About a month ago, I was invited to be in the exhibition “Off the Wall” at J.Rinehart Gallery. The eponymous and lovely Judith Rinehart handed me three 8″ x 8″ frames. The frames upon closer inspection turned out to be shadowboxes, which seemed to beg for yet another new process and medium, and for pushing my work a little further into the third dimension.

For many years as a side gig, I have been helping people pick paint colors for their homes and businesses. As a result, I’ve ended up with a rather large collection of pint-sized house paint samples, in the sorts of colors one might put on a wall in a living room or office. I’d been aching to use these things for something, so for this project I decided to restrict my palette to only the colors of the samples I had on hand. After painting them all out on paper swatches, I realized they looked an awful lot like the dusty colors in old paint-by-number sets.

I had chanced upon a book about Josef Albers’ travels in Mexico, which partly inspired the images that I would later translate into relief. After seeing the ruins at Mitla, Oaxaca (which I visited 25 years ago myself) Albers painted some geometric compositions based upon the temple’s receding planes of carved patterned stone and their sharp relief in the bright sun. Albers’ interlocking and overlapping shapes appear to be generated by a single line that bounces around the frame. The flat shapes are painted in colors that give an illusion of depth and transparency. I bounced a lot of lines around until I had something I liked, then translated my drawings into actual depth, four layers of a very not transparent medium, masonite. I assigned each layer its own color (not unlike the color separations I’m doing in screenprinting).

Branching out from Albers’ sharp euclidean shapes, I also bounced around the lines of old-timey tents (from a 1960’s Sunset camping guide), using a state-park-inspired palette. The lightest green in the piece above is named “Folk Art” by the folks at Benjamin Moore, which seemed an apt name for a piece constructed in a shop-class manner.

The paint colors all have numbers, of course, a delightful echo of their paint-by-number qualities. There exists a exhibit catalog about the mid-century paint-by-number phenomenon, from the Smithsonian of all places, which naturally I own. I did complete a number of paintings from these kits as a kid; what I remember most from them is that I learned how to reverse-engineer an image: particularly how the modelling and shadows on an object, the convincing illusion of depth and even transparency, were made up of discrete hard-edged shapes of these dusty, flat industrial colors. (Copying at the Lourvre is all well and good, but a budding painter living in the wilds of Parma, Ohio will make due with what the craft-industrial complex provides.)

But I digress. Next, I transferred each layer’s shapes onto the back of a piece of painted masonite, then cut it out with a jigsaw.

Nearly everyone for whom I’ve ever done a color consultation expresses the wish to be “that person who names the paint colors.” The names are indeed evocative yet noncommittal, which, coincidentally, also happen to be desirable qualities in the title of a work of art . And so of course I couldn’t let those names go unused; the title of each piece is the name of one of the colors in it. Having spent much of my professional life sneering at art that “goes with the couch” (or any other bit of the decor), I’ve decided instead to embrace the irony: Should a collector desire to reverse the formula and paint their walls to match the art, I will happily provide the color numbers.

Oh, and there’s this: Everything in the “Off the Wall” show is $100(!) and the happy collector can take their piece off the wall upon purchase. The gallery will be releasing new work every Saturday, so the show will keep changing all month. It opens Thursday, December 2 (reception 6-8 with the usual pandemic restrictions), and run through December 24th. J.Rinehart Gallery is located at 319 Third Avenue South in Seattle’s fabulous Pioneer Square.

Scarecrow 8″ x 8″

Folk Art 8″ x 8″

Pure Essence 8″ x 8″

I have been a huge fan of Édouard Vuillard from the moment I became aware of his existence. (He rivals my other Édouard for my affections.) I spent the last 30 years painting figures who, like Vuillard’s, nearly disappeared into their patterned environments. Until finally one day they did.

A few years ago I was starting to feel that the printed fabrics I had been painting on, while I still loved them, were increasingly getting in the way of actually painting. The process necessitated meticulously planning each piece in advance, deciding ahead of time where to leave the fabric exposed and then carefully working around it. I glazed shadows and wrinkles on objects to give them dimension and solidity, and realistically grayed-out the colors in the shadows. I was gravitating toward painting on bold, geometric prints, and I wanted to paint equally boldly on them. But I had created this world which I had to employ a certain set of tricks to maintain, and I didn’t know how to leave. I had trapped myself, like my characters, into the world of the fabric.

