This summer I co-curated, with Dawn Endean, The Exploded View, a satellite pop-up concurrent with the Seattle Art Fair. Urban Visions donated an immense and impressive new space, Pioneer Square Business Improvement Association supported us with a grant, and we had crucial help from technical expert Steve Coulter and numerous volunteers. More info about the show, including a list of the stellar artists we somehow convinced to be in it, is here. Crosscut and the Seattle Times both gave us some nice ink, and we had a great turnout and an all-around lovely experience working with the artists and partners.

We were fortunate to be able to hire photographer Mark Woods to document the whole thing for posterity. Here are some of his pictures.

Between now and November 11, I’ll be in residence at the the Understory, the public part of the Amazon Spheres, at 7th & Lenora Street in Seattle. During this time visitors are invited to contribute to a crowd-sourced animation project. I’ll also be there most Thursdays working on more animations.

I’ve put 300 magnetic 4″ square “pixels” on a board, painted in shades of red, green, and blue, which anyone can move around, creating patterns or pictures or words (although the staff told me they’ll scramble the naughty ones). Hanging from the ceiling is this punk-rock high-tech/low-tech concoction:

The pink thing is a tiny Raspberry Pi computer. Attached to the ribbon sticking out of it on one end is a camera, which is aimed at the pixel board. The computer is programmed to take a picture every minute and feed it to the green USB drive, from which I periodically harvest the photos, compiling them into stop-frame animations. These crowd-sourced movies go into the rotation on the video loop on the main screen. That is, the “pixels” get converted into actual pixels.

Oh, did I say “programmed”? You may be wondering, what or who is the subject of that verb?

C’est moi! I learned some Python language from various helpful souls on the internet and wrote a little script to make that cute pink computer do my bidding. I am beside myself every time it actually works.

This project is a sort of complement to my relentless fascination with CMYK printing colors, but this time I’m breaking down the ubiquitous screen images of contemporary life rather than the printed ones of yore. The pixel blocks are painted in three shades of red, blue, and green, to approximate the primary colors of light that make up the millions of colors visible on a screen.

It’s also related to what the Impressionist painters were up to: They were interested in the way that visible light was composed of discrete wavelengths of different colors. They painted “broken” strokes of color side by side, allowing your eye to “mix” them, to replicate the dynamic experience of seeing light in the real world. That’s what I’m hoping will happen on the pixel board, but you can’t really exert that much control over a public art project; it’s as much a social experiment as anything.

Here’s a link to the first harvest, heavily edited. I’ll be adding more to my Vimeo feed as the project progresses.

The Exploded View
Contemporary Printmaking in Three Dimensions
July 27-30th
316 Alaskan Way S. (at S. Jackson)
Opening Reception: Thursday, July 27, 6 -9 pm.
theexplodedviewshow.com

Back when I thought I was going to be a painter forever, I had always found it valuable to take forays into the world of printmaking, primarily screenprinting and etching. The process of re-engineering an image (for example, some pineapple-clad ham) would force my brain to think in three dimensions for while, reset all the circuits, and I’d come back to painting with a refreshed sensibility and a new eye.

My last foray from painting into printmaking turned out to be of the one-way variety, and later morphed into a new foray, off of the wall and into the solid, spatial world of three-dimensions. Soon I began to notice that other printmakers I knew were also venturing into sculpture and installation; I surmised there was a connection.

I spoke with Dawn Endean, a printmaker friend, about this idea, after I’d seen a little cranktoy she had made that perfectly illustrated the concept. Because I can’t just leave an idea alone to fester by itself (and because those old Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney movies made an indelible mark on my developing psyche) I couldn’t resist the urge to say, “LET’S PUT ON A SHOW!” Dawn and I then gathered fifteen other printmakers whose work also wouldn’t stay put on the wall, and we invited them to show with us in an Old Barn in My Backyard—actually a brand-new fancy highrise (but still in my backyard). We’ll be putting on this show during (and a few blocks from) the Seattle Art Fair, lending some local, indy flavor to the art festivities.

My own piece for the show (still in progress as of this writing) is a freestanding sculptural installation involving translucency, geometry, a whole lot of screenprinted sheer fabric stretched around a big metal armature and lots of CMYK dots.

I’m honored by how many excellent artists have agreed to be part of this show. The fact that many of us met teaching or printing at Pratt makes it feel like a reunion. The support of the community outside of the art world has been fabulous as well: Besides the donated space from my friend Greg Smith, the project was also awarded a matching grant by the Pioneer Square Business Improvement Association. With the help of Steve’s forty-some years experience suspending things in the name of art, we’re transforming a 7,000 square-foot retail storefront with 22′ ceilings into a pop-up gallery for one long weekend, July 27-30, at the Jack, 316 Alaskan Way South. More info is at the explodedviewshow.com

The other artists are: Magda Baker, Romson Bustillo, Mary Anne Carter, Dawn Endean, Esther Ervin, Kerstin Graudins, Cynthia Hibbard, Eva Isaksen, Kamla Kakaria, Michèle Landsaat, Fulgencio Lazo, Linley Logan, Kelda Martensen, Christina Carlyle Reed, and Kim Van Someren.

