I made this dopey little book 10 years ago. . .

So I'm heading into year number 12 of making these little eight page books. I try to make one each month, and I mail them out to subscribers to the FIMP book of the month club.

I'm slowly posting the artwork from these books on Flickr, figuring that if I'm going to spend more than a decade doing something I might as well get it out there. Here are the
first 19 (out of 105) FIMP books that I've uploaded so far.

Here is this month's book, How To Be A Stand-Up Comic In Three Easy Steps.



I tried to model it as closely as possible on a book I made in 2001, How To Be A Magician In Three Easy Steps.



I used to do a lot more collage of the cut it out and glue it down sort back then. These days much more of it happens in the computer. My dopey sense of humor hasn't changed much in ten years, though. My standards for how the books have to look have gotten higher. Or at least, a bit more labor intensive - doesn't necessarily make for a "better" book. I guess you could be the judge of that. Sometimes I like the polish, sometimes I like the ragged edges. . .

Linocuts, drawings, and collages on Flickr

I'm putting together some image sets on Flickr, and found a small group of digital collages that I'd made in advance of one of my tiny books. Amazing what's hiding on the hard drive! You might want to check out the growing gallery. . .

COPY JAM!

This 8.5" x 11" painting/collage on paper, "Chester Carlson, Inventor of Xerography", is my contribution to PRINTERESTING's upcoming event, COPY JAM!

On Thursday March 25, PRINTERESTING will host a reception at Philadelphia's Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. This event will coincide with Mark Remarque, the 2010 conference of SGC International, and the city-wide festival Philagrafika 2010.



"COPY JAM!" will be an interactive print event. During the party, fifty works by fifty artists will be displayed in a grid on the wall. Upon arrival, each guest will be handed a complimentary ticket that can be exchanged for one black & white photocopy of any work the guest chooses. There will be no sales; one ticket equals one copy. Copies will be made LIVE in the gallery for one night only!



I tried to make something on paper that would truly be a printing plate for the xerox machine - a piece that was only artwork when it had turned into a contrasty, black and white xerox. And I also wanted to use materials that seemed very inappropriate to the task at hand - a nice chunky painterly collage. The subject matter is a celebration of innovators and thinkers who made xerographic art possible.

So, March 25th, Philadelphia, be there and get a print. It's an open edition, you make the art when you press "print".

If you want it, here it is. . .

As promised a post or two ago, you can surf to this auction to pick up Crow IV. The auction finishes up next Sunday.

Crows 2 and 3.

Crow II, linocut, acrylic, and collage




Crow III, linocut, etching, acrylic, and collage


Well, here are Crows II and III (see Crow I below). I'm pleased to report that these three pieces were selected by juror Robert Villamagna for "Altered States", a printmaking exhibition that will be on display this November at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts.

Before and After

I recently finished a piece that is going to be on display in an exhibition at the Southern Humanities Council Annual Conference. Invited artists were asked to make a piece around the theme "Home is Where the ______ Is". I thought you might enjoy seeing the thumbnail sketch and the finished product. I went from this:


to this:


Home, cyanotype and acrylic on paper, 12" x 12"

Now I'm the first to admit that things don't always get better as they get more complicated. There are qualities in the sharpie sketch that might have been lost in the finished piece. But it's a process - I keep working, and try to pull things out of the stream that are worth saving.

I know that this thumbnail drawing was one instance where the quick drawing ended up the "keeper", compared to the finished product.

The last week of the Blogger Show. . .

Well, we've arrived at the last week of the Blogger Show. If you haven't been over to the Digging Pitt Gallery, this is your last chance! They'll be open Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and after that you're out of luck. So here we go with the last three auctions of the Zero Sum Art Project - Blogger Show edition.


Zero Sum #43, with its auction ending Thursday night.


Zero Sum #44, with a Friday night finish.


And finally, Zero Sum #24, the piece that was shown both in the New York segment of the Blogger Show at the Agni Gallery, and here in Pittsburgh, the grand finale, with its auction ending Saturday night.

The Zero Sum Art Project will return to its much more relaxed pace post-Blogger show. . .

Week 4 of the Zero Sum auctions in the Blogger Show

Saturday's opening reception for The Blogger Show at the Digging Pitt Gallery here in Pittsburgh was a lot of fun. It was great meeting a few of you there!

The Zero Sum #33 auction, ending Thursday night, 12/13, at 10 pm Eastern time.

The Zero Sum #34 auction, ending Friday night, 12/14, at 10 pm Eastern time.

The Zero Sum #27 auction, ending Saturday night, 12/15, at 10 pm Eastern time.

The Zero Sum #35 auction, ending Sunday night, 12/16, at 10 pm Eastern time.

Here are the Zero Sum Art Project auctions for the week. . .

