feather2pixels

The April 2013 CityArt show is installed and open.  This month I am  experimenting with some heavy artillery.  I would be honored if you stopped by this month to check it out in person.  Thanks to EB for hanging helping.

Clockwise from top:

1. Crossroads on  Mount  Tamalpais w/ Traffic Cone (Marin County, CA) | Unique screenprint on handmade canvas | 48×24 inches | 2012

Permanently installed in a special rustic pine frame.

2. Seal Rocks | Ocean Beach, San Francisco CA | Unique screenprint and ink on paper | 30 x 24 inches | 2013

140 lb watercolor paper.  Archival mounted in a custom fir shadow box with double strength glass. Removable title plaque.

3. Something That Will Catch Their Eye | Unique screenprint and ink on oak tile | 16 x 16 inches | 2013

4. Michelle’s Print | Screenprint on Pine (2nd edition of 9) | 12 x 18 inches | 2013

Today I finished printing and framing the two latest pieces I have been furiously chronicling here for no apparent reason. By the way, this piece is a small part of a project I am ramping up called “The Twenty-Seven Best Memories of Theodore Clayborne by The Genius Artist Hiromi.” If that title sounds intentionally ridiculous, maybe that is because it is meant as more of a story-visual art hybrid; a fictional piece of art might be an okay way to put it. Or maybe the title is ridiculous, which is definitely not what I am going for, but I passionately feel that there is an exciting idea in there and therefore proceeding is just something I have to do.

Here’s the second piece.  The black was a lot runnier and the whole thing is a bit less nuanced.  It’s like the angry, destructive version of the serene and sanguine first piece.

And just so that the completion of these prints is not just an occasion for me to write to myself online,  I joined 900 of my closest friends in this line for a slim shot at exhibiting immediately.

Thanks to Rodney and Andy for tool support.

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.

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.

The view from the ol’ office today.  Sun setting behind Mt. Tamalpais in the background,  “No Photography” sign in the foreground.