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.

The Case of the Mystery Screen Print Panel

My boyfriend recently acquired this crazy vintage screen print panel

and I immediately set out to try to learn more about it. Now I hate to toot my own horn, but I could make a sizeable part-time income as a professional internet searcher-- I am excellent at the Google. I thought I'd find information right away because its huge and really bold.

I poured over Pop and Op art screen printers and vintage textiles. I searched every single visual characteristic and visited countless pages on retro home decor. Eventually I gave up because this panel just didn't provide me with enough clues-- not signed, dated, titled. It was stretched well, but not professionally. So I'd totally given up and resigned myself to the fact that we'd always have this weird print we knew nothing about laying around.

Then today I casually opened up my Apartment Therapy SF Feed (I don't typically even visit the Apartment Therapy blogs because they go up so often its virtually impossible) and I saw
this!

The exact same print! Well almost-- this one doesn't have that extra set of lines that ours does-- so I'm guessing its a little shorter. To see this ever so serendipitously after combing the internet for hours days earlier really freaked me out.

I've emailed the apartment's owner (an Apartment Therapy contributor) and am hoping she can help me solve the mystery. I imagine she probably found it rather haphazardly too, but you never know.

Plugging Away & My Day Job

I am switching gears tonight and working on woodcut prints. I tried this method prior to the last show-- where I amass a pile of screen prints and then focus only on woodcuts, and it worked really well. The hope is that I make around 200 5x7 prints between today and tomorrow. Those sold the best at my last show, and I'm thinking this next one will be very similar.

I have one more day off to really pump them out, and then back to the day job for another 40 hours. For those of you who don't know me very well, I am very fortunate to have a really wonderful and creative day job, so you won't hear too many complaints from me on that end.

In addition to spending the last few months selling prints in shows and online, I also work as a sign designer for Trader Joe's. If you're wondering what that entails, its probably a safe bet that you haven't been in the store. Trader Joe's is a kind of wacky gourmet grocery chain-- there's around 300 stores in the US, most of them around metropolitan areas. Each store keeps a small staff of local artists on who make every single sign in the store by hand. In addition we've worked a lot on the visual merchandising end this year-- giving the store an entire new look with a community theme and creating and working within cohesive brands and images for events. Right now we're about to hang huge hand-made ornaments from the ceiling for the holidays. Here's the theme introduction to our Thanksgiving-- its the first thing you'll notice as you walk in:


This setup is a collaboration between myself and Adam, by colleage and creamate. For those following along at home, a creamate is a soul mate in the creative realm, and yes, I just made it up. I will post more about Adam and his many amazing talents later. We spent around 4 hours at 4 thrift stores putting this look together. The shadow boxes are made with black foam board and old wood frames and they're so perfect that we're going to recycle them as gift boxes for our Christmas display.

All right, I'm fresh out of stalling material-- time to get to printing!