The Zero Sum #29 auction, ending Thursday night, 12/06, at 10 pm Eastern time.

The Zero Sum #30 auction, ending Friday night, 12/07, at 10 pm Eastern time.

The Zero Sum #31 auction, ending Saturday night, 12/08, at 10 pm Eastern time.

The Zero Sum #32 auction, ending Sunday night, 12/09, at 10 pm Eastern time.

Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. . .

Zero Sum #20

The four Zero Sum auctions that are currently up and running are Zero Sum #15, ending on Thanksgiving (bad planning on my part there), Zero Sum #17, ending Friday, 11/23, Zero Sum #20, the etching you see here, finishing Saturday, 11/24, and Zero Sum #21, another etching, ending Sunday, 11/25.

Look for an auction ending every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night at 10 p.m. from now until mid-January, with the exception of a week off for Christmas, as part of The Blogger Show at Digging Pitt Gallery, here in Pittsburgh PA.

The Blogger Show's Pittsburgh venues open their doors today, and ZSAP takes off!

Zero Sum #9

A couple of hours ago the doors opened for The Blogger Show's Pittsburgh venues, at Digging Pitt gallery, Digging Pitt Too, and the Panza Gallery. These three shows will be up until January 12. The opening receptions for the Digging Pitt and Digging Pitt Too shows will be on Saturday, December 8, from 6-9 pm, and the opening reception for the Panza Gallery will be on Saturday, December 15, from 6-9 pm.

And, I just gotta say that all of the Blogger Show artists owe a huge Thank You to Susan Constanse, who has done the lion's share of work installing the Pittsburgh shows, and has done a fantastic job. Thank You, Susan!


My contribution to the show will be a frenzied rotation of works from the Zero Sum Art Project. The first six pieces are up on the walls now. Each day that the gallery is open during the exhibition, a new auction will begin from the Zero Sum Art Project. These auctions will run for a week. So, every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night from here until January 12, you will find a new piece from the Zero Sum Art Project being auctioned off on eBay. Every week I will take out the sold pieces from the exhibition, and replace them with the next artworks on the auction block. It will be a different show every week. Visitors to the gallery will see a small slice of the project, but they will see it in "the flesh". Online viewers will see the work through the pixellated haze of the computer monitor, but they will be able to see all of the work in the project in one place. So it's an odd blend of "virtual" and "real" worlds.

The first piece, that will start its auction at 10 pm tonight, will be Zero Sum #9. You can find the Zero Sum auctions, once they start tonight, here.

Zero Sum #25

Zero Sum #25, taking advantage of that new moon etching of mine. It goes up for auction later tonight. Visit the Zero Sum Art Project blog for all of the details.

Teasers

If you were to dig around in my studio, shoving aside the empty Coke cans, here's a few bits and pieces that might catch your eye:


This is a detail from a linocut I just printed. The linocut includes four rats, four roaches, and seven flies, along with some other non-vermin imagery. It's part of a broadside I just finished, working with a poem by Ron Offen, to be published later this year by Pygmy Forest Press. When the broadside comes out, I'll let you see the entire print.


I've got a few etchings of the moon scattered about. These are going to be used as collage material, along with the stack of


cyanotypes that I just received in the mail. These were made from transparencies of photographs I made from my Box. All of the collage material will end up in pieces for the Zero Sum Art Project.


Speaking of the Zero Sum Art Project, the animation above is a record of the making of Zero Sum #24, which will be on display at the Agni Gallery in New York City during the month of November, as part of The Blogger Show. After it's stay in NYC, it will be auctioned off on eBay, consistent with the ZSAP rules.

I'm telling you, I'm up to my elbows in here. Lots of stuff kicking around. . .

Animated Etching Proofs

One of the many nice things about making an etching is that you are left with a trail of proofs, that document what you were thinking and the decisions you made along the way. I'm a firm believer in the thinking-while-making school of art - I do my best thinking when I'm pushing the materials around. So I like to jump into a plate, get something on it, scrape it off, put something else on, until things start to come together. And this animation gives a little sense of how that process looks.

The final image is a collage, Zero Sum #23


which is the most recent finished work in the Zero Sum Art Project. If you would like to see a larger image, visit the auction on eBay.


After I finished that Zero Sum #23, I went back to work on the etching plate. I decided I liked the vulture a lot, so I scraped out one of the bird heads and socked in a nice black aquatint, from which I will carve a vulture. We'll see what happens. . . if nothing else, a lot more proofs, no doubt.

Verse 3 - Indelible Images

Here's "Verse 3", the next in a series of small collages that seem to be an irresistable byproduct of working on the Zero Sum Art Project. As with 1 & 2, Verse 3 is being sold on eBay, where you will find more information about how the image is put together and a detail of the collaged and painted surface.

