8 January 06
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…
5 January 06
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…
3 January 06
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…
11 December 05
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!
6 December 05
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.
27 November 05
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.
26 November 05
Galling
While travelling to Boston in May I left a pencil case at an airport gate. Nothing in it was really irreplaceable, and I quickly bought a few pens, pencils, and Caran d’Ache watercolor crayons to replace my Derwent Signatures on an interim basis.
I still haven’t picked up new Derwents but plan to tomorrow on a trip to Berkeley. And as a wetting agent, instead of water, I’m going to try to find ox gall, a medium made from the bile in bovine gall bladders, normally used in marbling and lithography, which supposedly makes a much smoother blend than water.
I’ll let you know how this all goes.
10 November 05
A Cartographic Font
Since I am both a map geek and a font geek, I am glad to learn about Cisalpin, which is a font recently designed by Swiss typographer Felix Arnold specifically for use in cartography. It is a linear sans serif face that is intended to be extremely legible at small sizes and also runs slightly narrow to avoid long line lengths.
7 November 05
Rainy Evening
Just the time to settle in with a sudoku or two.
I’ve actually been working on some calligraphy this evening for the first time in a while. I got a commission to do some wedding vows for a couple whose table place holders I did over the summer. I haven’t seen the text yet but have been working on loosening up, which is going to need to happen a lot before I even start on this. There are a couple of challenges: the vows are of quite different lengths, and how do I render them without making the longer one seem more important?
The cats have responded to the change in weather in opposite ways. Charlie’s hunkering, Diego’s running around. Maybe I should take some calligraphic cues from this.
5 November 05
Impromptu SketchCrawl, Davis Style
We seem unable to coincide with any official SketchCrawl outings. For instance, next weekend there’s one to Alcatraz, which sounds like a wonderful idea, but I’ll be in Maine. So today we decided to do our own.
The car was due for its 10,000-mile maintenance, so we left it at the Honda dealership and walked across to Mocha Joe’s, one of the better cafes in town even though like Common Grounds it’s in a mall [cue scary music]. On the walk there, on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, a headline blared out: the Provost of the University of California had abruptly resigned yesterday for promoting friends and relatives.
Normally these kinds of things are par for the course, except this Provost used to be the Dean of Graduate Studies here at UC Davis, where I used to work. It was before my time but a strong and brilliant personality like this leaves its mark long after any kind of physical departure. (Given that Greenwood had taken a leave of absence to go to Washington to work for Clinton and set her sights on a Chancellorship when she returned, which she in fact nailed at Santa Cruz in short order, this mark has to be interpreted at best as “mixed.”)
She’ll be returning, the Chronicle assures us, to her “first love teaching.” Probably here, in Davis. This is a universal euphemism in academia. It means “he or she got canned.” Only Greenwood didn’t; she resigned first. If only Rove could be so honorable…
Our sketching took us to the Yolo Bypass where the sharp-tailed sandpiper was seen earlier this week. There was no sharp-tailed that we could see, and after sketching resting dowitchers and dunlin we were about to move on when two American bitterns flew in and landed within a few feet of us.
There is no benediction like that of a bittern. University politics, governmental politics, the whole hoo-ha over Covell Village—all of it melts away; to be in the company of this spirit-presence is like nothing I can describe. I tried, miserably, with a sketch, two, three, but mostly it’s just reverential whispering and holding your breath.
The birds finally moved on and so did we, sketching frolicking at the dog park, the salsa bar at El Mariachi where we had lunch, then patrons at the Yolo County Library (where I finally read Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit; a philosophical treatise that has me puzzled in certain respects—I think his interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remark to a post-operative friend is off-base, but on the whole it was very provocative, especially the examination of how bullshit is different in so many ways to lying).
Sketching your way around your environment: it’s a way to see things. Fresh. Cutting through the bullshit.