Blog
February 8th, 2016
Well, now that it’s been a whole year since I first showed you these, and the secret no longer needs keeping, I can tell you about what I did today. Today is the start of the lunar new year, and here in Tacoma we have a tradition that proves how wonderful this town is, year after year. The tradition is called “Monkeyshines,” a public treasure hunt through the city that falls on (or around) the first day of Chinese new year each year. The name comes from the Year of the Monkey on the Chinese zodiac cycle, exactly twelve years ago, when an anonymous artist going by the name “Ms. Monkey” created a few hundred colorful hand-blown glass floats, each one stamped with a monkey design, and hid them all over the city. Anyone who found one could take it home with them, and since only Ms. Monkey’s inner circle knew about it, it came as a complete surprise to those lucky few who found treasure that year. Over the years the tradition has grown and the secret has spread like wildfire, with more and more beautiful pieces of glass art being hidden around Tacoma with each cycle of the zodiac. Since the only rule is “take only one,” many people have taken to rehiding the ones they find, or contributing their own handmade treasures to the hunt. Not that it’s easy to find multiple Monkeyshines—or even one! Even now that there are thousands of treasures hidden each year, it’s still like finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. I’d never been lucky myself, coming up empty-handed year after year.
2015, the Year of the Ram, completed the 12-year zodiac cycle that started with that first treasure hunt. Ms. Monkey approached me (no, I won’t tell you who she is!) and asked if I would contribute some “Monkeyshines” of my own to the cause. I jumped at the chance: even though I’d never found a glass float myself, I loved the hunt, and by then I’d amassed a mental database of potential hidey-holes. By then I was more excited about the prospect of hiding treasure than of finding it. Besides, even though my work has been moving away from letterpress printing in recent years, it was fun to do a printing project again.
So I whipped up a little medallion design, and hand-carved it in linoleum.
Then I threw it onto my tiny tabletop press, and set to work.
I printed close to 500 medallions (until I ran out of paper and the block started to break down!), and then hand-assembled them in the style of my other letterpress ornaments.
And then came the fun part: hiding them all over Tacoma.
Since there were so many medallions, and I had to go out of town over Chinese new year, I enlisted friends to help, and staggered my own distribution over several weeks. Together we managed to canvass almost the entire city map, hitting both well-traveled areas and less-visited neighborhoods.
The hiding was, indeed, the best part. I loved walking inconspicuously at weird hours, my hands stuffed in my pockets and posing as a searcher, waiting until the coast was clear to pop another medallion into one of Tacoma’s nooks and crannies. Sometimes I’d hang around and wait nearby until someone came by and discovered what I’d left behind. It was a thrill every time.
I saved this pictured for last because it echoes this year’s odyssey, when my chance finally came. Fast forward to this morning, and it’s the Year of the Monkey all over again. Since it’s now become a tradition as ingrained as Christmas, there was no question that I’d resume the hunt. A friend came to pick me up at 4:30 am, and after a quick swig of coffee, we set out.
And in less than an hour, in my eighth year of searching, I finally found my first glass Monkeyshine! Just like the previous picture, it was in the mouth of a fish sculpture—this one in the middle of a fountain downtown. Luckily for me, there was only about an inch of water in the fountain, so all I had to do was climb in and step right up. And yes, if the fountain had been full of water, I would have gone in anyway, 35-degree weather be darned. I wouldn’t have been the only one—tales of people braving murky koi ponds and polar-plunging into the Bay have become the stuff of legend around here. For some things it’s worth getting soaked and dirty!
My friend is still searching for his Monkeyshine—we spent the rest of the morning hunting on his behalf, but even if he doesn’t find one this year, we made sure to pay it forward by hiding a few small monkey-themed treasures ourselves.
So now I’m back home, refreshed after a nap and a hot cuppa tea, admiring the Monkeyshine that’s serendipitously in my favorite color. SO many thanks to Ms. Monkey, all her fellow ‘Shiners, all the friends and friendly strangers I hunted with this morning, and my art-loving city. Thank you for making this happen year after year, for making my year so far, and for bringing us all together for a chance to play explorer in our own hometown. Gung hay fat choy!
