The month of December is always a busy one for me. Every weekend between now and Christmas I’ll be at an event showing off my latest work. Here is where I’ll be:
Dec. 7th, 10a - 4p North Union Holiday Market in the Market Hall at Van Aken.
Dec. 14th, 11a - 4p Open Studio at Wright & Rede in Cleveland Heights.
Dec. 21st, 10a - 4p North Union Holiday Market in the Market Hall at Van Aken.
Hope to see you there!!!
Ink Maker
It is the first grey day of fall and I'm thinking about color. Pinks and reds are kissing the tips of the maple out front. The sun has shifted to a low enough orbit that it sneaks in under the clouds at an angle, burnished gold, as it sets.
In photography if you want deeper, richer colors in your picture you underexpose the image just a little. A little less light to make the colors deeper. That is what today is. Underexposed.
My fingernails at the keyboard are stained brown with the color of fall. Black walnuts from the next street over.
I've been making ink.
When I started getting interested in fountain pens two years ago I swore I'd draw the line at making my own ink. I've got too many things to do. I don't need another rabbit hole. Yet here I sit, sepia fingered, eyeballing the buckthorn fumbling purple berries onto my drive.
Making ink feels like collecting the spirit of a place. I can sample the color of a space in time and store it in a bottle. Like a sorcerer drawing forth the essence of a place for spellwork.
The buckthorn yields two cups of berries with a few minutes of effort. Boiled down in a pot they make a thick purple syrup heavy with sediment. Mixed with water steeped in wood ash, for there is color hiding there as well, the purple blossoms to blue then green then yellow. Alchemy.
I delight in the process. So much of my creativity gets diverted to my work. To income. This ink is profitless. It is a living color. In time it will change and fade. It's lack of stability means it will never be a product I can sell.
It feels rebellious, this ink. I don't even have the right kind of pen to use it with yet I sit here thinking of the art I will make. Grey taken from the acorn caps collected on the way home from dropping off my youngest at kindergarten, made into a wash of ink on watercolor paper, and hung on a wall where in time it will slowly fade. Bittersweet. A memory of a time in my life that too will fade, slipping through my fingers as I watch it depart.
Maybe that is what I am really doing here. Trying to hold on just a little longer to the autumn in which I watched my daughter first walk through the doors of her elementary school, then disappear around the corner. Bottling a time beautiful and painful in it's impermanence.
Fall Cyanotypes and British Racing Green
New Work for September
August ends with school supplies and leather orders.
The first leather order of what will eventually be the work I have ready for the holidays has arrived. I've spent the last few weeks looking over what sold well last year and taking inventory on what I might be running low on.
Today I starting cutting down the leather. In this batch I'll be getting a full set of wallets (Belhoste, Ensign, and Pointsmen) in British Racing green. I'm dedicating the other half to making a new collection of cyanotypes on leather.
The cyano-leather is the part I'm most looking forward to. I have some new ideas I would like to try out.
In the past I've relied on straight forward botanical silhouettes. In the print work I've been doing this year I've been exploring the idea of depth and layers. I've been trying to make a foreground, middle, and background and it's resulted in what I've been thinking of as the canopy effect. Leaf shadows passing through each other.
I'm hoping to figure out how to translate this onto leather. I'm imagining layers of ghostly maple leaves overlapping each other.
Cyanotypes on leather are finicky though. It can be hard to keep subtle detail from washing out. If that happens I'll just end up with splotchy leather.
You Need to See It On the Wall
It's early in the 2000's. It is the end of the semester and my classmates and I are standing in the basement of a former mattress factory that serves as the campus's art building. As we stand around chatting and sorting through stacks of finished work, one by one we pack up our portfolios and head down the hall into a darkened room.
It's slide day.
Slide day would come every year at the end of the school year. We'd put our newly minted art up on the black studio walls, in front of bright, soft boxed lights on tripods, and shoot slides of our work. We'd then take the finished slides, carefully crop the image to show just the artwork using thin foil tape, and then label each slide with the title of the work and the year it was produced.
