less I know in a way, because it just spurs me on to keep searching. It is so important to keep the mind receptive. To never close the flood gates by feeling you have complete knowledge of something. The minute you do you cease to evolve, cease to grow, and cease, essentially, to LIVE.

Do live. And learn. And practice. Practice, practice, practice. Practice every day.

Connections

2011-08-13T19:50:00.000-07:00

Okay kids. Wow. I think I got it.

You remember my recent breakthrough with the easel and the drawing board. Since then I have with a few exceptions begun my mornings with a quick crayon session. Even a couple unrelated scribbles helped me get out of that weighty am I really good enough nonsense you sometimes encounter as you approach your desk, and instead you are transported into that magical observant place where you can just notice the shape of things. And all you want out of life is to copy them down.

This inevitably led to my bringing crayons and the drawing board with me to the Oregon Country Fair, and resulted in those big crayon studies of what I saw. The result was not necessarily better than my attempts to capture journeys in the past -- things were not nearly as detailed as they needed to be to really be accurate -- but it was a LOT more satisfying. What I was seeing and feeling was BIG STUFF. So it was nice to record things in a big way.

I have gone to some really amazing places in the last couple years. Ireland with my Mother in 2008, a two-week camping holiday in Canada a year later, San Diego a year after that. Travel has always been a deep love of mine, and all the while I have secretly hoped someone might pay me money to go places and experience them and then report my findings to whoever would be interested in the sort of things I notice. So whenever I've gone somewhere I always feel that anxiety -- perhaps even more than you do -- to capture the experience.

I say perhaps more than you do only because I illustrate things. In a way that's really my job all the time. I capture experiences, feelings, emotions. All those things cameras do not capture.

Furthermore during the trip to Ireland I learned something -- cameras are not fast enough. My mother and I both had cameras with many memory cards, but we often lamented that the thing we'd wanted to take pictures of was usually just after we got it in our head to press the button. We had internet available at every place we stayed and adequate downtime every evening set aside for emailing loved ones back home to give them a day-by-day account of events. This morning we caught the bus outside the pub in Cork, changed buses in Tralee. Ate dinner at this place outside Bunratty Castle. All true but it somehow doesn't capture what the three-to-five hours on the bus was like. Rushing past rolling hills and stone walls straight out of a storybook. The alarming skinniness of the roads. The thrill of seeing bilingual road signs, placed in places that made no sense to our American brains. The tiny towns passed through, with tiny shop fronts and Easter egg colored houses. Buildings crowded around the road. A man in a check cap and patched trousers walking with an ancient terrier. And these things were addressed in the occasional prosey email, but there was still so much missing. The color of the stone walls and how it matched the man's jacket. The sound of people muttering to each other. How can you capture it all?

The next adventure was Canada, and I tried doggedly to document everything. Snapshots of anything that seemed promising, sketches, painting on the fly. I even had a gluestick and collage paper with me, and I faithfully kept every single piece of paper we were given or came across. It was a mess -- way too ambitious for the timeline we were on. And of course in the end the car window was smashed in and I wound up mostly only talking about that, and it's a shame because that was one of the most beautiful trips I have ever been on.

After that trip it was clear that I needed to simplify my capture approach. In San Diego I only brought my pen and notebook. And with the exception of the Museum of Man, which I badly wanted to sit in front of and paint for a few days, I actually did really well. But I ran into a new problem.

My simple pen studies had a satisfying feel to them all on their own. But whenever I tried to iron them out, or add color, or turn them into a more polished painting, I was somehow never able to capture the charm of the original drawing. I've had this problem a long time actually, in several other facets of my drawing-life. Different stages along the way. It was something I wanted to confront, but something I never got around to. Other things kept demanding attention.

Since then when I go on journeys I take nothing more than a pen and that at least solves the anxious burden of Capturing Everything. It helps you let go when your supplies are limited. It also helped me hone in on Which Details Are Important and get a grip on how I saw things, so that eventually I was able to do things like paint that picture of the Tillamook Cheese Factory without taking any pictures or any written notes at all.

So at this point I have these stories I want to tell, these pictures I want to make, about these bigger travels. They are all backlogged in my brain and keep getting pushed behind other things. Added to this we are constantly going on little weekend excursions. Constantly. Remember, Anthony lived in Eugene for two years before he moved in this summer, so there were many, many weekends spent on the road. The baby cooler is in constant use, the roadmap is marked up with highlighters and tattered from the number of times it gets stuffed down between the passenger seat and the gear shifter. Now that Anthony lives up here we are able to explore east and west more often. We go on more walks into the hills and take little mini-vacations to the rural countryside. Make our own minor discoveries. This is a beautiful state and I am pretty strict about not working on weekends, preferring instead to go out and explore.

I guess what gets me is: I am really good at going on adventures. My last trip to Colorado was a 72 hour affair in two different cities with three different groups of people and it was as slick a little operation you could ever hope for. I just wish that my digestion of my adventures was as solid.

So. With all this bubbling around my head, in the far and distant background. This next thing happened.

I have a new cleaning-client who has a house situated near a wooded hill. When you look out one of the upstairs windows, you essentially see what I drew as a crayon study the other morning:

I drew it because it's a beautiful view and I can't stop thinking about it. In fact I actually cheated a little and worked on this crayon-doodle for two mornings. The second morning -- yesterday morning -- I mostly just darkened some things, and colored in that orangey square in the foreground.

In that inexplicable way these things happen, that orangey color got my attention. I thought about it all morning. It pulsed urgently in my soul. I thought about that canvas that I'd played around with a few months ago when I'd thought again about big-scale painting. I thought about those vague scaffolding studies I'd done after visiting the fairgrounds. I thought, I know what I'm doing what I get home..

Thus it was.

And as I was wrapping up I began thinking...what else can I do?

What about that great image of the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport?

Yeah, I thought. Let's try that.

So that's what I did today. It kind of feels unreal.

This of course does not capture the detail that the little gouache paintings do. So there's more work to do. (Happily, there's always more work to do.)

The jury is still out about all those complicated things I was worried about yet failed to articulate about abstract art, fine art, etc. There's so much baggage there. But what gives me hope is that for the first time in a long time I'm not too worried about all that rubbish. What's important to me is that I have finally figured out how to make big things on canvas again. To make with the big colors. And I've connected those little expressive drawings to a way to make them as big and colorful as I want them to be. The static drawings can be lifted out of the notebook and rocketed up to a realm way, way beyond where they started.

It's so satisfying to arrive here. To make that connection. Now I feel like I COULD paint the Museum of Man building. Tomorrow. With nothing but my memory of the place and my feeble attempts to sketch it.

.

What I did with my Friday

2011-08-12T21:11:00.000-07:00

God that felt good.

2011-08-02T07:37:00.000-07:00

Feeling a bit off it but glad I stuck it out to see my favorite two clients, who are in their eighties, come back from their picnic at Wahkeena falls.

As he put it, “we spent the day at the Columbia Gorge-ous.”

We talked a little about the tourists who tend to stop, take the requisite picture and leave. “They don’t take the time to take it all in!” They said with deep sympathy. They began unpacking the styrofoam cooler they'd brought, filled with all sorts of treats that made me even more fond of them than I already am.

That night I couldn’t bare to do much else than flip through some of my big pretty books about picture-makers -- and there’s worse ways to spend a sick night on the couch I suppose. I was reading some of the final remarks about Mary and Lee Blair, about alcoholism (which, naively, I was shocked by, considering the warm strength of her visual sense.) The author muses that it could be because both Mary and Lee gave up dreams to be fine artists in exchange for financial stability.

Happy are those who do not draw lines. Maybe. This reminded me of an earlier conversation I’d had with this client when we discussed my work that she had seen for the first time -- in a Christmas postcard I’d sent out.

“I think you’re a fine artist,” she’d said.

2011-07-29T08:07:00.000-07:00

Good heavens.

My paint is on sale at the art store this week (50% off!) so after getting that yellow I KNEW I needed, I high-tailed it back home to get to work on finding those other colors I mix and use every day.

Some of this has been rewarding. I did find that pistachio color!

Some of it has been grueling. I worked for almost three sheets of paper before I came even close to my lovely family of cream-green-purply brown.

And of course some of it has made great swaths of color that don't really sing to me.

I am recording all this on paper this time so that I STOP getting that weird grey-green color. It's a lovely color, it just really doesn't have a place in my pallet. (My inner, mental pallet that is. As you can see it takes up a great deal of my actual pallet.) Thus far it's been a lot of trial and error. Trusting instincts, and making clear and careful notes when a desired result goes against instinct. It often does.

There's so much here that can't easily be seen on a computer screen. I paint with gouache -- an opaque watercolor -- but not all gouache is created equal. You cannot take colors at their face value. A dark color may actually have a lot more transparency than you'd think, and transparency and opacity is the sliding scale on which colors assert themselves. A yellow with lots of opacity is going to look stronger than an orange with lots of transparency, even though the color as it sits in a big puddle on the pallet looks a LOT darker than yellow does.

Even if we're talking a dark army green and a lavender. It's all about how much paper shows through when it dries.

It's so baffling at first. How can a darker color look lighter than a paler color?! And when it dries is the key. Because man, that dark green looked a lot darker when it was wet.

Knowing about the transparency helps with mixing too. If I'm mixing a sort of wimpy dark color, it's going to mostly stand in the background. It will certainly affect the color, but it won't take over.

Whereas, if I have a really opaque dark color (like this mauve-y purple I use all the time) my mix will end up being mostly-mauve-with-a-touch-of-whatever.

Mixing white with anything seems to cancel out the transparency problem -- fine if we want a lighter color -- but it also (with a few surprising exceptions) tones down the vibrancy of a color a GREAT deal.

That's okay if we're going for the muted "tertiary" type colors. But no good at all if we want the power colors.

It's a lot like genealogy's dominant and recessive traits. It's not a simple 1+1=2. It's more like, I mixed this sand color with three things and twice I got something gross but that other time I got this crazy gorgeous lavender and how did THAT happen?! So you have to experiment. You have to just get the paint onto paper and look at it. And then by God you have to record your findings so you don't waste so much material next time.

And when you finally find something, and replicate it once to make sure you got it right, you cut out the little swatches to make a crisp, clear formula page.

And then you feel so much better.

.

Floating

2011-07-27T07:04:00.000-07:00

After being tied to a project for so long it's a bit floaty to be untethered. It's often hard to know what to work on. This time I have something to digest, but how I go about that is wide open. So I'm experimenting.

I am wanting to do something BIG with LARGE blocks of color.

If I do that, I can't really share it with you. Those crayon pictures I did are actually very beautiful, but they are larger than my scanner. With the light available I can only take a terrible photo which strips away everything about the picture that makes it worthwhile.

Been looking at my copy of Jules Verne: the Man Who Invented the Future by Franz Born, illustrated to perfection by Peter P. Plasencia. (Ward-o-Matic has posted the illustrations on flickr.) These pictures are small -- the book is about seven inches wide and ten inches tall -- yet as you can see the pictures are epic. Huge, somehow. He has such incredible depth while still flattening and stretching things the way you must do if you work on paper. I don't know quite how he does it, and one of my next missions is to find out. To come to terms with perspective.

My instincts are still a bit too realistic. I keep correcting things. Overlapping something as it actually appears, rather than showing it off as one is able to do in the world of painting. Anything can be seen. Should everything? Shouldn't some things still be partly hidden behind other things, to create interest and drama? I have smaller goals. Find that pistachio color. Loosen up a little (which, I hope, will help with perspective), bring people comfortably in the world. Digest some of those things I keep wanting to digest -- particularly the adventure stories. Ireland, Canada, San Diego. I really don't want to go anywhere else until I digest those adventures.

Some of these things can be done as I make some pictures about Fair. Other things will just require a lot of looking and a lot of desk time. Which is really all I ever want.

.

