Wrap-up

Line made with Buttermilk, Nov 22, 2018 9:10am, Samsung Galaxy 4 

Rowan Moore Seifred, Not for reproduction.

It's that time year when I add it all up. All the actions, all the practice, all the ideas, questions, conclusions. What I learned, what I forgot. On this day 357 of 2018. I add it all up and look at where I have been and where I am. 

I would say I am in a good place. My health is reasonable, as is the health of those nearest to me. There is so much gratitude in that mere fact that I could stop here but I will continue.

I enjoyed my design work this year as I normally do but this year was just a bit more pleasurable mostly due to my own attitude. I am extremely fortunate to work the way I do and I kept that fact in clear focus to get through the tougher days. I am grateful to my clients who provide me an opportunity to ply my trade. 

I read a lot. One of the best practices I have managed to cultivate this year was morning reading. I finished 8 books which is a major accomplishment for me. This brings me to another practice, a more challenging one, social media use. I have been struggling to avoid that one. Really it's just the device that is the draw, wanting to pick it up and hold it. It's all totally insipid. I read more about our developing digital lives and that in turn has broadened my thinking about my art practice. I have worked very hard to filter the information that I consume online. 

I thought a lot about existing in a liminal space. I spoke less often. The more I read and avoid the tendency toward distraction, the deeper I can feel myself go into where I want to, to expand my thinking. I shared a first piece called "Permission to Contemplate" and continue on that line of exploration into making art. I am slowly creating a community around the work and that feels good. I pushed drama and excess aside in favor of reaching my true goals. 

While I still have not written a coherent artists statement I am not worried. It's coming to me slowly, and I see that it is a thing I may never know fully. My mottos for this year include "know thyself". I have worked doggedly here. It helps my work on both sides of the spectrum. I kept things simple. I have also come to understand that no one is coming to save me. No one is assigned to the task of making things right for me, this is my responsibility alone and this has been a most freeing realization. Empowering in fact.

So, to conclude. I am grateful for everything and I plan to stick to my daily routine and avoid wearing the devil's mittens. 

Diagram of Me

Swirling.
There is a black dot at the middle of an empty page.
It is labeled, Me. It is not me but a representation of me.
Above it I imagined the heading WORK and a long pencil line connecting the two.
Me and work. I am imagining a diagram. A central mark with radiating lines.
Words on post-it notes. Nourishment and enrichment, two different things to Me.
Nourishment I imagine is painting, knitting, sewing. Not food. It sits below Me.
Food is represented by the word FOOD. It is to the right of Me.
Enrichment sits below work but above me. Learning and reading. Worthwhile.
I have another list that could dot the pencil line between Me and Enrichment on the way to WORK.
E-book technology sounds enriching but it stands to the left of Enrichment and lower down,
at the same height as Secret Signage Project to the right of Enrichment but higher than me. I could pull the trigger on that one any day now. HIKING sits to the left of me. It is a dreamy goal waiting for the snow to melt. MAKE SHOES sits next to Nourishment under FOOD. I have tried to hold all these things in my mind, putting them on paper releases the grip of my brain and frees it up to think creatively about the small steps that dot all the connecting lines. Impulses along thin pencil lines
on blank pages in endless notebooks. Journal entries dated and begun and stopped after one written
letter M—R—S. The page abandoned in favor of what? Items from the list that jump out and pull me away before I have a chance to record them or put them into the diagram where they might make sense. Does it count as a list if it never made its way from brain to hand into letter shaped pencil lines. I am thinking differently about the diagram. Rather than the long laundry list of things one must do. The diagram is a celebration of all that it is possible, radiating like a sun, and at it's center is Me, making it all happen. I have resisted lists as they make for messy pages in Sketchbooks but a diagram. A diagram is a thing to behold. As the diagram evolves I develop a deepening understanding for all of the activities I am engaged in and I can see where my practice lies. Working which is the key to my survival can be exactly what I want it to be. Nourishing, enriching, satiating and it's important to keep moving about, vigorously if possible. This is me.

Coming in 2012

Am hoping to lend a hand with some set design/construction for this project this Spring. My first foray into the world of theater and set design. Please pledge if you can, every little bit helps.

Wasteful

There is no picture for this post. If there were you wouldn't like it. The distended anus of a chicken as it propels itself forward shitting one final shit as its heart stops and its nerves fire one last time and it lands way off in the corner of the pen causing me to grab at it with the pitch fork. All I can think is what a waste, 3 months of feeding and it can't be eaten. The butchering takes preparation and will happen in two days on another farm near here. If I were a farm wife, I'd know what to do in this situation. I might even have an over-sized pot boiling on the wood cook-stove up in the farmhouse, sharpened knives at the ready. 15 or 20 minutes and it would be ready to cook for my hungry family. If I were a farm wife I wouldn't  have on a Pashmina scarf under my chartreuse green coat, I wouldn't be worried about feathers and blood and guts. I might even have pigs that I could throw the entrails to like little treats or god forbid the entire chicken if it were suspect enough. I am not a farm wife, I am a designer and I have no time to pluck a chicken today because I need to finish a rush job, butchering a suddenly dead chicken was not on my docket for the day. Even still, I feel the futility as the limp body heavy with meat gets tossed into the woods, hopefully some other animal will discover it and eat it. Happy early Thanksgiving.

