Printing Zapata

Work today involved among other things doing an ACEO size block print of Emiliano Zapata.

Emiliano was born Aug. 8, 1879 in Anenecuilco, Morelos, and was the ninth of 10 children.

During the Mexican Revolution he was known as El Tigre del Sur.

According to Wikipedia. Zapata was a mestizo, a mix of Spanish and native peoples. Some say that he could speak Nahuatl. 

These words are from the Nahuatl language:

avocado, chili, chocolate, coyote, tomato

These words are in my blood.

Their fruits traveled to el Norte and have given us sustainance.

The Art of Anton Chigurh

Okay, kids, I’ll admit it I’m a little slow.

I just discovered the newish shop of frequent commentor, NB.

Here is a very cool charm for all you film buffs. No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh. Those Cohen bros. are so nutty.

I think this rocks.

NBscloset, over at etsy, also has really unique ACEOs. They are hand drawn by NB. I bought two today. I could not resist.

Check them out for yourself.

These are Hog Lips and Hoot Hoot. Too cute.

 I have always been very into dreams.

It is interesting me the people who find their way into my dream mind.

The other night it was NB and CBT, of cbtscloset.

I have never met them other than through notes and our interactions on etsy and our blogs. They do have really cute little sketches of themselves as part of their etsy shops and I recall seeing a really cute picture of CBT somewhere in my blog reading.

But there they were in my dreams and they had invented a really neat little car that did not run on fossil fuel.

It was a little bit steam punk and really functional in addition to being cute.

Here is a quick sketch of the vehicle:

The front had all these cool windows that seemed somehow Victorian. It was kind of like the time machine in the film  Time After Time.

So, guys, are you working on this project?

 

Now, here is my latest purchase from CBTsCloset:

It sort of relates to a dream, too. A long time ago i dreamed just a quick image of my mate Frank. He was standing with a gun. Yes in this case a completely phallic symbol. Because of his tenderness and kind nature I dreamed that rose petals were falling from the barrel of his gun. These are hearts and so they communicate the same sentiment to me.

Desire: Art Monger Deluxe

I feel that I have been away from making art for days and days.

I had a busy week that somehow involved things that weren’t focused on creating art but did involve buying art supplies! I bought square drawing pads which both my partner in Art crimes and I prefer.

I received an order of soft cutting blocks from Dick Blick art supplies.

Late the previous week I had received my luscious Japanese micro-gel pens. Signo rocks! I bought a set in colors and then extra Signo .28 pens in black and brown. Mind-blowingly fine lines are definitely in my drawing future. Doing the backs of my postcards with these is really nice.

 

Isaac Hayes postcards.

 This brought me to a realization.

I am an art monger deluxe. I want to do it and I want to indulge my desire for things to do it with when I get to the work bench.

I cancelled the premium cable channels to free up more cash for art supplies.

I dream about creating and find creating dreamy. I’m hooked.

 

 Here is a retro postcard  from my etsy shop. 

I design the backs of the cards putting in the standard sections, identifying the image, noting the year it was created. I add tiny touches with the signo pens. Then I stamp it with one of my micro soft-block stamps. Ta Da!  She is a fetching mid-century girl. Isn’t she? The curly bangs, black eyeliner, the arched eyebrows speak of an Elizabeth Taylor aesthetic. The screwed in hoop earrings are pretty swingin’.

 

 

New Life Summer!

Just a few pictures from the garden.

Here is a big blossom on our non-Japanese Eggplant. These are slower growers.

If you look carefully you can see a tiny bug on the left. It is green and may be the spider’s next meal.

The Japanese eggplant is crazy with blossoms.

It must have busted out with six of them overnight.

They are smaller than the domestic  eggplant.

These are fresh buds.

The color is an  electric and pale version of the rich aubergine the eggplant will become. Ah, Color!

 

 

 

These flower photos are from my trip to downtown Mt. Shasta.

I have always loved hollyhocks. They are the towering beauties from old gardens that i always associate with the late 1800s, early 1900s. There were often seen in illustrations in children’s books from that time.

Now when I see them I always think of Kelly Brewer, too, and her blog Pink Hollyhock.

