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!

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.

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!

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.

I then glanced away from the cool glow of the display, back to the stacks of T H I N G S around my desk, and in that moment I imagined I was stepping outside of it. Seeing these times for what they are in a way that would normally be reserved for entire decades, eras gone by, fat chunks of time that can be emblematized, characterized. While pretending to view these messy days through the lens of twenty years from now, I thought how nice it would be if oversaturation, wires, and webs were to become passé. Maybe we aren’t snowballing down such a ridiculous tunnel, I thought to myself. Maybe things will start to get cleaner again. The idea of everything folding in on itself is too predictable. And predictable is boring. I won’t have it. The information isn’t going to disappear, so I think I’ll just tuck it away invisibly, 01010-style, in cabinets and boxes, only to be accessed on a need-to-know basis.

At that point I think I will redefine need-to-know.

Because in simple moments, free of cynicism and so-called irony (free of so-called anything), I think the future may just be outside again. Outside is where it’s at, tuning into the broadcast of autumn leaves and cold air smell. My lover’s unwitting sigh is where it’s at, the moments when he doesn’t know he’s being listened to. I like the image of my post-post-modern house. It will be clean and windowed and linked to the world. Everything in its right place. And my headspace will be free, a post where intellect and emotion are their rightful equals and I take in and am taken as naturally as an inward-outward breath.

…These highways are hundreds of arteries, impartially channeling us from point A to B. And the roadside motels are anonymous. I always look in the mirror across from the musty bed, trying to imagine the reflection of each person who has stood in front of it.

And then there are the motel beds. I can never sleep in them. I get dizzy trying to comprehend everything that has happened on top of the dingy bedspread, under the covers, and on the carpet. For a moment I pull the scratchy white sheet up to my nose and close my eyes. That chemical smell of cheap detergent gives way to the smell of them, all of them all at once – the cold, the hot, the raunchy, the perfunctory.

It’s the same way when I’m in a museum. I stand in front of that huge Klein canvas, and yes it’s all blue, but don’t you see, his hands were all over it. It’s so easy to treat the work as static, to walk past with little more than a cursory glance. But the paintings don’t capture singular moments any more than a song encompasses one note. They capture series of moments, some sequential (he touched this corner then that corner then that one), some circular (he touched this corner then rubbed it out then layered on top of it). There is no beginning or end. The viewer provides the trajectory – sometimes it’s challenging, often alienating, but perhaps such is the viewer’s price for being treated with reverence as to his or her will.

So I’m usually more interested in the process than the result, and as such, vastly prefer to watch the world through a timeless space. Here I’m still allowed to write long letters to M.D. and mail them to random addresses in Paris. I’m allowed to look at anything a boy has ever written me and feel faint, simply because, well, I can see his hands simultaneously hovering above every square millimeter of the paper, all at once, and it’s too much.

Dynamism. Look.

Giacomo Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash

Look again.

Eadweard Muybridge, Headspring, a Flying Pigeon Interfering

See? The movement, it never stopped. You look at it, then walk away. You come back one minute, ten years later, and it is still moving. The function is continuous, at all points understood.

i t ’ s  a l m o s t  l i k e  c u l t u r e  s h o c k , i  c a n  s m e l l  t h e  t r e e s  a g a i n

Last night I left the sheets in the wash and fell asleep on the mattress. My dreams were stripped bare. I awoke at 3:37am and wandered outside; the air was actually cool. That smell! It was back, that particular seasonal smell perched on the cusp of summer and autumn. I would bottle it if I could (along with its winter-to-spring analogue).

I’ve been spending far too much time on playgrounds lately. For some reason, returning to painting demands that I act like a five year old again, at least within the confines of my own imagination. I want to run with fistfuls of dripping paintbrushes, trailing them across everything in sight. I drop the brushes and keep running and running and running and running. Then stop. A crack, a pop, and just like that I’m gone again. A never-ending game of tag. The notion of anywhere but here rears its head yet again. It’s not 2001. I’m not getting older. I don’t live here, I don’t live anywhere.

This must be a dream, I thought, as the sweet scent of nitrous oxide filled the air.