Blog
July 13th, 2011
My next stop on the trip was one I would have made anyway, just for the sheer natural beauty. But what really happened is that I let my inner movie geek take over. Film buffs: recognize that location?
Ah, Cannon Beach. Home of the iconic Haystack Rock and filming location for The Goonies and a whole host of other movies. I would have loved to stay longer, but the only thing likely to roll in that morning wasn’t a pirate ship—
—it was another storm.
I finally managed to tear my eyes from the ominous horizon—less gaping, more fleeing!—but as I turned to walk back to the car, I happened to glance northward:
The moment was more like an instant; there was just enough time to let the shutter fly before the light disappeared.
As the first sheet of rain reached me, I jumped in the car and got the heck out of there.
At last I was finally back on my mental map, with just a sliver of Oregon remaining. Within minutes I was perched at the summit of my favorite place to watch the clouds, where the weather is always changing: Astoria.
Here, I set about finishing what I started the last time I was in town. Without a detailed map or internet access to tell me where to go, all I could do was wander around. But that’s the best way to explore a place like Astoria—and I found what I was searching for anyway.
Look familiar?
Or how about this place? (Hint: “It’s not a tumor!”)
Even if I hadn’t been location scouting, I had my hands full with a beautiful panorama around every corner. I just love the view of the bridge from here.
But staring into the mouth of the mighty Columbia, just as the rain turned into a heavy snow squall, reminded me that home was still many miles away—and that I was hoping to get there before dark.
There was just enough time for one final rainbow,
and then I embarked on the last lonely stretch of empty road.
As I pulled over for my last glimpse of the Pacific, I realized that I’d come almost exactly 1000 miles along the coast. Even with six days spent on the road, those miles flashed by entirely too quickly. But then I remembered that I still had the southern half of Highway One left to explore—and the promise of a whole lot of meandering, some day, to get there.
Sounds like a plan.
July 7th, 2011
My lucky good weather held out until I hit the Oregon border. And then the storm hit.
It poured. I mean, absolutely cats and dogs.
Once in awhile it let up enough to let a hint of sunshine through,
but then the shower curtains would roll back in a moment later.
Sometimes the weather made me laugh out loud. Whenever I’d step out of the car to snap a photo, I’d be buffeted by gale-force winds, and then an invisible person would throw a gallon-sized bucket of icy water right in my face. (Didn’t need coffee to stay awake that day…)
And somehow, it seemed like the quintessential Oregon to me. I think for my maiden voyage up the coast, a monsoon was the appropriate setting; it’s hard to imagine the place in the sun.
And at the end of the day, I could watch the storm rage and crash from the cozy comfort of a beachfront room. Then I sipped a mug of hot tea, and just listened to the roar of the waves.
June 30th, 2011
Eureka!
(Sorry. I just felt a great need to say that. Ahem.)
I stopped in Eureka, CA for a cuppa after my sojourn in the nearby redwoods, and was charmed in a heartbeat. Thanks to its obvious proximity to timber, Eureka is chock-a-block with fancy Victorian and Art Deco architecture. And by stumbling upon a book in a shop downtown that day, I discovered it’s not the only town on the Redwood coast that can make that claim. Since one of them was only a few miles back the way I’d come, I turned right around and headed back up the valley to Ferndale.
Nicknamed the “Cream City,” Ferndale had its heyday in the 1880s, when the area’s prosperous dairy farms provided much of the wealth that built the town. These affluent farmers built ornate and sumptuous homes there—which the locals called “Butterfat Palaces.”
Right away I could see why—when I got to stay in one.
The next morning, after an early breakfast, I took a stroll around town.
As seemed to be a running theme for my trip, I had the place to myself. The only sounds I heard were mourning doves and lowing cattle—and the early morning glow bathed the buildings in sunlight.
Ferndale is a tiny town; if you add up all its historic buildings you might get three or four city blocks. But the place is worth its weight in butter when it comes to the details.
I mean, come on! Just look at that pink door! (I want a pink door on my house!)
It’s the details that actually played a large part in saving the place from destruction and “urban renewal.” After a series of devastating floods in the mid-20th century, the buildings on main street were slated for demolition. That is, until a local resident bought up every threatened building, then painted them in outrageous Victorian colors—essentially creating the tourist draw the place enjoys today.
