AffectArt Artists' Party at Taste

One of the patrons at my table was a drunk bee- the swinging bunny did not approve.

I had a table at AffectArt.org's Artitsts' Party at Taste in Winter Park on June 15th. I had a fantastic time and met a slew of wonderful artists and people. One of those people was Boone Fowler who set the whole thing up and did a great job of keeping all the artists happy and helping us set up.

Parker Sketch set up his booth beside mine, which meant I wouldn't have to be worried about boredom for the rest of the evening. That was a big relief. Thomas Thorspecken set up to sketch across the sidewalk from Parker and me, so I'm very excited to see that pop up on his blog since I didn't get a chance to peek at it the day of.

Richeson Baby Etching Press was there for print your own prints trying to drum up some interest in my next printmaking workshop. I had several people run prints and I'm hoping some of them caught the printmaking bug! Parker snapped a photo of some of the printing:

Boone is hoping to make this an every other month event, so keep your ear to the ground for the next one because I highly recommend going - whether as a patron or an artist with a table!

Guinea Pig Zone

I recently finished a commission for GuineaPigZone.com's logo. Teresa, who also runs CavySpirit.com, contacted me through my website a while ago and I have been slowly fighting with Adobe Illustrator since. I think I'm pretty competent at using Photoshop, but there is a reason I am a traditional artist and not a computer artist. That reason being that trying to make original art (not just doctoring up some images) on the computer for me is like trying to type with boxing gloves on my hands. I wanted to make the logo in Illustrator so that it would be a vector file and could be easily resized- oh how much I had forgotten about Illustrator! I spent most of my time reading through the manual trying to remember all the tricks of the pen tool that I used to know. I owe a lot of thanks to Tim Chism who helped me slay the foul Adobe beast.

I was super excited to do this logo because I am a huge fan of CavySpirit.com. I used to own guinea pigs, in fact most of my friends refer to it as having a guinea pig farm because I had so many, and I've always admired the work CavySpirit.com does with informing guinea pig owners. Her new website has a strong social emphasis with petfinder listings, product and pet reviews, and shopping.  The heart is designed to change based on the color scheme of the website or to be used in several different colors to designate different website sections.

I believe Teresa found me through my deviantArt page, which was a terrifying revelation. I hadn't updated that thing since 2007 and the thought of people looking through my gallery and only seeing bad ceramics and really old art gave me the heebie jeebies. Therefore, this commission also inspired me to update my page, which is going slow and I'm still only up to 2008 as of now. I deduced how Teresa found me because she provided two of my guinea pig images as reference photos, both of which are only available on DA. One was an old sharpie drawing of my lethal white guinea pig Winkle (he was blind and deaf and had one gangly tooth), and the other was a screen print of Ginger (who loved oranges).

A Photo History of the UCF Library

Exhibit mock-up on graph paper - one square to every six inches.

I've recently co-curated the Special Collections and University Archives exhibit A Photo History of the UCF Library which I installed this past Friday. As with all the exhibits I've done with SC&UA, it was immensely interesting and consuming. The library is the first academic building on campus and one of the only buildings ready for classes in 1968, which meant the library housed many random university needs including weightlifting as well as books. This exhibit is in preparation of UCF's 50th anniversary and is installed on the 72 ft. art wall at the main entrance. It's a step up, in size and exposure, from the exhibit area we have right outside of the department. I don't usually make such an extensive plan for an exhibit (pictured above) but since we only had one day to set it up I wanted to make sure we had all our ducks in a row beforehand. I've grown quite fond of my graph paper mock-up. The only significant difference from the plan and the actual is the absence of the groundbreaking shovel and Nierman's maquette of the Flame of Hope. The exhibit would have been approximately 10% cooler with their inclusion, but we also didn't want anyone walking out with them since it is so close to the entrance.

I haven't been lurking around the wall since I've put it up, honestly I haven't, but already I've seen a group men looking at photos from the 1981-1984 expansion and pointing out all their old buddies. I hope this exhibit is causing that kind of reminiscing even when I'm not creeping around the corner.