OCF: moments

2011-07-23T09:00:00.000-07:00

I often embellish things to make them look a little more amazing, but this is absolutely a true story. It's a little more subdued actually, since I think he was also wearing cat's eye sunglasses, and you also do not see the rest of the crew with buckets scanning the ground for cigarette butts. I hasten to add that the truck was not moving when he did this, he was just waiting for the driver to get back and move the truck closer to the kiosk.

In the mornings the various truck crews went to service the various kiosks throughout the fairgrounds. This means rolling full barrels to the truck, lifting the barrels up onto the truck bed, and handing off empty barrels to waiting arms (or, more often, yelling BARREL DOWN as you drop on over the side, with a satisfying gooong) to replace the full barrels. Taking inventory. Make any changes (do we need another cans & glass barrel out here?) Then for the main stages the crew gets buckets and combs the field for trash. Cigarette butts, bottle cabs, paper fragments, and even -- gulp -- condoms.

I forget the exact number of trucks-and-crews we had, but it must have been something like fifteen. Certain routes were so full that they were broken down into types of refuse: compost on one truck, paper, cans and glass on another. Shifts started at six in the morning and sometimes wouldn't finish until eleven.

While they did this I wandered the fairgrounds in awe of the birdsong and relative silence. One delicious morning though I was sitting in the meadow at the far east of the property. It's a high-traffic area, and that morning it was also occupied by a lot of sloppy still-drunk vendors or crew people easing themselves into the new day. Their rhythm was stilted and unstable. Uncertain.

So it was a treat to watch Ceder's truck, Mothra come trundling into the field. Mothra is one of many ancient trucks the recycling crew uses to cart barrels. It takes its cue from the 1920's and is a flatbed truck with wooden boards nailed to the sides to accommodate loads. I am fairly vague here in the painting but that's becuase I can't remember the make and model of the truck itself, and I didn't spend much time with the trucks. And there aren't many pictures online. The public really likes Godzilla, because it has toys on it and breathes fire, but there are many other trucks. Mothra is one of them.

You know a recycling crew truck (or forklift) right away because it has a lot of gloved people hanging off of it. And as soon as it stops the occupants hop off smartly and get to work. They were such a wonderful sight, and probably a really strange pill to swallow for the bleary-eyed non-recyclers in the field. It made me proud. Yes, we are unkept and have a really ragtaggle band of workers. But by God we can get stuff done.

UNSORTED FAIR THOUGHTS

1. During the first meal I had at the staff kitchen we ended up at a bench with a great loose board on the top. Fortunately we were sitting with members of construction crew, and they fixed the thing right there on the spot.

2. Despite the relative chaos of the thing I only lost two things. The biggest loss were my beloved yoga/PJ pants. They weren’t particularly grand -- in fact they were bought after I’d forgotten mine on the move to Portland (silly chilly AC filled hotel rooms.) They were made of an organic bamboo-rendered jersey knit but purchased from Wal-Mart. I’d cut off about 5 inches from the bottom so they were hobbit-pants, unhemmed so they were a bit ragged, had bleach speckles on them from that one time I cleaned that one house, so they really wouldn’t look like anything much to anyone but me. I should have written my name in them -- really I just should have done what sensible people do and checked in with lost and found. But instead I lamented, and then resolved to make some new ones. I know they’ve got similar knits at the fabric store.

2a. The other lost thing was a towel, and we replaced that on the way home. Bath Towels is bath towels.

3. I keep mentioning that being around the recycling crew was a bit like hanging around the muppets, and I’m not lying. For a start, stuff like this guy hula-hooping on the hood of the truck kept happening. But in other ways also:

3a. The crew is not just for those strong enough to lift full barrels (really, no one person can do that. It takes two.) There are many different people-shapes, and people-types in the family. Crews were not really organized as such, but there were some trends. The delicate smallest ones (particularly those on "teen crew") tended to be the extras pulled in during the glass and plastic sorts when the trucks came back to the dock. Big beefy people tended to work at compost or on other non-truck-crew projects like fixing trucks or building things. And the biggest one of all -- an Amazonian with a knee brace -- was the lady who took everything we sorted in boxes and packed the trucks that went to the redeem-the-recyclables places at the end of the week.

3b. The weird collection of dilapidated trucks, which were often painted and made awesome.

3c. We had a house band. Or what amounts to one. A member of the Conjugal Visitors was a friend-of-someone's, and so they were there at our first night of camping, and then again at the cocktail party, and then again for a different non-party fireside night, and THEN at the week-after party at someone's house. Whenever we were together and not working, they seemed to be there. It was lovely. Good high-energy bluegrassy stuff.

3d. The fierce loyalty and sense of “all for one and one for all” that I’ve never, ever seen so strong in a group.

4. There was a spider in the tent, and he was clever clever. Our tent is a minimalist sort of affair, a new take on the old-school pup tent. It's basically a tarp-shelter with a little floor. The floor and ceiling are separate elements. Condensation drips down onto the ground outside keeping the floor and interior dry. Genius. Only drawback is it basically acts like a bug trap. We usually have a cloud of things flying around in the top, but you know. You're camping. So who cares. Though in future we may rent to a spider on purpose, because the cloud of bugs was significantly, immediately diminished when the spider moved in. The few that remained cowered on the far side and did not make much trouble.

.

OCF: scaffolding

2011-07-18T08:48:00.000-07:00

Fair. What can I say? It’s magic. And everybody says that. So what can I say that other people haven’t?

Well, as a picture maker I can say this: it was a sweet, blessed relief to be in a world that understands the need for whimsy. From the admission gates made to look like the heads of dragons to the simple shapes set up near the bank of the Long Tom River, aesthetic playfulness was there at every turn.

It was good to see playfulness. To see giant stars made of kite material lit up at night and in the early morning by Christmas lights. To see a bench surrounded by a wicker creature. To see people walking around in tree costumes. It seemed no visual field was left unadorned. Even the recycling kiosks were all distinct and interesting. There's a kind of acknowledgement of the spiritual there -- and I don’t mean just the knee-jerk hippie woo-woo kind of spiritual. I just mean that hunger for colors and shapes that we recognize in children. Grown-ups have that hunger too -- and probably need it even more than children do, in the face of their busy, messy lives. But rarely does one see it in quite the way one saw it at Fair, and it was lovely to behold.

I know a lot of people see Fair as a throw-back to Woodstock, but I don’t think it’s as simple as that. I don’t think it would have endured this long if it was just about a lot of burnt out hippies. All the pieces fit too neatly together. The dust gets bad, so there is a water crew that keeps the road sprayed down. There are barrels of water around for the vendors to attend to their own paths. There is a fanatical commitment to using every resource and not over consuming, so there is a truck that picks up wood -- old timbers, usable sticks -- and takes it to what is essentially a giant filing cabinet near the compost barn to sort them out. There are shelves for every kind of thing they find. So when the construction crew needs to build a new vendor-space, or fence, or recycling kiosk, the wood is ready and waiting. When de-construction pulls the extra things back at the end of the week, (the traffic control chairs, the extra fences, the sign posts) the wood goes back to the filing cabinet. Ready and waiting for next year.

I’m not ready to be back in civilization. It took me a few days to really click into the rhythm of the place -- it’s so different from regular life. Now that I’m there it’s hard for me to click back out. I sort of hope I don’t, actually. I’ve not felt so calm and wonderful in a long time. I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, it’s just what happens when you are around a group of people that assume the best of everyone.

.

2011-07-06T09:18:00.000-07:00

...I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free, like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria...

Drawn after listening to Jill Bolte's TED Talk.

.

2011-07-06T06:24:00.000-07:00

There's something about lots of people working together that I really find compelling. They're all doing different things, but it's all part of the bigger picture. If each were working on his own it would take much longer. And each can work according to his abilities: farm stock can lift the slabs of concrete, anemic bookworms can scoot stones, can plant the vegetables. Can paint signs.

This is my last submission for the cyborg book, and it's bittersweet. Truthfully I could have worked for several more (full) days on this picture and would have liked to. But it's also been a long time (a couple months longer than it was originally), and it was time. Things were delivered, paperwork was signed, last minute tensions were graciously ignored, and another piece of this chapter comes to a close.

Weirdly: the end of this project, much like the end of the last project, does not feel like a completion so much as a surrender. That's not the most satisfying of feelings. Anthony was doing happy dances for me and all I can feel right now is drained. I wonder if that feeling ever goes away, or if it's the mark of a brave artist to keep slogging through those feelings and carry on.

In any case, if this becomes a regular thing with me it would behoove me to have an exit strategy. When you fall and skin your knee you have a method, right? You check for debris, swab, apply pressure, disinfect, affix a bandage. External things we have down pat. What about internal things? That's harder. If I get overwhelmed with anxiousness or frustration, I usually try and get outside and bring nothing with me. Or play with blocks. Or watch something light and silly. Revisit the children's book shelf here on the floor with a quilt. There are many things I do. This isn't a fix the sad situation though, this is a you finished! feeling that I'm just not having yet. I need a ritual to signal the switching of gears. A new playlist, for sure. I am embarrassed to admit how important playlists become for some of my activities, though maybe you'll remember my day job is housecleaning, and I spend a LOT of time with my iPod. I have a "to battle" playlist, to get hyped up for big houses (and, originally, to get myself psyched up for a job interview). I have a "down and out in Portland" playlist, with the Hobbit theme and the Happiness Hotel and old songs about how money doesn't by the clear blue sky -- a playlist I play when I'm feeling broke and need to not feel down about it. Light driving, (for Sundays), heavy driving (for blowing-off-steam times), an hour of really energetic stuff called "Clean up this mess". But I don't have anything for a victory lap. So probably my finishing ritual can start there.

In small ways I have tried to signal that we are back to a clean slate: the huge stack of sketches has been moved from my desk to a sorting pile near my desk. The interminable checklist is gone and in it's place a lovely blank sheet of paper waits patiently for instructions.

And of course this time I have a very clear pallet-cleanser: we are as I speak packing up for the Oregon Country Fair, and for the next week will be in the forest with all the other muppets having a grand old time. I think nothing will wash the dear robots out of my head like a week of port-a-potties and forest time.

.

2011-07-02T08:48:00.000-07:00

From doodle...

To picture...

2011-06-29T07:33:00.000-07:00

Here's the latest couple for the Cyborg book.

No one has said a word about them online, which is a pity because they are slightly darker than some of the other ones and I am REALLY curious about what people think of them. This one in particular was a tricky one, conceptually for me. It's actually about ad-blockers that people use in the real world. My understanding is that one wears a pair of robot-goggles or something that "knows" where ads are and places a white rectangle over the picture.

Setting aside the whole issue of designers and people who make those ads (and you know, that delicious opportunity to critique bad ads, and thus deprogram yourself from the ad's message,) this sort of thing really bothers me. I understand that there are those ad-saturated places that are too noisy, visually. But something in me rebels at the idea of simply blocking those out with a white square. Or even with a painting. It's just...I don't know. The feeling is similar to that reaction towards Photoshopping models. We live in the world and you need to be able to take it, lumps, weird shapes, different colors and all.

It was a garbled visual journey that lead me to this metaphor, but I think this sums it up really well. It's not a binary one is right one is wrong issue, it's a debate. And yes, ads messy up our worlds, but also censorship is something we really shouldn't take passively, and certainly not something we should inflict upon ourselves without careful, careful thinking. Do not wear, as Peter Sagel once called it so poignantly, a "rose-colored blindfold".

The other one is pure cheek.

I am in love with this concept and if I had my way I'd have another month to paint it more realistically and carefully. But there we are. "Mundane Science-Fiction" -- only "mundane" to differentiate itself from the sort of science fiction that involves death stars. It's actually a fairly compelling way to confront some of the Big Problems we have, only as far as I have seen most of the "real" "mundane" sci-fi chiefly falls back on the weird and paranormal stuff. Earth itself is pretty interesting, and all its inhabitants are distinct and strange, so I've never understood why this is. But then I am no real connoisseur of sci-fi, so what do I know.

Just a few more on deck. I am really excited for these last few. Paint paint paint.