I probably could have stared at egg-and-dart cornices all day, but then I turned a corner, and stopped dead in my tracks.
But before I go on, I have to provide a little back story.
The Tailor and I have a tradition of putting together a jigsaw puzzle on New Year’s Day (riveting pastime, I know, but we love it)—we’re always raiding thrift stores in search of the next puzzle. This year’s was an image of an ornate victorian house, in some town I’d never heard of.
Well, when I turned that corner, I was absolutely gobsmacked to discover it was the jigsaw puzzle house!
I knew I couldn’t possibly be mistaken—after all, when you reconstruct a building from 1000 pieces of cardboard, you start to memorize the details.
So I plonked myself down on the curb, and started jotting down some of those details in my sketchbook. After all—why settle for a jigsaw puzzle when I had the real thing before me?
June 24th, 2011
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The tree is more than first a seed, then a stem, then a living trunk,
and then dead timber. The tree is a slow, enduring force straining
to win the sky.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
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I’ve had four months now to mull over the experience of driving through a redwood forest in the early morning, in complete solitude and silence. And even now, there really are no words to describe it.
Thankfully, though, a redwood forest by its very nature makes it easy to ignore such things. Because my brain certainly wasn’t going to get a handle on what my eyes were seeing—nor was my camera.
And neither, it turns out, was my paintbrush. I needed a sketchbook that was six inches wide by about twenty feet tall.
And then I realized that I needed a sense of scale, a point of reference. Enter the only other car I saw that morning, and my wide-angle lens.
Eh. That’s still not it.
The only thing to do is to go there in person, crane your neck, and gaze upward in wonder.
June 19th, 2011
Even though my trip south originally brought me across the Bay, it seemed like San Francisco was the logical starting point for my long trek home along the coast.
So after a quick sketch (while humming that Journey song that popped into my head for the umpteenth time), I crossed the bridge and headed north.
It wasn’t long before I’d left civilization almost completely behind. My chosen route was the (in)famous Highway One, which winds a precarious path along the shore, with breathtaking views and treacherous challenges at every hairpin turn. In other words, it was perfect in nearly every way. Despite the environmental guilt of it all, I confess that I love driving—and hugging the curves of 300 miles of switchbacks in a stick-shift Subaru? Pure, unadulterated bliss. And while I missed the company of the Tailor, or any of my other traditional travel buddies, it was nice to be able to stop and take a picture every thirty seconds, without the risk of annoying anyone!
I knew that by traveling the Coast Highway on a weekday in February, I’d have the place pretty much to myself. But I was completely unprepared for the solitude that awaited me at my first stop along the way: Point Reyes National Seashore.
Point Reyes is a long, jagged cape with an equally long history. Sir Francis Drake reportedly landed there in 1579, and people have inhabited it, farmed it, settled it, and even wrecked their ships upon it for many, many generations. Since the 1850s much of the land has been parceled out into dairy farms, which are still in operation today, thanks to the protection of the National Park Service.
What first struck me about the place is the near total absence of trees. The place reminded me more of the Scottish highlands than anything I’d seen in California—and in fact, one of the few small towns located on the peninsula is called Inverness.
And I’m sure that at the height of summer, the place is crawling with tourists—but that day I was completely alone. For miles and miles and miles, it was just me and the cows.
I hadn’t intended to travel the whole length of the cape; I wasn’t on a fixed timetable or anything, but by that point it was already late morning. But I saw a sign indicating a lighthouse ahead, so I kept going. There was no mile count on the sign, and I didn’t bother to fish out the map. It couldn’t be far, right? Well, the road wound on and on and on, with no sign of a lighthouse, and no indication of where this would end. But then, a full twenty miles on, the track came to an abrupt end. I got out of the car, faced back north, and nearly had to pick my jaw up off the ground.
The lighthouse was just a short hike from there:
I could see why people were forever dashing their boats upon the rocks.
And that wasn’t the only thing I could see. I was staring into the bright teal surf when something surfaced and caught my eye:
A gray whale! It’s funny—I’ve lived on one coast or another for over eleven years of my life, and I’d never seen a whale in person before. If that wasn’t worth the forty-mile detour, I don’t know what is.
After the whale-watching and a 2-minute watercolor, I made the long trek back to the highway.