For the last twenty years I have drawn from a live model at least twice a month. The figures in my paintings may come from old magazine photographs, but drawing real live people injected the life into my figures. Life drawing sessions also provided a vital space for experiments with color, materials, and the simplification that I was trying to get to in my painting. In March of last year, I hired my long-time model and friend Amanda and painted her on a yellow floral fabric, using the fabric as her dress, but working directly and loosely. The experiment was promising, but I wasn’t sure what I wanted the finished painting to look like, so I planned more model sessions, excited about this new direction . . . and then the world fell apart. Being in the same room with a model was no longer an option.

The weird upside to one’s world turning upside down is that it removes any pressure that one might be feel to live up to perceived and largely self-imposed expectations and limitations. In recent years, there had been a LOT of “detours” that I had wanted to make, but which I had stopped myself from doing in order to focus exclusively on my “real” work, i.e., the work I had built a career on and which supported me. Not that I have any regrets about digging deeply into one project for a long time—that has value independent of worldly success. But there were experiments I wanted to do, and paths that I only let myself walk down a few steps before turning back. I sometimes used teaching as an excuse to explore some of these detours (I get paid for that after all), including a pattern class that never happened, but didn’t take my own time for it.

Back to my boyfriend, Vuillard. One way I look at my current work is that I’m taking his disappearing figures to their logical conclusion. I sometimes used to think of myself as liberating my characters from the fabrics, unearthing the stories buried in the tablecloths and curtains I’d scavenged from thrift stores. Now I’m letting the patterns pick up the narrative, but first I have to figure out how they operate.

Technically, what I’m doing now is very simple, but it has infinite variations and lots of potential detours of its own. I cut re-usable stencils out of tyvek for the various geometric patterns I’ve created, and screenprint them in translucent inks. The patterns are all based on a two-inch grid, which allows me to combine and layer them.

I’m using cheap paper, and the backs of things, so as not to be precious, to allow myself the freedom to screw up and to make as many experiments as possible. There’s a special pile for attempts which I don’t particularly like; I print other patterns on top of them, almost randomly, while I’m waiting for other prints to dry. Those throwaways lead to the most promising new directions: more layering, more translucency, and attempts at optical moiré effects.

Stay tuned.

It starts with a unit.

The rule is that the unit rotates, clockwise or anticlockwise, in alternating rows. Depending on where you start successive rows, you get different patterns.

The most interesting sequences are the ones in which the relationship between the elements won’t neatly divide itself into foreground and background. I keep changing my only two variables—the starting position and the direction of the rotation—looking for the place where orderly repetition gives way to something unpredictable.

I initially employed carefully measured pencil lines, filling them in with watercolor and ink, but that method was way too slow for the number of experiments I needed to conduct. I’ve since moved on to screenprinting.

I cut a tyvek stencil for each color of every possible row for each pattern. This combines some of my favorite activities: cutting with an x-acto knife, measuring, drawing grids, and figuring out all the permutations of a limited number of variables. I’m taking the simplest elements—circles, squares, lines, primary colors—and teaching them some basic steps and seeing what they DO. When does it become a narrative?

An unexpected advantage to moving the project to screenprinting is the ability to layer slight variants of different colors on top of one another. The result can be beautiful or hideous, but I’m trying to forget about that part for now. This is research.

Public installation at 1430 Second Avenue in downtown Seattle

I usually paint pictures of people in spaces, geometric modernist spaces laden with pattern. I have been studying the structure of pattern for a long time and in this project I wanted to project geometric pattern into three dimensions.

Pattern can be thought of as the relationships of shape that occur when you introduce variations into the repetition of form. The squares in this piece change regularly in size and tone: Their sizes diminish and their values get lighter—which is what I would do if I were painting a flat picture of them— as the blocks themselves recede in space.

Tired of staring at screens instead of people, and missing the sharing of solid space and furniture and things together, I broke my ephemeral, flat screen-world into its red, green, and blue pixels and rendered them in solid form with plywood and paint. In a way it’s what I do as a painter—render an illusion of the solid world on a flat surface—sort of turned inside-out.

The Zoom portraits on the right-hand side are a different sort of attempt to take my flat screen experience and inject some life into it. One of the things I’ve missed the most this past year has been my biweekly life drawing sessions, drawing a human model in company with other humans. The closest substitute I could find was to covertly draw people in virtual meetings. Despite the sneakiness, it actually made me feel closer to them.