2011-06-27T22:14:00.000-07:00

For the past two years Anthony has had the privilege of working on the recycling crew at the Oregon Country Fair, and this will be the first year I will get to join him.

“Getting” to work a volunteer position that routinely means lifting barrels of waste onto the back of a truck, climbing on rusty cylinders and (as it did last weekend) dumping out foul-smelling food remnants into a pile of slimy goo may not seem like a privilege to most people. But idle hands are the devil’s play-thing, and apart from that working hard for a few hours a day means we’ll have the sort of experience at a fair that only those back stage can have. Twenty-four hour access, camping for a week, hanging out with a downright muppety group of hippies, outlaws, refugees and pirates. Good stuff for an illustrator.

So far I’ve only been privy to “pre-Fair”, and even that has been a treat. The O.C.F. has been going on for forty-two years, and we live in an area where severe weather is rare, so most of the booths are permanent (or semi-permanent) structures built out of scrap timber; as aged and weathered as the trees themselves. It reminds me of my elementary school’s playground, which was made of logs bolted together to make climbable pyramids and balance beams. Before the O.C.F. booth-ers arrive to set up shop the forest appears to host some sort of elven ghost town. Empty scaffolding, stairs, and lofts hint deliciously at what was (and will be) there come next week. So many wonderful lines.

When I was last there I didn’t have time to sit with my drawing board, but I hope to this coming weekend. I am wrapping myself up in a tight curl, pushing out the very, very last pictures for the big Cyborg Anthropology book, and I hope to be finished by the time we leave for the week. I think the fair would be a wonderful pallet cleanser.

2011-06-15T08:41:00.000-07:00

In my Farmer’s Market newsletter last week I learned that our own dear mayor proclaimed June to be Farmer’s Market Month. It sort of is anyway, since most markets open just as all the produce gets going, but it’s nice to have things official. They actually enclosed the entire notice, and of course because I used to format legal notices for the newspaper I read every word. And then I thought about what it should have been like. (And WAS like, for all I know.) And then I drew it.

I regret that I don’t have time to paint this because I’d really like to. Maybe if things are quiet after this Cyborg thing I will do a little unit on mayors. I still know practically nothing about what mayors actually do, apart from snippets our own mayor drops on twitter. There is clearly much more to being mayor than walking in parades, fixing potholes and proclaiming June to be Farmer’s Market month.

Speaking of parades: there was a parade of mayors! I can’t believe I missed the parade of mayors! Evidently many mayors from all over Oregon where in the Rose Festival Parade, parading. Considering my interest in city business (esp. in the area of Those Things That Require Notices To Be Published) and mayors it would have been such a treat!

I must not be a very good Portlander because I’ve never managed to make it down to the key attractions of the Rose Festival. The first time I had the chance I’d just moved here, and I sent my family down to the shore to see the big boats mostly to have some time alone with the moving boxes for a few hours. Last year no doubt I let my knee get the better of me. This year I was shepherding Anthony’s family around for the Big Big Graduation Celebration. It’s still fleet week so maybe I will get down there and draw boats tomorrow evening. A change of scenery from all these robots in my brain.

.

The wild and lawless days of the post-Impressionists

2011-06-14T07:17:00.000-07:00

It will not surprise you that most of my fancies lie in the representational world. It may surprise you, as it did me, that I was so taken with this painting.

I saw it at a client’s home a few months ago. I am usualy very strict about NOT sharing things I find in people’s houses directly -- privacy and all that -- however in this case I feel okay about this blurry snapshot. It really was not about the other things in the living room (which were equally engaging) but all about this painting, about two feet tall, with such beguiling depth and detail that I honestly had trouble working around it; it was so captivating. They have a sofa perpendicular to this thing and oh how I long to lie there in the evening and consider that painting.

Abstract art is such a difficult topic. It’s honestly hard for me to get “into” it because I think the openness of the genre (that “pfft I could do that!” feeling) has made room for a lot of stuff that is not good. And something being not good itself has been incorporated into the aesthetic, (What is “goodness” anyway? Who’s to say this is good and that is not?), so it’s sometimes hard to tell the blowhards from the curious explorers. And because of that, because of the pretentiousness of some painters I have known, and for many, many other reasons, I have to say anything Jackson Pollack flavored has always turned me off, because it’s just so hard (for me) to tell if the artist is trying hard or just, well, going through the motions. If you will.

(I should hasten to point out that I’ve never seen a Pollack in person. And also that I am glossing over a LOT about intent vs. result, pictures to look at vs. pictures to make a gut reaction vs. pictures to tell a story, skill vs. happenstance, training vs. talent, Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, polished fine artist vs. folk artist, artists painting for other artists vs. artists painting for an audience, relevance of painting in the 21st century, et cetra. Many other things. Come over for coffee or a glass of wine and we’ll paint the town red.)

(I should also point out that I love cubism and those “abstract” forms that take what one sees in life and plays with what can be seen. Illustration is, in a way, abstraction. It’s simplifying what you are seeing or dealing with and squeezing them down into something a bit more manageable, making the scene pleasing / dynamic / challenging to the viewer. I am clearly not voting for absolute stoic realism. It is not abstraction I am objecting to, it’s those paintings that don’t move you. For me that category becomes very wide. And I don’t think I’m alone.)

It had been well over a year since I’d painted anything on canvas, but seeing this painting made me get my messies out and tinker that very night. Because I’d seen that and thought: that’s wonderful. I feel like I can do that. I want to do that.

And it was interesting to try. Because no, as it turns out, I can’t do that.

Well no, that’s not true. I can apply paint to canvas and make layers and use colors and shapes and lines. But my method of doing this has become so different from the canvas-based method. I’m thinking of the base player in my Mom’s church choir who once brought his guitar during a particularly thin choir turn out during the summer. I remember being fascinated by his playing, because he didn’t strum chords. (And guitar mass is a pretty chord-strummy affair.) He would pick each note separately from the six strings. He played guitar just like he played base. I came to painting having drawn all my life, and for lack of any teaching I would often paint just like I draw. My technique is a bit more sophisticated than that now, but it’s still very much suited for the kind of thing I do, and not the kind of thing this unknown painter is doing.

A few days ago I stumbled upon Michelle Armas’ work, a lot of which is also refreshingly substantial. I was delighted to find she is doing her part to dispel that pfft I could do that feeling by posting a blog entry about the steps she goes through to make a painting. (Or, more specifically, how painting commissions work.) I love the way she talks about her process, the fact that she acknowledges the stopping, the stepping back, the self-evaluating. (A very, very important step. One of the key reasons why pfft... gets dispelled.)

Somehow her work, that blog entry, that painting I saw; it all has me thinking about interplay of colors, shapes, lines, spaces and all with a vividness I haven’t felt in a long time. I find myself scrutinizing with renewed attention the colors I see in all the flowers blooming in the neighborhood. My early morning crayon warm-ups have taken a much more gestural quality, and I’ve shifted from starting with sleepy contour lines of the tree out my window to scribbles of light color and experimenting with different colors and line thicknesses on top of that. None of it is worth sharing, but all of it starts my brain off on a good receptive direction. It ensures that I will remain a bit more hungry for Good Art Things all throughout the day.

It's these sorts of paintings that make my heart sing most. Paintings that without the use of any objects of any kind still manage to have me on my toes and squinting, getting lost in that sea of color and shape. Is it just the applicability of the picture-field? Like watching clouds? There's a shape, now there's another, or maybe it's something like this. Those choral pinks and teal-green colors make me feel a little edgy. But that pale grey-blue keeps it contained, I think. Isn't that strange how those greens drip but that one does not? It almost looks like a crowd waiting in line doesn't it? Oh really? It made me think of diving into an ocean. Maybe footprints. It's making me think of what we were talking about the other night, remember? Thinking about how things can never stay the same but always move into something else, away from where they are. You know what I mean?

These paintings. The catalysts. Paintings that engage, ignite, that encourage reaction. Paintings you'd want to explore for hours. Singing paintings. Canvas that says something. I'm waking up to these sorts of paintings again, and I'm glad.

.

2011-06-08T12:07:00.000-07:00

I don't think I mentioned this earlier, but the protagonist of the "what IS Cyborg Anthropology?" entry is actually someone who existed. I got hold of some genealogy papers a while back and became enamored with the old-timey photos of the various relations who sailed to America from Ireland. Many of them were very fun and plain looking in a dated way, and I used a few of them in some quickies that I posted to flickr. In particular:

Edmund John, son of

Mary-Anne Clarke.

"Edmund" has been a Wheelahan namesake ever since. I don't see Avonia here in my sketches, but I believe she was the same generation as Mary-Anne, also married into the family. I am very curious about her and of course there is little to go on. Avonia. That doesn't sound like an Irish name. Possibly where the gypsy blood came in?

At any rate, something about Mary-Anne's stern brow and frumpiness made her a natural for my cyborg-y explanation, because I needed someone who wasn't young and intimidating. She's done very well, so much so that we are letting her tell even more of her story.

You will not see that here because we will be releasing it as it's own booklet, which is terribly exciting to me. It also means I need to hurry up and finish the rest of it.

.

2011-06-02T07:50:00.000-07:00

This is a really trippy cell-phone-picture-collage of what my garden plot looks like right now. I regret that I didn't take a "before" picture, becuase it was pretty grim. It was basically the inspiration for this:

It's hard for me to remember to build neat little narratives from things I see in real life sometimes, particularly when things get intense and action, not reflection, is the order of the day. It's the 400 yard dash to the deadline here at Chez Kumquat, but nobody told the garden manager. Yesterday there was an email sent to everyone to say: remember, June 1st is the deadline to have your plot worked and weeded and mulched. Community gardening is very popular here, particularly in my neighborhood where everyone is keen to make a go of it. There is at present something like a five year waiting period to get into the garden I'm in, and so they are really trying to crack down on those who don't really work their plots much. For the next few days (and indeed for the rest of the summer) they will be monitoring the plots closely for lack of activity. Those who are clearly not putting in their 3-4 hours a week to keep things maintained will be given a five day shape-up-or-ship-out warning. Then all will be chopped up and reassigned.

It seems severe but there are some serious jungles in some of the plots right now. (MUCH more so than what mine was.) And it has contributed to the increase of invasive weeds and pest buildup and other bad things.

We are no where near this category of slackers but when you can't remember the last time you worked in the plot (it'd been weeks, certainly) and you get an email like this is really turns your skin. But fate stepped in and canceled my afternoon house yesterday, so I spent the time I would have been there in my rain jacket and mud getting things tip-top. The result is very satisfying. Onions are finally separated out and ready to grow, all greens look gorgeous (in fact, need some harvesting,) blueberries are heavy and waiting for the sun. Compost worked into the soil. All we need now are seeds and starts and we are in business.

.

2011-05-25T05:55:00.000-07:00

Things are ramping up to an insane scream here. I have plans for the next four weekends, and even for someone who plans her menus two weeks in advance this seems like a lot of scheduling. It is mostly geographic: I have to be here for that event, there for that event. There is also an unusual amount of stuff that remains unplanned, and indeed is unplannable because of circumstances beyond my control. (For instance: Anthony’s graduation is the second week of June and we still don’t know how many members of his family will be in attendance -- the number seriously changes every time we talk to them.) Separate to this there are a lot of art-related loose ends back stage, most of which are not fixable until I hear from other people.

To prevent the top of my head from coming off I have been knitting like crazy in the evenings. I took this picture Sunday night and I'd say the sweater is now about four inches longer than what is pictured up there. I am secretly hoping tp finish by the end of this week but I think that’s a bit ambitious. It's nice that even my down time right now is productive, it makes me feel less like I'm being blown about by all this uncertainty and more like I'm in control of something, even if it's just this string.

.

Pistachio

2011-05-20T18:32:00.000-07:00

Oh my dear, beautiful pistachio color. I wish I could remember how I arrived at you.