I bought my first hollyhocks at Bracken’s down on Eureka Way. When they grew and blossomed they were double petal hollyhocks. Beautiful, yes, but I prefer these.

Here is a rose that I found growing outside that cute book shop in that little cottage on Mount Shasta Boulevard.

Young, Gifted and Psychic

Here is the first spider to set up shop in our container garden.

Isn’t it great that helpers find their way to the environment where they can flourish and do their part for the entire ecosystem?

Thanks, spider! You are perfectly welcome.

 

 

Yesterday, for work, my task was drive to the city of Mt. Shasta. It was one of the only locations within many miles that was on for the traditional glittery explosions in celebration our nation’s birth. It was fun to get out and talk to people and watch them have fun. I couldn’t stick around for the fireworks but it was a lovely way to spend the day. I hadn’t been north for quite a spell. Hadn’t been on even a short trip.

The last time we talked my daughter, Jessica, told me about a TV program she had been loving lately. There are two shows on A&E. One is a psychic-detectives show, “Paranormal State,” in which a small band of college students interested in the paranormal help people deal with ghosts or spirits. It’s usually a spirit or two who are attached to a place or home where new people now live. The lead “detective” had a childhood in which he experienced paranormal phenomena. His sensitivities didn’t blend well with his religious upbringing and his parents did not understand. This show is okay and there are some amazing discoveries but both shows weaken their material by adding scary sounds and freaky, shakey camera work. There are heat meters and alot of “Did you hear that,” “Did you see that?” questions between the ghost squad in place of actual phemomena.

The best thing between the two shows is the presence of Chip Coffey!

He is a psychic with his bona fides. He is very empathetic and he seems to have a calling to help young people learn how to deal with their gifts.

The second show, “Psychic Kids: Children of the Paranormal,” features Coffey. The second one I viewed dealt with three young girls, 8, 12 and 13 years old, who were having very intense experiences.

Their mothers were uneducated and each was very preoccupied with the thought that their daughter was mentally unglued. Part of it was worry for their child’s health. Some of the girls had headaches. All three were somewhat ostracized by peers and others in their midwest towns. But the mother’s were just clueless and felt fairly sorry for themselves. They just wished they could have normal girls.

One of the girls during an illness had been clinically dead for over half an hour. When she was revived she had the ability to see auras.

Another, the youngest, had a little boy spirit, Freddie, visiting her regularly. She knew his full name and the date in the 1800s that he lived. Unfortunately, she was also visited by the boy’s malevolent mother, Catherine, who would sometimes shove her out of her bed. A lot to deal with at 8 years old.

The third girl also was visited by a little boy, a very playful one who kept her up half the night. This made it difficult to get up early for school. She was “haunted” by a grown female ghost, too. This woman used to be her mother and was very bossy, often yelling at the girl and tormenting her. These experiences contributed to the dissension at home. This girl had the least perceptive and most self-pitying mother.

Chip Coffey worked with the girls individually. Verified that they saw what he could see, psychically, and then he brought them together, their mothers along, too.

The girls, for the first time had others who did not think them crazy but understood them and their unique way of seeing both worlds. Coffey made sure to get across to the malevolent spirits that they had to leave these girls alone and move on. With the help of a therapist even the mothers made progress in understanding their daughter’s predicaments.

The therapist also did research on Freddie and his mother Catherine Stuart and found a document proving their existence.  That did more than any other thing to change the attitudes of the parents.

“It’s all real,” said one mother.

Coffey is doing an enviable job of bringing light to an often cloudy world. I really admire him.

His web page is here.

Coffey’s interesting background. It runs in the family.

I ran across a beautiful quote related to parenting or mentoring by Lao Tzu:

“Be parent, not possessor. Attendent, not master. Be concerned not with obedience but with benefit, and you are at the core of living. . .”

“If I keep from imposing on people, they become themselves.”

Dream of Painted Eyes

I dreamed this morning of moving between settings or places. I made my way, at one point, to the warehouse home of a man who seemed a combination of David Hildalgo and Cesar Rosas (Los Lobos).

The man was in his late thirties or early forties. I was recovering from some torment and was drawn to him. I went to see him even though I knew he was married and later wondered if it was not  a completely cool thing to be hanging out with him.