The installation, Things That Were Unrealized Due to Lack of Funds, Space, Time, Interest (explanation of title here) is at 1430 Second Avenue in downtown Seattle, viewable from the street at all hours, but best seen during daylight or early evening.

Things that were unrealized due to lack of funds, space, time, interest.

That about covers all unrealized things in general, and last year saw a big uptick in the Unrealized Things index. I took this quote from a typed document, “Project List 1990-91,” left in our shared studio by my late studio-mate/mentor, Drake Deknatel, when he died in 2005. I later hung it on the wall in my subsequent studio, and I look at it frequently. I think of it as a kind of shrine to unfinished projects, a testament to all the ideas we leave behind that never materialize. It had always struck me as funny, too: I mean, lack of funds is a chronic problem for most of us, space can be an issue, time is in short supply for nearly everyone—but interest? If he’d lost interest in these projects back in the 1970’s, say, why was it on the list to pick them back up again in 1990 or 1991? It only occurred to me very recently, after 15 years of staring at this list, that he might have meant other people’s interest. The interested people or entities who might provide the funds, space, and, indirectly, the time, to realize these things.

My own Project List for 2020 included: Reassess the role of fabric in my painting, which means reassessing how I paint, and Finding the Next Big Thing. By which I meant things like subject matter and the shape and size of the canvas. I had left unquestioned the assumption that I would remain a figurative painter.

It didn’t quite work out that way. I did make some new paintings, even had a show of them, and started a few more. With a global pandemic, civil unrest, a racial reckoning, impending autocracy, and general madness floating about, following the project list from the beginning of the year made less and less intuitive sense. Why continue to satirize the American Dream while it’s imploding? Are we moving forwards or backwards in its pursuit? I’m a narrative painter, sure, but not one who reacts to immediate “iss-yoos:” I try to take in a longer view, and a wider one, to understand what stories I want to tell; I like my art (and the art I look at) to have a longer shelf-life.

Funds, space, time, interest: We are always balancing that equation, but this year the four were in constant flux and the math especially tricky. However, out of the flux emerged opportunities to create some things that I didn’t plan on, things I had always wanted to explore but had never made the list because they weren’t my “real” work.

Some building owners of my acquaintance had an empty space (a lot of those these days) and were willing to spend some funds, so I proposed a window installation for them. I took some time—which there is never going to be enough of—to revisit and explore ideas I’d never let myself spend this much time on before because they weren’t painting, i.e., my “real” work. It could be called a “departure,” because at first glance it bears little resemblance to the work I’ve been doing for thirty years, particularly if you like your categories neat. I think of it more as an arrival.

Things That Were Unrealized Due to Lack of Funds, Space, Time, Interest is installed at West Edge, 1430 2nd Avenue, visible from the street 24/7, best viewed in daylight or early evening.

“Hollywood Hawaiian” is available on my shop page.

The third and final (for now) print in my become-a-human-color-separation-machine series (that’s not really what it’s called) is complete, just in time for holiday shopping madness. Or whatever kind of madness it is we’re having right now. But supporting artists is never mad: For every $1000 in sales, I will buy a piece of art from another artist, passing on the love and money. It’s called Artist Support Pledge, a way of getting through this together, and the brainchild of UK artist Matthew Burrows. There are a number of initiatives to buy from artists and other small businesses directly this year, and I hope the sentiment continues. It’s a challenge for anyone to make a living at their craft even when there isn’t a pandemic.

But back to my true love, CMYK printing! This new print is the most chromatically complex of the series, making more use of layering and transparency to render, for example, fat (get it?). Additionally, I was trying to create more space in the picture plane, still using the inherently flat process of cut paper stencils. Inspiration came from looking at lots of still lives—from old Dutch masters to Wayne Thiebaud, with stops at Matisse and Morandi—and I finally settled upon simple repeating elements of circles and lines, along with a gingham ground whose linear perspective would add depth and hopefully tie the whole thing together visually.

Ham and pineapple recur throughout my vast collection of mid-century cookbooks, always touted as “Hawaiian” in the same way that topping anything with avocado makes it “Californian.” The title, Hollywood Hawaiian, references the general feeling of fakitude attached to the word “hollywood”, as well as a Warren Zevon lyric.