You were buried under so many other layers in my "muddy greenish stuff" space in the little pallet. But after the grey stuff in that square was used up in that street in that painting, now YOU have surfaced. I'm wondering where you've been all my life. You are different from that yellow-green color (though you maybe can't tell from this photograph). You are much richer in appearance. More subtle. You have Magic. Grey certainly, just a lingering whisper. Also possibly peach, lavender. You are benefiting from so many colors all mixed up. I know there's a yellow-green is the base -- the one I purely mixed though, not the one I tweaked from the bottle.

I used to mentally scoff at one of my art teachers who fastidiously made a color key every time she mixed a color, because she didn't always use the colors she mixed and she must have had hundreds of color keys she never used. And the most common colors ("white" skin tone especially) were mixed so often you quickly ceased to rely on the recipe. So much of it was flying blind anyway. One was always adding a touch of this, a touch of that, to get something to look just right for a particular project. So why bother?

Well. You bother for this very reason, right here. I am actually kind of bewildered now as I realize almost all of my colors on the pallet right now, while not straight up mixed from process yellow, red and blue (I am not nearly that talented), is all tweaked from what comes out of the bottle. Some of it I am not happy with, and am relieved that they are slowly disappearing. But some of the others, the major standbys, are dwindling and I have no idea how they got there.

And still others are like this gorgeous pistachio color. Serendipitous accidents that I will use everywhere until I can pinpoint the formula. And then I will write it down, so I don't lose it again.

.

Hyperbolic Geometry

2011-05-20T18:19:00.000-07:00

Euclidean geometry is all about the flat stuff; straight lines, triangles, and occasionally the radius-formulas in an idealized situation. It is Regular Geometry, the sort of math that got me excited only because it dealt with drawings, which was something I could see.

Those who are hardcore might move on to hyperbolic geometry, and learn about curvy things on curvy surfaces. I have primarily heard about this when trying to learn about black holes, becuase that always gets into space-time and Albert Einstein and all of these hypothetical things that my brain has a very hard time latching onto. A common visual is the planet earth heavily sitting on a grid, and the weight of the planet pulls the grid down around it. Which is what I was doodling when I realized that it reminded me of playing popcorn with those big parachutes at school.

I don't usually like to toot my own horn, but my I am proud of this one. This word was rather dubiously turned over to me, almost eluding explanation from my busy author who simply said, "just go watch my talk about it on youtube, I'm not really sure how to explain it."

It's cool, breeze. I got it.

.

2011-05-20T06:47:00.000-07:00

There is a friend-of-a-friend going through knee stuff -- stuff that makes my little procedure last year look tiny and insignificant. My friend is receptive so he gets lengthy reports, some of which get forwarded to me as I deeply empathize with a sad patella in a way that my friend probably does not. For a while I was drafting a book about what it means to be put back together, and how difficult getting back together truly is. Other projects have popped up and I'm very, very, grateful. But I gobble up these physical therapy reports because it's all good stuff, and I may yet come back to my knee book one day. It's in that stewing-place at the back-burner of my mind.

OTHER THINGS

I recently had a very rare thing happen: a book sent to me by a used-book person got lost in the mail. Amazon’s file-a-claim page is fairly straightforward, and features a cute little explanation of claim process in pictures. Reminds me of Ikea’s instructions, which are strictly pictures. At the beginning it always depicts your options if things are overwhelming:

A little guy looking at the instructions with a wavy mouth of concern. Is it confusing?

The same guy smiling on the phone, the phone with a little word bubble with an Ikea store inside. Don’t worry! Call us!

A guy trying to lift one side of a long horizontal object. Is it too heavy?

Two guys lifting the same horizontal object Don’t worry! Get a friend!

Pictures make it better.

.

Pictures and unrelated words

2011-05-19T09:07:00.000-07:00

SPEAKING OF NOTHING, LET’S LEARN TO SPELL THESE WORDS:

silhouette

refrigerator

simultaneous

miscellaneous

engine

fuchsia

conscience

conscientious

squirrel

Of these I can consistently spell “miscellaneous” correctly, because I used to work in classifieds and during the summer we transcribed a lot of garage sale ads. They were a package deal and had no real line limit, so we took great pleasure in spelling things out. I can also spell “fuchsia” correctly now because of Randall’s color test.

Last week (when updating the Supermodernity post) I had to google the phrase “give a little whistle” to confirm the spelling of “conscience”, which I used to know for sure because one can think of it as “con-science” and that’s fine. But I’d suddenly wondered if I had that tangle of letters mixed up with “conscientious” which is really not the same sort of word in modern usage. It is itself composed of letters that don’t seem to match up with the sounds. Kawn-chee-ehn-chus. “Con-” is fine, and “-tious” at the end is almost acceptable because of other adjectives that seem easier (luminous, pretentious). It’s that chee-ehn part that gets me. Must think of a clever way of remembering that...

Interdependance, or, one good turn diserves another

2011-05-11T06:24:00.000-07:00

For Easter I treated myself to an old sweater I'd found on etsy. It was one I had been eyeing for a LONG time, for the color and for the fact that it was not a strange shape that would be difficult to wear a jacket over, but seemed to be something a librarian would wear. If a bit frumpy. In a good way. I labored for a long time over this. I’m trying to learn to make sweaters after all, but something about this one called to me. When the shop owner marked down everything for a “moving sale” it seemed like fate.

The sweater is indeed frumpy, almost exceedingly so, but it is also beautiful and very well made. My learning-to-knit brain loves the different textures, the different types of stitches all running down, and the fact that there are smaller stitches around the cuffs so I can scoot the sleeves back gently and they stay put. It is made from a what is probably chiefly wool, though pre-blocking it feels a bit like that pink house insulation. However I only say this in comparison to my standby cardigan, which is made of almost...silky yarn and machine-made, therefore no real comparison at all.

The two biggest problems with the sweater were the lame buttons, which is a problem easily fixed.

Goodbye generic plastic buttons, hello beloved pearly buttons. I've found a home for you at last.

The other problem is this sweater has no pockets. And a heavy cardigan with no pockets is a drawback indeed if you constantly want a handkerchief at the ready, as I do. But! Now I can knit! So this means I can make pockets for the sweater! Knowledge is power!

Even without pockets I already get a lot of mileage out of this sweater despite the warming weather. Mornings are still a fairly chilly time, and I've been spending a lot of time next to the open window during my new morning activity: Stand At The Easel And Draw!

This easel is a cornerstone fixture in my making-things life, standing proudly at the window. When I found out I was moving into this particular apartment I set about building my art-making space from scratch. I was happy to see that the easel could at once benefit from the natural light of the window and the lamp light attached to the desk.

I used to do a lot more painting on canvas than I do now, so for the last couple years the easel has mostly just taken up prime real estate next to the window. Most of that time it's displayed a single painting/collage that I keep meaning to work on. We also used the easel last year during the philosophy class for Research Club, when we walked down to the river and Anthony essentially performed a famous lecture by Friedrich Nietzsche whilst I painted a portrait of him. (Of Neitzsche that is, not Anthony). Mostly though the easel just sits and waits. It has been niggling at me because I hate having something I don’t use, particularly something so big.

Separate to this I am having incredible difficulty staying seated and getting work done lately. I think it must have something to do with the gorgeous weather we are (finally) having. Once I am warmed up it is fine, but it’s that initial getting-focused part I struggle with. Particularly with this project, since so many things involve looking things up online. What does an old gas pump look like? Can I have a telephone wire with just one wire coming out? If I illustrate that concept this way, am I still basically on topic? How did she word that again?

Let’s solve the puzzle. I need to do a lot of drawing. I have:

a.) drawing-boards I take with me on outings

b.) an un-used easel by the window, and

c.) way too much energy for sitting.

Let’s see, how might we solve this problem?

Why, we could put a drawing board up on the easel of course!

Why this has not occurred to me before last week is anyone’s guess. The important thing is that it HAS occurred to me, and every morning since this connect-the-dots game I get up, make a thermos of coffee and stand at the easel and do warm-up doodles. Usually with crayons, which adds to the giddiness, and also helps me feel a lot less pent-up about letting go. No pressure -- you're not making Great Art here, you're just playing with crayons. It has made me feel ten times more productive, somehow. Because doing this opens up the drawing-things part of my brain and without meaning to my mind wanders into the puzzles I had worked on the previous day. And I wonder about them. And I get them out and put those up on the easel. And then I look at that color I'd been doodling with and wonder if that could work for that ziggurat. And just like that I'm working without realizing it.

To have a crayon in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other, next to an open window listening to the birdsong, feeling the cool spring air, and watching for the sunrise is (for me) about as close to nirvana as one could hope to get. And as luck would have it I've found a way to get there each and every morning, just by rearranging a few things.

And the only threat to this bliss was the bite of the morning air, but that was solved with that NEW SWEATER. Life is uncanny sometimes. I'm glad I get to be part of it.

.

2011-05-10T20:35:00.000-07:00

2011-05-04T07:51:00.000-07:00

The big rhododendron plant in front of my building is in full bloom right now. This hot pink color is one of my Aunt's favorite color, and it always makes me think of her.

I usually don't go in for pink personally, but I've noticed it mixes well with the teals and oranges I've been into lately, so it's cropping up all over the place.

(Though in this picture's light I admit it looks a bit more like red.)

Supermodernity

2011-04-29T08:35:00.000-07:00

I HADN'T ORIGINALLY INCLUDED THIS BIT, BUT MY CONSCIENCE HAS BEEN NIGGLING

"Globalization" is unquestionably loaded territory, especially from the perspective of those who have no control over it. I don't even mean in big socio-economic terms, I just mean in terms of things-we-can-make-art-with. For instance: I want native kora players to be able to use their music to be successful. But the first time I experienced a kora was a white guy who had one at a live music set in a gallery in Seattle, and if I hadn't, I would never have wanted native kora players to use their music to be successful. The lines between "pillaging", "colonization", "appropriation", "adoption", "attention", "interest" and "appreciation" are all muddled up for us these days, particularly in the first world. Or maybe they aren't and I just have 20th century baggage. It's hard to say.

"Supermodernity", for the cyborg anthropologist's purposes, is a much more 1970s one world kind of idea. At least, that's how I read it. It's Howard Shore choosing the hardingfele to make the sound of Rohan, out of any and all of the fiddle-like instruments in the world. It wants to mean that you can select anything that history has thought up thus far and use it to make something. I like making things, so I think that's ultimately a good thing. I just don't want people to assume that it means taking from others for ourselves. Because I don't think anything good could come from that.

.

2011-04-29T05:50:00.000-07:00

2011-04-28T08:45:00.000-07:00

I was on my way to the secondhand bookstore on the edge of Ladd's Addition last week and saw this tree, apparently growing pom-poms.

But no! The pom-poms are actually made up of tiny flowers.

It's the season of flowers, and I grow increasingly distracted by them.

Luckily they do offer a wealth of inspiration.

.

Knitting: slow and steady wins the race

2011-04-27T08:26:00.000-07:00

I actually haven't been working on this stuff much lately, because it is more important to work on other stuff. But unlike paint that gets dried out when you ignore it, or ideas that likely fly out of your brain, knitting waits for you patiently.

The biggest thing I have made is a rectangle, trying to gain consistency in my stitches, which is what the author of the sweater’s pattern recommended I do before I do something insane like attempt to take a sweater to completion as my first project. I’m not quite there yet. I am having yarn-tension issues, which I’m told is not unusual. You need stuff to stretch and move a certain amount so you can actually poke the needles into loops and push them around on the needle -- and this seems like a SURPRISING amount of movement, I might add. Particularly to a seamstress, since in the thread-and-fabric world looseness means eventual fraying and things that fall apart.

So but you don’t want things to be TOO loose, because then your stitches get wonky. There’s a lot of wonky stitches at the end of my little sampler here. Knitting works like zig-zags: you make stitches down along one row, and you turn around and head back, adding new stitches as you move along. And If you have a patch with wonky stitches, it doesn’t seem to...un-wonky, but instead your subsequent stitches in that area are in turn just as wonky as the existing stitches. Wonkiness grows. I’m sure there’s a way to pull things from other places and tighten up enough at the base of the wonkiness and make the wonkiness cease, but I haven’t yet found the correct places. And anyway mostly this exercise is to get a rhythm going, which I am told is the easiest way to avoid wonkiness in the first place. Stellar.

