Dreaming

While Numenius was away the catalog came for the San Francisco Center for the Book. There was a week-long class I thought he’d be interested in taking, Mapping as a Creative Strategy. He always ends up with a lot more vacation time than I do. (If I had a week to spare I’d probably take the Weeklong Letterpress Intensive.)

Encaustic painting, pochoir, surface techniques, Turkish marbling, flag books, nature-print books with hidden hopenings: I want to take them all. Some are during the week in the evenings which is not practical and helps weed out some, but not enough.

I am left with longing and difficult choices…

Letters From My Adolescence

In boarding school, in Derbyshire, we were corralled every week to write letters home. I enjoyed writing them, I think. I know I wrote often, more often than the weekly corralling.

Looking back on these letters now, if I can bear to (oh you’re not supposed to READ them, says my mother, who had handed them to me in bound packets the week before), I see a lot of experimentation: inks, papers, hands. Not much experimentation with what I said, because it was all in what I DIDN’T say (this was a co-ed boarding school, it was the seventies).

Am I that person, unrecognizable? Yes. I’m thinking of ways to contain her, this adolescent so frightened of authenticity. Collage with paint over it, my current handwriting, different calligraphic hands.

Another project. Like I need any more of those…

Earthquake In Jello

This month marks the 100th anniversary of the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. In an exhibition at the Exploratorium entitled “Magnitude X: Quake Science and Survival”, artist Liz Hickok has created a model of the City in multicolored Jello. (From The Map Room.)

Designing for Post Office Requirements

I attended a class this morning: Mail Design 101. It was the last thing I wanted to do. We had our first sun in days and our classroom had no windows. It’d be more interesting to watch paint dry anyway, I thought. Still, I enjoyed my bike ride onto campus.

For someone who spends a lot of time online I do seem to send a lot of mail that involves a stamp, or several. Turns out I’ve been slowing myself down a bit, or the mail I send out.

I will not entirely give up my calligraphic envelopes with wavy lines that might be illegible to young post delivery people who’ve never learned how to write cursive, never mind OCRs. But I won’t expect them to get anywhere in two days. Now I know why. Anything lumpy, anything that sloshes around, anything non-standard goes in the “non-automated” pile, where it languishes.

Much more fun this afternoon was working on design ideas for bookmarks and wallet cards featuring mountain lion pawprints for our upcoming booth at Picnic Day (April 22).

Cold Canyon Watercoloring

We got a quick trip in before the rain arrived this afternoon. I find I’m a very impatient person and will never manage this fiendishly difficult medium, but it was a good time…

Illustration Friday: Monster

For today’s Illustration Friday topic of monster, here is a monoprint of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (may you be touched by His Noodly Appendage).

Illustration Friday: Insect

I’m a week late for this theme, but I wanted to include a sketch I did of a David Smith sculpture I saw last week at the Guggenheim. The title of the piece is False Peace Spectre (1945). It looks like a wasp crossed with a fighter plane.

Illustration Friday: Tea

Here’s my submission for this week’s Illustration Friday theme, Tea.

More can be found about the Zawadi tea project here.

Rumsfeld's Song

I woke up in a fury about Rumsfeld’s strategic communications speech this morning. Better to do art than to seethe, say I, especially if you’re deficient in zen skills. I am submitting this for Illustration Friday’s theme of the week, which is song when I scan this tomorrow on a large-format scanner. Click on the thumbnail for a legible version. This piece is dedicated to all those people who have suffered or died at the hands of this administration’s “communication.”

Dumpster Diving

A successful day: looking for (and finding) plenty of material for my “found objects” artist trading card swap, realizing that this might better be done as a map folded into a tiny rectangle attached to a card. Most of the stuff that’s really interesting is too big to fit or too bulky. We’re going out for a tandem ride tomorrow, so I may catalog things as we go.

I did the first longish walk with the new boots today: no blisters. It was only three miles, though. Not a perfect test…