Blog
August 25th, 2011
We had some guests visiting from Kansas last week, and when our friend Jeff heard about it, he invited us all onto his boat to give our visitors a taste of the ocean before they headed home.
As a landlubber myself, I think it might have been an even bigger treat for me.
The best part, though, was seeing my town from a whole new perspective.
If that’s not the perfect way to spend a summer day, I don’t know what is.
August 17th, 2011
Whenever the Tailor and I do our annual peach haul from the other side of the Cascades, we like to take the back road. That way, we get to take in the mountain air,
visit every orchard along the way,
Have our pick of the best farmstands,
and take the time to find out what’s beyond the next bend in the road.
August 11th, 2011
Virginia Woolf said that “a room of one’s own” was essential for women to do creative work—so imagine what 150 women could do with such a room. Jessica and I got to unveil our newest broadside at the first-ever Ladies of Letterpress Conference in Asheville, NC, where we were asked to speak about our series. It was unbelievably inspiring to stand in a room full of heavy equipment—
and even more exciting to help our fellow lady printers turn that room into a powerhouse. The conference was a smashing success, and we were both surprised and heartened to discover just how many of us are out there.
The three days of LofLCon were jam-packed with panel discussions, demos and presentations with the most prominent and skilled members of the letterpress community;
an exhibition to introduce us to a vast array of talent;
and a whole lot of hard-won know-how—like when to salvage an old press, and when to hold a funeral. (Sigh.)
Absorbing letterpress goodness by osmosis was wonderful—
—but the best part was meeting dozens of long-admired artists and brand-new, fresh faces alike.
And then there was the joy of running into old friends—look who it is! It’s the lovely Allison from Igloo Letterpress, one of my favorite partners in crime!
I can’t express enough how excellent the weekend was—Jessica White and Kseniya Thomas (pictured here in white, giving a die-cutting demo on the platen press) deserve a standing ovation for organizing such a fabulous event, and wrangling so many printers to make it happen.
And for those hundred-plus people who shoehorned themselves into that tiny space to attend our Dead Feminists talk, we can’t thank you enough. Your support and enthusiasm for what we do was completely overwhelming—and it was so much fun to be able to get technical with y’all! (Sorry, the accent rubbed off a bit.)
One more thing: I know it somehow didn’t come across in my photos, but we were blown away by the sheer number of feminist fellas who came out of the woodwork and outed themselves as fans of the series. We love you guys—you make us feel like we must be doin’ something right. And thanks to the conference, we’re fired up and ready to get back to work.
August 10th, 2011
Jessica and I are back from Asheville, with fresh memories of hazy heat and sweltering summer on our minds. Back home in Washington, however, we’re having the kind of chilly summer that demands a cozy sweater, a cup of tea and time spent curled up with a good book (and thanks to our sojourn in the South, we want to do that curling up in a rocking chair!). The news of bankrupt corporate bookstores and dire warnings of an electronic apocalypse swirl around us as we read. Yet the world contained between a pair of unassuming cloth covers begs to differ. The e-readers and tech gadgets of the world are carving out their niche—but we breathe a contented sigh at the simple truth that books are here to stay. In honor of the tactile power of fresh ink and crisp pages, we’ve shared our composing stick with a fellow letterpress printer, the celebrated English author Virginia Woolf:
Books are the mirrors of the soul.
Paper Chase is teeming with letterpress references and the tools of Virginia’s trade. A type case helps sort the problem of minding one’s Ps and Qs, while an inked-up chase (an inside joke for our fellow printers) is locked and loaded and ready to print. Above that is a staple of any writer: a messy bookshelf overflowing with stacked volumes.
Reflected in the mirror of Virginia’s work is the beauty—and sadness—that veils her prose. Ghostly silver ink floats like a lingering afterimage, and an ethereal garden blooms from spectral soil. Lilacs and lilies, thistles and honeysuckles take root—each planting a seed of meaning from the Victorian tome The Language of Flowers. Do a little digging and discover layers of rich symbolism that reveal the woman behind the words.
And for those of you who are into historical printers like we are, there’s an extra little goody hidden in the hand mirrors: a nod to another great Victorian printer and Renaissance-person, William Morris. And if you know your floral national emblems (hint: look for the rose!), you’ll discover a link to both Virginia’s and William’s homeland.
We’ll be donating a portion of our proceeds to the Independent Publishing Resource Center in Portland, Oregon, a non-profit organization that provides individual access to the resources and tools required for the creation of self-published media and art. The IPRC offers workshops, digital technology for writing and design, a research library, and even a letterpress print shop and bindery to aid in the publication of original work.
We think Virginia—and anyone else who loves making an impression—would be proud.
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Paper Chase: No. 13 in the Dead Feminists series
Edition size: 129
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:
Virginia Woolf (1882 – 1941), born Adeline Virginia Stephen, grew up with a steady stream of notable authors visiting her London home. While Virginia and her sister Vanessa had unlimited access to their father’s extensive library, their brothers were sent to Cambridge. This inequality and other Victorian double standards figured prominently in Virginia’s writing. In 1915, she married Leonard Woolf and moved to Hogarth House. There they established the Hogarth Press, publishing the work of T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Vita Sackville-West, the first translations of Sigmund Freud as well as Virginia’s own novels. As editor, typesetter and binder, Virginia had the freedom to control not just the content but the physicality of letterforms and space on a page, declaring herself “the only woman in England free to write what I like.” With Leonard as printer and Vanessa a frequent illustrator, the Hogarth Press published more than 500 books, many far too experimental to be considered by mainstream publishers.
Virginia’s life-long struggle with depression began with a breakdown at age 13 following her mother’s death, and ended after multiple attempts at suicide when she walked into a river with pocketfuls of stones.
Illustrated by Chandler O’Leary and printed by Jessica Spring, with roots firmly planted in ink-and-paper soil, and souls bound to bloom.
UPDATE: poster is sold out. Reproduction postcards available in the Dead Feminists shop!
July 20th, 2011
As you may have already noticed, I kind of have a thing for lighthouses.
It’s probably no surprise they’ve cropped up in my work lately, since my corner of the world is fair teeming with them.
But I even find myself sneaking them into other projects, even when it’s not strictly necessary.
So you can imagine my excitement on my trip back East,
when there seemed to be a beacon
around every corner.
Best keep a sharp eye out—
I have a feeling there’ll be more lighthouses popping up here in future.
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.
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