There used to be a boxing gym here in my building, directly above my studio. It took up the whole of the third floor, where there are now more artists’ studios. The joint was run by a character named George Chemeres, who trained numerous world-class champions here for a couple of decades in the middle of the last century. In addition to his formidable training skills, he was also known for a Yogi-Berra-esque command of the language. A frequently-cited example is that one night during a championship bout, when the crowded room got to be unbearably stuffy, he bellowed, “Somebody open the window or we’re all going to be sophisticated in here!”

Another time, while promoting a fight at a news conference in Glasgow, he insisted that the Scottish referrees all get eye exams. An indignant uproar ensued—and subsequently a packed house at the fight, which was the point of the insult. Revisiting the incident years later, he said, “That was me; I lived by the sweat of my imagination.”

Which brings us back to the art studios. I have always felt that buildings’ histories live on in their bones. Of all the enterprises that have inhabited this building in its 130 years—diner, flophouse, haberdashery, storefront mission, underground jazz club, underage brothel—the one that resonates for me the most is the boxing gym. As to why that is, well, Chemeres hit it on the schnozz: We artists, too, live by the sweat of our imaginations.

These last few years, as I reinvented my own art from the bottom up, my imagination sweated harder than usual. During the same period, a more practical section of my imagination simultaneously sweated, to secure the deal that ensured the future of imaginative sweat here in the building. All that sweating made me feel even more connected to my sweaty pugilist forebears.

At the top of the third floor stairs is a curved wall, a remnant of the questionable corporate taste of one of the later twentieth-century occupants. The wall has fabulous visibility from the staircase, but is impossible to hang paintings on. It was practically begging for a site-specific installation.

What does the sweat of an imagination look like? What does the history of a building look like as it oozes in and out of the walls, floors, and ceilings? What color is it?

For a couple of years I thought about these questions while I worked on other stuff, including how I would bring my printed patterns to life in three dimensions. After a series of detours (which live in my back pocket for later use), I landed on a series of fins that stuck out of the wall, their shapes evolving as they progressed along its curved surface and around the corner, creating illusions of volume and movement.

My mental model for this evolution was hand-drawn animation, which I studied in college, back in the Pleistoscene when we shot the frames individually on film. I used a trick called “in-betweening,” in which you draw what you want to be the first and last images in your sequence on tracing paper, lay one atop the other with a third piece of tracing paper on top, and draw what you see as the “middle” image. Then you take the first and middle drawings, and do the same thing to get the one in between THEM, and onward, until you have a series of drawings that form a visual sequence. You can do this trick with a bunny rabbit, a not-so-bright hunter, boxing gloves (which I tried and rejected), or abstract doughnut-like things like I finally landed on.

After sweating over a couple variations of my model, I took it apart and scaled the individual pieces up into full-size paper patterns. Even though I used a grid to enlarge the shapes, there was a fair amount of approximation involved at each step, which kept the gesture of hand drawing in each step. I laid the patterns out on 3/16″ birch ply, and cut them out with my beloved Cutawl K11.

I painted them a cool yellow on one side and a warm yellow on the other, both as saturated as I could find in the standard Ben Moore paint deck. The “fins” are thin: they get their volume from their numbers and proximity, and also from the yellow glow that surrounds them. The two yellows also reflect on each other, making the colors appear changeable and ambiguous.

At some point, my Technical Support Team drew my attention to the sheer number of holes I was going to have to drill to get these things up on the wall, about 150 on the metal brackets and another 100 or so on the pieces themselves. TST then drew my attention to an inexpensive drill press on sale at Harbor Freight, and what girl doesn’t adore a trip to Harbor Freight?

Pictures of the finished The Sweat of My Imagination are here on my installations page— and you can see it live in the sweaty flesh at the ’57 Biscayne open studios on June 1.

Earlier this year I joined a group of printmakers for a master class in Oaxaca, Mexico, organized by Pratt Fine Arts Center, where I used to teach. Oaxaca City is home to a thriving and impressively innovative printmaking community. The influence of Japanese artist Shinzaburo Takeda, who settled there in 1978 and trained many local artists (among them my friend Fulgencio Lazo), has been felt strongly for years, but printmaking also experienced a resurgence during the protests of the early aughts, attracting younger artists and injecting a more pronounced political element. There are hundreds of small workshops throughout the city, most of which double as galleries and are open to visitors. We studied at Producción Gráfica Zanate, where master printer Daniel Flores collaborates with artists on adapting their work into editioned prints.