June 19th, 2014
I stopped by the Collins Memorial Library this week to see the new Puget Sound Book Artists exhibition, and look what’s in the show! If you haven’t had a chance to see my Mnemonic Sampler abecedary in person yet, the PSBA folks have it beautifully displayed in one of the wall cases. (The display is definitely better than my low-light cell phone photo of it…sigh.)
And they were even kind enough to include a snippet of it in the exhibition poster—can you spot it?
Catch the show now through July 31!
April 25th, 2014
The carving is done, and we can’t wait to show you the finished product. See you at the Wayzgoose on Sunday!
April 21st, 2014
Here we are: year ten. Since the time Jessica Spring founded the Tacoma Wayzgoose all those years ago, it’s become one heckuva beast—and a veritable Tacoma institution.
So here are a few sneak peeks of the giant linoleum block Jessica and I are carving—and we’ll reveal all on Sunday:
10th Annual Tacoma Wayzgoose
Sunday, April 27, 2014
11 am to 4 pm, Free!
King’s Books
218 St. Helens Avenue, Tacoma, WA
If you’re new here and don’t know what a Wayzgoose is, or you just want to relive the glory days of old, here are links to all the Wayzgeese (gooses?) I’ve been a part of:
• 2009 (Tacoma)
• 2010 (Tacoma)
• 2011 (Tacoma)
• 2011 (San Francisco)
• 2012 (Tacoma)
• 2013 (Tacoma)
Itching for more? Well, then, see you on Sunday!
June 24th, 2013
I’m working on something huge (and secret!) that I’ll be launching very soon. In the meantime, I’m going through the studio and doing some housekeeping (both literally and online). As happens with any big shift, it’s time to take a good hard look at anything that doesn’t quite fit the puzzle going forward.
So at noon PST on July 1, I’m going to be making some changes to the shop in preparation for the big thing to come. And while they’ve had a good run, I’ll be removing a few things permanently—including the last remaining hand-painted linocuts from the Flock series.
(Don’t worry, the bird cards aren’t going anywhere!)
Most of the rest of my hand-printed artwork (like the Mt. Rainier and Horse prints) will still be available, but the prices will go up on July 1—some by quite a bit. So if there’s anything you’ve had your eye on for awhile, now might just be the time for you to snag it.
Take your pick over at the shop!
April 30th, 2013
Wayzgoose worked like a well-oiled machine this year—and that’s the way we like it.
(Even if we were just a little extra tired afterward.)
We were finally able to have the event in the parking lot next door, which allowed way more people to gather ’round the steamroller—and gave the artists more elbow room for spreading ink and chatting it up.
Steamroller prints by Ric Matthies (left) and Charles Wright Academy students (right)
The usual suspects were up to all kindsa good on Sunday—
Our print (left), Beautiful Angle (center), Maggie Roberts (right)
—and it was fun for Jessica and me to come back after a year off.
Photo by Victoria Bjorklund
This year, we added something a little different to the mix—just like we did in 2011 in San Francisco. After Jessica inked up the block…
Photo by Victoria Bjorklund
…and the steamroller packed its punch…
Photo by Victoria Bjorklund
…I set up shop across the parking lot, adding a few hand-colored touches to the piece.
Here’s the finished product—and for those of you who don’t happen to live in T-town, I’ll need to provide a little back-story. You probably recognize the reference to Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, but there’s a second tribute to pop artist Andy Warhol, as well. And I’m not just talking about Venus herself—to whom Warhol did pay homage in 1984.
You see, over thirty years ago now, Warhol was one of several artists to propose a permanent public artwork to adorn the roof of the Tacoma Dome. Not only was his proposal rejected at the time, but the whole project resulted in an enormous backlash of public opinion, insurance nightmares and political in-fighting—which literally derailed the city’s entire public art program for nearly two decades afterward. Fast-forward to today: not only is our public art program back in the saddle and going strong, but now there’s a growing movement to put Warhol’s flower on the Dome after all—which, in fact, would be the world’s largest Warhol original.
