Venezia

So I am in Europe for a while, mainly in the UK, but last week I got lucky enough to spend five days in Venice. It was beautiful! I kept a travel journal while I was there, keeping track of what we got up to, and making a few sketches when I had time. (I also took squillions of pictures.) Here are a few pretty rubbish sketches, ah well.

Funnest Door Ever

Just moved into an awesome new house - lots of room, lots of light, great colours, no nasty surprises! (Yes, I have encountered my fair share of icky student housing. No ants, mould, rats, mice, absentee landlords or creepy neighbours for us.)

One of my favourite things about my new bedroom is that I have a chalkboard door. Yay! Having a chalkboard door/wall/whatever always looked like so much fun, and I can confirm it is indeed fun. I got out my 36-colour pastels set the other day, and did my first drawing. I also put a calender on there, because I have misplaced my diary planner in the move and it's nice to know what the date is.

My room will look a bit better when I've gotten around to putting up pictures.

PDX friends - come visit our new place! Friends from elsewhere - take a plane, and then come visit our new place! We have a spare bed!

Cities and Signs

I'm calling this one Continuous Cities. Four-colour screenprint, 2011.

The image size is about 10 by 13", the paper size is 15 by 22". The title is, of course, yet another reference to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. (My fave!) I am pretty damn happy with how it turned out. I think it helped that I gave myself plenty of time to think about the colours I used - colour is not my strong suit, so I wanted to take some care and try to follow through with exactly the feel I wanted for the piece.



I nicked some paint sample cards from the hardware store to give me an idea of the colour scheme I wanted. In case anyone is curious, what we have here is Mellow Bouquet, Raven's Rage and Faded Jeans.


Then I worked up some samples using the screenprinting inks, which can be a bit tricky to work with. Producing some small amounts gave me an idea of the colours and ratios I needed to use, before I produced the larger amounts I'd need to print with - otherwise I might bugger it up and waste a lot of ink. Colour-mixing is not a strength of mine; I tend to get impatient, add too much of a colour and end up with some unpleasant vomity brown. Or pink. I hate pink, I always accidentally end up with pink.


Here is the print with the three block colours all done, missing only the final key colour with the line work. I actually rather liked it just like this. If I had more of the Arches 88 printmaking paper I was working on, I may have left a couple unfinished like this. Instead I took a picture.

The registration was a little tricky, but I'd given myself some minute leeway with the lines and block colours where they overlapped, so working from light colours to dark it all lined up pretty well.


Another one with just the dark red, grey and gold-yellow. A little dark.

Oh, so I didn't include a key colour- for the lines and details of the buildings - in my original colour scheme. I was going to be lazy and just use black, but that wouldn't have worked. Instead I used a dark grey which used the blue grey above as a base. I kept it pretty warm so it would go with the red/grey/gold.


And here is the final product again. I think it looks a little better in real life, since this scan turned out a bit drab. The colours really pop, which I feel like is a nice property of screenprints.

City Moons

A few new sketches from my current carry-on sketchbook, i.e. the moleskine I am working on right now. Long-time viewers of my art will recognize some favourite themes here, including trainers, spheres, and city skylines.

This one is all about the constant lines of communication between the city and the ghost cities.

This one is about the humble trainer as the source of psychic energy and self-esteem.

This one is about cities floating around in the void.

Palimpsest

Here we have fabulous artist Julie Mehretu, my latest obsession. She is of Ethiopian origin, born 1970, now lives and works in New York (with her lady partner, omg.) She received MacArthur “Genius” grant, is represented by White Cube in London and big galleries in New York and Berlin, and according to Wikipedia one of her pieces sold for around a million US dollars at auction in September. So Mehretu is making bank, basically.

Untitled (brigade) detail, 2005, ink and acrylic on canvas, 36 by 48 inches

Mehretu's thing is highly worked, large-scale canvasses layering pencil, pen, ink and paint, usually acrylic, and her subject matter is architecture and cities: she may include drawings of buildings, floorplans, symbols and flags, along with more abstract marks and blocks of colour and tone. Some earlier work has a diagrammatic, chart-like quality, using made up symbols to record some mysterious change or movement (like the 'Stamped Ink' pieces below). She may use assistants to layers drawings using a projector, which sounds like pretty much the best job in the world to me, I wish it was mine. I think the idea is that she is creating her own syntax to record the city’s history, change and flux, the movements of people and how they respond to the space – it's her own idiosyncratic POV.