The remaining stretch of Highway One was almost equally deserted. It made the miles melt away quickly, and gave me the feeling that I had the whole Pacific to myself.
Before long, the rolling hills and eucalyptus trees tapered off,
and the landscape gave way to cypress stands and evergreen forests.
The road ended just as the day did. As the sun went down the path turned eastward, away from the shore, and plunged into the thick darkness of coastal forest. By the time I pulled into a hotel for the night, it was pitch black, and Highway One had been replaced by the other Pacific Highway: US 101. I was in completely unfamiliar territory, and would be until I came all the way north to Astoria several days later, but despite the darkness and lack of bearings, I knew what lay ahead. And I was almost too excited to sleep, because I knew that in the morning, the sun would reveal exactly where I was: in the heart of redwood country.
June 14th, 2011
My usually insatiable wanderlust has been at an absolute fever pitch lately—and a pretty intense recent case of studio burnout has only increased the feeling. So in order to recharge the old battery a bit, and maybe stir up some brand new inspiration, I’m closing up shop and hitting the road. The Tailor and I are embarking on an epic five-week cross-country adventure, starting tomorrow morning. Along the way, if all goes according to plan, we’ll visit eighteen states and six Canadian provinces—and probably a host of art supply and camera stores along the way, to keep me stocked with sketchbooks and memory cards.
We’ll be back in the third week of July, which will give Jessica and me just enough time to design and print a new Dead Feminist broadside, and then hop a plane with the stack of prints. Jessica and I will be among the presenters at the first annual Ladies of Letterpress Conference in Asheville, North Carolina. If you happen to be local (and since a curiously huge percentage of our customers and followers live in NC, you might be!), swing on by and say hello! The conference will be held on August 5-7—as far as we know, we’ll be up to bat on the first evening.
So as you can see, I’m going to have some blogging to do in the near future. Which reminds me that I never had the chance to report back about my last road trip, down the Pacific Coast. Either time flies, or I’m spinning too many plates. Since I won’t be set up to live-blog from the road this summer, I’ve queued up a series of posts about the Pacific Coast Highway to run while I’m away. It’s almost like being in two places at once!
So anyway, you take the high road, and I’ll take the low road, and we’ll meet up again, at the other end.
May 30th, 2011
Today is Memorial Day in the United States, a holiday designated for the remembrance of those lost in time of war. But on this day, Jessica and I can’t help but extend our thoughts to others as well, in the spirit of peace. Today our eyes and hearts are trained on the far shores of the Pacific, where the people of Japan are still reeling from the March 11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster. So for our twelfth Dead Feminist broadside, we remember them by giving wings to the words of our youngest-ever feminist:
I will write peace on your wings and you will fly all over the world. — Sadako Sasaki
As you can probably tell, this piece is a bit of a departure from our usual way of doing things. This time it just didn’t feel right to let the typography run amok, or to fill every inch of real estate with illustrated goodies. So instead, we simply opened the door and let our imaginations take flight. The quote stands quietly apart, running parallel to a flock of origami cranes rising upward from a persimmon sun. As they follow Sadako’s words and wishes, they transform into red-crowned tancho cranes, disappearing off the page.
Since the traditions and history of Japanese printmaking are a veritable goldmine, the sky was literally the limit when it came to inspiration. But I had something particular in mind:
On the left is is Cranes and New Year Sun by Utagawa Hiroshige; on the right is Katsushika Hokusai’s famous Great Wave Off Kanagawa. You can see a reference to Great Wave at the bottom of Cranes—making references to both other artists and one’s own older work is a common convention in Japanese art.
I had the good fortune of seeing Cranes and New Year Sun in person earlier this year at the Tacoma Art Museum. Not only is it a beautiful image, it has an interesting quirk that sort of stuck in my craw. See that line running halfway through the composition on the left? The piece is made up of two sheets of paper; it was originally designed to function as the front and rear endsheets of a book. As far as I know, the original viewer never would have seen the image as a whole—and maybe never would have given it a second thought. But together, the two halves of the image form a stunning vertical composition that I wanted to reference for our piece.
