Shig! lecture at the San Francisco Main Public Library

 "No, I'm not a Chinese-American. I'm an American Eskimo." Hastily departed matron from Duluth: "How interesting!" Furious deadbeat, after having been turned out of City Lights Bookstore for bothering everybody by spare-changing, "Who that fat Chinaman think he is anyway?" 

This large, thick, imposing person of the small feet, the spiky black beard like a fence around his aloofness, he of the aplomb, this is Shigeyoshi Murao, known far and wide as "Shig". He is manager and part-owner, with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of the bookstore; he has been there from the beginning."

— from Common Soldiers by Janet Richards

the 2009 calendars are here!

At long long last, I have crawled out from under my annual private letterpress hibernation and emerged with the 2009 "Edges of Bounty" letterpress linoleum calendar. The entire project is based on a miraculous book entitled "Edges of Bounty" that was published earlier this year by Heyday Books, written by William Emery, featuring the magnificent photographs of Scott Squire.

It is a California Central Valley, food themed calendar with thirteen original linoleum blocks, printed on delectable Canson papers in delectable hues. All quotations throughout the calendar are borrowed liberally from William's essays, set in Bell MT typeface, which were printed from polymer plates. Calendars are $45 each; $3 per calendar for shipping. 8" x 12.5" trim size, limited edition of 100 calendars.

Hoorah! Hoorah! Hoorah!

I will be tabling at a few holiday fairs over the next few weeks, selling calendars in person:

21 Grand/Art Murmur in Downtown Oakland:

Friday December 5th, 7-10 p.m.

San Francisco Center for the Book Holiday Fair

Friday (6-8) and Saturday (12-5), December 12th

Root Division Holiday Fair

Saturday, December 12th, 7-10 p.m.

Or just get in touch- I can swaddle up these muffins in no time and deliver them piping hot to your very own door!

2009 Edges of Bounty calendar

Living at the Center for the Book letterpress printing the 2009 Edges of Bounty calendar. Here are some previews of my studio time.

edges of bounty 2008 calendar

A very quick posting today, as I just arrived home from a transformative artists' hangout at Mono Lake last night (more on that soon) and am off to Minneapolis, MN to visit Coffee House Press this morning.

I've finally settled on a subject for my 2008 calendar- with their permission, I'm adapting the stellar photography (Scott Squire) and gorgeous prose (William Emery) from a project they spent several years creating (a year traveling around the Central Valley, a year to finish writing, editing and going through production), and which is now in published book form by Heyday Books, as well as on the web through www. edgesofbounty. com. Jeepers, I'm really not explaining the Edges of Bounty project adequately, so forgive me until I get back into the saddle this weekend.

Here are a few sketches, still to be adapted into 5 x 7 linoblocks.

evolve

Little Lino (12" x 12") just in time for the Roadworks Steamroller prints this Saturday, September 20th, 2008 at the San Francisco Center for the Book. A real record- I started drawing yesterday afternoon and made my first marks on the lino late last night and finished before 11 p.m. the next day. whew!

I mentioned to Minette that it looks suspiciously like a tattoo design, replete with unfurling ribbon banner. Seeing that I am going through a pretty major transition in my life right now, it seems fitting that I went through the process of carving the tattoo out of the fleshy tan linoleum without actually getting the tattoo staccato-ed onto my body.

mimi, miyeko, bachan, mom

I made this book in 1997, in honor of my maternal grandmother, Miyeko Okamura Kebo, who celebrated her 80th birthday that year (she is still alive, although extremely frail and feeble, living in Fresno with my Aunt Janis. But give her a break! She's 91 years old.) I am named after this grandmother, and this book was one of the very first I ever assembled, designed, printed and bound. In it is a collection of letters and truly extraordinary photographs of my Bachan that I solicited from family friends and relatives in her honor, and since I only made five copies at the time, I finally got down and scanned the book for wider distribution. You may note that my piece (the final letter in the book) is abnormally historical in nature. See? I was buck-toothed and hopelessly covered in archival dust eleven years ago.

One errata: the title poem is written by Kathy Kebo. Her name was accidentally left off the page in my original design (which was done with tremendous support from Bruce Smith of the Arts & Crafts Press). 

**RATS! Stupid stupid Blogger is acting jinky and for some reason, most of the images are lying on their sides. Sigh. Bear with me while I try to remedy this malfunctioning post.

portraits of Quincy

I received a blog request for color photos of Quince! 

Some quick backstory though, since you asked. Quincy came about via a high school biology teacher and closet herpetologist (hey, Mr. Herrick!) and was a graduation gift to me from my one and only brother, Doug. That was in 1992, the year I graduated from Mills College. Quince was but a little chopstick of orange delight then, so tiny that I could hold her in the palm of my hand and had to feed her baby doll pinkie newborn mice.  Photos of Quincy at that stage must exist somewhere- I'm going to have to dig into my archives to find them though, so patience, dear readers.