Whom do we have to thank for both the…uh…Renaissance of our public art program, and the push to bring Warhol back? Our wonderful City Arts Administrator, Amy McBride (click to see her talk about the Warhol story)—who, incidentally, drove the steamroller that printed our Venus linocut on Sunday.
How’s that for coming full-circle, huh?
Many thanks to everyone who stopped by on Sunday, and to Amy and the Tacoma Arts Commission for continuing to make art happen—both for Wayzgoose and for Tacoma.
April 21st, 2013
It’s that time of year again: the trees are blooming outside, and inside we’re playing with knives. The ninth (!) annual Tacoma Wayzgoose is one week from today—and if we’re really lucky, Jessica and I might just finish carving our design by then. As usual, we’ll reveal the whole design that day, but until then, this little peek might look familiar…
If you’re new to my tiny u-bend of the Intertubes, you might ask: what the heck is a Wayzgoose? It’s a festival celebrating the art of printing, a tradition that goes back hundreds of years. Here in T-town, our party mobile is a steamroller—yes, ma’am—and we churn out giant-sized linocuts in the street to mark the occasion. If you’re local, come on by and get ink on your jeans:
9th Annual Tacoma Wayzgoose
Sunday, April 28, 2013
11 am to 4 pm, Free!
King’s Books
218 St. Helens Avenue, Tacoma, WA
In the meantime, you can whet your appetite with a stroll down Amnesia Lane—take a look at the ghosts of Wayzgeese past:
• 2009 (Tacoma)
• 2010 (Tacoma)
• 2011 (Tacoma)
• 2011 (San Francisco)
• 2012 (Tacoma)
See you next week, rain or shine!
December 25th, 2012
Today contains some of the few precious hours in the entire year that are just for us—when we can just be. We love the whirlwind of lights, colors, food, friends, music and surprises that comes with the holidays, but it’s the day we set aside for nothing but time that we look forward to all year.
May today be a gift to you as well—whether you spend it with family, friends, wide open spaces, or in your own lovely company.
Merry Christmas.
December 4th, 2012
Photo by Laurie Cinotto
Right now my little cottage-industry factory is churning out Christmas—starting with this year’s letterpress ornament collection. This is the second year I’ve made letterpress ornaments, and I have been dying to show you this year’s crop.
Thankfully, I can finally let the…ahem…cat out of the bag.
Look at Laurie’s amazing tree! She is the queen of holiday decorating.
There are two sets of ornaments this year, and for one of them I collaborated with my friend Laurie Cinotto, the fabulous fine-craft genius and kitty wrangler behind the insanely wonderful Itty Bitty Kitty Committee. A year ago I asked her if she’d be interested in doing a set of kitty ornaments, and for months now we’ve been positively chortling over these things. (Curious fact: we make nearly identical chortle sounds.)
The really hard part was picking which kittens from Laurie’s nearly endless alumni and gorgeous photographs to illustrate. In the end, I settled on a few of my all-time favorites: Clovis Ashby, who is a bit of a Tacoma celebrity. Extra-pretty Victoria Anne McGillicuddy in all her calico glory. Aloysius Petrie for his “Who, me?” look. My particular friend Baxter Lamm, who now makes mischief full-time at Jessica’s house. And Pearla Dearborn, to whom my secret heart belongs forever (even though she doesn’t live with me). And watching over the flock is Laurie’s own Empress Mama cat, Charlene Butterbean.
These kitties (and Laurie’s photographs) are T-town legends, as I found out this weekend. We did a little ornament test-drive at a local craft fair, and people kept saying things like, “Hey, that’s Clovis on that tree!” and “Wait a minute—what is Charlene Butterbean doing at your table?” But whether these guys are old hat for you, or you’re a dog person who’s never heard of such a thing as kitten blogs on the Internet—well, I just dare you to tear your eyes away from Laurie’s world.
There are just 200 sets of these ornaments to go around, and each one is ridiculously handmade. To give you an idea of just how ridiculous, I thought I’d walk you through part of the process.
Yes, there’s sushi on that press sheet. That’s the other ornament set this year…
Y’all know my printing process pretty well by now, so I’m going to skip ahead a bit. Just FYI, these are linocuts; check out my bird prints if you’re curious about that process. But as you can see, I printed both ornament sets all at once, on one press sheet.