Of course, "Verse 3" quotes an extremely famous photograph. There are three photographs that date from my early childhood that are indelibly burned into my mental image bank, this one being the street execution of a Viet Cong officer photographed by Eddie Adams in 1968.


Eddie Adams, 1968

As I was working with that collage, I started thinking about the lasting power of those 3 photographs from the Vietnam war. Though the subject matter is horrific, their strength is also that of the crafted image.


John Filo, 1970

There's a bunch of reasons why this photo by John Filo won a Pulitzer Prize, while


this one is relatively unknown, and the grieving figure of Mary Ann Vecchio is only one of them. It must be a terribly strange and awkward feeling to be witnessing a tragedy and on some level know that you just put together a fantastic image.


Huynh Cong "Nick" Ut, 1972

And the third image from that time that I can't escape, and that I no doubt share with many of you out there, is of course this one from 1972 of the terrified children escaping the napalm.

I've been thinking about how different those three photographs are from so much of the imagery we are seeing these days. Partly we have the dilemma of the journalists being embedded with the troops, and a much greater awareness by the military of the need to control the images being released in the media. Digital technology is also a major change - the most potent images coming out of our current conflicts are those captured with cell phones and portable digital cameras.


The Abu Ghraib photos come foremost to mind. But these photos are snapshots of atrocities, souvenirs of violence. The story they are telling includes an element of "hey, look what I just did". We can't empathize with the photographer, so our horror is doubled, at both the atrocity portrayed and the motives of the photographer. We're looking at trophies instead of journalism.


Of all of those horrible photographs, this hooded figure had to become the iconic image. It could be straight out of Goya's "Disasters of War".


"No More", etching from the series The Disasters of War by Francisco de Goya, 1810–14

Looking at those etchings from almost 200 years ago, and holding them up to what we're seeing today, it's awfully hard to believe that we're really capable of learning anything.

Verse 2

Here's "Verse 2" for your viewing pleasure, continuing the little series of spin-off works from the Zero Sum Art Project. For some cheap summer thrills, I'm selling these on eBay with the auction starting at a penny - you can visit the auction to see a few details of the paint and collage elements.

The small crowd at the bottom is made up of bits and pieces from 24 Poets and 1 Astronaut, one of my linocuts from 2002. Never throw anything away - if you saw my studio you'd know I live by those words. Prints that don't make the final cut for an edition are always good as collage material. The palette for the little cityscape is based on an old postcard - that's an idea I first started playing with in Zero Sum #16. Ideas are something you can always return to, just like bits of old prints. . .

An update on the Zero Sum Art Project

Here's Zero Sum #18, and the bidding starts at $13.32.

Why $13.32, you might ask? If you're unfamiliar with the Zero Sum Art Project, you can find an overview of the operation on the Digging Pitt blog. ZSAP will be on display there in November - it'll be a nice complicated puzzle to solve, putting the exhibition together within the rules of the project.

Verse 1

It was kind of inevitable that the artwork I'm doing for the Zero Sum Art Project would start spilling over into the rest of my studio work. Here's a little collage that's representative of the bits and pieces of things that I'm knocking around these days.

If you want it, here it is, go and get it.

I am trying

Digging Pitt Gallery, Zero Sum #10, and an apology

If you're in Pittsburgh, you should put a visit to Digging Pitt Gallery on your list of things to do. Not only are the exhibitions consistently interesting, but the director John Morris maintains an extensive set of flat files, making the artwork of over 140 local, national, and international artists available to anyone who comes in the gallery. And as of recently, I'm one of those artists, so there you go.


If you want to see what's looming in the sky above this happy postal worker, you should visit the auction for Zero Sum #10 on eBay. It's a nice chunky collage of a painting.

One of the curious and amusing features about this blog for me is that the counter at the bottom allows you to see what brought people to the site - how they were referred. Ideally they would arrive here having done a search on google for, say, "nice chunky collage of a painting", and be happy to have found something related to their online quest. Sadly, it seems that for some reason a large proportion of FIMP's visitors arrive here looking for information on one of two topics - the Fiji Islands, or Mermaids. Quite a few are looking for instruction on how to draw mermaids. And despite the fact that this is the Fiji Island Mermaid Press, they find no relevant information whatsoever on their topics of interest.


Barnum's mermaid, as depicted in the New York Herald in 1842

One of these days, I need to discuss the origin of this grossly misleading title. For now, I'll just tell you that the Fiji Island Mermaid was one of P.T. Barnum's exhibits, a gaffe made up of the top half of a monkey sewn to the bottom half of a fish. I'm a big fan of Mr. Barnum, his display of this object, and his encouragement of the public to debate its "reality". It reminds me of a lot of things I find interesting about art.

So, my apologies to those web-surfers who have washed ashore on FIMP and been grossly disappointed. I'll have to work up a "how to draw a Fiji Island Mermaid" one of these days. . .