She is named after the "coroner of the stars" Quincy, M.D., that crazy 70s television drama starring Jack Klugman, which has an excellent theme song, by the way. Rumor has it that the tv show "Quincy" was actually modeled after the real-life Japanese coroner, Thomas Noguchi.  Noguchi has penned several memoirs about his life in the forensic sciences, and also appeared as himself in the classic high school shocker, "Faces of Death"!

Lost snake $100 reward

This past Saturday, in the heat of other personal drama, I discovered through our neighbors that Quincy the snake had somehow escaped from the house. (Fallen out the window? Took the stairs? Dumb waiter?) My kind neighbors put up an actual ad on Craigslist. 

Once it sunk in that my snake was loose in the neighborhood of East 28th Street, I realized to my horror that chances of ever finding her again were pretty much close to nil. That went over well, as you can imagine. After prodigious weeping and tearing of hair on chest, I managed to pull myself together enough to distribute flyers (the first draft was totally incomprehensible, full of blowsy sentiments and history of the snake, outrageous reward offers, etc.) and bother the neighbors, door to door. I quickly remembered that it is universally understood that Everybody Hates Snakes, a creepy feeling shared by all cultures: Chinese, Black, Vietnamese, White, Latino, Creole...So each emotional plea on my part was met with animosity and barely contained disgust ("Sure, I'll keep my eyes peeled and look around the backyard" followed by subtle nostril flaring and eye bulges).

I finally went knocking on the door of the doctor who lives in a huge Victorian mansion with acreage surrounding his property directly behind us, and when he proved to be absent, left him a flyer, then poked around his backyard with BR with no success. Woodpiles, bushes, dead leaves, cat poop. No snake. So we started the walk back to the doctor's front gate, which is long since he has a formidable sized front yard. Still leaking tears and hiccuping sobs, I kept scanning the ground for gory snake remains and as my eyes passed over to the right side of the gravel path, not but a few inches from where my foot trod, there was....a dappled pink/orange snake, hesitantly inching forward in full exposed sunlight (very unsnake like behavior! But then again, Quincy is not knowing of birds and raccoons and cats and stray dogs. bleh) It was a MIRACLE OF BUDDHA. One lucky snake. And one lucky, lucky, blessed snake mom. 

Contours in the Air

She is very beautiful, quiet, energetic, and unaffected and believes almost religiously in work. She is five feet two inches tall and has very black hair. Besides her painting and design work she likes to grow things and cultivates mad little gardens at school and she had rather dance than eat.

— letter written by Albert Lanier introducing Ruth to her future in-laws, 1948

Ruth Asawa and Albert Lanier were extraordinarily talented, young, and beautiful artists who met while studying together at the renown Black Mountain College in 1946. Through the guidance and instruction of major art figures such as painter Josef Albers, dancer Merce Cunningham, and architect Buckminister Fuller, Black Mountain College gave the two lovers the self-confidence and courage to pursue careers as artists and to brave the untested waters of a mixed race marriage, just a few years following the end of WWII, which had cast a perceptible pallor over the entire population Japanese Americans like Ruth Asawa and her family. 

To understand her origins as an artist and her motivation to continue to create things of "unrefined beauty" well into her 80s, one must observe Ruth Asawa's early experiences as a child of immigrant farmers, with a strict and conservative Japanese culture cocooning her, as did the subsequent years spent in an American interment camp through the duration of the war. It is not typical for artists to begin their careers in incarceration, but despite the hardship, Asawa not only absorbed lessons from her time in camp (she first learned weaving as a volunteer camoflage net maker, and picked up the sumi brush during art classes in camp), she flourished. She was only 16 when she and her family were forcibly removed from their homes in Norwalk, California, and interned along with 120,000 other people of Japanese ancestry who lived along the West Coast. For many, the upheaval of losing everything, most importantly their right to freedom and a private, family life, caused irreprable harm. For Asawa, the internment was the first step on a journey to a world of art that profoundly changed who she was and what she thought was possible in life.

(photos by Laurence Cuneo and Hazel Larsen from www.ruthasawa.com)

we have to shake the tree...we will make it fall

transfered image from the drafting papers onto bristol board and inked all the live long day...its got its rough spots but in pretty good shape. could still use a little working I'm sure. I added the quote just for placement, since I won't be actually designing the t-shirt and am not exactly sure how they will handle this. 

good morning gocco

Its been at least a year since I've pulled out my Japanese gocco printer, what with the cost of supplies out the roof and well, my experience with gocco in general has been somewhat spotty. The results are always a tad unpredictable in terms of evenness of printing and multi-screen registration is a real b*tch. 

But all snarling aside, I had the perfect project to crank out on gocco, so after an energetic morning round of paper cutting, I got to it.

Drying the prints on the sun drenched kitchen table.

Gocco inks and screens taking a breather on the New Yorker magazine.

Very limited edition of cards in honor of the arrival and safe homecoming of Marcas Liam Taylor, the littlest bear of all.

illustrator for hire: part 2

For an upcoming POWER: People Organized to Win Employment Rights t-shirt. I did several sketches for them...guess which image they liked the best, the one I'm working on refining now? The quote is the only thing they gave me for direction on this freelance project. But cool! My first t-shirt design (I mean, not some jinky print I did myself at home with fabric inks and gocco or some smeared up linoblock).

illustrator for hire: part 1

Illlustration project for the UCSF Parent/Infant program. This is only one of the (hopefully) multiple images I will be creating for their website and other marketing uses, and despite my common sense, I decided to go ahead and carve a linoblock out of this image, even though the illustration below (plain old graphite on paper) is cleaner in some ways. There is just something about my favorite medium (and sharp knives) that I just can't resist.