These slides would then be used to present our work to potential gallery spaces and clients.
As you can imagine I haven't had a need for these slides in years.... decades. But I took something more important away from the experience. An offhanded comment my professor, Masumi Hayashi, made while I was shooting some of my work.
"There is something about seeing it [the art] up on the wall. It never looks finished until you've seen it up on a wall."
I think about that all the time while I'm going through my recent work. I've got two spaces in my studio, a shelf off to my left, and a hanging rack just in front of me where I can set works in progress. They are far enough away that I can get some distance from them, and still in my line of sight so they catch my attention as I'm going about my day.
I learn a lot about my work this way. It's always smaller than I think it is. Most of it is missing something. Having it up on the wall gives my subconscious a chance to work through the problems while the rest of me is working on other things.
Sometimes is takes hours. Sometimes days. Eventually I'll look up from an email I'm writing and realize a composition is too busy or that I'm on the verge of saying something but haven't gotten to the point yet.
That piece will come down off the wall and a new one goes up. I come up with solutions that I wouldn't come up with otherwise. These slow burn answers that I can't force my way to.
I was sixteen when I went with my best friend's family to Ocracoke, North Carolina. They rented a towering house on stilts and we crammed all the boyfriends, and girlfriends, and friend friends into it. From the deck on the second floor you could see out over the marsh grass and beach plums to the ocean.
We spent our vacation trying to body surf on nascent waves, rising pink and fresh skinned from being tumbled along the abrasive sandy bottom of the ocean.
There was this sandbar way out in the waves, just at the limit of our range. Twice a day it would disappear and reappear in a new location.
On our third day we made the swim out to this lonely island. We arrived just as it was fading, mushy wet sand between our toes, and water already lapping at our ankles. I remember us standing there, lit up in the golden sun, like trickster messiahs, walking on the water.
Turning back to the shore I saw the adults on our trip waving at us. Not the kind of wave they give you when they are saying "yes, we see you out there". This was a different kind of gesture. The kind of wave you give to a group of teenagers who have been ignoring you while doing something stupid and dangerous for the past thirty minutes.
The tide was changing, and with it our disappearing island was now in the middle of a river forming out in the ocean. The first few off the sandbar made it back through the forming current. The rest of us followed shouted instructions to swim along the shoreline, flipping over onto our backs to catch our breath, until the tide let go of us.
I remember my feet finally hitting the soft sandy shore, standing wobble-legged on the beach, looking out at the ocean that looked just as friendly as it had an hour before, feeling scared and alive. Our fugitive island having been washed away by the changing sea.
Hundreds of miles, and twenty seven years, away I still think about that sandbar.
A lot of hard work has led to a good week, in the middle of an expectedly good month, halfway through a unusually hard year. I wish I could say it was like standing on a hilltop looking down at how far I've climbed.
Really though I'm out on that sandbar, mushy sand between my toes, trying to figure out where I can stay dry.
No matter how far I've come there is always a little voice asking me "yeah, but what have you done today?" The sand slipping away beneath me. Water at my ankles.
I worry that it is eroding me. Washing me away.
Then I look back at the shore. I am the adult now, and it is my children that are watching me, waving.
To them I am something else. I'm walking on water saying 'this too is possible.'
So I point out the currents. I show them how I swim on my back when the tide is too strong. I teach them to swim along the shore.
Because the truth is that it is all sandbars out there. But it's not about the sandbar. It is about how you change with the tide.
Shale Cliffs, Hidden Paths, and Storm Clouds.
Distant Shores
On occasion I will make a design that I know is going to be a hard sell.
That was the case with these.
I knew the freehand, not quite perfect lines, were going to look a little wonky. I knew the dip dye marks from the indigo would look strange.
I wasn't seeing all of that while I was making them though.