I first visited Oaxaca about twenty-five years ago, when I knew virtually nothing about printmaking. That time I mostly just walked around and took in the sights and smells and tastes. This time around I had a purpose, and the privilege of being able to immerse myself in the local art scene. It seemed like everyone was constantly starting new workshops or galleries, collective ventures that felt like bands. (And like musicians, they all played in each others’ “bands”. Also, there are actual bands marching through the streets pretty much every day, usually accompanied by giant puppets.) Galleries full of print work are on every street, in addition to the fact that the outsides of the buildings usually double as print galleries.

I drew inspiration from the constant barrage of art incorporated into everyday life and architecture, one of my favorite things about Mexican culture in general, which is on steroids in Oaxaca. The walls and doorways alone could keep me gaping and processing for months.

For the actual printmaking part, I needed to arrive with at least a sketch of an idea, so I spent the weeks prior working on a little experiment. I’ve been really intrigued of late with how making a print requires so much three-dimensional thinking, that the leap to sculptural work is not a large one. So I started with some little three dimensional models, to see what it was like to move in the opposite direction.

I copied the patterns for the polyhedrons out of a geometry textbook from 1897. All of them fold up into regular solids, but they were more interesting to draw when arranged into irregular shapes.

I based my print on the first of these sketches. Such a line-heavy drawing is of course a natural fit for hard-ground line etching, but we had two plates to work with and, more to the point, a maestro with thousands of tricks up his sleeve and a great eye for which one to pull out for your piece. We worked on our plates for four days, trying out new techniques (like dabbing the wet ground with a plastic bag), periodically pulling a proof and coming back for additional advice on what to do next. Here are some intermediary steps in the process.

The final piece, Desdoblado can be seen on my Prints page.

My friend, mentor, and studio-mate, the incomparable artist Drake Deknatel, died on this day in 2005. He had been home recovering from heart surgery, and called me that morning to let me know he’d be in to pick up some art supplies so he could work at home. We started to talk some more, but I was walking under the incredibly loud Alaskan Way Viaduct, so I said, “I can’t hear you, but I’ll see you in a few hours, let’s catch up then!” (Life lesson: You might not.) He stopped first for lunch at his favorite haunt around the corner from our studio, Cafe Paloma, owned by his good friend Sedat Uysal. Moments after giving his order, complications from the surgery caused him to collapse completely. He never regained consciousness.

When something good happens in my art career, I think about Drake the unwavering champion of his artist friends. When something disappointing happens (more often), I think about Drake’s persistence and his example of maintaining a thick skin and sense of humor in this business. When my work changed to abstraction from figuration, I thought about his late-life shift in the opposite direction. When I’m trying out something new and I need a highly specific tool or material to make it happen, he miraculously provides it from the heaps of his stuff that I’ve been storing for seventeen years. Here is what I said at his memorial service.

I first met Drake thirteen years ago when I was modeling for his classes at Pratt. I later modeled for and drew with a life-drawing session that he ran in his studio, where he created an atmosphere that allowed the small group that gathered there to transcend our conflicted historical moment, and to be simply artists and human beings, drinking wine and talking about art, life, politics, music and philosophy; we could have been in a Parisian garret a hundred years earlier.

My favorite image of him in my mind’s eye is of him standing at a table during one of those sessions, surrounded by jars of indeterminate powders and granules, sprinkling them willy-nilly on his drawing, making a mess. In that moment, all that existed was that mess.

He tried to get people to become as adventurous with materials as he was. He would hand out little unlabeled plastic containers of mysterious products for you to try. He’d try to get you to make your own paint. He was generous with his materials and his tools and his time to those who shared his passion.

Our friendship was based on the shared assumption that you could live your life completely in art, that it was making art that made you an artist, not a masters degree, a grant, or a gallery contract, although if you achieved any of those things, he would celebrate your accomplishments as enthusiastically as if they were his own.

Making art can be a lonely and isolating experience. To Drake it was a conversation. In the works we could call his figurative abstractions, I can say firsthand that the figure was anything but an abstraction. Those paintings are a record of conversations, of moments of being present to art and life. All those moments, all those conversations we all had with him may have been themselves ephemeral, but they left their traces on his canvases, just as his words (and he had many) have left traces in the work and lives of all of us who were his friends.

Photo of Drake and Dermot by Sedat Uysal

I’ve started a fundraising page for the Movement Voter Project (MVP). They work to strengthen progressive power at all levels of government by helping donors – big and small – support the best and most promising local community-based organizations in key states, with a focus on youth and communities of color. Right now they are focused on local groups in states with competitive races for congressional seats.

I’ve created a series of 9″x9″ screen prints, each unique (and named for a state with a competitive race). I’m offering them to the first 13 people who donate $100 or more to MVP. Make your donation here, screenshot the receipt, and email it to me along with your choice of print (be sure to include a second choice — I’ll try to keep the page updated as quickly as I can, but I don’t exactly have a tech support staff.)

If you’re in Seattle, you can preview the prints at my open house, & take yours away on the spot. If not, I’ll send it to you.