Hungry Turtle Weekend

Coming up in the middle of this month, a sweet weekend of art, food, people, and music courtesy of Hungry Turtle Farm and Learning Center. I have the distinct pleasure of showing my work there with that of Kate Casanova. Casanova is an interdisciplinary sculptor based out of the Twin Cities. She is what the Ancient Romans called a bad-ass and her beautiful and minimalist work makes me swoon. I especially love this video piece, Ornament, in which hermit crabs traverse the landscape of Casanova's plaited dome.

You can see our work Saturday, November 15th from 7 - 10 PM and you can sign up for the many interesting workshops of the weekend here.

Paper Fox Printmaking Workshop

This past Thursday I got to work with Ben Reinhart and art students at Lawrence University as part of their Paper Fox Printmaking Workshop. Ben was an attentive host and the students a great help. The Lawrence printshop is full of light, well-stocked, and organized. We pulled 50 impressions of a two-color screen print on blue paper. Later I'll edit the edition down to 30 prints. The image is a drawing of small objects found walking our neighborhood. It will be part of the forthcoming Land Scout Guide Book.

Screen printing is especially fast relative to other analog print media, and it was exciting to arrive, get to work, and crank out the run. I came home with the prints neatly wrapped in a box and waiting to be sorted, trimmed, and editioned (i.e. signed with title, number, and signature). One of the things I love about printmaking is the excitement of having more than one art-object to distribute. Here is the thing I produce: this stack of objects. Let's trade.

First color in the drying rack

One half of the prints will return to Ben and the Paper Fox Printmaking Workshop. I plan to sell ten of the remaining prints to cover the costs of attending the Southern Graphics Council International conference this spring. You can see a detail below. Each print is 17" x 11" and is $75 plus shipping. If you are interested in purchasing one please be in touch. If $75 doesn't fit in your budget, please make me your best barter offer.

A detail of the print

Many thanks to Ben and students for the opportunity and generous hospitality.

Ben and some of the experimental fun prints left over. Fluorescent paper! 

Really Big Prints

On Friday my print collaborators (Johanna Winters & Don Krumpos) finally printed our big wood block. We started carving earlier this summer and drove down to UW Manitowoc to ink it up and print on big sheets of paper and fabric with a steamroller.

We met a great group of fellow printmakers and lucked out with very little rain.

Beaucoup des process photos below.

Johanna and Don stand on the jig to keep it from slipping out.

Candice rolls up her beautiful block.

Katherine's block at rest.

Annica the steamrolling queen with Katherine and Candice of Missouri. 

In front, Chicken Pot Pie, by S.V. Medaris, printmaker and poultry farmer.

Berel Lutsky, one of the hosts of Really Big Prints

Our crew: Don, Dayna, and Johanna.  

The lovely Victoria of Austin, TX was a great help with our printing.

Final print on Kitakata with women for scale. 

We pose in the gestures of our saints.

What the Living Do

Some friends recently tweeted to each other this interview with Marie Howe  and I was so glad to see it again. When I think of my late colleague Bill Bohné I am reminded to keep on with what the living do and to live well while I'm at it. Howe is good at getting at the liminal spaces in an ordinary day and the unexpected sacred. When I listened to the story and heard Howe quoting her dying brother I imagined Bill could have said the same, "This is not a tragedy. I'm a happy man...When I'm asked if I could love I can answer yes."

In fact, Bill said as much by being loving and engaged until his last. He was concerned about craft in art, about living well, about teaching, about maintaining the art-ness and weirdness of our discipline, and about celebrating. I'm still mourning him and perhaps feeling sorry for us not to have him physically here. I am living. I remember you.

Mourning sleeves in a swimming pool. 

I first encounter's Howe's work through her poem Part of Eve's Discussion in a college course on the Religious Poetry of Asia. It was the liberal-artiest type of class that one can take in a liberal arts college and the kind that could have been total underwater basket weaving. Instead it was beautiful and unexpectedly practical. Some of the poetry and ideas of that class stuck, rooted, and enriched my thinking and my mourning. In addition to Howe's book of essays Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, the class read Robert Hass' Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, & Issa (Essential Poets). I've most recently returned to that book for subject matter in my beginning printmaking class. In fact we were sitting around a table in the printshop reading haiku when I learned Bill had died.

In honor of Bill, art, and wit, here is one of my favorite haiku by Kobayashi Issa (translated by Robert Hass).

A bath when you're born,
a bath when you die.
How stupid.

Bartram the Land Scout

I read an article recently about American botanist John Bartram. Accompanying the article was this great drawing of Bartram by Howard Pyle an illustrator considered to be the father of The Golden Age of American Illustration. There's an excellent group of Pyle paintings on exhibit at the Baer Gallery right now. If you live in or near NE Wisconsin, the show will be up through the end of this week.

After it the Pyle show comes down I'll help install Land Scout illustrations in that same gallery. It feels sweet and serendipitous to find this image in common.