The screen prints I’ve been working on these past few months are part of a project called the Artist Support Pledge. To help support each other during the pandemic, artists around the world are offering works of art for $200 (or €200 or £200). When an artist reaches $1000 in sales, they buy art from another artist. For me, the first part, making the jello and viaduct screen prints, was satisfying and engaging and fulfilled a number of artistic goals. The second, selling them for less than $200 each, was also satisfying because a lot of people could buy my art at that price, and I could pay some bills. After I quickly sold the first seven Joy of Jello‘s, it was time to make good on the third, and most fun, part of the pledge: Buying art from other artists!

Looking at all the available art tagged “artist support pledge” proved somewhat overwhelming. There is a lot of great affordable art out there right now. My life was simplified when an email newsletter arrived from the inimitable Shari Elf. I’d met Shari about five years ago at Art Queen, her studio and gallery in Joshua Tree, California. Shari makes delightful art from trash, among other goodies. She is also the founder/proprietrix/curator of the World-Famous Crochet Museum, which is housed in an old Fotomat booth in the Art Queen parking lot. Shari’s place is one of many cultural riches of the high desert area, which I wrote about here. Her current newsletter featured some new pieces that spoke to me. The Pink Poodle, pictured above, spoke particularly loudly. The speaking poodle needed a friend, so I also snagged the Bluebird of Contentment.

In 2018, a couple years after my visit to Joshua Tree, I came across this giant photo of the Crochet Museum in Charles de Gaulle Airport (proving it really is World Famous). It was, oddly, part of an ad campaign for HSBC Bank. The message is along the lines of “fortune favors the bold.” The bank appears to be taking credit for various peoples’ eccentricities, but there is no actual connection between the museum and the bank. Perhaps if they’d paid Shari to use the image, then fortune would indeed favor her and their slogan would be proven true. Go, capitalism.

Speaking of capitalism, there are still some prints left in each series, available on my shop page.

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.

Earlier this year, I was thinking to myself that I really wanted to do something meaningful to help swing the 2020 election in the direction of good and away from the direction of dictatorship. Because of our goofy electoral college system, my “blue state” vote alone isn’t worth much, and neither is knocking on doors, as far as the presidential election is concerned. I had heard about an organization, Movement Voter Project, that raises funds in states like mine and gives the money to grassroots groups in swing states who fight voter suppression and get out the vote. I convinced my co-curator, Dara Solliday, to add a benefit for MVP to our annual “100 under $100” show, scheduled to happen in June.

Of course, the big group shows we loved to create, our hall crowded with people vying for affordable art—obviously couldn’t happen. (Neither could knocking on doors.) In May I reconvened my dream team (via Zoom) of artists with multiple skill-sets in marketing, art installation, press relations, etc. and we decided to make the benefit happen anyway. After all, with a disastrously mishandled killer pandemic, racist tweets, federal troops invading the next town to beat up protesters, voter rights under even more vicious attack—you get the idea—our motivation to make a change was all the more urgent.

So we organized the thing as an online gallery and auction. We collected the physical art from the 50 artists, hung it in the upstairs gallery, and posted it online, along with a donation link to Movement Voter Project dedicated to our event. Donors of $100 or more can pick out a piece of art (while supplies last!) and pick it up* in September, when we may be able to open the gallery to the public to see the whole show before the work goes to its new homes.

The artist who created each piece will remain anonymous until the work is selected, so I can’t post mine yet. However, a complete list of the illustrious names of the artists I persuaded to donate is on the ’57 Biscayne website.

GO TO THE SQUARE DEAL SITE & GET SOME DEMOCRACY & ART.

*I’ll ship!

The Food Art Collection is now open by appointment!

You can view my new show of 24 tiny round food paintings, I’ll Never Have That Recipe Again, in the lovely apartment gallery, with masks and at a safe distance, through August. Contact Jeremy to make an appointment. All the work is also viewable in their online gallery.

PLEASE JOIN US FOR A CLOSING PARTY AND INDUSTRY NIGHT ON WEDNESDAY, JULY 17 FROM 5-7 PM!

For the sixth year in a row, my colleague Dara Solliday and I will be organizing and curating the 100 under $100 show at ’57 Biscayne. I love doing this. We gather art from a whole bunch of artists we know, and usually a few that we don’t, all of it priced under $100 (as the name would imply) and wrestle it into a surprisingly coherent show. The first year we put  it on, it was kind of thrown together at the last minute (we frantically raided a lot of our neighbors studios to get to 100 pieces) but nevertheless went pretty well. There are collectors from that first event who still come back year after year. We’ve got it down to a system now: The work has to be ready to hang; the artists have to drop it off at prescribed times and enter their own information into a form (I spent several evenings sliding down the hall with my laptop on a chair with casters as Dara fished out post-its and tried to match them to artworks); and we’ve gotten really good at herding a big fat mishmash of art into aestheically pleasing groupings that make their own kind of sense. In other words, it’s a real show now. And until the day we hang it (with some help from other Biscaynitos), we really have no idea what it’s going to look like.

One of the many pleasures of this show is giving some newer artists the opportunity to show their work and actually sell it. However, many established artists look forward to it as well because it’s a chance to do something outside of their known style or medium, to play around a little bit.  We can take risks with something brand-new, or conversely, dig up something old. I’ll be doing the latter this year. I found some oil studies for paintings from the turn of the century—studies that were actually done after the works themselves were in progress. The paintings have long since left my life and gone to good homes, and the studies are like memories of them. They’re also fresher and looser and less precious, from a time before I learned to be loose in my “real” work.

Update: Join me for Industry Night on Wednesday, October 24, 5-7 PM. There’s still some great work left in the show, and I’m also offering a rare sneak peek at the Salon Rue de Cerise, a creative project I’ve been working on that supports artists in Pioneer Square.

For the fifth year in a row, Dara Solliday and I are presenting “100 under $100” at ’57 Biscayne Studios. Each year, we gather work from numerous artists of our acquaintance and curate a show of 100 pieces of art that go for less than $100 a pop. Some of the artists work here in the building; others show with us frequently; some are established in their careers; others are just starting out. This year they range in age from 9 to 94. It’s a great community event and despite being a lot of work, one of the highlights of my year. I love seeing people become collectors for the first time, and empower themselves to like something, acquire it, and support (and usually meet) the person who made it. And they can take it home that night.

It’s happening this Thursday, October 4, from 5:30-9 PM at ’57 Biscayne Studios, 110 Cherry Street in Pioneer Square.

It’s also a chance for artists to clean out their closets, and show work that doesn’t fit in anywhere else: I’ll have some weird demonstration paintings from classes I’ve taught, some old pattern experiments, an artists’ proof from an etching series (above), and other odd bits. In my studio, I’ll have more recent smaller paintings, watercolor sketches, and some studies that may offer a sneak peak at future paintings.

The show I co-curate every year, 100 under $100 at ’57 Biscayne, has been extended until Friday. We’re having a little soiree to give folks a last crack at the lovely pieces that are left. I love everything about this show: the artists bringing their work to pile up in my studio, getting together with Dara Solliday (and Lindsay Peyton this year) one morning with a lot of coffee to see what we got; dividing it into themes that strike our fancy (this year it was by color); then setting to work with hammers, levels, and lots and lots of little nails. But the most fun part is selling all this work for the artists. Every time there are buyers who have never bought art before—this year we also had an artist I’m certain has never sold before, too: she’s eight, and her piece got snatched up within seconds of the (metaphorical) opening bell.

This year I’m showing some little collages I had made as preparatory drawings for a painting, that ended up having very little to do with the painting, except for the color palette.

The event is Friday, October 20, from 4:30-7:30, and we’ll have cocktails, conversation, and some fun art to take home.

110 Cherry Street on the Second Floor.