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.

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.