He was gentle and strong. I figured he would set the tone for our encounter.

On my arrival I was a little apprehensive about being accepted but I needed his energy to calm me.  He was living a cool alterna life on a level that appealed to my aesthetic sensibilities. There were interesting things in his environment and it was a personal, authentic style that he had built around himself.

Aside: What do I mean by that? I have been in the homes of some people, not often but on occasion, where all the decor is completely removed from thier essense or personality. Nothing in their home speaks of them and the seem to have assembled things by rote. I think you know what I mean. I love entering a space that speaks of the person. A space rich with things that tell you something about them.

Back to the dream.

This man’s home was low key but deep with meaning.

At one point the man’s wife came by. She didn’t seem upset and it didn’t seem she even noticed my presence. I slipped out the large open warehouse side door and went elsewhere.

Later I was going to a gathering. It was in a place with two or three floors all open and intertwined with open staircases and landings.

I noticed, at once seeing myself as if in a mirror, that I had beautifully decorated eyes. Though the painted portions were actually the surface of my eye balls it did not seem at all strange to me. I thought the look was quite entrancing. I gave myself quick non-ego centered props.

I had gone to the gathering expecting to see the man. There was another man who was more of an authority figure standing on one of the staircases. He was trying to explain something to me. He seemed sort of like a police investigator but there was none of the self-important, control-freak elements that can be found in law enforcement peeps.

I woke up shortly after arriving at this place. I wanted to return to sleep but the morning light had broken the dream spell.

Here is a rude approximation of the eye design:

In the dream the eyes did not look startled and of course the design was sublime. They did have design elements above and below the corneas. In dreams things are very different and often contradict physical reality.

I love dreaming.

 

 

I could launch into an examination of home interiors from here. I am fascinated by interior design and by cool personalized spaces.

I’m going hunting for some inspiration. If I don’t find pictures of the type of thing I’m talking about. I’ll start a project of my own taking pix of really cool rooms.

Anybody want to volunteer their space?

Here are really cool refrigerators.

 

Vegetable Self-Realization

Ah, how I delight in the colors of nature. She’s a bleeping genius!

My container garden continues to grow and come more fully into being everyday. I’m up early watering, thrilling to the new color as the plants mature.

I thought I’d start this post with a treasure from the garden of Kimberly and Bruce Ross.

This is a great squash. It is so vibrantly yellow.

It is what it is and that is something amazing.

It was love at first site and, hey, they were giving it away. Their garden is very prolific. They’ve got more squash than they can consume.

I wonder what other goodies will make their way to the lunch room table.

The green stem is a great color, too.

On to this year’s Hamilton Street garden made possible by a Big Lots sale of enormous plastic pots for $5 each.

Last year we discovered the beauty of eggplant blossoms. They are such a lovely shade of pale purple and inside is a bright yellow close to the color of the Ross squash.

This is one of the blossoms on our eggplant this year.

The blossoms face downward and so, to truly appreciate them you must get into some Twister-esque positions but it’s worth it.

Why containers? The house we are living in has a very large lawn. But that’s just it. It’s a lawn. It’s to be kept green and weed free and should not at any time host unauthorized vegetation.

Okay, I’ll admit that I have made that sound a lot more fascist an attitude than it really is. Those words are nowhere to be found in my rental agreement. My landlady, Margo King, is a very good person but she doesn’t appreciate our free-form style of gardening.

When we moved from the apartment we had lived in for a decade, a place also owned by Margo, she let us know that she had to pull out nearly eveything in that little backyard because their was “all kinds of weird stuff back there.”

Okay. So we have literally “contained” our loose gardening tendencies.

 

This is the largest specimen in our garden so far. Japanese eggplant that is said to be very productive and fast growing. So far it is living up to the hype.

I have planted cilantro, Texas tarragon, basil and cinnamon basil, too. And lots of chilis.

 

 

I bought a lot of eggplant largley because of the amazing take home dinner I got from Racha Noodle for my honey, Frank’s, birthday late in May.

The chicken and pumpkin red curry is mind boggling. As I recall it is a favorite of the esteemed Jim Dyar. But our other selection, fresh basil, prawns and eggplant, was shockingly right. All the food at Racha Noodle is so fresh, and seems infused with the most loving of vibes, yes vibes!. Go there and you will feel it. Eat those grumbles and you will be permeated with Racha Love.

