Not Reading, Still

The Creative License by Danny Gregory arrived today. It made a cross-country trip to the Davis Post Office, was returned to New York, and finally arrived today at my office.

The bummer is, I can’t read it. Not till Tuesday. (The delight is I can already see I need to buy a few copies and distribute them around the planet…)

This Reading Deprivation Week is doing weird things to me. I’m realizing, for instance, how email and reading blogs are a narcotic for me. I must check both emails—work and home—at least 30 times a day.

Nobody needs an answer that fast.

Ever.

If they did, they’d call.

I am not reading the paper. I’m barely reading comments on blog posts of mine, something I normally pounce on like a cat onto a lurking mouse. I’m not reading for pleasure. I AM reading for work, but it’s editing, it’s almost like connecting the dots. I’m restricting my home email to once a day, which I’m sure is breaking the rules.

It’s amazing how simultaneously liberating and freakish this is.

Were I a Sculptor

At the intersection of 3rd and F downtown here in Davisthere is a sculpture of two joggers, clad in shorts and t-shirts, running in opposite directions, with index fingers pointing up and forward. In times past this sculpture was the subject of serious debate in the City Council: people were worried that somebody would be impaled on one of the fingers.

Since it is 2006, it is time for the sculpture to be updated. Instead of two joggers, picture two students walking past hauling overloaded teardrop-shaped backpacks, holding cell phones glued to their faces, oblivious to each other and to the world.

What a Difference a Little Water Makes

New Pencils

Before we spent a couple of hours yesterday standing in line at the Oakland Museum, we stopped off at the art store at the foot of University Street in Berkeley, where I picked up a set of the new Derwent Graphitint pencils. These are water-soluble graphite pencils that have some colored pigments thrown into the mix. They’re intriguing pencils, with a subtle color range, good for landscapes, with the colors becoming more vivid when wetted with a brush. Above is a sketch of Charlie and Diego snoozing on their kitchen countertop mat.

Printfest

Well, I’m back.

Here’s how you do this: you get some unflavored gelatin and make it according to the instructions on the package (about 4 tablespoons per 4 cups water). You pour it into a mold and allow it to set.

Then you spread ink [water-soluble block printing ink] over the gelatin with a brayer, put something like a feather down on it, and put a piece of paper down on top of all of it. Pulling it up gives you print #1. Pulling the feather off and putting another piece of paper over the whole thing gives you print #2, the ghost print, where the most remarkable detail is preserved, almost photographically.

It’s fast. It’s not toxic. It’s unbelievably cheap. And I made at least 120 prints yesterday…

Illustrated Letters

Danny Gregory of Everyday Matters announced a contest late last year: people were to send him an illustrated letter and the winner would be sent a copy of his new book. I do covet the book but mostly I love the idea of illustrated letters so I sent him one; it appears in the gallery.

Taking time not only to write to a friend but to include sketches, drawings, paintings: what a luxury. If any of you out there think this might be fun, let me know…

All the World's a Surface...

I’ll be heading to the San Francisco Center for the Book on Saturday to take a one-day class in gelatin printing for artists books.

Whenever I’m getting ready for a session like this—and I expect we’ll get a LOT of prints made—I go into a week of delicious anticipation, seeing things all over the place I could use or bring. I’ve been looking today at pine needles; yesterday I got some feathers and suede cord. I’m looking at objects that are flat and that might work to have ink rolled onto them.

Looking at the world like this gives you glimpses into other things: this morning as I sipped my tea a stray hair on the counter resolved itself into a woman’s bottom, Rubensesque. I wouldn’t have seen it if I hadn’t been looking slightly to the side, which I’m doing because of this upcoming class.

I’ll post some prints from my class here on Sunday or Monday…

Sketchcrawl Sunday

We had good weather today for our first group SketchCrawl—it wasn’t as sunny as yesterday, but no threat of rain. Alas, the day started out with a bit of a calamity. Poor Diego fell out of a tree he had just bounded up during his morning walk! He hurt his rear leg, not very seriously though. (Happily, Pica’s vet coworker Deana very kindly stopped by and checked him out before she settled into a day of office work just up the road from us.) But he doesn’t get to go outside for a little while.

While I was home waiting for Deana, Pica met the sketchcrawlers, about 10 in total, at Mishka’s Café in town and sketched there for a while. She returned home, and after we concluded Diego would be fine we headed out and met up with the sketchcrawlers in the Arboretum. A few had already dispersed, and we ended strolling through campus with just two others, Mike who had come up from Walnut Creek, and Emma who had organized this Davis event.

I did about a dozen sketches total, ranging from one of the egghead sculptures to the impossible angles of the Death Star. Above is a sketch of an acacia in the Arboretum, as well as a bridge over the Arboretum waterway.

Thanks to Emma for organizing this—it was great fun and I’m glad the sketchcrawls are turning into something of a bimonthly event!

Davis SketchCrawl: This Sunday!

Looks like we may be able to catch an official sketchcrawl outing this weekend. Other venues include Vancouver, Sapporo, Chicago, Brussels, Corvallis. The New York group is meeting at the Natural History Museum, lucky things…

The Davis group will meet at Mishka’s on 2nd at around 9:30-10 10-10:30 am. Full details are posted on the Daviswiki.

If you’ve considered doing this but are not sure about your sketching abilities or whether you want to give this a try, please do! It’s a wonderful way to get to know our town, who’s in it, what’s going on, and so forth.

And if you can’t make it to the Davis one, why not start one where you live? Just go out. And sketch.

Art Around Lunch

Conveniently, the art store was right across the street from where we had lunch in Berkeley. This was the Blick Arts store, down near 5th and University. The lunch was at an Indian place. We found the ox gall, but no Derwent Signature watercolor pencils. I still don’t know if this Winsor & Newton ox gall is synthetic or actually made from bile of cow.

Later on the in the afternoon, we went up to the UC Botanical Gardens to sketch a bit. This is definitely one of my favorite spots in Berkeley—I should get there more often.