17 June 07
Anxious Week Ahead
I took a two-day workshop in Spencerian from Bill Kemp in March. I’ll be taking a flourishing class with him on Sunday in Berkeley. Easy enough to get the basics of, fiendish to master. I haven’t been practicing enough: there are no real shortcuts. Mornings are going to be interesting from here to Saturday evening…
13 June 07
QSLing
There is a tradition in ham radio to send out a card in confirmation of a contact with another ham, and to expect to receive one in return. This is called a QSL card. A week-and-a-half ago I received one out of the blue from a ham who I had a contact with in Oklahoma City, and this prompted me to put my own into production. The result is at left; the underlying image is a little watercolor I did three years ago looking west over the field next to our house towards the Vaca Mountains.
QSLing is definitely not as popular as it once was, the blame for such being put on the rise of the Internet, the cost of postage, or just the frenzy of modern life. But it’s a great tradition, motivated in part by the need to document contacts for various amateur radio awards. I’m now sending my own card to recent contacts. And just today, I received another QSL card out of the blue, this time from Pennsylvania — I’m all set with one to send in reply.
11 June 07
Artichoke Artist
Pica draws the artichoke for her series below.
10 June 07
Cynara: Historical Geography of an Artichoke
I sit and draw
the king of artichokes
I couldn’t eat
for pride—
consumed, now, by aphids
that are
herded by ants.
The mighty fall.
It can still maim, though:
the blood flows.
Flowed:
Al-Andalus,
honey and fruit and
artichokes
(and learning and
all that)—
fallen to greed
and stupid zeal, to
swine-eaters.
We don’t learn much.
I hear whispers
beyond the freeway and freights
of fountains, singing.
Past. Mint tea
and tiles and
lemon trees
that shaded
courtyards.
Gone.
The honeybees die
yet
without a thought
the artichoke
blooms.
8 May 07
Going To The Horses
Embedded in many sidewalks around Portland, Oregon are rings for tying up horses. The equine species no longer figuring much in Portland’s transportation plan, these rings were mostly forgotten until artist Scott Wayne Indiana tied a toy pony to a ring in the Pearl District. Thus was born the horse project — dozens of toy horses may now be found hitched up all over Portland.
24 April 07
Sketching Our Way Through Colorado
This trip had always been billed as one where you freeze. You have to get to the leks about an hour before the birds do, then sit there, quietly, while the weather does whatever it’s going to do. (I quickly learned to snag the motel bedspreads to wrap up in for this long wait, the famous Heure Bleue, the time of day when most deaths happen, when the edge of day and night is as sharp as the frost on the windshield, inside.)
And then you hear them, long before you can see anything. In the case of the greater prairie-chicken, here on the right, what you hear is a three-interval boom, not unlike the golden-crown sparrow’s in pitch, but very different in timbre. (Think descant recorder duo versus cello.)
The trick now is to get your hands to work well enough to wield a pen. I made a huge number of sketches in the dark, trying just to capture the essence of these birds. I’d try to work the sketches up quickly at breakfast before we had to saddle up again. You have to work fast and there’s no time for detail…
It was easiest for the greater sage-grouse, since they were so close to the car. We could hear their feet on the ground outside the window. We could hear the intake of air as they filled their sacs, knocking them together in an audible Dolly Parton parody. And as the sun grew closer to rising, we could see the filoplumes on each male’s head, rising and falling with the dance.
Our tripmates mostly had small digital cameras, which they wielded to greater or lesser success through scopes or binoculars. (Our ptarmigan victory salute, for instance, can be seen here ). Paul had a good digital SLR; I’ll look forward to seeing some of his shots. But to learn the bird, learn its lines, its feathers, its stance, its essence, I’d rather sketch: these birds are now etched into my head.
1 April 07
Spencerian Weekend
I just got back from a two-day intensive workshop in Spencerian script. This is really the only truly American calligraphic hand, reaching its heyday in 1860 or so. It differs from its copperplate predecessor by having more oval shapes than round, a smaller x-height, some truly quirky capitals, and much less thick-thin variation.
I’ll post my final project tomorrow when I gather my wits. But it was about Feathers of Hope turning four today… The blotch you see on the feather is, well, a blotch, Dr. Ph Martin’s Bleedproof White, to be precise. I’m still learning this. But you get the picture…
17 March 07
Four Years
Today was one of those days where so many things were planned a little triage was called for… picked up some ceanothus and monkey flower at the Arboretum Plant Sale, rushed home, went in to the Farmers’ Market on my bike for the 13th Worldwide Sketchcrawl. I had planned to go to the one in Sacramento but decided to pull a last-minute event together in Davis. It was so last-minute I was the only participant, but that was fine. I sketched for an hour, had lunch with Numenius, bought a new sketchbook, and then went over to the Code Pink demonstration marking the fourth year of the war in Iraq.
There were probably 100 pairs of shoes, each labelled with the name of a civilian killed in Iraq. This baby I drew, for instance: her father has come back from Iraq, is now on the circuit as an Iraq Veteran for Peace. There was a pair of shoes there that could have fit her.
I returned this evening for a candelight vigil, poetry reading, singing. We’ll be doing this for the rest of our lives…
13 March 07
Gill's Flawed Masterpiece
Ben Archer writes in Singapore’s designer magazine that Eric Gill got it wrong in redesigning Johnson’s typeface for the London Underground.
Eric Gill is one of my heroes so it’s hard to hear this kind of thing but having tried to work extensively with Gill Sans for two large projects over the past year, even I can’t argue that the bolder weights are unproblematic.
Archer puts forward other, in his opinion better, redesigns of Johnson’s typeface, many of which have faded into oblivion.
Stephen Coles in Typographica provides a couple of others. One I’d be particularly interested in trying out is Bliss, clean and “humanistic” without some of the quirks of Frutiger.
3 March 07
Ekphrasis
I’ll be co-editing qarrtsiluni with Lori Witzel of Chatoyance for the next couple of months.
The full description of the theme and how to submit is here, but here’s a short version:
This qarrtsiluni theme pairs submissions in poetry, or poetic prose, with a form of visual art. Ideally they need not be by the same person: this is a collaborative experiment. Non-bloggers are particularly encouraged to participate. Find a partner whose work you admire and have at it!
The visual art contributions will be posted in our gallery awaiting writers – check back often over the next two weeks, as we will have more to share.
All work, visual and otherwise, will be reviewed and juried by the editors before publishing. Poems should be no longer than 30 lines; prose pieces should be no longer than 500 words. Image files should be a maximum of 500 pixels in width.
Please take a look, and consider partnering with someone (they can be dead: if you’d like to write a poem about or inspired by Las Meninas, please feel free), or if you’d like to send in a photo or a piece of art you think might lend itself to poetry, send them in!