Last weekend I took a sun-blown walk along the waterfront, down to the Chittenden Locks and back up along Golden Gardens. I returned with over a hundred new photographs of the northern bay and renewed excitement about seascapes as a subject. Along the way I passed through the living rooms of those who sleep without doors. There is no bookcase, no lamp, but sometimes a bright red sleeping bag, some boots and a pillow. Perhaps the painted walls are [Read more…]
This week I have been participating in the “art challenge” thrown down on Facebook. I don’t know where these things come from, (likewise memes, where are they born? who runs the meme factory?) but this one seems to have started in the illustrator community and crossed over into the artist world that is my social media life. Unlike the chain letter of old in which a tattered mimeograph threatened karmic harm and financial ruin if you didn’t pass it along with five dollars to the next person, this benign version simply asks that you post three images for five days in a row, each time tagging a new artist. In the currency of the chain letter, five dollars is worth approximately one ‘like’, as one ‘like’ can, if you are fortunate accrue interest and become forty, and perhaps even lead to a comment. Which of course will not buy you a cup of coffee. [Read more…]
I have been experimenting today with color. Lurid wild-child Aurora color, for an image that captured me as I was wandered the bleaker spaces of this territory last week. Hot midday sun, a lot of dirt, and the glory of green. Aurora, AKA Highway 99 is a riot of color theory once you get over bad taste, disregard, and what I used to think of as ugliness. Now it’s all just material, and life on the edge is looking good.
I am thinking of a new approach to digital printmaking. Instead of focusing on editions of 20 in which every print is identical, I am returning to the ancient analog idea of the “variant edition” in which the plate (the basic “file” or photo/image composite) is the same, but one makes subtle shifts to each print. The editions will be very small, perhaps 3 or 5. Here are some takes on the newest piece done in this mode. I am still proofing, so I am not sure yet what scale will suit these best.
I have just completed several of the final new images for the upcoming “Excavations” show at Zeitgeist. One portion of the show will be a series of 10″ x 10″ transfer prints devoted to the ongoing saga of the Alaska Way viaduct. The images are created from my photographs of the viaduct layered with painted and drawn surfaces made in response. This is a place filled with industrial strength beauty: loud, dirty, sometimes hazardous but always provoking.
I have been photographing the viaduct for at least 25 years, and this iconic structure is an enduring object of affliction. Many of the collages are based on recent cellphone photos taken from a moving car. This is the glimpse, the rapture of the vista, the overstory. But this one, the most recent piece, uses as its backdrop an analog photograph I took over 20 years ago when the train tunnel could still be seen. I stood for hours one long gilded afternoon waiting for trains, and documented the graffiti as it changed color in the refracted sunlight of the bay. Now that tunnel is invisible, walled in behind condominiums. This is the understory. As with all of the images in this series reality has been subtly collaged and reconstructed.
Meanwhile, although the cracks are getting larger we still drive. Best view of the sky anywhere:
Each transfer print originates from the same image, but the transfer process creates a unique monoprint each time, with different surface qualities and subtle variations in color. I often make only one print of an image, but in some cases the variations possible are too interesting to pass up. This particular print has several variants, as I experimented with the grain of the ink and application of the transfer medium. In this version I “wiped” the paper as I would a zinc plate, to get the organic washed quality of the sky.
Mark your calendar for the opening, First Thursday April 3rd, 6-8 at Zeitgeist. A reminder will come closer to the date.
I am hard at work on my series of prints about the Alaska Way Viaduct. Big Bertha, our sensitive and emotionally overwrought digging machine is helping me out by quitting on the job. We may have several extra years to contemplate incipient ruin, the subtleties of patina and the beauty of going nowhere.
This morning I started on a new collage with Pandora in the background set to my favorite station, which I am guilty, guilty, guilty of listening to instead of finding each song individually or listening to mixtapes made by friends 30+ years ago. The station, wouldn’t you know, is named for the father of music for airports Brian Eno. I do like this phrase from the Rolling Stone review of 1979, “...there’s a good deal of high craftsmanship here, but to find it, you’ve got to thwart the music’s intent by concentrating.” The trick of collage is often to concentrate while not concentrating, a sleight of hand through which something interesting may appear. Mr. Eno and his friends are the perfect soundtrack to encourage this state of mind.
As I was working, shifting layers back and forth and on and off and testing all the ways two simple images can converse and transform each other, I thought about driving and the visual emotional space of the car, which is so entirely married to music. I got my first and only car, a gray Toyota Corolla, in 1989. I will never take it for granted. The first time I sat on a lookout at sunset and turned on the radio I had a kind of American Satori experience: so this is what they were talking about! I get to sit here in my room on the street and just turn the dial and look out at the view?
The view of course is what the lovers of the viaduct will miss the most when it comes down. It is the last populist vista, where you don’t have to pay big dollars to see The Mountains and the Sound which make us want to live here. When it is gone we will have to buy a multi-million dollar penthouse condo or use binoculars to peer across the six to eight lanes of traffic they propose to go on top of the tunnel, which by then will cost 10 dollars per trip and which no one will use because who wants to drive in the dark?? Hmmm.
The music of this situation is both requiem and anthem, weaving its modal intervals in and out in lane changes and near-misses and ultimately onto the great offramp of what-it-is. Requiem for what is to be lost, anthem for what we can still see if we ditch our worries about gas and earthquakes and just go for a drive. I checked Pandora to see what lovely song was transporting me: “Ballad of Distances” from The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid, and “Requiem for a Dream” by the Kronos Quartet. Gotta love this many-splendored synchronistic modern life.
Stay tuned for details on my upcoming show, “Excavations,” at Zeitgeist, opening the first week of April.