ARCHIVES FOR "Ramblings"
sold out!
Well, that’s an exciting thing to write. Magically, the Vertical Cities prints sold out with minimal intervention from me. The whole thing began as an experiment, having set aside the money for the first edition on a bit of a lark. Expectations were minimal. As a buyer and window-shopper, I’d been on Etsy for a while… so when I ended up with a stack of one hundred prints in my project closet, it seemed fitting to give selling a try. I’ve learned a lot in the process and am really excited to start the next chapter of this adventure with the follow-up prints and a far greater sense of direction. After going to college to pursue studio art, and then ending up in the tech industry (like so many of my brethren and sistren), it’s a thrill to be actively making (and selling) art again!
Also, watch for Vertical Cities in the follow-up to Fingerprint, to be released sometime next year! More details to come. And thank you to Ben for being supportive of my artwork time, just as I aspire to be for him. On the pictorial tip, above is a shot of the day after I picked up the prints from the wonderful folks at Rohner here in Chicago — I brought a couple into work to show off. Onward and upward!
ég elska þig
Oh, Iceland. It’s truly a magical place. I’ve long dreamt about living there, but that won’t be a reality anytime too soon! Of course, vacations can go a long ways to salve such long-term desires, and this recent trip more than fit the bill. Ben and I spent a couple of weeks circumnavigating the island counter-clockwise, continually being blown away by the changing landscape. Somewhere around Mývatn, we were informed that we were driving the wrong way around, clockwise being the general rule, but that trajectory now seems quite difficult to imagine. Now that Ben has the photos up, check out our journey via the complete set on his Flickr… or merely take a quick gander at the edited set, put to music, on Vimeo.
við fórum til íslands
We were in Iceland and took our tiny wooden effigies along for the ride. Originally serving as our wedding cake toppers, Ben got the brilliant idea (inspired by his friend Anisa, who, incidentally, makes awesome clothes) to take them on our travels and garden gnome-style, documenting them in photographs. Visit the slideshow for the whole deal!
matrimony
Well, I got hitched last month! Ben and I held a great little shindig at Jane’s in Wicker Park – chill and intimate, complete with a late-March snowstorm. Above is niece Ella, holding up the wedding guest dossier I designed.
pocket sandwich math
So I was recently recalling an old ’80s infomercial for a fabulous little kitchen appliance dubbed the SNAKMASTER. It was essentially a small electric sandwich grill that presses your creation into little triangular pockets.
I think they’re fairly commonplace now, but whoo boy, it seemed like a real innovation to me at the time. Somehow my brother and I must have convinced our mom to buy one. At least for a few years there it seemed like we were always sitting around after school, cookin’ up some sort of glorious (read: disgusting) pocket creation.
In memoriam, I present a Choose Your Own Sandwich sketch, featuring some of the ingredients that most dazzled my ten-year old tastebuds.
My fave combo probably would have been The Breakfast Pocket: 4 + 5 + 6 + 9 +2
Aside: I can’t even believe it, but the original infomercial is actually on youtube. Thank you, Internet!
parallel universes
This is a page from a little storybook I drew for my sweetheart. It stemmed from a lovely random morning conversation about something in the world we needed to take care of – view the whole set to find out what!
All sentiment aside, it was fun to make. I really, really like working in more of a sequential format and have been tossing around some petite book ideas for some time now. I still have the two burning Vertical Cities follow-ups burning up a significant portion of my right brain, though. We’ll see!
springtime in austin
Things have felt especially sensory-spiked the past week — could be that it’s finally started raining again. That loamy, damp spring smell is always a bit of a high in and of itself. Incidentally, Demeter has1 a fragrance called “Wet Garden” that almost kinda approximates it (unfortunately the scent evaporates way too quickly, as is the case with most of their stuff).
You know, at some point way back I remember hearing that they had this full-on fragrance laboratory in Manhattan, filled with all sorts of the really obscure scents (like Funeral Home, Bacon, Condensed Milk, and Chalk), but I have an idea I’ve conjured this resplendent mental image of it that’s way out of line with reality. Like you have to utter a secret password to be granted access and then it’s a whole subterranean maze of foggy corridors and floor-to-ceiling shelves full of colored glass bottles, scents of every description all in alphabetical order.
Spent the morning holed up in the upper echelons of the UT library with a smuggled mega-cup of JP’s ultra-octane latté. Looking for pix/info on the Limbourg Brothers’ illuminated calendars as I’ve been kinda sorta noodling with the idea of taking a stab at a modern take on them.
hot pink, an ode
Inside closed eyes lies the canvas for day & night dreams: pools of milky black offset by the ghosting of blood vessels, nerves, and other assorted arithmetic patterns that point to a greater natural language. Faintly purple bursts fade to strawberry whorls.
A fingerprint, a blot, a parade of sunspots.
Even entrenched in the neon faux-glory of the ’80s, I felt a slight nausea toward the never-ending parade of fluorescents, the wide chartreuse shoelaces, Hypercolor t-shirts and neon feathered keychains. Then one weekend we went to the Crayola factory and I saw a vat of molten day-glo pink up close, all fat, fat bubbles and the thick scent of hot wax.
As a kid I’d always been fascinated by color wheels and the different models used to create them (Munsell, CIELAB, Swedish NCS, etc.), and in this moment, staring into the steaming psychedelic impudence, I wondered where this color could possibly fit into the spectrum. So aberrant, it seemed, so manmade and impossible to belong to a natural order.
It wasn’t until the drive home that evening that it suddenly made so much sense. You know those certain dusks, when the sun’s just begun to graze the horizon line, making a perfect red disk with no visible corona? Nose pressed to the backseat window glass, I stared directly at it, that perfectly hot slice of round neon red. Roy G. Biv, you’re out there somewhere, I said. Twenty years later I marvel at the many shapes the colors take. Undefinable, somehow, yet ever-present in fluorescent bursts.
