Printmaking with Portland Cocktail Week

Last month I had the privilege and pleasure of leading a t-shirt printing event for Portland Cocktail Week. Bartenders + ink + stencils + t-shirts = fun!

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

There have been some major life changes in the last couple of months. Some good, some hard. No, scratch that... All good. All hard. My feet aren't exactly on the ground again yet, but I've been feeling alive in a way I haven't in a while. It feels strange and brave to talk about this here, but it's what/who I am, right? Isn't that what it is to be an artist? Raw-edged. At least the kind of artist I am, the kind I want to be. I've spent the last few years pursuing the particular vein of making public space for the private and intimate.

It makes me think of my first or second term of grad school, of a man who didn't stay with us in the program for long, but he made an impression. He was a little more than most of us could handle, but he would raise his hand in discussions, and count off on his fingers: raw, naked, vulnerable and lost. This is how he felt, where he was, what his world meant to him at the time. He was an aging surfer, a lawyer, a man whose life had veered from the path he had anticipated, and he was trying to make sense of new terrain.

These things aren't exactly true for me. I don't feel lost. If anything, I feel suddenly, joltingly found. But, new terrain, that's the case, to be sure, and to be an artist, there is always a fair amount of that grappling. There has to be.

I've been waking up in the middle of the night with ideas... feelings and ideas, and today, finally, I gave myself to the studio, to the press, to color and shape, to the particular kind of motion of hours passing while I work. I spent the afternoon with ink on my hands and I feel it all in me again. I feel that river coursing again. I feel like myself. I feel myself, and one notch deeper. I'm excited about this new terrain.

I made monotypes and played with layering color, neither of which I've explored much in a long time.

And here's little a peek at a few of the pieces I was working on.

on the wing of a bird

I've been in the studio again the last few days, practicing making things from the remnants of what's been broken. I am gearing up for a new body of work that is eliciting that tingling feeling in my fingertips, the one that makes everything feel brighter and better... and, you know, possible. I have an installation/performance in the works for next year that's rapidly tumbling and growing into an event I'm pretty damn excited about. There will be more details to come, but in the meantime, here is a detail of the wing of a bird in flight painstakingly constructed from shards of things that were once whole, things I have loved, believed, things that had to be broken in order to take flight:

Nourishment

The haze of the holidays is finally lifting, and today there was a small peak of sun. My mind has been filled, mostly, with the personal and mundane: shifting objects and patterns to make space in this home for another person, making meals, hibernating, gestating art ideas, feeling the rumblings of spring's imminence. I've spent some time out shooting with my new camera, and making things from what I find. Always. There is always that. The what do I make of it in my life. That's been focused on film for a time, and, suddenly, food.

I have become obsessed with food. Where art blogs once sat, food blogs. Afternoons in the studio have become afternoons in the kitchen. Maybe it's the comfy feeling of sharing my home with the man I love; maybe it's the hibernation of winter, but maybe there is something else here too. Nourishment. It's a word that has flashed across the screen more than once over recent years. What do we do to nourish ourselves, each other? What feeds us?

For the first few weeks of this month we did a bit of a cleanse, and every time I drank a jewel-colored glass of carrot ginger beet parsley juice (or whatever the combo of the day), I felt it. I felt a tingling rush into my body of nourishment. I feel it too in conversations with good friends with whom deep and true understanding is shared. I feel it when I witness someone in power speaking the truth, or when I see someone without power respected, honored. It's not as present as it ought to be in our world. And I know that I'm one of the lucky ones. It is, in fact, a palpable presence in my world. Wholesome food, love, connection, kinship... what nourishes you?

(Inter)Action and Artmaking

As my artwork has expanded beyond gallery walls, as the frames have fallen away, unsurprisingly lots of questions have arisen. Many from within me, and many from curious friends and onlookers.

The most common, and still the hardest to answer is the ever ubiquitous 'so, what is it, exactly, that you do?' More often than not, this question is my own. The jacket of a bell hooks book I've been reading describes her as a 'cultural critic'. Yes! I think to myself; that's a good term. I'm certainly a cultural critic. But that's not the whole of my practice, not even close.

Some colleagues of mine have decided not to call themselves artists anymore. They've adopted terms like culture worker, philosopher poet, environmental interventionist, and activist.

And, yes! All those fit too. My film, time and its passing is surely the work of a philosopher poet. And what could you call my private protest: sprouting alfalfa project if not the work of an activist/ environmental interventionist? And the gifting project? Culture worker, clearly.

But then there are the small private pieces, like this broken ceramic bird, each shard threaded together, a metaphor of brokenness and repair, of the glaringness of the fissures in ourselves, the possibilities of re-piecing into a new whole.

So, you mash all these things together, and you slap on the label artist. But the image that title conjures doesn't quite fit, either. The art itself has never lived exclusively in the lines for me, the composition, the color. (Though you'll never convince me that craft doesn't matter.)

Art is in the action, the interaction.

Which is why I'm so excited about the Occupy movement. This is not a protest; it's a movement. And that movement is pure art. People are out on the streets embodying the metaphor of change, of action, of engagement, of democracy. They are not demanding democracy—which, I think, is what has so many people flummoxed—no, they are modeling it; they are creating and performing it. Our cultural frames are being challenged, falling away.

So, when I marched down the street with fellow citizens chanting: show me what democracy looks like: this is what democracy looks like, and singing quietly to myself we are a gentle angry people (and we are singing, singing for our lives), it felt more like making art than a lot of afternoons I've spent alone in the studio. Art is about creating something, and there I was amidst thousands of engaged, saddened, angry and hopeful people who were co-creating something together.

Yes, this is art too. This is everything art is meant to be.