Earlier this year I was already at a juncture in my painting where I was questioning everything about it that had worked up until now: process, materials, subject matter, scale, context, everything. I was ready for a reset . . . be careful what you wish for, reset-wise. I started this screenprinting project partly to have something physical and technical to work on while I worked all that out. I have since learned that big-ass social and personal upheavals wreak physical havoc as well: they bring about physical neurological changes and we have to kind of re-wire our brains afterward. As it turns out, boiling the visual world down to its most elemental properties—flat shapes cut with a knife, four colors—was the perfect exercise for my pandemic-addled noggin. I still don’t know what it’s going to look like when I resume painting in the coming weeks, but these prints are an integral part of my new wiring.

“Hollywood Hawaiian” is available on my shop page.

Buy the Left Lane Ends screen print here.

During the last two summers of the Before Time, I made a point of getting out regularly to sketch Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct before, and then during, its planned demise. This hulking hunk of concrete, built in 1950, was basically a wall of noise, darkness, and looming collapse between downtown Seattle and Puget Sound. I had a studio overlooking this monstrosity for ten years, and sometimes I’d draw it out the window. I later made one of the drawings into a series of etchings.

But more often I have experienced this thing from below. Any walk or bike ride from downtown to the water necessitated spending time underneath the viaduct. You would try to get out from under there as quickly as possible, because it was a well-known fact that it would (not “could”) fall down on your head in the event of any reasonably-sized earthquake, which not a rare occurrence in these parts.

The project of drawing it, however, did one of those things art does: it forced me to appreciate this ugly thing and to acknowledge its perverse beauty. I was surprised to discover that it actually had something that could pass for a style: the repeating buttresses, if you looked at them all lined up together, are almost Art Deco. Almost. On the other hand, I also became more aware of how oppressive it was. You don’t realize how much daylight four lanes of concrete can rob you of, until you go to draw it. Most of the interesting views were from underneath, and it was cold and dark under there on the nicest summer days. I learned to bring along a sweater.

For the second of my 2020 screenprint projects, I decided that I would try to tackle this beast. I pulled out all of the watercolor sketches I’d made and picked one to adapt to a cut-stencil DIY 4-color process.

A watercolor sketch is loose, spontaneous, and often benefits from the accretion of detail. Hand-cut stencils printed in four colors is pretty much the opposite of all those things. Translation required a daunting level of editing and simplification. I started out by tracing the watercolor into a simple line drawing, then scaling that drawing up to the size I wanted. I traced over parts of the drawing again and again, dividing them into sections by color and transferring them to pieces of tyvek. Each of these steps made me lose some extraneous flourishes and helped me get closer to the essence, the concrete hulkitude of my subject.

A technical problem I ran into was that a lot of items were free-floating and would fall away if I tried to cut them out. For instance, I couldn’t block out the yellow signs in the big grey stencil I was making for the freeway, so I had to divide it in two parts. This actually proved to be unexpectedly beneficial when I went to go about creating the layered tones for the receding arches. The farther-away buttresses were made with five successive passes of the same transparent gray; at each pass I would cover up more of the stencil, so that the closest buttress was the darkest. I went through a similar process with a darker gray for the larger parts in the foreground

Beyond the freeway itself, I also had to decide which details were essential to the impulse of the original drawing and therefore would make it into the print. Color, of course: There were those bright yellow signs, in two different shades. I also loved the pedestrian and traffic light icons, the latter echoed in the real traffic light in the shadow of the freeway. But really, my favorite detail, and the reason I chose that vantage point in the first place, was the ominous “Left Lane Ends” sign. The left lane was going to end, all right. All the lanes were going to end.

(I returned to the same spot a year after making the sketch, while the demolition was in progress. Atop a pile of rubble, the “Left Lane Ends” sign was still dangling from its pole, as if to say “I told you so!”)

So I really had no choice but to pour a cup of tea, haul out the economy pack of x-acto knife blades, get comfy and start cutting.

In case any fellow CMYK afficianandos are reading, here’s the breakdown, in order: Nine layers of K (black to civilians), in two different transparencies, for the concrete; one Y layer for the signage; a very transparent M (magenta, to those of you with a life) to warm up some of the yellows; C for the sky; a darker K for the letters and symbols; a stronger M for the red lights, and a final dot of bright C for the green light. A lot can go wrong in 15 layers, which is why this is a very limited edition of 12 prints. They are available for purchase on my shoppe page AND along with the Jello print are part of the Artist Support Pledge: Each time I reach another $1000 in sales of these works, I will buy art from another artist.