14 August 08
Discovery of Local Sketchbloggers!
I ran into Pete Scully at lunch. We sketched together a while ago during one of the sketchcrawls, and he said he’d recently started a website. (He produced a card, a must for bloggers; I think we’ve run out.) It’s astonishingly good. He mentioned he’d participated in the How to Save the World sketchbook project, and he also mentioned Blue Bicicletta.
It is a huge deal to discover that people are sketching daily and blogging about it not five miles from where I type this. I feel some of the initial excitement such as finding Brazilian Davis-based blogger Fernanda some five years ago. She now has another blog, as I do.
9 August 08
Sketching to Save the World
I signed up for the Sketchbook Project and received, some months ago, a tiny Moleskine notebook with 64 pages to fill on how to save the world. The paper’s fantastic for ink, but I didn’t want to do ink, I wanted to add watercolor, and it was a mess. A MESS. The paper shrivelled up and I lost my enthusiasm for the project.
Then I received the most fantastic paper in the mail: Arches Text Wove. I had ordered a bunch of it for calligraphy — it has a soft tooth and holds a line really well — but I decided to gut the Moleskine and switch in a small accordion-fold text-wove instead. I did this a week ago and got the thing finished and in the mail by the second, extended deadline. Hundreds of these sketchbooks are going to be on display in Atlanta as of August 22. Wish I could go and see them all, but oh well.
Speaking of Saving the World, Ron and Joe have started a fantastic project. Hope it’s wildly successful, guys!!
9 August 08
Out Geary Street
I took the day off and went on a expedition to San Francisco today, heading down by train and then taking the 38 Geary bus to the Outer Richmond district whereupon I walked up to the Legion of Honor museum. I don’t think I’ve been to that art museum in 35 years or so. And they gave me two dollars off admission since I took the bus.
The main exhibition was a show of four women impressionists: Berthe Morisot, Eva Gonzalès, Marie Bracquemond, and Mary Cassatt. I particularly liked Morisot’s work. Also at the museum was a small show of Israeli antiquities, including a couple of Dead Sea Scroll fragments and some 5000 year old pottery.
It’s a very pleasant trip to make, an outing to San Francisco for a one-day vacation. I should do it more often.
30 July 08
Fly, Julia, Soar
Her name was Julia. I remembered. I doubt this will be the last tribute I make to her, either.
24 July 08
Letter to a Former Classmate with Down's Syndrome
We sit on chairs
two feet tall, you and I:
pencils in hand
the dust of Castille
sloshed round by
Maria’s swift mop—
Tracing books ready.
Patterns. Sir Alfred’s.
They are lines to worlds
galaxies
words
and, you and I,
we trace them.
My line wobbles but
I clench my fist round
my pencil and,
readysetgo, follow the lines.
Your almond eyes
wander, yet focused, and your
staff
follows unscripted calls,
out of order, explores,
it’s Breaking the
Rules.
A new dance.
Be kind, Teacher said.
Your name is now lost.
But if I could return,
dear friend, and be not
just kind
but
learn
from your uncharted brain
hows and whys of
breaking the rules:
fortysomething years on,
the universe
might hold just a little
more sense.
22 July 08
Confessions of an Art Supply Junkie
We’ve been keeping a fairly close eye on what we’ve been spending in 2008 in an effort to understand where all the money goes, what should (and can) be changed, and what we really need to live on. No full answers to those questions yet, but Numenius compiled a breakdown the other night.
What I spend on art materials is daunting. Do they get used right away? No. Most of them are filling nooks and crannies and the books are stacked by the bed and it’s all a bit frightening.
Katherine Tyrrell of Making a Mark has a wonderful post today on the art of economizing on art materials. First step, for me, is to organize what I have, see what I still want, and find a good home for stuff I don’t. And, proud of myself, I didn’t go into an art store in Berkeley over the weekend. This is another easy thing to do: avoid the temptation in the first place…
27 May 08
New Pens, or Numenius Bicolor
I picked up a couple of fountain pens on Saturday in Berkeley, as well as some brown ink cartidges. I tested them out on Saturday evening: Numenius was looking intently into the laptop screen.
He doesn’t really look like Jerry Garcia…
[Comments disabled because some cretinous spammer obviously really hates Jerry Garcia]
9 May 08
Mimsy
It’s wedding invitation season, a process that can make you go a little crazy. I’ve been addressing envelopes in Spencerian, a nineteenth-century American outgrowth of Copperplate.
Today at the Whole Earth Festival I heard, and heeded, the siren call of a beautiful hand-turned cherry pen holder. (Dale will laugh when he reads this, because he’s seen this look in my eyes before.)
Italic nib, good paper, contaminated with Spencerian crazyness: I give you
Below is the first stanza of a poem I wrote for my niece back when she was about three or four five or six and had just been to Florida (I illustrated it and made an accordion-fold book for her, and was pleased to find out this afternoon she not only still has it, but knew exactly where it was and was able to read me stanzas two and three).
Mimsy. There you have it.
In case you want the second and third stanzas, such as they are:
Said Poly to young Tesla:
“Now mark me well, and harken
My bath I cannot leave to play
On meadow, beach, or wold.”
Said Tesla, “Poly, I’ll come in!
And play till sun goes down.”
Said Poly, “Roll and swim with me—
My bath is never cold.”
8 May 08
Cosmological Graffiti
I’ve been puzzling over this graffiti which is by the bike path underneath the freeway near the UCD Arboretum for some time now. Browsing through my copy of the Oxford Dictionary of Astronomy this evening an answer came to me. The upside-down V must be a capital lambda and the statement would be a reference to the cosmological constant.
This parameter was introduced by Einstein as a modification of the theory of general relativity because of his belief at that time that the universe was static. Later, after Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding, Einstein withdrew this modification and considered it to be his “biggest blunder”. Stepping forward into the late 1990s with the discovery that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, this parameter has now made its way back into contemporary cosmology, as something needs to counteract gravitation. What could be more theologically profound?
Hey, the physics building is only a half-kilometer away from from the graffiti.
4 April 08
Ink Under the Fingernails
I dropped and broke the water jug (it wasn’t empty), I left the binder in the wrong place, I lost my glasses, I’m behind on everything at home, at work, and in the garden.
Breathe, and get ink under the fingernails. I did. My, that feels better.
In other news and to get some perspective, one of my coworkers was rescued from the San Jacinto Mountains yesterday having hiked in the day before to retrieve a radio collar from one of our tagged lions. He twisted his knee (don’t know quite how badly he’s hurt yet, but he couldn’t walk). He was luckily a) with a colleague, b) carrying a GPS emergency beacon, which he activated at six the night before. They made a shelter (which didn’t cover his hurt leg, which he had to keep extended and which got rained on in the same rainstorm that delayed the Dodger/Giants game). (At this time of year it could still have turned into a blizzard…)