I should also point out that all of the stitches in that picture? They're supposed to be all going in the same direction. That is, I'm not going for ribbing. I'm not sure why it's ribbing. This is another reason I'm still at the swatch-and-rip phase.

Fortunately I LOVE ripping out stitches. It’s so quick compared to seam-ripping a sewing project, where you must take a tiny tool and sever nearly every little tiny threaded stitch. Ripping out knitted stuff just means removing the stick and pulling. Done. I don’t mind all this practice. I’ve knitted, pulled apart, knitted, pulled apart many, many rectangles at this point. I’m sure I’ll love it less when I have to rip out parts of the real project, but you know. Now it’s sunny out. And again, I have seven months until the weather gets cool enough for this particular sweater. No worries.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that while I don’t really have my knitting creation down, my comprehension has suddenly seen a MAJOR improvement. I KNOW about knitting, and all of the sweaters I see anywhere have a new fascination.

I know how cables are made, what the difference between the v-shaped stitches and the brick-and-mortar looking ones are. (Those v-shapes actually take TWO kinds of stitching! What!) I can look and see whether the creator dropped a needle size (or two!) to tighten up the cuff’s ribbing, or if they just left it alone, or just gave up and did a bind-off without making cuffs at all.

It's like I'm learning a language and I've reached that moment where I can pick words out of a cloud of speech. I know some key words and phrases. Now I need to start stringing them together and making sentences.

2011-04-21T16:10:00.000-07:00

I've had a bottle of frisket -- a masking liquid especially designed for us water-based painters -- for probably six months now, but today was the first time I'd ever used it. I'd used frisket back in high school and bought this bottle when I saw it on sale somewhere. Just in case. You're supposed to be able to place it down, paint all around it, and then rub it off leaving clever white space. Considering my deep pulsing love of white space you'd think I'd use it all the time, but the kind of detail I need is a little more dexterous than my goopy frisket can manage. I could thin it a bit with water I guess. Frisket also ruins brushes so I'd have to sacrifice one of my nimble thin ones, and I go through those quickly enough without all that. So I usually just eyeball the white space, connecting the invisible lines where I need them to be. A bit more brain-strain and sweating, but that does mean I have a bit more flexibility with my white space.

I don't use pencil lines when I paint. I've never been able to satisfactorily erase pencil out from under yellow or other lighter colors without smudging or making them completely gone. I don't even sketch with pencil actually. I tend to draw with a pen -- a particular kind of pen that I really ought to start buying in bulk or looking for refills online. And then I just take a blank sheet of heavy paper and just go for it.

This is a fairly brash way to go about things, and when I first started doing things this way I wasted a LOT of time trying to figure out how. But at this point it's just the way I work and seems natural.

Which is a good thing, since I've a table full waiting to be finished.

Pronoia

2011-04-20T05:16:00.000-07:00

That sneaking suspicion (or in this case, full-blown belief and understanding) that the universe is plotting to make you happy or do you a good turn.

I don't suffer from this so much as revel in it.

.

Continuous as the stars that shine

2011-04-18T07:29:00.000-07:00

I was off to Eugene for the weekend, a quick getaway from the GO! GO! GO! rhythm I've had for a while now. It was exactly what I needed.

It's always a good drive, but this time of year it's especially rewarding. There's all kinds of WEATHER blowing around us here in the Northwest, and it's fun to drive through the various phases and leave them behind. It's also lamb season, so the stretch of I-5 past Albany was filled with the usual woolly blobs accompanied by much smaller woolly blobs -- some so tiny it seemed as though they could hardly reach mama's milk.

I also noticed (to my delight!) that daffodils speckled the roadside for almost the entire journey. I can't remember if I've seen them there like that in previous springs. Last spring I wasn't doing much driving, and I suppose the year before I was too busy with my new job to notice? But how could you not notice row after row of happy waving faces like that? Who planted them? I like thinking of some troupe of farmers taking it upon themselves to pretty up the corridor. Or did the flowers get there all by themselves? How do daffodils spread their bulbs? They come from bulbs after all, not seeds. Or do they? I will have to look into this.

Dorothy wrote in her journal: "When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side. We fancied that the lake had floated the seeds ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing." (From The Writer's Almanac, 4/15/10.)

Eugene was healing for all the usual reasons, but this time we also took a quick rainy stroll through the woods to look at this downed tree Anthony had been talking about, and from there we sat on a wet log over some rushing water.

This is but a gesture, a thumbnail sketch. If I had the time to show you, I would paint it as it truly was; each individual leaf dancing and crisply clear under the dripping canopy of that enchanted wood. But the little flowers were there, part of some other nearby blooming tree. We saw them from the ground and got to climb up through them, almost worth the journey all on its own. There was moss all over the log, which was slick to walk on and squishy to sit on. But also wonderful.

We were quickly soaked through to the skin but we didn't let that worry us. Rainy Saturday adventures are not the time to stay warm and dry. It was too beautiful be worried about such trivialities. We stopped picking daintily over puddles and boggy grass almost as soon as we stepped off the sidewalk. We just squished along and felt all the better for it.

Cyborg Anthropology: an introduction

2011-04-12T17:09:00.000-07:00

***
People who don't know Amber Case -- and/or people who can't really be bothered to read a lot of text about a foreign topic -- keep asking me what in the world this cyborg thing is all about. What IS cyborg anthropology? Well...it's hard to explain that without simply deferring someone to the TED talk or to the pre-order page for the book, but that's not very fair for the timid-yet-inquisitive-mind.

And let's face it, a lot of text is a bit intimidating to start with.

In an effort to take away the intimidating -- which is in fact always job one for me -- I put this little introduction together. This is by no means exhaustive, or else people like Amber couldn't devote her life to it. But for us not-techy-people it might be a nice soothing step into a new idea.

***

I am a human, this is a robot.

We are not the same.

I have organs that nature made, he has wheels and nobs that I made.

I feel warm to the touch, he feels cool to the touch.

I have desires, he waits for input.

We are not the same.

But we are friends, and we help each other.

I get lost, he helps me find my way.

He gets hungry, I feed him.

I create beautiful ideas, he shares them with those I love.

He finds wonderful facts, I incorporate them into my thoughts.

As time goes on I find I have more robot friends.

They help me talk to my other human friends, who live far away.

My human friends and I help the robots become more familiar with our human ways.

But does that mean I’m becoming a robot?

Does that mean he’s becoming a human?

I don’t think so.

But, I’m different than my Uncle Bill, he does not have many robot friends.

Maybe that’s why some people call me a cyborg.

But, tiny robots help Uncle Bill hear me when I speak to him.

So maybe that’s why some people think he could be a kind of cyborg too.

***

To think more about this conversation, you are probably ready to go and visit the website all about cyborg anthropology.

.

2011-04-12T07:19:00.000-07:00

I have lots of things to tell you about the little weekend trip we took a few weeks ago. There are so many neat things I saw, felt, thought about. Alas, time is getting on, and though my memories are not fading, they are getting pushed behind the deadline, the other things I want to think about.

It just kills me that I can’t paint this stuff right now. I have colors picked out in my mind, I have things that we saw and felt that no one took pictures of. I have nice reference photos of boats. I have all these things screaming to break through, but instead, for now, I have to stay in the world of robots and brains.

And that's fine, it's good in a much different way.

And in the meantime I can show you these. I can say that we learned a LOT about lighthouses. We saw fat cats and seagulls and thought about the rain.

And lights that break through the rain.

.

2011-04-11T17:08:00.000-07:00

This is my submission for "famous machine."
Though I think for me it's going to be a bit broader than that.

The waters are unusually choppy for a lot of people I know right now. For all kinds of reasons. It's hard to know what to do for people when they are struggling, particularly when you are far away from them -- geographically or mentally.

I often wish for a machine like this, not to make fame but to make happiness. Contentment.

Alas, you cannot find happiness for someone else. As Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes in Flow: the psychology of Optimal Experience: "...to do so would be impossible ...since a joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe."

(Also: I would love to find out how to pronounce that guy's name.)

.

Cyborg Security

2011-04-09T15:43:00.000-07:00

Right? You're happily chugging along, and with one fell swoop, you are cut out of the cloud.

And everyone you know has a badly written email about foreign bank accounts.

Reading about this article obviously took me back to when this very thing happened to me. It's such a weird phenomenon. One morning you wake up and you have a sort of digital-self-amnesia. You still know your old passwords of course -- why wouldn't you? You type them over and over again so many times. But they are no longer valid. So you have to make news ones, and the effort it takes to remember them has been, for me, excruciating.

I was not nearly as diligent as people ought to be when it comes to cycling passwords and keeping things difficult to guess. I had a few stock ones, and I'd used them since the very beginning of my online interest, in Middle School. I'd typed them so often I often forgot how they were spelled, forgot what words they were based on. The passwords were just muscle-memory, certain fingers moving to certain keys. They were that rhythm of sounds it made when I'd type them. If I'd miss-typed something I'd know from the sound alone. They were made before passwords needed to include numbers or above-the-number-key symbols, before password fields were case sensitive. A flurry of fingers, and I was on my merry way.

So now these conditions have been placed on my various passwords, "secret questions" have been provided so that I can retrieve my passwords if need be, and my surfing world is a lot more choppy, staggered and inhibited.

(As an aside: I have the greatest respect for those application which allow one to write their own security questions. My mother's maiden name? That's easy to look up. But a sentence that harkens back to an inside joke or refers to a real memory? Very, very few people will know the "real" answer to a question framed around something like that, and those people tend not to be the sorts of people who want to go after my online bank account.)

It's good I suppose, to be this careful, but it's also kind of a pain. I usually leave myself logged into to key sites that I use often, and when do have to eventually log back in there's lots of conscious effort and hard work where once there was but reflexive action. I still type my old passwords more often then not and then have to be sent to the "no, dummy" page to try again.

It's like having Alzheimer's. I'm suddenly very bad at remembering something that used to be as easy as breathing.

*

Quick knitting update: the cat's out of the bag

2011-04-09T09:18:00.000-07:00

This isn't exactly how I found the cat yesterday afternoon, but it was something pretty close.

My cat spent the first two years of his life mousing on a farm and running around with the farm dogs. But he was raised by humans, as his mother was killed by a car before his litter was weened. I think it's largely because of this he's been able to adjust so well to his new life with me.

Now he lives with me in a studio apartment, resolutely indoors. That's a big change, and he has actually adjusted extremely well. He does have a lot of energy though, and so he needs projects. Chasing things is okay, but really what he wants is to tear something apart. To kill things. Thus the torn up cardboard boxes and tiny bits of paper you'll find all over the floor if you come to my apartment. Thus the egg cartons I keep in a big drawer in the kitchen. Thus the paper receipts crumpled into little balls in my pockets.

His aggression is purely towards tiny things. His remains terrified of the Giant Stuffed Sheep, who sits nicely atop the basket filled with yarn. He also bares no aggression towards humans. We had a traumatizing visit to the vet's office back in December, and though he was more afraid than I've EVER seen him, he never once so much as raised a paw to the strangers holding him and doing things to him.

.

2011-04-03T13:51:00.000-07:00

Today I painted simultaneous time. Or my impression of what that could be. That inability to focus on one thing.

Then I painted synesthesia, a word I can finally spell because of this assignment.

And now I may well go drive to McMinville and visit the ice cream parlor with the self-playing piano, just because I can. A Sunday sundae.

.

Knitting: the gathering storm

2011-04-02T16:53:00.000-07:00

Because my interest in knitting is strictly practical, it was essential to find the right yarn. My sweater dreams were all in a color I cannot find in commercial sweaters right now, new or used: a warm hunter-green. A brownish-green-that-is-still-resolutely-green. The sort of green that makes me feel like a rock star.