There’s also a bit of a practical homage for us here: just as Hiroshige’s illustration is made up of two parts, each one of our Dead Feminist broadsides is also comprised of two halves. For us it’s purely a technical limitation—Jessica’s platemaker can only make plates that are about 8 x 10 inches in size. So since each of our prints is 10 x 18 inches, we have to break the illustration up and print it in two sections: one set of plates for the top, and another for the bottom. So that means that somewhere in every one of our broadsides, there’s a little break running horizontally through the composition. We usually try to hide it as cleverly as possible, or at least blend it in with the overall design, but it’s always there. Take a look at some of our previous prints and see if you can find it. (Mind the gap!)
Anyway, Hiroshige is not the only person we have to thank for all of this. I’d also like to send out a special, winged bit of gratitude to Hiroshi Oki for providing us with his exquisite kanji (Japanese calligraphy) rendition of Sadako’s name—and to his daughter Shiori for introducing us.
The thing that has just enchanted us both about this project is the very idea of imbuing paper with a wish—of creating something so labor-intensive and time consuming, and then sending it out into the world for a greater purpose. Sadako wasn’t the only person to fold cranes for a wish, but she might be the most well-known. Every year, on the anniversary of the atomic bombing, Sadako’s monument in Hiroshima is festooned with thousands upon thousands of cranes—so many that permanent shelters have been erected there to house and protect them. And even in Western countries, it’s become somewhat of a tradition to give senbazuru (a set of 1000 paper cranes) as a gift to cancer patients. Talk about a ripple becoming a tidal wave.
In that spirit, we’ll be donating a portion of our proceeds to Peace Winds America, a non-profit organization based in Seattle and dedicated to disaster response worldwide. The donation will be directed to the Japan Relief & Recovery Fund, used to rebuild local infrastructure and restore the livelihoods and communities of those affected by the earthquake and tsunami. We’d like to think of this as a little senbazuru of our own.
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Peace Unfolds: No. 12 in the Dead Feminists series
Edition size: 166
Poster size: 10 x 18 inches
Printed on an antique Vandercook Universal One press, on archival, 100% rag paper. Each piece is numbered and signed by both artists.
Colophon reads:
According to Japanese legend, one who folds 1000 origami cranes will be granted a wish. After being diagnosed with leukemia—a result of her proximity to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima—Sadako Sasaki (1943 – 1955) began folding paper, hoping to live. With her best friend Chizuko, she finished 644 cranes before her death at age 12. Sadako was buried with a wreath of 1000 cranes completed by her schoolmates, and is honored with the Children’s Peace Monument in the center of Hiroshima.
Illustrated by Chandler O’Leary and printed by Jessica Spring, with kanji by Hiroshi Oki, in memory of those lost and suffering in Japan—and with a wish for hope, peace and life, once again.
UPDATE: poster is sold out. Reproduction postcards available in the Dead Feminists shop!
May 28th, 2011
I’m still not sure how it happened, but it’s May already—and that means Jessica and I are due for another broadside. This weekend, while everyone else is grilling hot dogs, we’re cooking up something entirely different. Now, if only print racks left behind those tasty-looking grill marks…
Memorial Day has a little bit of a part to play in the new piece, so we’ll be unveiling it here on Monday.
In the meantime, have a safe and happy holiday weekend (and to all our friends outside the U.S., a safe and happy regular weekend!). See you soon.
May 18th, 2011
Despite the fact that in my brain it’s still January, and I’m still irrationally looking forward to all the catch-up time I’ll have in the “new year” (which is starting to look more and more like next year instead), the rhodies blooming right outside my studio window are hard evidence to the contrary.
May 7th, 2011
Despite an overabundance of deadlines and studio hubbub lately—well, beautiful spring weather and productivity just don’t mix. Besides, a sunny Friday in the Northwest is basically a license to play hooky. So I took a day off and made my annual pilgrimage up to the Skagit Valley to catch the end of the Tulip Festival.
I’m glad I waited this year; not only did the blooms hit a late peak, but the weather was nearly flawless.
Unfortunately, that also meant I wasn’t alone. Finding a shot that didn’t include minivans, port-a-potties, cyclists in DayGlo jackets or entire families striking goofy poses was quite a challenge, and required a lot of waiting and creative cropping.
This time, however, I was interested in far more than just the tulips alone. So I cast a wider net, and found the magic absolutely everywhere I looked. Whenever I wandered away from the fields of pink and red, I seemed to have whole acres to myself.
Still, come sunset, the tourists had all gone home, and it was just me, the mountains, and a sea of blooms stretching to the horizon.
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