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.

This print, “Joy of Jello”, can be purchased on my shop page.

When I first met screenprinting, it was love at first sight: The squeegees, the screens, the physicality of pushing the ink through the holes, the feeling of being a human printing press. But mostly I think I fell in love with it because it forces me to reduce images into their simplest, most essential forms and to just go ahead and DO it already. With a painting you can futz around with it for awhile and dither, putting off major decisions. It is nearly impossible to this in screenprinting. Should you lose your focus and start to futz, the punishment will be swift and obvious. And it’s just paper, so you try it again.

If there was anything my pandemic-addled brain needed forced upon it this summer, it was focus. Before any of this nonsense started, I had already been working on eliminating the dithering from my painting. I was wondering if I could paint in big, bold simple shapes of primary colors, and yet somehow treat my subject matter, particularly the people, with the same depth and dimension. The tiny food paintings were a move in this direction: the colors stayed clear and the shapes simple, yet they were also painterly. They were a successful experiment, but also a pretty low-hanging fruit cocktail, being so small and not on fabric. I then started several slightly larger paintings on fabric, but I’ve set them aside for a bit while I pursue the radical simplification of screen printing.

Andy Warhol famously said he wanted to be a machine. I finally understand what he meant. The particular machine I want to be is a color separation machine, the one that takes a multicolored image and decides how many dots of cyan, magenta, yellow, or black it takes to reproduce the colors. Nowadays that process is done with Photoshop or the like, but back in the day they’d take four pictures of the image, each through a different colored filter and a screen that divided the image into little dots of density.

I wrote a while back about my obsession with CMYK printing. It hasn’t abated. In fact, for the last few years, I’ve only painted with those four colors, closely approximating the printing primaries, but continued to mix them like paint. For this project I am printing with only one color at a time, controlling the density with transparency. The color separations I’m performing are radically simplified from even the traditional photostat process: Each image is made by pressing the ink through a tyvek stencil I hand-cut with an exacto knife. I determine what each color’s stencil will look like by transfering the image by hand on to each piece of tyvek, using only a carbon-paper-like material. It reminds me of using old mimeograph machine stencils. While the local communal printing spaces remain closed, and with them my access to fancier equipment, I’m really enjoying working so low-tech, using tools and materials I have on hand.

The Joy of Jello print is a limited edition—there are only 15!—and available on my shop page. Each print is crafted with by my own inky hands, signed, and numbered. These prints are part of the Artist Support Pledge: To support one another, artists around the world are selling affordable work (under $200 or thereabouts when you convert to pounds, euros, etc.). Once I’ve made $1000 in sales, I will buy some art from another artist (I can’t wait!). This is the first of several print series I’ll be selling as part of the pledge. Stay tuned.

Sleek shiny cars, gleaming ribbons of freeway, convenient modern handheld devices like TV remotes and light meters—we’re all nostalgic for the future that never happened.

My show of recent paintings on vintage fabrics, remixing images of mid-century car ads and real estate porn into dissections of the American unconscious, is up through this Friday, April 26 at Atelier Drome Architecture + Design, 112 Prefontaine Ave. S in Pioneer Square. Hours are 8AM- 5PM Monday through Friday.

Recommended by The Stranger as one of the top shows to see this spring.

When I was a model for painting classes, I often heard one professor tell his students a story about a Chinese artist who received a commission for a painting of a fish. Some months had passed when the patron inquired as to the status of his fish painting. The artist replied he was still working on it. More months passed, the patron inquired again. Still working on it, the artist replied again. A year goes by, the patron asks after his fish yet again, and the artist once again tells him he’s still working on it. Another year later, the patron finally just goes over to the artist’s studio and says, please, I really want my fish, I’ve been waiting for two years now, can I get my fish painting? The artist pulls out a brush, ink, and a piece of paper, then deftly paints a fish on it and hands it to the guy. “Wait, why did it take so long if you could just make one in five seconds like that?” the patron wants to know. The artist walks over to a closet, opens the door, and out fly hundreds of pieces of paper with fish painted on them.