I also wanted a fair amount of play in the color, if possible. I wasn't after strict flatness and sameness. Really I'd like to work up to handspuns and funkier stuff later on, but this is my first. And what I really needed was something with eveness so I could see the stitches I was making. I also needed something that wouldn't dissolve as I wear it. Machine washable, ideally.

I got one ball of yarn and some of the needles at the Yarn Garden, which is a quick springtime stroll from my apartment. I was a little panicked that they only had one ball in the EXACT color (and weight, and wash-ability, etc.) I needed, but Knit-Purl downtown had nine balls so I bought the last few from them. I still need some needles as it turns out, and may need to exchange one of my tethered round needles (it turns out knitting-in-the-round is fairly supply heavy,) but in the meantime me and Stitch 'n Bitch are learning on some thick string and chopsticks.

Last night I learned to cast-on! I would cast on about 7 stitches, rip it out, do it again. I will do it a few more times, away from the book at weird times during the day before I move on to the next page, where I'll learn to actually knit. It was very warm yesterday and I realized that by the time I really get going with this it may no longer be heavy sweater weather. But the way I see it, this just means I have about seven months to get it done. No sweat. No worries. Hurry hurry ruins curry.

.

Persistant Architecture

2011-04-02T16:23:00.000-07:00

I'm not quite in this boat, but I know a lot of people who are. We're living in the future. Where's my jet-pack?

.

The Importance of Being Earnest

2011-03-30T13:06:00.000-07:00

Occasionally as I'm working I'll pull up a recent painting, just to set the tone. Today it's been this one, which is the latest thing I've finished for the Cyborg Project. I am up to my elbows in notes, reading things about Flow and Interaction Design (.pdf), watching my favorite TED talk that mention synesthesia, and trying to figure out what a jet pack should look like. Heavy stuff, sort of.

In the background I'm still thinking about knitting, starting the painting that I'm going to sneak into that last entry, thinking about Why People Ought To Do Things. Mostly it always boils down to: people can. We get kind of tripped up in adolescence and start thinking we can't do things.

I'm not talking about big things, just little things. People say things like, "I can't draw," people with fingers and hands and arms and adequate access to paper and pens. It's strictly untrue.

Of course they can. They're just self conscious and won't. But I wish they would. I don't think it's good for a person to limit themselves, and I also think that things like drawing, singing, messing around with dough or clay, jumping...all those things we did in preschool or as children are really valuable still. It contributes to How To Live Fully.

I was thinking about all this when I received an email from a friend. I'd told her earlier that she'd been in my dream last night, wearing a skirt made of that poly-fill stuff (that cottony mess that comes in a plastic bag at the fabric store), and that we'd talked about weird-shaped dogs.

She sent me this in response:

So now THIS is up on my monitor, becuase it makes me unbelievably happy. Pictures help. Everybody should draw pictures.

.

On top of everything, I want to learn to knit

2011-03-29T23:56:00.000-07:00

Winston Churchill wrote a tiny little book that I think will be my stock birthday gift from here on out until all of my friends have a copy. I had no idea I liked Winston Churchill -- though I'm partial to orators -- but when I picked up this book by chance in a bookshop in Berkeley I knew we'd be firm friends.

Many remedies are suggested for the avoidance of worry and mental over-strain by persons who, over prolonged periods, have to bear exceptional responsibilities and discharge duties upon a very large scale. Some advise exercise, and others, repose. Some counsel travel, and others, retreat. Some praise solitude, and others, gaiety. No doubt all these may play their part according to the individual temperament. But the element which is constant and common in all of them is Change.

Change is the master key. A man can wear out a particular part of his mind by continually using it and tiring it, just in the same way as he can wear out the elbows of his coat. There is, however, this difference between the living cells of the brain and inanimate articles: one cannot mend the frayed elbows of a cost by rubbing the sleeves or shoulders; but the tired parts of the mind can be rested and strengthen, not merely by rest, but by using other parts. It is not enough merely to switch off the lights which play upon the main and ordinary field of interest; a new field of interest must be illuminated.

He goes on to maintain that the mind will go on working no matter how hard you try to rest it. I think anyone who has ever dreamed of work will sympathize. No, "just" resting isn't good enough for your brain. It wants activity. The thing to do, to rest the parts that are tired, is to use different parts by focusing on a completely different activity. By having hobbies.

Churchill weighs merits of common hobbies like reading, which he says is good, but:

1. Reading-as-leisure can lead to that dread of knowing you will never read ALL there is to read.

2. To truly enliven a new part of the mind one would need to learn another language, and master it enough to read in it. (He actually heartily recommends this.)

3. If it's anything similar to your real work doesn't really count.

Me? Well. One could argue I don't need another hobby. I cook and bake. I make quilts, napkins, lunchbags and other things on the sewing machine. I am an eggheady naturalist, and can identify a bewildering variety of animals and birds. And of course, above all else, I go on adventures. Maybe I'm just Greedy For Activities. That's fair. But in order for real mental repose one must do something one does not initially know how to do. And then master it as best one can.

Churchill chose painting.

As I cannot choose "British minister" or even "influential political orator", I have (without strictly meaning to) chosen knitting this time.

To explain: my usual clothing regimen is button up shirt+sweater, in most all weathers. (Luckily I live in drizzly Bridgetown, which is only summery for 3.5 months of the year.) I am frightfully picky about both items which saves me from buying too many things. But in this weird transitional period of weather where I am both hot and cold in the same day, when all the new colors peep out of the ground and my activities change from Resolutely Indoors to Let's Get Some Air Into Those Lungs, I sometimes get the dragon-sickness and desperately search around for new clothes. And this time was particularly aggravating for some reason, because I tend to look for colors or shapes independent of what is actually available. And the available options at present are, for me, not options. I layer. I am hard on clothes. I need something that will last for many years. I need something I can wear under a jacket without needing to fold up weird flappy sleeves, I need something that will actually keep me warm. Something I can mend when it starts to get shabby. Et cetera. I'm insufferable.

I had a similar problem last summer when I could not for the life of me find button up shirts with short sleeves that were long enough. (What? I know, I know. But see, most girl short sleeved button-ups have ridiculous capped sleeves, or else just end abruptly at the thickest part of the arm, and I find such sleeves grotesque.) I solved this problem by converting some of my beloved-yet-not-often-worn 3/4 length sleeved shirts (those false-roll-up type shirts). I cut off an inch or two of fabric, hemmed them, et voila! Suddenly the shirts were wearable and beloved.

The sweater problem is not a matter of conversion, it's a matter of creation. Somewhere along my feverish searching quest I found a knitting pattern that was absolutely spot on. It was like a match being struck in the dark. I went from never having the slightest inkling of putting needle to yarn to knowing that I would be making a sweater. This sweater. And that by doing that I would open the door to many, many other makable things.

*

The prospect of the veil of ignorance being lifted is incredibly thrilling. Think of the possibilities! Why suffer the anguish of losing a favorite garment or accessory on vacation when you can merely make another just like it? How many times have we looked at that favorite pair of pants, just before it disintegrates, and think, if only I could clone you. Then life would be perfect.

But also think of the modifications! I like that sweater but wish it came down to here, not here. I wish this color came in a v-neck instead of a crew neck. Why doesn't anyone make a decent sweater vest anymore? These are but piffley details from the knitter's privileged perspective.

Today for the first time I went into a yarn store. As with fabric and art supplies, there's something thrilling in being around raw materials, especially in this giddy mindset I am in right now. I can MAKE something with this stuff!

Add to this my big illustration project making me particularly aware of every fine detail there is ever to be seen. Add to that my scouring the internet just before, thinking a lot about yarn and what makes different textures and trying to gauge homespun consistencies through a monitor. What a joy it was to pick up a skein and feel it in my hands! I felt so fortunate to be able to reach out and TOUCH this stuff.

Of course it must be said: this kind of empowered thinking would not be possible without the volumes of knowledge available at ravelry, where hundreds of people have already made the sweater I'm about to attempt.

*

If anything I am feeding these starry-eyed sentiments by noticing each and every detail of the journey and taking it slow. This way, when I really do push off into the choppy seas of Really Beginning, the wonder will sufficiently carry me through the storms of disappointment. It took me many, many attempts to make the cloth lunch bag I use every single day. Retracing steps, struggling, taking it slow does not really daunt me. I may be singing a different tune a few weeks from now, but for now I am just awash with excitement.

Just LOOKING at the ball of yarn in the basket next to me makes me terribly, terribly excited.

.

2011-03-29T20:36:00.000-07:00

This weekend I stole away to what turns out to be something of a seaside icon here in Oregon: the Sylvia Beach Hotel.

It's worth every bit of its somewhat secretive reputation. It was incredible in every way. I sort of want to live there.

This was my first stay at the coast itself. I've camped near the coast -- in the bushy undergrowth where the seaside campsites are -- but not really on the coast itself. Certainly not at the beach. I don't think it would be wise to camp out on the sands of the beach, whatever the weather. And in March the Oregon coast is really not all that inviting.

Not to say that we had rain the WHOLE time. But we had a lot of it.

This though. This was delightful.

To sit in the northwestern window of the reading room, tea at my elbow, sun almost too warm on my feet, looking out over a beach-full of people to Yaquina Head lighthouse. It was nice out there -- sunny and mild-looking. But it was even nicer to be indoors, under a blanket in an armchair.

And the nicest thing of all was we had several days out there. So instead looking at the ocean all day long only to have a wearisome two-to-four-hour-drive-home, we got to stay.

.

2011-03-24T17:41:00.000-07:00

Before my sketchbook project sketchbook went to SXSW, it lived in the Brooklyn Art Library for a few weeks.

Based on the photo on the Art Library's website I figured a similar set-up would be in place on the tour. Quiet shelves filled with a myriad of books from a myriad of people from a myriad of countries. And a long table with identical chairs on either side of it, where one could casually pick up a book and flip through it and look for another. I imagined browsing.

As it turns out the operations is a lot more controlled than that. Think restaurant rather than buffet. And it's probably better that way, as I believe there are well over 23,000 books in the project. You arrive, make a library card, and request a specific notebook and then get to spend some real quality time with it.

The only snag of course is that I have to work harder to get people to go see it at all when it's out in the world.

The next stop is: March 30-April 2, 2011

Portland, ME
SPACE Gallery
538 Congress Street 
Portland, ME 04101

My sketchbook isn't particularly exhilarating because there's a LOT of unfinished pages in it. But it's mine, which may be reason enough for some people. It also has some prototypes of pictures I have painted for the cyborg book, which might be interesting. (The grocery store line in particular is a key sequence in the sketchbook.)

Also, if you go and see it in Portland I will know that you did because I will get a little email about it, and if you also send me a note telling me your address I will send you a postcard thanking you. And that would be neat. Portland to Portland, with love.

.

2011-03-21T19:17:00.000-07:00

2011-03-21T08:10:00.000-07:00

The following is a list that was on the fridge of one of my housecleaning clients a long time ago. It's from a local natural-and-Chinese-medicine office.

I don't know the underlying reasons behind some of these items, but literature directed towards health and wellness is one of my very favorite things in the whole world. So one day I came armed with paper and pen and copied the list down. And now I'll share it with you.

Basic Treatment Guidelines for Optimal Health.

Note: The client's copy had amounts or checkmarks next to some items, to reflect the practitioner's individual recommendations. These presumably did not reflect anyone else's recommendations, so many have been omitted or replaced with a variable.

Routine:

Establish a routine around eating, sleeping, exercise and other daily activities. Doing these at the same time daily will encourage optimal health by regulating internal cycles within your body.

Sleep:

Go to sleep between [x-y pm] for 8-9 hours a night in complete darkness.

Breathe:

Deep belly breaths. Take [100] conscious breathes per day.

Exercise: [x] at least [x] minutes a day, [x] days a week.
- Move all of your muscles every day.
- Ideally movement exercise is outdoors.
- Examples: walking, hiking, yoga, qi gong, biking, join a sports team.