Then I went ahead with my usual hand-coloring assembly line.
No, wait a minute. I said 200 prints, right? Well, that’s a small edition for retail goods, but when you’re hand-painting each one, 200 feels more like eleventy billion.
There, that’s more of an accurate picture.
Still, if the work stretching endlessly ahead of you to the horizon is a bunch of drawings of kittens, it’s impossible not to be happy about it, despite yourself. I know—I tested the hypothesis, and I’m still grinning like a fool.
This year I added a new step to the process: rather than hand-cutting all 1200 kitties in the set by hand (ahem, Local Conditions, I’m looking at you!), I made the design simple enough that I could semi-automate part of the assembly line. I bought a hand-crank die-cutting machine, created a digital dieline (basically an industrial pattern) of my design, and sent it off to a friendly steel rule manufacturer in Kent.
I know that plank with all those pink foam bits doesn’t look anything like an ornament set, so let me zoom in. A die consists of steel blades embedded in a piece of wood. The blades are bent and arranged in precisely the configuration specified by the dieline. Those pink foam bits cushion the blades, hold the paper in place and help with cutting accuracy. When the die is run through the cutting machine (which works much like a Vandercook press), those pink bits squish down under pressure, exposing the blades and gripping the paper to be cut. Those metal pins sticking up are for lining up the press sheet—they’re spring-mounted, so they retract when the blade goes through the cutting machine.
Here’s the underside of the die—now you can see how the blades fit the press sheet.
Still, while the die is a total lifesaver in terms of cutting time, the lightweight paper I was cutting made for some wiggle room—even with the extra line tolerance I built into the design. After all that hand-coloring I didn’t want to lose a third of my prints by cutting them in the wrong place. So I still had to do some puzzling and figure out how to outsmart the limitations here.
Since the lightweight prints are mounted to a heavier board to complete the ornaments (the ribbon loops are sandwiched in between), I was basically using the die twice. I realized that the leftover blanks of board would make a good template, and wouldn’t wiggle under pressure.
A little masking tape,
some quick eyeballing,
and slow-and-steady cranking in the press—
—and Bob, as they say, is your uncle.
Individually taping down all eleventy billion 200 press sheets was a little mind-numbing, but still, the “finished” pile added up fast.
And it was awfully satisfying to see the whole edition completed in days rather than weeks or months.
Laurie stepped in and saved my sanity by doing a lot of the grunt work—rough-cutting boards, snipping lengths of ribbon, and cutting insets into the board-kitties so that the ribbon loops lie flush and disappear.
A quick coat of black around the edges,
and just a wee bit of cursive script on the back,
—and we have a litter of Christmas kittens. Laurie contributed one of my favorite photos for the packaging, and I basically have been unable to stop squealing ever since. Now the Tailor and I just need to hurry up and chop down our Christmas tree, so I can display these guys in the living room!
If you’d like a set, they’re up in the shop. To answer the foreseeable question, we’re just offering these in full sets—they were printed in sets, so we don’t really have any oddball solo pieces this time. And last year almost everyone wanted the full set of bird ornaments, rather than just one, so I let those votes carry the motion. Actually, there are still some bird sets left, so feel free to snag ’em if you missed out last year. As usual, these are limited-edition—I won’t be reprinting them, so once they’re gone, they’re gone for good.
One last thing: to make sure that Tacoma pets also have a happy holiday season this year, Laurie and I will be donating a portion of our proceeds to help stock the Tacoma Humane Society’s emergency pet food bank. We want to make sure that while we’re all having a kitty-themed Christmas, the kittens who inspire us get to enjoy Christmas dinner, too.
Happy tree-trimming!
October 12th, 2012
I’ve been asked to take part in another collaborative letterpress portfolio—this time, with the theme of an animal abecedary. Each of the participants gets just a couple of letters in the collection, and I’m happy to report I nabbed two of my favorites. For these prints I experimented with something a little different. They’re hand-painted linocuts, like I often make—but these are hand-cut to reveal a fabric background. I’m pretty happy with how these turned out—now to file away the idea for future use!
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