I’m not sure if I have all the details right from the professor’s version, let alone whether it’s really an old Chinese fable—the professor himself might have just made it up, for all I know. It really doesn’t matter where it comes from, because the story as I have come to understand it (and retell repeatedly to my own classes) is wise and useful regardless of its fuzzy provenance. The point is that you have to make a whole lot of bad or mediocre art in order to get even close to making good art. You have to fill rooms and rooms with bad, or just not-quite-it, fish paintings. And you have to keep doing it. I’ve been painting and showing and selling paintings for over twenty years, yet I am still filling up the fish closet with crap. I’ve learned to embrace it.

When I made the series Floor Plan for the American Dream (AKA the Manet covers), I started one piece that never, ever worked out. The working drawing, pictured above, gives you an idea of how I tried to squish way too many people into an overly complicated composition. Yet I persisted in squishing and started the painting itself on two panels, one of them truly weirdly shaped. It only got worse from there.

You can tell by the wildly fluctuating color changes that I was grasping at straws. Eventually I figured that out myself and stopped painting, separated the panels, and whited out everything except the curtain and two ladies.

I put those panels away until I’d finished the rest of the show. I occasionally pull them out and do stuff to them. They might make their way out of the fish closet and be reborn as completely different works, but it’s OK if they don’t.

The last four years have been boom times for the fish closet. The slight distraction of buying a building happened to coincide with the distinct feeling that one period of my work was ending and it was time to find the next evolution. That particular alignment of stars meant that the experimentation, focus, and long, seemingly unproductive hours of making work destined for the fish closet was further complicated by a lot of unrelated interruptions. I messed around with a lot of processes and ideas that would probably never make it into finished form but had to happen anyway.

Experiments included ink sketches of patterns set in the traditional prototypes I found in a 1948 book for textile designers; tiny square magazine collages; paintings of patterns based on carbon atoms and organic molecules; and attempts to wed the painted patterns to existing fabric ones.

Meanwhile, I was also trying to learn to compose in a circle. I had kept my first tondo paintings simple—single objects centered on a patterned-fabric ground—but I always intended to get back to narratives and architectural space.

Let me tell you, it’s not easy to squish the entirety of the American Dream and its discontents into a circle. I had managed to get people to behave themselves a little bit, by keeping to an intimate scale and leaving out the complicated architecture. These paintings felt like they had the right amount going on in them for their fourteen-inch diameter.

 

 

 

But I craved big ideas, big spaces, big hunks of steel. I confidently and foolishly built two 42-inch panels then spent two years figuring out what to put in them. I had been wanting to explore the cult of the automobile, its shiny finned candy-colored midcentury rockets luring us to planetary demise. For a setting, Albert Frey’s gorgeous Aerial Tramway gas station of Palm Springs beckoned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Doesn’t that yummy car just want to drive up to that yummy gas station? Not so fast, buster. What do you think this is, a RECTANGLE?

It didn’t work but, determined to marry the car theme to the architecture, I pressed on. I stumbled upon a picture of this lovely car dealership in Las Vegas.

Don’t even think about putting this in a circle. Not gonna happen. Additionally, in both scenarios I couldn’t figure out where the people would go. The buildings steal the entire show.

Then I found this stunning interior. Finally, something that looks like a car dealership but there’s a place to put the people! And it’s even in one-point perspective, which is something that works just fine in a circular composition.

I tried adding the car, but it was still weird.

I have a wall in my studio that is its own fish closet, just for humans. Lots of them are drawings of people I ended up using somewhere, but in a different size, so these wrong-sized versions accumulated on this wall. I’ve had it in the back of my mind to put them all in a painting together some day. This seemed like the moment to try it, as nothing else was working.

And neither was this. (Although it was fun to try.)