Dietary Guidelines:
- Eat organic, fresh, or unprocessed foods whenever possible.
- Try to stick to seasonal fruits and vegetables and include many bright colors and dark leafy greens.
- Try to make half your plate veggies at every meal; preferably steamed.

Include: [protein at every meal]
Avoid: [x]

Ground seed rotations:
- [2] TBSP ground flax/pumpkin seeds daily:
new to full moon (or day 1 - 14 of menses)
- [2] TBSP ground sesame/sunflower seeds daily:
Full to new moon (or day 15 until menses)

EFA:
[1 TBSP] cod liver oil 1x/day, new to full moon (or day 1 - 14 of menses)
[2] EP oil 2x/day, Full to new moon (or day 15 until menses)

Water: Drink at least [60 oz] every day.

Proper Food Hygiene:
Before a meal:
- Prepare body for food intake by smelling foods
- Apple Cider Vinegar - 1 tsp in a little water 15-20 minutes before each meal
[bitters 15 drops 15-30 minutes prior meal]

During meal:
- Chew each bite of food 30 times before swallowing.
- Avoid drinking during meals.
- avoid other activities and stressful stimulation (TV, Computer, Reading, Tense Conversation). Instead, try and eat with people and carry on a low key conversation.

Hydrotherapy:
- end shower with cold water rinse for 30-60 seconds. Begin at extremities and end at lower back to draw blood back into vital internal organs.
- Epsom salt bath: place [x] cups epsom salt into bath of [x] water.

- Dry skin brushing:
using a dry loofah or natural sponge, lightly brush skin using short strokes toward the heart. Begin at extremities and move inward. Best done before bed or before shower.

Remedies to support wellness: (a litany of homeopathic tinctures)

Additional Recommendations: [Almond butter or nuts before bed]

Play outside daily and have fun!!

.

Mundane Studies

2011-03-19T14:55:00.000-07:00

Which are NOT mundane, not really.

Nothing is truly mundane, if you really look.

.

2011-03-15T16:59:00.000-07:00

As if I haven't enough to worry about, now I'm reading up on the singularity.

I feel less doomy about this one though, probably because I'm a Hobbit and focus most of my time on those things that happen to people on the surface of the earth. I'm sure my technologically minded friends feel much differently about this.

I'm also comforted to learn that Deep-Blue, the computer that bested the world's greatest chess player, was hurriedly dismantled by IBM and is now broken into two halves -- one half is on display at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., the other at the Computer History Museum in California.

When humans achieve something great we encourage them to do more great things, we throw confetti, we give them gifts, and we exchange their privacy for fame. But we don't make them stand in a museum for the rest of time -- we make a wax replica for that.

.

2011-03-14T18:31:00.000-07:00

I drew this shortly after hearing about the devastation in Japan on the radio, and being so incredibly touched by Naoto Kan's (albeit translated) words: "We ask the people of Japan to exercise the spirit of fraternity and act fast and to assist one's family and neighbors."

Keep calm, carry on, and help your brothers and sisters. It was a strong ray of courage in the face of so much bad, and I clung to it as a drowning man might.

It was also drawn so I could keep the facts straight. My mother is on jury duty and therefore under oath to avoid and and all news sources, so she had no idea this was happening.

Of course at this point there are additional details that are missing. Like the leaking and explosion at the nuclear sights, and the dead bodies washing up on shore. These are details I haven't had the courage to tell her yet, though she must be told soon that deaths have already been estimated around ten thousand.

Ten thousand.

I still haven't even seen any real footage of the event to be honest.

I'll get there.

I'm working up to it.

Otherwise, I'm speechless.

Except when I get home and assemble what I've heard on the radio, and report to my Mom.

.

Playground as factory

2011-03-14T09:10:00.000-07:00

I have always been wary of those activities which are finite games and cost money. They taste futile. They can have an addictive nature, a small circle of pay, play, pay, play, pay. And as you do it, someone gets your money. Or your sellable statistics as a consumer.

2011-03-12T21:13:00.000-08:00

"And then you see it going through the blackness of space, the utter void of space, and every astronaut and cosmonaut has the same reaction when they first get up there. It's you want to put your arms around this little planet that we all live on and protect it. And it's - everybody has that same feeling."

Capt. Mike Coats, director of the Johnson Space Center in Houston said this on the radio this morning.

.

Paracosmic Immersion

2011-03-12T15:45:00.000-08:00

Sketchbook tour begins!

2011-03-12T09:17:00.000-08:00

If you find yourself in or around Austin, TX for the SXSW festivities this week, I would love it if you visited the Austin Museum of Art to browse around the 2011 Sketchbook Project Tour.

I really can't give you a good way to find mine by sight, it's shamefully blank on the outside. But it's in the theme Boys and Girls, and maybe they'll have them categorized by theme? I'm from Portland and turned mine in only JUST in time, if they have them organized by turn-in date or place of origin. My last name is "Nichols" but of course it may also be under the name "Simply Kumquat", if they're arranged by name.

If you go and see it, please get in touch with me and let me know your impressions of the set-up there. My first opportunity to see the show won't be until June 10-12 when it hits Seattle, and even then that's really close to a friend's wedding and Anthony's graduation. So I'm hoping I can go see it. But until then I'm relying on your descriptions. Don't leave me hanging!

March 12, 2011 / 12:00-6:00pm
Austin Museum of Art
823 Congress Ave
Austin, TX

March 13th, 2011 / 12:00-6:00pm
29th St Ballroom at Spider House
2906 Fruth St
Austin, TX

On being utterly ensconced

2011-03-10T20:57:00.000-08:00

I am so deep in this book project right now that I've scarcely time to do anything else.

That's good, mind you. I really enjoy it. I get really into a project as stimulating as this one and don't have much trouble focusing. I am able to budget once a week off of the cleaning time. Today was one of those. My art-only days. They are usually 10-12 hour days solid painting -- the bulk of the work gets done then. The composing and sketching and blocking. Nothing but audiobooks, radio, podcasts, music, tea (LOTS of tea) and painting, with occasional breaks for a quick bite here and there.

The rest of the working week it's paint for 1.5-2 hours, clean houses for 3-6 hours, then back home for about 3-5 hours of painting time. Those days finishing or beginning is what gets done, as well as a lot of the other things that slip by on the full painting days. (Like washing the dishes or cooking batches of rice.) On these days I bring little slips of paper around with me in the car that say things like: Think about: what machine wants? and I have my sketches and the drawing board, in case I think of anything.

This is really more or less what I usually do anyway. The difference here is I'm in full-on Production Mode all the time, and not the usual ebb and flow that working on your own has. Right now I'm chasing after ideas with a butterfly net, rather than sitting under a tree waiting for ideas to come to me.

The consequences are subtle. The butterfly net method uses a lot more energy than the tree-sitting method, so I also am trying hard to keep rigidly to my schedule of up-at-five-thirty-to-bed-with-a-book-no-later-than-nine. This estranges one from one's peers. Especially since I work pretty much ALL the rest of the time, with the notable exception of weekends. I still try and have weekends free of project work, though I end up getting other projects done then: making bread, organizing stuff, culling things to Make Room For Anthony, writing emails to people explaining why I haven't been talking to them.

I suspect this is how people get a reputation for being "reclusive," though in my case it's not so much eschewing people and their good company, but it's more like having an inner clock set to a different time zone, and burning passionately for all the wonderful things there are to do. Lately I've been looking up hikes I want to go on once the weather clears. Garden time is looming there in the horizon and soon I'll have even more to do.

It's all good stuff and I enjoy it immensely. I find solitude incredibly productive.

.

Rhizome

2011-03-10T13:25:00.000-08:00

2011-03-06T17:33:00.000-08:00

I saw this the other afternoon. It had been raining heavily all day and at the very moment of sunset the sun powered through, turning the sky an impossible warm color. Rainbow time. From my window I could see a complete unbroken rainbow.

I brought my tea to the window to watch. As I sat there a huge group of seagulls flew underneath the rainbow, looking unreal against all the moody darkness. It was amazing.

.

Anomie

2011-03-04T16:47:00.000-08:00

People forget sometimes that we are all a big mass of humanity.

More often it feels kind of lonely here on earth.

.

Satisfice

2011-03-04T16:39:00.000-08:00

Friends, don't just settle for the knee-jerk answer you get on your first Google search.

No.

Retain that hunger to dig deeper.

.

Ambient intimacy

2011-03-03T22:20:00.001-08:00

This phase of my life is soon coming to an end.

Sort of. Because Anthony is really much more social than I ever will be.

And we also do not always keep the same hours. I am the only person I know my age that happily wakes before dawn, whereas Anthony's non-profit hours last summer were something like 2pm-10pm. (Two o'clock! In the afternoon! To put this in perspective: I would usually have drawn for several hours, eaten two meals and cleaned a house before he'd even wake up.) My "stop working" alarm goes off at 8pm and I usually turn in soon thereafter. But of course Anthony would wrap late and his non-profiteers would head to the fabulous dive bar just across the street.

We actually fell into a perfectly pleasant routine. Several nights a week he would come home, eat something and visit for a bit -- he buzzing with post-work energy, me just barely hanging onto consciousness. Then I would select a bedtime story and Anthony would read it to me, tuck me in, give me a goodnight kiss and head out to the bar. Perfect. I got my sleep, he got his social time. Incongruent harmony.

So this is the image I thought of when I read about "ambient intimacy", which is something our robots create for us. The option of connecting with someone who may not even be physically in the same space. (Amber talks about it in her TED talk).

It sounds chilly and alienating until you remember that sometimes it's also a Godsend.

Life keeps happening to us both in two different cities. Anthony goes to lectures, classes, sees things in the library, hangs out with people I know, or sees a strange cloud in the sky. Meanwhile in Portland I finish pictures, go to Research Club things, watch movies, learn things, notice weird plants in the garden. We can still hold virtual hands and pass virtual notes to each other, and give lengthy reports on the state of things where we are, what we are doing, seeing, thinking or feeling, and in doing so we add an additional dimension to our combined experience on the planet.

(Getting a bit mushy up in here!)

Mostly: Long distance? It's hard.

But it's a LOT less hard these days, with the internet and cellphones and things to bring you as close as can be. It has certainly made this chapter of my life easier. It's the reason I can sincerely say "it isn't ideal," rather than "I can't stand it," when people ask me about it.

.

Prosthetic culture

2011-03-03T21:51:00.000-08:00

We tend to lump prosthesis into a "fix the inadequacy" category, but I think it behooves us to be a bit broader about it. Prosthesis covers a wide range of ability-enhancers. They extend possibility.

For some that means having legs where there are no legs. But for some it means having webbed feet and the ability to breathe underwater.

The warm feelings that guided my thinking here originally came from Aimee Mullin's TED talk. It was nice to think about it again for this project.

.

Robots!

2011-03-02T18:23:00.000-08:00

Can't go wrong with robots.

.

2011-03-02T06:56:00.000-08:00

The latest finished thing for the Dictionary of Cyborg Anthropology. Asynchronous communication. Or, messages you have to wait for.

We've had this concept in our world ever since we started posting letters. Probably earlier. Messages run from the king of one country to another, town criers, carrier pigeon. Smoke signals. Tribal drums. Signs in the forest.

Even these days unless you are right there in person you don't really get true back-and-forth communication. I suppose a telephone conversation is usually in real time, for the most part, as long as you have a good connection. But even when I text or instant message people more often then not it's more like leaving a note for someone rather than talking to them. Sometimes I get a response right away. But sometimes people are in class, or in a library, or in the bathroom, or simply doing better things with their time. And that's as it should be. I don't want people to be locked to their phones or computers.

.

Cyborg as celebrity

2011-02-24T19:59:00.001-08:00

I love this concept.

.

Slogging on in the face of worry

2011-02-23T19:30:00.001-08:00

I've been a bit gloomy lately about all the world events and potential national events. It's hard to focus sometimes when things get all monetary and dreary. And when people are dying for Just Wanting Things To Be Better. It's all very hard to take.

