My favorite project of all

Oh, little blog-- where did the weeks go?
Strap yourself in, I have lots of ground to make up for!

I have long maintained a love/hate relationship with living in a four-season climate—meaning I hate it in the winter, am over the moon for the first days of spring, take full advantage of the summer, and mourn with the changing trees in fall.

This time around winter has been crazy busy-- normally this season drags by in the snowy north, filled with cold mornings scraping the car windows, white knuckle drives to work, and daily musings about why on earth I live here. I'm happy to say that this time around, winter was a complete blur. I hardly noticed the snow, and barely had time to miss the sun until I realized last week that it was suddenly beginning to make appearances!

My busy winter has everything with do with my work—I haven’t been printing until very recently, but have had a plethora of other lovely projects come my way. As many of you know, I have started working with Blue House Ann Arbor-- a sublime handmade studio created by an amazing woman named Siobhan Lyle. Blue House's mission is to be a sort of one stop shop for local artists and crafters. Siobhan re-imagined a graceful old home on Main Street, turning it into a place to create, gather, shop and learn. I have been fortunate enough to have a part in almost all of those ends-- I have been doing some signs for the studio, am selling my work in the shop and at its inaugural event: Handmade at Blue House, and, best of all-- I get to teach.

At the risk of sounding a little hippie dippie, I will say the act the printmaking-- the many, many steps that lead from start to finish, keep me sane. There's been a lot of attention paid lately to flow -- the art of being so fully immersed in one's work that focus, joy and concentration is at an all time high. It’s almost like meditation in a way, but with the focus on your work instead of yourself. I find this flow in printing constantly-- it’s a way of making that is simply set up, through the act of being process driven, physical, repetitive, and problem solving in nature, for this level of absorption to take place.

There are lots of reasons why I fell in love with printmaking and enjoy teaching it. Flow is central. Printing is also unique in that its history is just as much trade and craft as it is fine art. It operates within a set of rules, uses a wide and enticing variety of tools and materials, and follows a sequence. As someone who has always struggled to say “this piece of art is done” I love printing because it decides for me. You make decisions early in the process and live with them at the end—that resonates much more clearly with my personality. In fact, I have kind of brought that process over to anything I make. If I make a sign I draw out four or five plans first, making all of the choices—color, font, text size, before I start. By making all of my choices right away, I reconcile my imagination with my somewhat Type A personality.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you find yourself in a creative slump, or think you’re not that creative to start, give printmaking a try. If you’re in the area, consider giving it a try with me. :)

Goings On

I am so slacking on the blog front, its true-- but not because I haven't been busy! Here's a wee update of what's new!


I met my new friend Heidi at last year's Craft Revival, where she picked up some framed prints, and I recently put together a nice-sized order of work for her to sprinkle around her gorgeous home. She sent me some photos for you to peruse:

Robin's Nest, Forest Floor, Petoskey Stones and Bracken Fern in a block of four--with a swanky lamp I can't stop eying and a really cute orange tabby in the foreground!

Remus on white in the bedroom over a mounted plate makes for a
sweet combination against her soft blue walls.

Thanks again Heidi, for sending these photos in. Heidi is an interior designer by trade and a founding member of MICE, so I'm really honored that she chose support my artistic endeavors!

I will take this opportunity again to remind you that if you send in photos of your new prints I offer a 20% discount on any future print purchase from the Etsy shop.

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Speaking of MICE, organizer Kate Kehoe is putting on a show next month to help raise money for its senior center. I will not be able to attend, but put together a poster for the event. If you're free you should stop in for this rare opportunity to support the arts and an important community resource here in Ypsilanti.

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In other news...



I am working on a commission for Ann Arbor's own Carillon Chocolates. Alex, who runs the show over at Carillon, contacted me after the Jamboree last month to get some work up on the shops freshly painted blue and green walls. I am currently working on a series of 4 images (12 prints in all) for the shop with local/food themes that will be finished by the end of the month! The best part: I will be printing on the same burlap sacks the shop's coffee comes in, making the entire venture a green and happy one!

Did I mention I love this little shop? They roast all of their coffee in-house, use local vendors, and have a glass counter lined with beautiful confections-- just like your favorite childhood candy store. You will be transported, I promise. They're very conveniently located right on Main St. between Liberty and Williams-- I would highly recommend you stop in! (psst: they have $2
Lattes on Mondays!)

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And a show update:


After I wrap up this sweet project for Carillon, I will jumping head first into holiday preparations, and at that point we might as well kiss this blog goodbye. (just kidding) Seriously though, I have my work cut out for me. I mentioned in my last post that I will be returning to the Detroit Urban Craft Fair on November 21st. Since then I have also been accepted to sell work at the Renegade Craft Fair Holiday Sale in Chicago on December 5th and 6th! This will be my first attempt trafficking prints over state lines, and I'm really excited to spend a weekend in the windy city!


And then the Holiday SuperSale of Awesome will commence in the Etsy shop!
That's the tentative name.

And now if you'll excuse me, I need to add 14 million tags to this post-- I probably should have split all of this information up over a couple weeks!

