feather2pixels

Printing of the Mt. Tam pieces continues.  One of the many things I appreciate and enjoy about screenprinting is that it allows me to produce several versions of one work in parallel.  This provides incentive for freer experimentation, since it’s not a disaster if any one experiment should yield catastrophic results.  This is sort of similar to absurdly low rates of taxation on investment profits providing the appropriately reduced risk that society’s elite need to trickle all that cash down to us schmucks with day jobs.  Actually it is exactly like that.

So far I think I kind of like where this experimentation is going, with the image resolving into photorealism at a distance and the bright color splotches revealing themselves to be made up of little dots when you get real close.  I like art that has different stuff going on at up close and from a distance.  Or if the nothing else, the pine box frame makes it look like legitimate art.

Note that I still have one more black print to add on the far right…or does it look more interesting the way it is?

I decided this first print on my Mt. Tam piece was a failure:

However, this failure wasn’t totally negative.  I really like the quality of the print up close:

I just need to re-calibrate.

As part of printing this big 2×4 foot image, I am working on ceding some control and encouraging the art-making to take on a more natural course. I believe there is a hard fought balance to be found that negotiates two competing items I hold to be true:

1. The reality that without a high degree of control screenprinting doesn’t work at all.
2. Learning how to surrender to nature is part of my life work doing visual art.

For this project, surrendering control/embracing nature is taking the form of certain decisions such as working with old emulsion that blows out the image randomly.  Here’s some pictorial dispatches from the studio I wanted to record.  I think it’s going to look pretty cool when I print it.

Sandwich board for Bernal Outdoor Cinema.  Yum.

Thanks Anne and Leslie for helping me grow the feather2pixel Bernal Sandwich Board empire.

This long image shall be my next screenprint.

It shall!

Perhaps you are thinking, pretty but not the most original image I’ve ever seen. My dear critical reader, how much I admire and respect you despite your near constant torments.  In principle I will concede your point.  However, the thought of screenprinting this image on a certain four foot long piece of wood is exciting to me, and since I have a day job that affords me if nothing else the luxury to screenprint things that excite me, screenprinting this exciting to me image is exactly what I plan to do. (I think I may have previously expelled some bullcrap about about experimenting with this four foot long piece of wood.)     Then there are the words on the sign.  They are not meant ironically.  In many ways they are the most sincere words that could ever be written.  When this is all through, it will be you conceding that to me.

My work on the Rapha Cycle Club mural is complete.  To recap: the SF based design firm Rebar hired me to put this image on vertical wood beams.  Forty-five total beams, forty-five total square feet:

With screenprinting out of the question, I decided to get this done with large format digital prints on adhesive backed vinyl.  It’s the very expensive stuff used for permanent vehicle decals, and I learned way more about 3M ControlTac technology than anyone should have to.

My neighbor Fran who runs a printing business out of her Precita Avenue garage, did the printing.  EB and Tommy helped me out with the labor intensive application process, which took the three of us working together four hours to complete:

The grand opening of the parklet is 4pm on Friday November 16,2012.  I’ll be there warming up for happy hour.

I recently got myself involved with San Francisco’s parklet program.  I am working with Justin Ackerman with the SF design-build firm Rebar to mount a humongous graphic on wood beams as part of a new parklet in Cow Hollow.

Parklets are an awesome development in urban planning.  In San Francisco and Oakland, any business or group can petition to convert 1-3 curbside parking spaces into miniature urban gathering spaces.  By law, these spaces must be available for  the anyone to use, which benefits the public at large as well as businesses who take the initiative to enhance their space.

One of the best things about the program has been the diversity of innovative designs we’ve seen executed.   For example, the parklet I am working on involves a sawed-in-half Citroën H Van, commissioned by a local bike club: