I love bad art.

I sent out an email to help ward off the creative block I was in a few weeks ago…

“here’s how it works:
i give you 3 abstract words and 3 concrete words and you make me a piece of art on a postcard size card and mail it to me. you interpret the words however you see fit and with me in mind. you do the same, send me 3 abstract words and 3 concrete words, and your snail mail address!!!, and i’ll mail YOU a postcard with my interpretation of your words and with you in mind.
you don’t have to be good at making art. in fact, i love bad art. yeah, send me bad art.”
…and so now the art is rolling in! and here’s what a sample of my postcards looked like before i sent them out.

 

Freedom of the Press

This past summer I made a homemade press using a car bottlejack, assembling some pieces of wood and metal–not without spending hours walking in circles in the black hole that can be Home Depot–and expending a little sawing sweat. I’m very proud of this DIY project (care of an article in the intermittantly useful magazine Readymade.) I’ve done a couple basic linoleum prints just trying it out but I’m ready to roll up my sleeves and really start squishing things. I’ve contemplated all things around my home that could be pressed…a soda can, apples into cider!, grapes into wine!…well, that’s a stretch), handbound books pressed together,…or the mother of all printing adventures…old school letterpress.

I took a mini 2-day workshop in the Letterpress studio at Columbia College recently. Their presses are probably from the 1920’s and were manufactured by a company named Vandercook. I learned such cute terms as quoin and quoin keys and composing sticks and arranging furniture around your type. I knew I was in the right place when someone went to the trouble of making a rubbing of Vandercook’s grave in a nearyby cemetery and then displaying it on the studio wall. Letterpress and Gravestones: my passions collide!

This relatively new process (to me) was invented (at least in the West) by good ole Gutenburg in the 1500s using a wine press similar to the one I have. Long live the freedom of the press! Sweet sweet mass produced prints for the masses. So if you see some antique letterpress equipment in a local store or you’re trying to get it off your hands, let me help you! Calling all letterpress equipment!

I am slowly acquiring my own letterpress equipment in my own space and I’ll keep you updated on this crazy project!

 

Absentminded drawing

The dictionary says to doodle is “to draw absentmindedly.” What does it mean to be absentminded? Does this mean I forgot how to draw momentarily? What does it mean to know HOW to draw? This week’s doodling:

 

Laundromat Handwriting

Here is a portion of a handwritten moving sale notice. It was taped to the wall at the laundromat. I tore a portion of the writing while trying to keep the main message in tact. I just needed this little bit. I looked up the strange characters in an old handwriting analysis book. Much like a dream interpretation book, it is full of more generalizations than I am usually comfortable with…at any rate, I looked up this overlapping coiling motion this writer did, particularly in the o’s and d’s. This poor writer is just trying to sell a set of tables and chairs and here I am scrutinizing the shape of their letter d.

Here’s what the book said:

Or maybe it more closely resembled this:

Well, there you go. If you want those table and chairs, you’ll have to live with the fact that the previous owner had  narcissistic tendencies, or maybe extreme autoerotism, and could have been dishonest.

…extra irony points if you connected the keyboard in the background to the handwritten letters in the first picture.