Exhibit will be up June 1 - July 31

FAVO market

The Faith Arts Village Orlando is an old motel that has been renovated by Park Lake Presbyterian Church to be a place for artist studios and art happenings. This Friday they are hosting an open air market full of art and local produce from 5-9pm. I will be there with a few prints to sell, but more importantly with the Richeson Baby Etching Press. I'll have a station set up where everyone can ink and print a little block and take home a piece of art for free! Hopefully some people will catch the printmaking bug so bad that they will be forced to come back for more, and by more I mean the upcoming Not Your Mama's Print Workshop.

Now is the time..

The time is now to sign up for our relief printmaking workshop! Maitland Art Center is offering all summer classes at 10% off if you sign up before May 29th. So while you're out barbecuing this long weekend, don't forget to hop on the computer and sign up here.

Groom/Stick

Today at work in Special Collections I encountered Marbling: a history and a bibliography by Phoebe Jane Easton which had been a victim of a particularly vicious act of book on book violence. It had the extreme misfortune of being shelved next to a deteriorating leather book. As you can see, neither were wrapped in mylar and Marbling sustained extensive red rot staining on its cover.

Fortunately for Easton's book, the Acquisitions Department had just cleaned out a storage area and brought me a cart full of supplies to go through and keep if I wanted. In those supplies were two packages of Groom/Stick.

My first impression of Groom/Stick was that it must be some form of book torture that in one long gone day was thought to work. I did some research and found that instead it was supposed to be a revolutionary new cleaning material:

GROOM/STICK is a novel form of natural rubber with specific properties combining to create a surface dry-cleaner of high efficiency. The rubber's natural structure has been modified to make it permanently soft, kneadable and strongly tacky. Moisture, solvents and chemical additives have been excluded.

As a non-abrasive, non-staining cleaner of paper and other library materials, Groom/stick gently but positively picks up a wide range of foreign matter. Graphite, carbon, charcoal, chalk, crayon, dry powder colours, mould spores, dust, dirt and grease are cleanly lifted off the surface and held in a 'molecular trap' from which there is no escape!

The process is fast and smear-free. It is demonstrated by lightly rolling a Groom/stick 'cigar' across a freshly-printed newspaper. Excess print ink is removed instantly - without blurring the print or soiling adjacent clean areas. Ordinary solid or granular rubber/resin erasers abrade, smudge, crumble or produce clinging debris. Groom/stick sacrifices nothing of itself, leaves no dirty fragments to brush away (or mould spores to regenerate in concealed areas) and is always ready and clean to use.

 I decided to give it a shot and the results were earily exactly what the promotional material said they would be. While I didn't find rolling the material into a cigar a very easy endeavor (my lump looks more like a creepy alien-esque cacoon), I did find that the surface dirt it grabbed would never escape from it's plasticky grave. Here it is covered in red rot powder and none of it is transfering to my hands or any other part of the book. In fact, it was cleaning me. I could see it, while still covered in powder, taking all the oil that I didn't know I had off my fingertips.

Groom/Stick is my miracle item of the week. Enjoy these before and after photos:

Not Your Mama's Print Workshop

We're ba-ack! Molly Chism and I are teaching a new installment of the print class this summer and this time it's in workshop form. There are two sessions to choose from; Sunday, June 24th 1pm - 5pm or Sunday, July 29th 1pm - 5pm. Of course, you can always come to both.

We will be focusing on printing our own greeting cards from linoleum blocks that we will design and carve. If greeting cards aren't your thing, then there's no reason you can't come and make prints for framing instead of prints for mailing.

The tuition is $70 a person for non Maitland Art Center members and $63 for members. There is also a $30 materials fee that covers the ink and paper you'll use during the day plus a speedball carving set, a bench hook (which is a fancy word for something that helps you carve without sending your block flying off the table), and linoleum- all of which you'll be able to take home at the end of the day. It's like a starter printmaking kit for you to continue making prints long after the workshop. All those materials that your fee pays for also means that you don't have to bring any supplies to the workshop. The only thing we ask you bring is your creativity (and an idea for your image won't hurt).

You can sign up for either (or both) workshops on the Maitland Art Center's website HERE. We hope to see you there!