Another Passion is an excellent Seattle art blog. It features local artists, musicians, and general creative types, along with musings on creativity in general. Also, this week it features an interview with me! I’m pretty excited to be on there. It was also a real treat to meet the guy behind it, Rasmus Rasmussen!
We unloaded the kiln on Saturday, and it looks like a great firing. I’ve spent the last two days trying to clean up all of the work, and sort it as to where it will be going. Most of the beasts came off of their wads cleanly, meaning there wasn’t too much work to do as far as that. What was harder was deciding where each piece should go. I’ve set aside four to submit to jurried shows, another four or five to send to a show in Idaho, about 10 to take with me to Japan, and another 10 to 12 that will be for sale online. They’ll all be showing up online at around noon (PDT) on April 18th – so if you feel like buying a piece, check back near then!
I’m also finally all packed up for NCECA. I’ll be spending four days there, and then camping in the area with my dad, my brother, and my brother’s wife. It should be a lot of fun!
There’s been a few things I found recently that seemed worthy of passing along. First off is the mysterious myspace artist known as Milk / Logyu. I found her work a little while ago due to random site called NotCot. She has no portfolio site, or really any information out there. There’s pretty much only her myspace profile that tells you that she’s 32 and from Tuscon, and her mind blowing work. What I love so much about it is her use of tiny continued themes, such as her skeleton birds, cards with hearts, and mp3 players. Have fun perusing her fascinating work. I wonder if her work only exists in the digital world?
Next is an oddly equally fascinating medieval beastiary. It’s truly fun to explore. It has a huge list of creatures, with each one having examples of medieval art and an explanation of what it was, along with bibliographic sources for the earliest references. Sure, it has all the standard creatures like hyenas and dragons, but it also has weird ones like … Barnacle geese?? And also, who knew that asps were originally lion- like creatures that guarded trees. To avoid being lulled to sleep by music, the asp would keep one ear pressed to the ground, and the other plugged with its tail.
The one other thing worth passing along is that I’ve been working to clear out my flickr backlog. I have unsorted and un-uploaded photos that go back to the last fourth of July. So if you follow my flickr feed, please enjoy chronologically random stuff that should be showing up over the next bit or so.
It’s been a long week. I finally have all the work photographed, sorted, titled and captioned. I’ve even sent off the first boxes to galleries and costumers. The photo is from Monday, when I’d been pushing really hard to get off an application to an emerging artist contest thing. I was going to just keep working on stuff on my laptop, but between the soft pillow and the soft cat, I didn’t stand a chance. However, everything is now finally up! Enjoy!
So I just now finished getting everything photographed and uploaded to flickr! (well, almost everything). I had been planning on re-photographing a few things, but decided that it was more important to have everything up now.
Anyway, in order to celebrate all this new work, I’ll be hosting a slightly impromptu opening at my studio tonight. It’s going to be pretty low key, but I will have all of the new work there and on display, along with food and drink of some type. If you’re in the Seattle area, I recommend coming on by! It’s at 218 Florentia st, just on the south end of the Fremont Bridge. We’re in the building with the crazy mural. I’ll be there from 6pm to 8, and maybe till 9. Stop on by!
I’ve spent the last 48 hours rushing to get off an application for an “Emerging Artist” grant. Now, the light box is finished, a first round of work is photographed, and the CD with my images is burned and in the mail.
I’ve only had time to photograph a few of my favorite pieces, and looking through the results, I think I’ll be doing a few more tweaks to the lighting set up. I’m pretty happy with it, but I feel like fussing with it a bit more. Once I have all the information on the new critters up, I’m hoping to put together a howto on building the lighting softbox.
I’ll have my work cut out for me with documenting all of my beasts, though. I’ll need to photograph them, record all the useful info for them, and price them. I’ll also have to decide which to send off to galleries, which to sell myself, and which pieces will be not for sale, reserved to enter into shows. Hopefully, I’ll have all of that worked out by the end of the week. In the mean time, I’ve uploaded some of the photos I shot today.
I’m quite excited about the firing coming up in late October. I’ve had some extra time to get pieces together for it, and I feel like it’s paying off. I think I’m on track to make enough work for my galleries, and have a holiday sale at my studio. I’ll post dates and stuff like that once I have them, but in the mean time, here’s more of a sneak peak at my drying shelves.
These are the ones that I finished most recently.
Also, in my studio, I have a big white board. I use it to make random notes to myself, sketch ideas, and just doodle stuff. I really like the idea I have on there now, but I’ll have to wait and see as to how it comes together. I’ve been big on antlers recently, but I don’t know how well they’ll survive the firing. They might just droop. To avoid that, I’ll have to make them very stocky. Also, do you you recognize the guy in pink?
I tend to take a fairly large number of photos. When I recently broke my year old camera, I’d taken 9000 photos with and it had been starting to wear out. To be fair, that’s including my art documentation, a trip to asia, and my habit of taking 10 photos of every shot I want to capture. Regardless of all that, it means I spend a fair amount of time sorting through photos. This weekend, I’ve been catching up on some of the random photos for the last few months, and uploading the best up to flickr. I still have a lot to go, but this is my favorite for the evening.
I’ve just about finished photographing all of my work from this last woodfiring. I have a couple pieces left that I’m still doing some mixed media work on, specifically a few beasts that will be walking on stilts and the big city beast. The stilt beasts will be done hopefully in another day or two, but it will be a bit longer for the big city beast. In addition to having some mixed media work to go, he’s also too big for my photo set up. It’s located in the shower stall of the spare bathroom of our studio, and maxes out on any piece bigger than six inches or so. I’ll have to take the city beast out to the other side of the Sound and get Steve Sauer to photograph him for me.
Anyway, here’s the point of this post. My new work!
I found a few more of photos from this last firing that I hadn’t uploaded yet. I suppose that’s the problem with taking plenty of memory cards, it’s easy to loose track of the pictures. These were from Wednesday night, when we were doing hikidashi (pulling teabowls from the kiln). Anyway, they’re now up on my flickr page, and also are part of the Santatsugama set.