To snap myself out of it a little bit I spent this evening finishing up these next few pictures and also listening to the Think Out Loud episode with Esperanza Spalding again, because I find she's very inspiring for us young unknown artists.

She appreciates the soul of simple honest things.

Of doing things the hard way.

Of creating.

I think struggle begets creation, but sometimes it's hard to remember.

.

2011-02-18T07:13:00.001-08:00

One of my favorite things about this project is that I'm meant to just follow the little garden paths of my mind as I brainstorm for these pictures. Sometimes I am stumped and ask the author to talk more about something, but I haven't really yet asked her to clarify anything specific. I like existing with a puzzle and seeing what comes of that.

It's good to have incomplete knowledge of something. It means you have to connect the mysteries yourself. I think the most imaginative things live in those spaces between the mysteries.

Another great thing about this project is I get to follow little garden paths online as well. Which is how the other day I learned about the Journal of Mundane Behavior, horseboating, and llama trekking.

My mother may know of a place in Colorado that one can go llama trekking. And oh, I hope she finds out more. I would go llama trekking in a heartbeat.

.

2011-02-17T09:09:00.001-08:00

the magic hour

2011-02-16T11:02:00.000-08:00

I actually put a LOT of effort into having a dénouement to my days, just as I like to have a brief period of sitting with my coffee staring out the window or sitting outside before plugging in the computer and starting the working day.

Because when I don't dénouement, this happens to me.

I read an article about feng shui when I was in high school and it talked about how there must be no electronics anywhere in the sleeping space, because the energy electronics give off is adverse to the calmness of sleep. At the time it was a neat idea, quaint-seeming, and I liked the suggestions of putting a cloth over a television or telephone would suffice in blocking the bad chi. I have recurrent insomnia, and have ever since I can remember, so any little suggestion in the area of sleep improvement is something I really latch onto.

Here and now it's much easier to understand where this sentiment comes from; many of our devices connect to other people in other places, where life is fast and unmitigated. Nobody I know is on my "early to wake early to rise" rhythm, so I have to leave a lot of activity undone in the great USS Internets. And often this means putting all of my blipping and blinking robots into the kitchen -- far out of sight -- while I also turn the lights dim, switch to the "sleeps" playlist (or listen to nothing) and read for a little while in the reading chair. Because my own brain can generate all these distracting fragments all on it's own without the help of the robots, who obediently and earnestly only continue to do what it is we built them to do.

.

Linguistics

2011-02-16T10:54:00.000-08:00

As I've been finishing this one -- another for the cyborg book -- I can't help but think about Watson, that jeopardy-playing computer.

I haven't watched footage but heard snippets on NPR as they casually follow the story. I'd imagined I'd be more horrified about the story when I first heard about it. There is something fundamentally perverse about the idea to me. But I actually just find it amusing and accept each subsequent update thoughtfully rather than anxiously. I am no longer defensive towards intelligent robots, no longer worried that robots are gunning for human obsolescence. We may still be headed that way, but this bend in the road I am still just filled with a simple open-eyed wonder about the whole thing.

We can build a computer that almost understands language. I think to myself. That's really quite astounding.

Watson seems very polite, very adept at his tasks, but of course he doesn't really understand what he is doing, as is made clear in those discordant moments when he answers inappropriately.

Watson is undeniably advanced, but had cannot as yet go to a coffee shop and share lives with people like what our finest minds dream about. It's still strictly in the minds of illustrators, film-makers and writers.

.

Panic architecture

2011-02-11T08:11:00.000-08:00

It really doesn't take much to get me to feel this way really.

I have a "smart" phone, mostly for geeky reasons but also because so many prospective art gigs begin online through email or twitter, and I was unable to idly surf the web on my down time at work, becuase instead of working at a desk I was on my hands and knees scrubbing miles of linoleum. There's no such thing as down time when you clean houses.

But there's between time, lunches at parks or on the roadside in a pretty nook. That is usually zen time or sketch a little time, but now it's also reconnect time, run on the little hamster wheel and shop for work. And mostly that's okay. But I do find myself checking my phone for that little blinking light when I don't have time to read an email.

I also have this problem; I see a blinking light on my phone, the toaster's about to ding, the kettle's about to go, the oven timer goes off which means the bread dough's ready, I get a text message. So many calls to my attention all at once.

The antidote, for me, is to unplug and go for a walk. Or fly a kite. Or write a letter with pen and ink. Make a paper chain. Read. Do something real, with hands and fingers, something far away from the world of blinking lights or glowing screens of any kind.

.

The secret of chickens

2011-02-09T20:24:00.000-08:00

I was going to (and probably still will at some point) paint this but all my picturing making time is being used up in Figuring Out How To Do This New Project. And anyway I didn't have a pen handy when I saw this.

Life is constantly giving me little glorious moments of lucid magic, like this one -- things that are actually difficult to paint or draw convincingly because they'd look forced or clever. This is where our brothers and sisters behind the lens of a camera have the definite advantage.

I am quite happy to explore the world beyond the grasp of lenses, things that interest me tend to reach out beyond objectivity, but every once in a while life gives you something like this and you think, yes. I don't think I could top that.

I love this moment and so I'm sure chickens and roughly-congruent beach balls will surface in my work at some point or another. That's how things like this work. I can't do anything with the original moment other than share it and hope you believe me. (And this time I have proof, so why wouldn't you?). But I can remix the moment into other places. Perhaps sitting on a bus bench with all her other chickeny beachside gear. Perhaps she's playing a game of toss with larger beings. Maybe she and the beach ball are a test for the blind-folded, to sharpen the sense of touch. And so on.

.

Maintenance of the second self

2011-02-09T07:43:00.000-08:00

This is the first of many illustrations for the upcoming Dictionary of Cyborg Anthropology, by our very own Amber Case. Yes it is.

I am incredibly excited to be a part of the project, and I'm sure I'll tell you a lot more about it once I get more stuff turned over. Right now I am gleefully sketching ideas onto paper even as ideas are gleefully being turned into dictionary entries on the other end.

.

2011-02-05T21:18:00.000-08:00

A year ago today I was sitting on a bench outside Union Station. I was facing a rare morning sunshine, yellow and orange.

I used to make a smoothie at the smoothie shop called "citrus sunrise" and it tasted just like that light looked like. Many's the citrus sunrise I have enjoyed, squinting and smiling contentedly facing the sun.

There was a pair of scrub jays trying to build a nest under the eaves of the roof, trying to be nonchalant and rather spoiling it by calling each other in that raw voice of theirs.

I was waiting for Anthony's bus to come in from Eugene, and although the bus was late and there could have been a lot of stress associated with this but there wasn't. There was a strange peace in that white, yellow and golden orange, waiting and waiting.

Waiting for what came next.

Three hours later I was in a hospital gown getting nervous about the knee surgery. Irrationally doubting the need for the whole business, remembering it was necessary as I hobbled to the bathroom across the hall. The difficulty in getting back into the bed. Getting anxious and weepy at the sight of tiny fat donkeys. Then the procedure, the pride of walking up TWO FLIGHTS OF STAIRS (with crutches and two helpers -- but I did walk) immediately afterward, and then the five months of physical therapy and recovery.

I was thinking of this as I knelt on my art desk's stool last night. I thought of it the day before in my yoga class, holding a lunge-type pose. During the six months of knee time last year both of these things were impossible. I thought about it during my brisk walk through the mist this morning, doing what I so badly wanted to do this time last year. I'm not absolutely perfect. The swelling has never really gone away entirely, I get fluctuation in feeling on my kneecap, and I am still in pain by the end of the day. But it's the dull ache of fatigue, not the sharp pain of BROKEN!, and as I sit and make pictures I can also apply ice and do stretches and rest.

And I can run and jump and squat and kneel, and I could walk forever if I needed to, and that's all I ever require of my knee.

Thinking of all this put me in an expansive mood, so drew this on much bigger paper than I've been working on. And in pure marker which is something I don't do often. Needed to loosen up. I also visited the Launchpad today and had a series of exciting conversations with one of the geniuses behind Geoloqi. Many other big drawings on big paper were made. Big feelings were had.

It was a big day. It was a big day last year too, so it's fitting.

.

Geographic thoughts

2011-02-04T21:17:00.000-08:00

Things have been jittery lately. I'm still awfully distracted by Eygpt. And other things keep me busy. I didn't even finish Nicolas Carr's book before I had to return it at the library -- not strictly for lack of focus but for lack of scheduled reading time. But it was nonetheless unnerving. Then I heard about that video of Quebecois children examining the quaint "les technologies du passé."

I was talking to a friend about a list of predictions of endangered technologies. Watches were on the list, as were real paper maps.

I think there's circles where this must already be true. But I also think of the African mariners on lake Awassa in one of Micheal Palin's travel documentaries, from less than twenty years ago, boating on a lake that had not been surveyed.

I drew a map last night of the area in the news. I was having trouble understanding why Isreal and Jordon were contenders in this conflict until I looked at a map. And then I felt foolish. I put this map on my fridge so as I listen to news I can look to the map and contextualize everything. With apologies to Oman, Qatar and Kuwait. My focus was elsewhere.

.

2011-02-03T19:38:00.001-08:00

Introducing: prints

2011-02-03T19:23:00.000-08:00

This was the scene from a few weekends ago.

I think we've all been there.

The only good thing about new technology, initially, is the great big box it comes in. This came in a doozy -- a box that I can fit inside of without any trouble. I would hardly need to scrunch down to close the lid. I don't have a lot of room in my apartment, but the box has stayed in the same hiding place behind the getting-ready-to-go-chair for a long time because the cat likes to go inside and tear up the Styrofoam stabilizers. Once he tires of it I will move the box somewhere new and ROCK HIS WORLD ALL OVER AGAIN.

After much wrestling with settings and drivers and other dreary things I now have the ability, finally, to offer you prints! They are printed onto delicious heavy archival paper with archival inks, which I think might mean they will last longer than the originals.

I now have five of them listed in the "Prints" section of my etsy store. There will be more to come as I scan better images and run some tests with funky paper.

.

Three curiosities

2011-02-02T08:36:00.000-08:00

1. I learned on Monday that the wellness center I clean every week was LIFTED OFF ITS FOUNDATION so that the basement's ceiling could be nine feet tall instead of whatever it was originally.

2. Later I was talking to a client about Egypt. She works extensively in Africa and has since I think the 1950s. She and her husband were based in Rhodesia right at the beginning of the troubles there, and were urged to leave by the embassy (they didn't, and eight years later fled to Kenya.) She had fascinating insights on the true meaning of Keep Calm and Carry On, which is absolutely all one can do in the face of a crisis like this. She gets news that we don't get yet, as she has many colleagues in right in the heart of Cairo and across Egypt. The most upsetting news she had was that looters have been breaking into the national museums and destroying national treasures. Beheading mummies. Something from the arms of King Tutankhamun was taken. I honestly got choked up. I've never seen anything of the history of the Pharaohs, and hope to travel to Egypt someday and see these extraordinary artifacts, there in the land they have always belonged to. For me, a foreigner, it is these things that seem to be the heart and soul of the country. Of human history in general. To tear them apart is an insult to history.

Guards formed a human chain to keep people out, which itself was upsetting. Living humans protecting the dignity of the dead. It certainly made the riots much more complicated for me, and this was before the army began to tell people to stop, before the counter-riots began.

This was not a curiosity -- this was a lead bead I had to carry in my stomach for the rest of the house. It was one she and her husband have been carrying around for a week now. She had a cute story about Suez however. One of her colleagues was visiting for the first time. I'm not sure if he came from an urban setting, or what his background was, but it was clear that the desert was a new adventure for him. He was admiring the great sandscape and the beautiful sunset out his hotel window. Then a SHIP crossed his path, right outside the window, giving him a fright.

He had forgotten, of course, that he was on the Suez Canal.

3.This is the sort of thing I wish was around when I was in high school. People who questioned illogical fashion stuff directly. I did it, but I didn't have a great public soapbox to stand on.