New SIte!

…and it's live. The website I have been working on for the past year or so is finally here. The plight of the Shoemaker's barefooted children is true. I spend way more time on client work than I do on my own promotional efforts but like most things I set my hand to, they do get done, eventually. It is with great pride that I launch my fourth website associated with my own company. One tip, it works more like a book than a website. Enjoy!

New Site

I am working on—have been working on—a new website for my little company. It's hell. Doing work for yourself is so difficult because it never gets priority. I am trying something new with this site and so there is a huge amount of angst and uncertainty about it. Plus, I can no longer do all my own programming (that is if I want the site to look any good) so I have to spend time communicating what I want to others and then like a horrendous client I am prone to change my mind because time passes between my work sessions and when I come back to look at what I have created, I think what on earth was I thinking. Here's the splash page and my new logo to amuse you while I grind the rest of the content out.

Tuesday

One of my sage friends suggested today that perhaps there was some inherent discipline associated with my blogging. After all I have been managing to do it in a regular way for over a year now, perhaps even two years. I assured him that there was no such discipline at play. It's a compulsion or a reflex, like needing to throw up suddenly when you were feeling fine or kicking out your leg when someone bangs on your knee. It's like nature calling and I have no control over when it will happen, but when the mood strikes me I respond without question. It's the least I can do to hold up my end of the bargain.

This thing we call creativity is allusive to me. I live in fear that it will leave me or that when I am called upon to perform I will have nothing to contribute. Creativity seems to fall out of me when I least expect it. It wakes me up in the night, it jumps out of books and food. I see glimpses of it in toothpaste and rabbits feet. What I have learned is to just keep my eyes open and my mouth shut and gather in ideas or shards of ideas or leaves or eggs or whatever there is to be gathered. And then I wait for an opportunity to use what I have gathered, sometimes I wait a long time and sometimes I don't wait at all. Those are the lucky days. So I guess the discipline lies in being conscious everyday which on the whole is fairly easy to do. The rest of it is out of my control so why worry about it.

Letterpress Job

250 of 2 names, 2c Business Cards, printed 3 up on 83 pieces of Newsboard

In between trips to the Fair, meetings in town, a little graphic design and being a mom I printed a letterpress job I have had in the works for a few months. Circumstances beyond my control delayed the whole thing. This economic slow down is hard on everyone especially my small paper supplier in Los Angeles. I have been buying paper from the same guy since 1985 when I first discovered letterpress printing at The Otis College of Art and Design, then the Otis/Parsons College of Design (A Division of the New School for Social Research. Try saying that after a few beers). The paper store is over on 7th, a block and half from the old location of Otis at Grand and Wilshire Blvd. It's a dusty one man shop specializing in printers papers. Business is slow and in order to keep it all going the owner has to gang up his orders to meet the delivery minimums. I guess I could buy paper elsewhere but nostalgia forces me to get it from this guy. When I call him up I can imagine the store, the quality of the air, the angle of the sun in the sky, the deserted street out front, the lake at MacArthur Park so nearby. So I put up with the 4 week delivery time and the half orders in lieu of full orders. The above/below pictured cards are the result of a few weeks of design, a couple hours of production and thanks to the spiffiness of the polymer plate 1 hour of printing. It was at least 80°F in the studio on Thursday afternoon when I was printing. It seems that if it's hot I am compelled to either bake or letterpress print. It was like this in LA too when I used to print in my friend Rebecca Chamlee's garage. It was eternally hot. I am quite pleased with the results on this job. I liked the design even though it was highly influenced by the client. Birds are not really in my visual vocabulary, chickens yes, birds no. I find them a bit over used by the young. I redrew the sample he sent and added the power lines because I knew they would look nice pressed into the news board under the logo. I actually took out a bit of the packing on the press because I was hitting the plate too hard and the fine knocked out type was filling in a bit. The newsboard is thick and can take a heavy hit but in some cases just a light kiss of pressure is more appropriate. Sadly my rollers are not what they could be and the impression is a bit uneven from top to bottom. My set screws are stripped I fear, the ones that hold the rubber rollers at the exact height. Anyway...blah blah blah. One day I will point Mark in the direction of the old girl and get him to detail her within an inch of her life. For now I am happy to print and live with the results which are probably finer than I let on. I love my press, I love the process of printing, I love dinking around with it, cranking the timpin back and forth, walking miles side to side. It reminds me of art school, of hot Los Angeles days when I was young and learning how to awaken what was asleep inside me.

This Week in Design

Here's a poster I designed last week after finishing the second pass of book for Rockport Publishers. It's always a mixed bag here at the DoubleM. My attitude has long been that I am happy to design anything for a buck. I have said it in different, more colorful ways over the years but it always rings true. A few weeks ago I even designed some labels in exchange for Raspberries. Food is as good as cash in my world, Pearl loves frozen Raspberries and I am wholy dedicated to providing for my little tribe of one. I'm lucky, I like what I do, I have autonomy and independence. Sometimes I go without things but I generally choose to focus on what I have a lot of and right now I have a nice amount of work and many happy clients. I had a meeting the other day with a client collaborator and at the end of the meeting she hugged me and I thought how great is this, I get to do what I want, I am adequately compensated and occasionally I get hugged. Life is really good when you stop and think about it.