Busy MICE

The Jamboree was an absolute blast! September is flying by-- its getting busy at work as we do a little permanent art remodeling, I have two more shows this month, and a couple of custom orders. I am about to screen a whole mess of birch trees-- they have become a hot commodity all of a sudden-- in the meantime please enjoy the poster I made last week for this falls' MICE at the Market show. This is the third poster I've made for this show-- they're always so much fun to put together. This time around I wanted to play off the acronym MICE, so I put together a little maze.

One Week Away (yikes!)

Hope to see you there!

Celebrate Summer

We always pull together a 'look' for the store entry for each new flyer-- this time we decided to go with 'Celebrate Summer' because it was nice and simple and we're just so glad that the sun is finally here!

I cut down a truck-load of triangle flags from four shades of textured cardstock in fantastic beach-side colors-- and then we hot glued each one to white string at 4 inch intervals and hung them up in long, graceful, 'county fair-like' swags. Adam made all of the signs-- from hundreds of gathered paint chips.

Its really simple, but came together so beautifully.
I love the negative space on the sign.

Here's a closeup of the fabulous paint chip job.

love this 2!

we carried the flags throughout the store. they were the perfect punch of color-- easy to make and effortless to hang. we'll definitely be revisiting them again, maybe with scantron sheets and old lined paper for back to school!

This seemed fitting to post tonight because I'm off to celebrate summer myself-- our first camping trip of the year starts tomorrow! Chris and I are meeting up with our friends Andy and Holly on Lake Michigan for a long weekend. I will be back next week with photos!

And another!

I had a blast in Mt. Clemens over the weekend-- shared a tent with lots of really nice people, enjoyed an elephant ear, and made a little money too. This show was huge in terms of exposure-- my work was awarded 'Best of Show' for the Urban Art Tent and I was also featured in Thursday's Detroit News Arts Section:

Hooray!

I don't have a lot of time to rest on my laurels because I was accepted into the Ann Arbor Art Fair last week! The Ann Arbor Art Fair is a famous group of four fairs throughout the downtown area that take place over four days in July. It draws about half a million people into the city, and claims to be ranked the #1 Art Fair in North America by various publications. Here's a shot of the fair from a few years ago:


This is just one block of many that make up the fair as a whole!

I will have a whole tent for this show, which means I need a lot more inventory and furnishings. I have many, many more screen prints to pull in the coming weeks and lots and lots and lots of woodcuts. Endless woodcuts. I'd like to say I'm not wasting any time getting started, but I already made plans to spend the next two weekends out of town-- so for now I'm doing lots of planning. Tonight I will be placing a very large Dick Blick order and trying to decide what to print. I'm buying a bigger screen so that I can make some larger work, and I guess I'll just hope for the best!

Ahead of Schedule at the Factory

I might actually pull this one off feeling organized.

I have screen prints to stretch, two clamp lights to finish spray painting (outside!) and inventory to inventorialize(?) in addition to making a few signs and some other odds and ends. I won't have to worry about packing the car with my table furniture since its still in the back of my wagon from the last show.

What's helped so much in this rush to the show madness has been the decision to stop using reclaimed frames. Most of the frames I own (and love the most) are vintage, and up until this point, I've used them almost exclusively. There's a certain level of fun in finding them-- driving to the one-day-a-week Kiwanis sale in Ann Arbor at 9am on a Saturday without brushing my hair, becoming a regular client on Resale Row, stumbling on other lovely treasures and so on. If I still practiced this method I'm sure I'd have found the solid wood mid-century coffee table of my dreams by now. And an entire Pyrex set. It was a fun, but time-intensive search. Then once I got the frames-- oh man. The things people do to wedge something in a frame- the nails and staples. I have a whole pile I could not resurrect once taken apart from the precarious situation I found them in. At the end of the day, the full time job was getting in the way of all of the time I wanted to spend thrifting, and I was starting to get frustrated at my lack of carpentry skills and time.

So when I stumbled on a gold mine of beautiful, modern, solid wood frames from a certain Swedish home furnishings empire at a huge discount, I spent a week thinking about it. At the end of the day the vintage frames were so.much.work. to find and put together, and I caved. I threw down a big chunk of change and took home enough frames to fill the closet in our office.

These new frames will make their debut on Saturday, and the online shop will soon be able to accommodate custom framing with any order. They look much more polished, but lack some of the character of a frame that's been beaten within an inch of its life and used to house a photograph of a duck in a party hat (true story). Sometimes I left the old art in the frame, just so anyone who takes it apart some day gets a sense of the life these four pieces of wood have lived. This sense of polish seems be true for my body of work this time around-- many of the woodcut images are the same, but on new, sturdier paper. The editions are more consistent, even, and neat. I miss the wonky frames, random fingerprints, and dinged corners a little. They contained a narrative all their own.

On the other hand, I learned printmaking in a purist environment. I was taught to craft my image carefully, ink neatly, and to print with clean fingers. I didn't appreciate learning the trade this way until I took a kind of 'anything goes' course, where the rules I learned about precision were thrown out the window. I admire amazing printmakers (like the very talented Annie Bissett, for example) who create images that pull this off so well, with so much patience. Its such a process-laden job to make a print that extra patience can sometimes be hard to come by. The small part of me that's a touch Type A is satisfied to see a marked improvement in craftsmanship in my own work... all it took was 8 years of practice.