Oh, and I also had this guy. I loved that he was shining his car until he could see himself, looking like an overenthusiastic housewife with her Lemon Pledge. I gave him a car upgrade, but I had trouble deciding where to place him along the hood, and then he wouldn’t fit into any of the other spatial settings I’d drawn, let alone into a circle. He’s still on the wall and may be destined for the fish closet, despite the fact I still have a little crush on him.

Sometime in 2017, in the midst of these forays into the abyss, I did stumble upon one image that worked in a large circle. This fancy lady in her automobile is straightforward, focused, in one-point perspective, with a clear center, and she knows what she wants. The circle demands simplicity, which is nearly impossible to get right, but sometimes you stumble upon it.

However, doing something once is easy compared to following it up. I spent another year and a half struggling to come up with a second composition. In a book about Los Angeles architecture, I found some black and white photos of their famous freeways; one under construction, and another of an interchange known as “the stack.” Rather than try to squeeze one or the other of them into my mold (like tuna into a ring of lime jello), I made a new image out of parts of both, and then I found the perfect family to drive on them, in an ad for the wonders of asphalt.

Clearly, after all that endless, angst-filled, fish-painting, the only solution was to break every known rule. Put a big gray concrete post dead center. Crop people across their faces. Make the perspective ask more questions than it answers. I painted it relatively quickly (if not as fast as that Chinese artist with the patron breathing down his neck). Quickly, that is, if you don’t count the four years of filling the up closet with all those fish.

Opening reception is Thursday February 7, 5-8pm at Atelier Drome, 112 Prefontaine Place South. After that, hours are M-F 8am-5pm (make eye contact with the front desk person to be let in). Show closes April 26, 2019.

I pilfer images from old magazines—feral children who are up to no good, beatific high-heeled homemakers, cigarette-smoking proto-hipsters, futuristic dream houses, gizmos tucked into tiny spot ads in the back pages—extract them, mix them up, put them back together into new configurations. Much like a recipe for twice-baked potatoes or some other mid-century labor-intensive foodery. These advertisements are the sacred texts of capitalism, and essential records of the history of our collective aspirations. Our aspirations seem to have changed very little since the advertisements were first concocted. We continue to lust after real estate, buy more stuff, and lovingly cradle electronic devices in the palms of our hands.

Next month, I’ll be showing some brand-new paintings that look at the golden age of the automobile (for which we are paying dearly), along with some paintings of the last few years that concern themselves with gloriously futuristic spaces of yore. Travel Brochures for a Past Future opens February 7 at Atelier Drome, 112 Prefontaine Place South, in Seattle’s Pioneer Square. There’s an opening reception from 5-8 PM on February 7 during the neighborhood’s first Thursday art walk. The show continues through April 26, and is viewable during business hours (8-5 weekdays) and by appointment.

Composing in a circle continues to challenge, inspire, and occasionally frustrate me. It’s damn harder than it looks. According to some theories, that is due to its gravitational pull being in the center, rather than at the bottom. A rectangular drawing or painting, by contrast, mimics the way we experience the world, a vertical orientation with gravity at the bottom, and a horizon line, real or implied, running across it horizontally. That center keeps exerting its influence, and you have to be careful what you put in there. You can’t hide anything in the corners, either. Which makes it difficult to fit a sprawling architectural space into it, let alone a road. Both of those things scream “horizontal! vertical!”

Here are some small sketches of my attempts at putting a freeway in a circle.

Why paint circles? Well, I have no idea why other artists do it, but I came to it arbitrarily. I had to ship a large, unstretched painting to Canada for my friend Lauren; she’d sold the work, by her late husband and my legendary studio-mate, Drake Deknatel. I rolled it up into a giant piece of cardboard tube, and then I needed end caps, i.e., circles. My handy partner and personal technical director Steve casually mentioned that I could cut them out of plywood by turning my router into a compass, using only a long, flat piece of plastic. Screw one end to the router base, and the other to the center of the plywood. The distance between the screws is your radius. Presto. Perfect circles in minutes.

