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Category: The mighty pieshit

Pillar Point

Exit, Pillar Point
October 2012

The hard sell from the Clallam County Parks website:

Pillar Point County Park contains 4.3 acres of land, vault toilets, concrete launch ramp for small boats, and saltwater beach access. Hit the mudflats during crab season or simply hang out on the shoreline, you can’t go wrong here. The Park is adjacent to the Highway 112 National Scenic Byway, 35 miles west of Port Angeles. Pull off the road and picnic with a scenery palette that can’t be beat. Sitting at home or in your office with your eyes closed, you can feel the soft breeze blowing off the water and hear the shorebirds and gulls cry out in their constant search of food.

Old and even older pilings, Highway 112, March 2012

Wait for it

Interconnected Limbs, Pysht Basin, November 2010

The background blackness is no exaggeration, neither is the wan monochromatic treeline. It could represent any season out here, but it is fall, very cold and very dry. I liked the Escherian loop of the branches,  and the spatial discord of the tree clusters. It’s not immediately clear what is in front of what.

There is fluid subtlety in most of the woods out here. Walking down a forest line, the patterns repeat but like the tides they are the same and very different. There is an animation supplied by my own movement and darting glances, trying to pick out patters and shapes, augmented by the zoetropic margins of the larger boughs. Like with tide watching, it’s easy to spend hours ‘waiting’ for cool patterns to emerge.

Where you once were now there is not even rain

Treeline in Drought, North Peninsula, August 2010

Well I haven’t taken my camera out in several months, which is about the last time when got any rain. The irony is only peripheral,  I’ve been so absorbed with  printing lately I hardly notice the absence. A typical day printing starts at 5 am and ends…well ends isn’t the word. My latest obsession is 4 color gum printing. Don’t ask why; I don’t see well in color and am not entirely sure I like gum prints to begin with. Friday a.m. I finally broke down and went for a drive with every bit of gear I could cram in the truck in 5 minutes.

I like rotating my obsessions around like so much veteran but bitter pitching relief, it keeps me in a self-important state of micromanagement and nervousness that might be mistaken for productivity with the just right squint. The winter is for obsessing about new work and the summer is for  printing but the cycle can find occasional relief in busywork or other spontaneous projects. I started making some new film holders several weekends ago in such a ploy to distract myself.

Confronted with the mindless sun though, and outside only in the broadest definition,  I made for the darkest forest I could find. The drought extends from the cloudless sky in its 10th or 11th week and I now feel like I squint around the clock.  Not because I notice  the outside world just now but because maybe if I think about the work just right, I’ll like it ok.

deadpan ham

Draped landscape, November 2009

Fleshing out a new portfolio. Most have been folded into this blog as an satellite of this series. The working theme is roadwork, a sort of non-denominational scenery that attempts to be neither escapist or utilitarian. It mainly started from a need to bodycheck my more purple, illustrative work, but sadly nothing much can escape my need to go over the top..:P

edit: more or less loss


Stumps, Highway 112

Random thoughts of the last few seconds

I hope a hurricane doesn’t come through the BP spill

I’d like more coffee in less cup…but how?

Don’t spare the bottleneck in that RL Burnside remix

hmmm…this didn’t suck this much yesterday

Paltry descending spiral, life. As I near utter desensitization, the landmarks continue to whiz by but interest gets no closer.. There’s a sort of implied dead reckoning as anticipation of interest..any interest..keeps missing in all dimensions of duration, scope, and reference. The errors compound as the next fix sails by, but logic refuses to sign on, and there’s no snapping out of the building inertia of it.

I’m a morose moron of late. Did I hit my head? Often? Maybe it’s just middle age, but I’m seeking comfort instead of inspiration. Visual comfort food, soft angles and light. Even the printing processes I’m working with lately favor bright child-like colors applied with simple tools. The craft of it is reassuring in times of lean creativity. It’s little wonder children and lunatics are amused with crafts, the purpose is soothing, and ravings or destructive energies are distracted for a breath-catching moment. Still, in the end it’s just more unsupervised half-assery with lots of paper towels, and enthusiasm seems to dry and harden in step with the materials, and there are half-finished thoughts everywhere.

The landscape seems sympathetic, this little gathering of stumps, a landscape of truncated notions.