Cipher, 2006, ink and acrylic on canvas, 48.5 by 60.5 inches

I like how the work can be read in detail – you can recognize bits of building – but also at a distance as an abstract piece. The level of detail as well as the scale and time-consuming method is almost overwhelming, but also absorbing. To me it really feels like what cities feel like: a confusing barrage of information, your eye roaming over a million complex shapes. Love it!

Palimpsest (old gods) detail, 2006, ink and acrylic on canvas, 60 by 84 inches

Atlantic Wall, 2008-09, Ink and acrylic on canvas, 304.8 by 426.7 cm

Citadel, 2005, ink and acrylic on canvas, 72 by 96 inches

Stamped Ink (the herd three), 1996, Stamped ink on canvas, 72 by 60 inches

Stamped Ink (the herd 2), 1996, stamped ink on canvas, 72 by 60 inches

Berliner Platze detail, 2008-09, ink and acrylic on canvas, 304.8 by 426.7 cm

P.S. I am referencing Julie Mehretu in a class project right now, so all this may sound familiar to anyone in my Drawing Concepts II (:Electric Booglaoo!) class.

Watch out for the Vortex

Some drawings from my sketchbook showing an idea (does this count as three ideas?) I've been throwing around. I think I may work this into a screenprint at some point. I nearly did something similiar to this for this series here, but in the end went with other ideas. These are scenes from around Portland, of course.

Famous Public Service Building at Night

Famous Public Service Building by Night, Denver, Colorado

Some favourite vintage postcards of mine. I like to pick them up from bookstores and junk shops and the like, it feeds my general status as a postcard superfan. Postcards are the best. Rectangles of joy and love and friendship and beauty! I do not have many vintage postcards, and they don't have a theme or anything, just ones I like the look of. The one above is my ultimate favourite, by the way. "Famous Public Service Building by Night"!!! You know? Here is what it says on the back:

"The Public Service Building is one of the striking features of Denver; it is of a pure white, brilliantly reflecting the thousands of lights covering its surface in graceful designs so that it stands out even in Denver's brightly illuminated business section like a flashing diamond, justifying its title of the best-lighted building in the world."

Isn't that wonderful? (Anyone been to Denver and seen this marvel personally?)

Rise Studio, Rapid City, SD

The Parrot Jungle, Red Road, Miami, FL

Old Mission Bells, San Diego, CA (and reverse)

From Mexico (and reverse)

Growing Smarter Day by Day

Some brand new prints, ta dah! I hope no one is getting bored by my work that I keep posting. Please tell me if you are, and I'll get back to putting up pictures of Chuck Bass.

These are two colour silkscreen prints, a brighter colour over grey. I printed an edition in the light blue you see below for a class portfolio exchange.




I also wanted to see if any other colours would work better over the grey, so printed some variations in 6 more colours. I think the purple is good, the silver/white looks surprisingly effective in real life (kinda shiny) and the lighter green isn't bad. Yellow clearly does not work, and the red looks gory to me. I actually think that the light blue I printed in originally works best. What do you think?









Oh by the way, the theme of this portfolio exchange was taken from a fortune cookie. Mine said "You are growing smarter day by day". I suppose I took that to indicate some vague ideas about complexity and cities and the future.

Snapshots of PDX

A series of relief prints I made recently showing little views of Portland. No landmarks or anything, just houses and street furniture. I had great fun with these, playing with angles and textures and composition.

Awning and Fire Escape

A quick little etching of a building in downtown Portland.




It's not great, but I used a salvaged bit of zinc, so it was FREE. And free things are always the most satisfying. The zinc had a load of crap on it already, I had to burnish away a layer of stupidly thick aquatint. The only thing left was a drippy sort of pattern running from the top edge, which I don't really have a huge problem with.