I later exchanged the plastic for a fancier aluminum compass arm, to keep it from wobbling around on the bigger cuts:

That’s the entire reason I started painting on circles, because I leaned how to make them.

The first set of circular paintings, or tondos, I made were a bunch of single objects in people’s hands. I’ve since progressed to more complex spaces and perspectives, starting small and working my way up to larger pieces. The new auto-pia paintings that will be in the show are 42″ in diameter. Here’s one on the table with just the fabric:

And another on the wall, further along. Note how the one-point perspective of the car interior sucks your eye into the middle.

The finished works, and some paintings from the Manet/modern architecture series (it is an architecture office, after all), will be on view through April 26.

The themes of house, home, and the American Dream of owning one recur so often in my work, it seems natural that people in the businesses of building selling homes would gravitate to it. For example, one of my earliest collectors and supporters was the late real estate goddess Jan Sewell. Her niece now has possession of the appropriately-titled This is the House You Ordered:

Last year, while I was in the process of scanning old slides and organizing my archives, I posted some older work on Instagram, including this painting:

My friends Kim and Chavi, the dynamos behind Team Diva Real Estate, saw it and wanted it to hang in their own wonderful world. Alas, the painting had been sold in 2009 by a California dealer. I suggested to the gals that they commission something.

Many artists don’t like commissions, but I love them. Maybe it’s because my collectors are such a self-selected group who share my sensibility, and we both understand from the start that it’s my vision they’re after. I’ve never once had someone try to micromanage me as I worked. What would be the fun in that?

What I did do is ask what it was they loved about Wonderful World. They said it was the feeling of abundance and hospitality; the anticipation of sharing one’s home and food with guests who are about to arrive. The fact that it is an abundance of weird, mid-century, overengineered food just makes the people more endearing (you almost forgive them for living in such a pornographically modernist palace.) Which all made sense, given that these gals, in addition to being residential real estate moguls. are enthusiastic and frequent hostesses.

So the food was a given (and I LOVE painting food) but I also intuited that the structure of the piece, which pops the table and the food into the space you’re standing, was also integral to the draw of the piece. I’d made Wonderful World on two attached panels: I covered the top one in a striped fabric and formed the couple’s outfits out if it. The bottom panel I cut by hand to match the curve of a round tablecloth, which as a bonus was trimmed in classic dingleballs. I covered the bottom panel with a piece of the tablecloth, lining up the bottom with the bottom of the panel. The shadow that curves across it is translucent paint, which gives the illusion of  the table jutting into the room. The top half of the table is painted to match the tablecloth. This whole construction was an idea I’d been wanting to revisit anyway, so I decided to try something similar for the commission.

I started, as usual, with the house.

I based it loosely on a photo from a Better Homes and Gardens decorating book from the 1960’s, much edited and simplified. (I really just liked the staircase.) Then I had to go looking for the right characters. The short list of potential co-hostesses is on either side of the drawing below. As you can see, I made reversed versions of each gal in order to try them out on both sides.

I drew a couple of them in the right scale and pinned them to the drawing. The one on the left was a keeper, the one on the right not so much. Her bending down so steeply seemed a little weird, and the hand going missing behind the table makes her look like she’s going to lift it with one hand.

The next one worked much better, but the hair was going to have to go. Too dowdy.

The fabric is usually kind of an agonizing choice, especially when I need to choose two of them. I was fairly certain I wanted to use this odd, scallopy Finnish tablecloth I had for the table, but getting them into the right outfits and somehow tying it all together chromatically would be a challenge. I ended up using a piece of the same striped fabric that I had left over from the painting of ten years ago, turned horizontally this time.

Here is the bottom panel turned on its back on the work table. Ten years ago, I’d cut the curve with a small Japanese handsaw, but this time around I used the whole thing as an excuse to buy a jigsaw. (Who knows what other wacky shapes I might want to paint in when I finally move on from circles?)

Here it is a few stages in, when I was ready to start blocking in the food. The final piece can be seen on my commissions page.