 

What was Radical Then . . .

My postcard work last week led me to try some of the collage images that I originally did in 2006 on matchboxes. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I chose interesting faces. Like Paramahansa Yogananda.

I read his autobiography when I young. He seemed very cool. He reminded me of my friend Alice Marquez. Both had the same hair and similar soul shines.

Alice came from a middle class family in Santa Paula. She was an Aquarius and wanted to change the world. Alice was among the group of UCSB students who tried to burn down the Bank of America in Isla Vista. The woman in the background of the pix on the site above looks alot like Alice.

It sounds tremendously foolish now but back then I guess it made some amount of sense to those young people. I guess it took a while for them to learn that the corporate state could smash them like tiny ants.

Alice is just a regular mom now. I think she works in the office at the school her kids attended.

For more retro-protest fun here is an excerpt from a guy’s novel about the bank burning with lots of pix.

Here are two more postcards from the matchbox set:

Drummer extraordinaire Ginger Baker and and the iconic image of Che Guevara.

South Market Street on either side of the railroad tracks is just full of tarnished jewels. I tried a few of these as postcards.

This photo captures a beautiful juxtaposition. It is born of my strange obsession with aging electrical boxes. I see them everywhere but how many people notice this fabulous, faded orange-red box?

The blue sky, the green trees, the tan brush and the great yellow X on the left door of this thing just makes me so happy.

It’s like a forgotten industrial flower dropped into the environment. I’m sure it started out bright and slick and over the years, as it did it’s job of protecting its electrical innards, it slowly faded and grew into something that’s sort of become part of the vegetation.

Look at this box car. It’s that same faded red-orange. It’s scuffed and rusted. The track is rust colored, the wheels are, too. Thess colors in the orange range look so good with the green trees and the blue sky.

 

 

 

Doesn’t the box car with tree look like an image from the ’40s?

 

 

Last Thursday I wanted a stamp of a cup of coffee. I made this little block.

I cut the coffee section away so now I must color in the coffee. I can make it black or a light cafe with various amounts of cream to color depending on my mood. I could even make it hot chocolate or any kind of tea. It’s now a flexible cup.

If I had cut the block perfectly it would always end up filled with the same drink.

 

 

There is a cool thing on Kelly Brewer’s site this morning. After you view the sweet video come back and check out Matt Harding’s alternative success story.

Bill Hicks on Sunday Morning

This is Bill Hicks. He was a comedian who worked until 1994 when he died of pancreatic cancer.

His point of view was in stark contrast to that of his upbringing. He was raised in a southern Baptist home. His parents were good people but Bill just wasn’t having any of the close-minded dogma.

Love or Fear, Light or Darkness I agree that it really does all boil down to shining the light or extinguishing it.

Here are Bill’s last words to the public.

To those who are viewing this entry on a separate page:

Feel free to ignore these unsolicited “possibly related” blog suggestions below. This is a tacky addition from wordpress. Wonder if I can disable it.

Some Links may be Temporarily Disabled

Okay, I know it’s happened before but as I become more invested in putting my work on Etsy the occasional outages are getting a tad more irritating.

A note here for anyone who is strolling through my old posts. Etsy is down and there are a few images that appeared to be X ed out. I’m confident they will be back up soon but . . .

It might also be my computer I guess. I found only one blog with a mention of the outage and some replied that they could get Etsy up on their computers. Can it be regional? My computer knowledge is not sufficient to know the answer.

I know that my photo program is misbehaving. And dang I have a photo of a truly dorky shrinky dink necklace. It’s a pix of Kat von D and Nikki Sixx. Don’t make fun of me because I’m mentally challenged, yo.  

Well, later.

Okay it’s later. I restarted and tried Firefox. Still no etsy.

 Soon I must make my way through the smoke to the newspaper for another fire-tracking day.

Here’s the pix:

Here is a really good picture. How frickin’ beautiful are these two?

Kat appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel Show and Nikki was in the audience with her mother. So, so cute.

I hope for everybosies sake that Nikki is truly finished with his self-destructive days. He still looks great and I hope he keeps it that way.