I've learned a lot through this project already- not being a mother myself, I am challenged with the unique and quite funny challenges of drawing people coddling babies, without looking menacing or distant. Things that might seem totally innocuous to those of us who are still awkward when a relative or good friend pitches their newborn into your arms saying, "can you hold her for just a sec..." and launches off before you can really protest know exactly what I'm talking about. Floppy, doughy, big headed...but really ultimately adorable. I don't have a babe in arms just yet, but I can carve one out of clay.

birthday in pt. reyes

We started the trip on Thursday by trekking out to Tomales Bay with Doug, Buddyray, Kimi and Anthony to the Tomales Bay Oyster Farm for serious birthday grinding. Despite claims that he doesn't really like oysters (ok so he still maintains that he doesn't like raw oysters), Buddyray tucks away a small kingdom's worth of grilled bivalves. He is followed closely behind by Anthony, who has already pledged allegiance to the oyster feast.

Buddyray warming his paws by the grill, groaning with oysters and sardines wrapped in shiso. 

Anthony contemplates his victim before slurping the oyster raw (with cocktail sauce, of course).

We, the intrepid backpackers. Anthony and Kimi are suited up with the external frame packs she used to climb Mt. Whitney back in the 70s. 

The next morning, we discovered a pair of mice had sabotaged our box and shredded all napkins, cloth towels,  tea bags, and other soft fuzzy combustibles into oblivion! If you think I was mad then, this was before the rodent jerk jumped full throttle out of my foodbag, helter skelter into the bushes! Followed by his kamikaze wife! I screamed, readers. Yes indeed, I screamed. It was a good thing my snake wasn't tucked into my coiffure that day.

These two were nearly blown away at Sculptured Beach. 

There was a mighty wind that arose in the afternoon as we set up tents, and again at night. On the second night, we were surprised by numerous night visitors (human). First Angie and Luke appeared out of the shadows long after nightfall, and then some crazy German cyclist pedaled up asking if we had seen his camping party. He had biked all the way from Menlo Park and looked sorely in need of a blanket and some s'mores.

Going home meant loading up our sherpa.

Wait, we need to climb 300 odd stairs down to the edge of the earth where we can scream mundane phrases at each other in the deafening wind, and threaten to push each other off the cliff to the fate of seagulls!

Butt that's not the tail end of our story. Driving home on Lucas Valley Road, we encountered nearly a hundred cyclists along the road, on what must have been a breathtakingly beautiful race. 

"It is no longer a question of whether or not we should set aside some more of the yet remaining native California landscape as 'breathing space'....If we do not, we will leave our children a legacy of concrete treadmills leading nowhere except to other congested places like those they will be trying to get away from."

- Former Congressman Clem Miller, author of the Point Reyes National Seashore bill presented to the 87th Congress, January, 1961. 

One day's harvest

From our gorgeous lil' organic garden down the street, Bella Vista. Here's BR watering and picking green beans with our friend Naima.

cling vs. freestone

Yes indeedy, being the Central Valley agriculturally raised kids that we are, my brother and I (bonafide former 4-Hers) actually do know how to can, preserve, and dry our bounties. I missed the actual harvesting party out in Brentwood and goshiso lunch at Lucy Arai's house, but was around later that night to pit the apricots, peel peaches and watch Doug sterilize and cook the fruit down. Our rad mom STILL to this day teaches food preservation and nutrition to local kids in the Clovis/Fresno area and remains crazy active with 4-H, both nationally and on the Fresno Fair level. 

Spaaaaace Baaaaaaalls

What do you do the day after a big holiday involving colored fire, bbq pork, hot tubs, jazz standards, baby nieces in a new house, and new/old samurai flicks? You go to West Oakland to play miniature golf created by art collective Space 1026, that's what.

mockturtle linoblock

originally commissioned for a Mute Socialite poster, but its a little bit homeless at the moment since I couldn't do the job in time for the cd release party (bleh.) nods to the woodblock master, Barry Moser.

recently, from the sketch book

BookWorks at the San Francisco Public Library

The books are in the cases, lit and in full glory over at the San Francisco Main Public Library....111 outrageously beautiful and wierd books handmade by book artists from around the world. This is my third, count 'em, THIRD time organizing the show, and I don't know if I get better at it as much as I get seasoned. For anyone who has an appetite for remarkable range of books in their myriad possible forms, sculptural, traditional or otherwise, I highly recommend checking it out- I think it just might explode your notions of what a book can be.

BookWorks exhibition is on the 6th floor Skylight Gallery of the SF Main and will be up until September 26th. Just a hop across the street from Civic Center BART.

For some photos of the cases (courtesy of ace photographer Kate Godfrey), go right here: