Andy’s Ambition, a site-specific installation at Bonfire Gallery at 603 S. Main Street in Seattle’s Japantown neighborhood, is on view now through June 30, 2022. It’s viewable from the street 24/7, and right next door to the storied Panama Tea Room. There will be a public reception on first Thursday, June 2, from 6-8 PM.

The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.

Andy WArhol

That quote might conjure up an image of Andy’s outwardly cold, unemotional stare as he churns out endless rows of Marilyns in his Factory.

For me, the associations are more nuanced: The line between machine and human is not so clear-cut. A human and a tool performing a task together make an intimate, intricate dance, the repetitions of their movements creating new rhythms and patterns that neither could have created on their own. Decorative pattern has its origin in one such dance: weaving, one of the earliest and most widespread of human-machine collaborations.

For this installation, I generated a pattern by rotating and repeating a single shape on a grid, in collaboration with screen, squeegee, and hand-cut Tyvek stencils. Out of our repetitive dance and its variations, additional shapes emerged. Those shapes felt both mechanical and handmade, and also somewhat creature-like. In collaboration with a saw, I brought these creatures out into three dimensions to continue the dance.

The basic shape at the root of it all is a square divided into two unequal L-shaped parts. Starting in one of its four possible positions and rotating it clockwise or anti-clockwise gives you eight possible variant rows. How you sequence those rows makes for an infinite variety of patterns, some of which form new unanticipated shapes.

Here’s a block of 4 units by 4 units, starting with the larger shape in yellow:

Magenta in the smaller shape, filling in the interstices.

And then it gets interesting…a variant pattern, generated from the same unit, printed in translucent cyan over top the first one….

And another layer of cyan, offset a bit …

Earlier I had experimented on a smaller scale with other patterns that I generated from the same unit. I kept returning to this sequence because I really liked the vaguely anthropomorphic, robotic, space-invader-era creatures that emerged out of it, seemingly by spontaneous generation. These shapes became the key to my next adventure: bringing pattern out of the wall and into the third dimension.

I cut two flat identical shapes based on the robot guys, cut a slot into each one, and rotated them 90 degrees from each other and attached them. My creatures now had a three-dimensional existence.

I cut the pieces out of plywood with the COOLEST FREAKING THING ON THE PLANET, a Cutawl K-11.

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.

“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.

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.