Instead I was looking into the future. I was imagining what those wonky lines would look like as they turned a darker shade of brown. How they would look almost organic after they'd had some time to be bent and curved around the cards inside the wallet. I could see the indigo getting darker, the deepest tones going from new denim to a deeper storm cloud blue. The dip marks taking on a mineral quality. Like marble or slate.
When I started making these I was thinking about perfectionism, mine in particular. I wanted to make something I couldn't possibly do perfectly but might come out beautiful anyway. Something that can only be appreciated over time with attention.
Still. I worried trying to offer someone something that will look cooler in six months or so sounded kind of scammy. So after I'd made them available on the website I pulled one off the shelf, marked it as sold, and got to work proving my point.
Six months worth of wear later and I'm happy to see where it's going. I'm just conditioning my wallet for the first time. The lines are changing. The blue is getting richer.
I see the ultimate goal of this work as being the kind of thing that sneaks up on you. I see my wallets getting fidgeted with while someone is waiting to close out their bar tab, looks down, and notices that the dip marks look like the shore of an ocean. The lines a path running long the coast. Or maybe for a moment they are tree rings recording time's passage.
I like the idea of hijacking someone's imagination, taking them on a little journey to distant shores, while they are waiting to complete some sort of mundane transaction.
A little color in the commonplace.
All the Years That Brought Me Here
"See the tag? Hanging down. Yes. Park by that." The parking attendant points at the far wall.
"Um. That sign on the wall? There?"
"No. The tag. See that tag hanging there?" I glance over in the direction he's pointing, desperation creasing the ridge of my brow…. There's nothing. "Yes, that tag. Park by that."
"Oh okay. Thanks." I park in the general direction he was pointing and hope for the best.
I'm in a parking garage in downtown Cleveland, and I'm on a quest. Since the arrival of the pandemic I've been shooting black and white film. Being confronted by the fact that in such a short period of time my whole world changed and slipped away made me want to record it. Save some memory of what was lost.
Up until now I've been shipping out my film to be processed and returned. It's not cheap and it's getting to the point where I'm shooting less because I don't want to have to keep paying for it.
For a while now I've known about the Cleveland Print Room. They have open darkroom hours. I have a degree in photography and don't want to keep paying someone to process my film. I also have kids, a creative career, house repairs, laundry, meals to make. I've been planning on checking out the darkroom for four year's worth of "next weeks".
Today is the day.
Up the elevator, through a room of college students having a critique (Pardon me young people, elder millennial coming through.), and into the darkroom.
Well, not quite. Darkrooms generally have two parts. One part where you develop film and one part where you make the prints. I'm standing in the well lit film developing area. I get a tour. There is a large sink and lots of tanks and graduated cylinders.
The darkroom attendant gives me a quick run down of where the chemistry is, what temperature to use it at, and at what dilution. I'm staring at her and nodding confidently as the numbers she tosses at me bounce off my head like bugs on a windshield.
"Do you remember how to load film on a reel?" she asks. "It's like riding a bike."
I take some proffered test film and a reel, without looking at what I'm doing (with real film this has to be done in complete darkness.) I feel for the entry notches on the reel, slide the film into them, start ratcheting the reel back and forth, and the film is taken up with no snags.
I realize later this was probably a test on her part.
Having passed the test I get led back into the darkroom itself. A quick survey of the equipment. Things are pointed out to me, its dark, that I'm can only imagine, as its dark. Then I'm left to my own devices.
Loading film onto a reel is a compromising situation. You have to go into a little room and turn off all the lights. Once your film is out of the little canister you can't turn on the lights again until the film is on the reel and secured away in a developing tank. This is fine if everything goes as planned. Less so if you put the lid of the tank somewhere you can't find while groping around in the dark.
There is also a level of performance anxiety. You are in this little room. Everyone outside of that little room knows what you are doing in there. If you're in there too long everyone knows that something is going wrong in there. It's somewhere between using a bathroom stall at a busy airport and trying on clothes in a fitting room with an overzealous sales person.
Knock knock. "How's it going in there?"
The first reel loads like a charm. The second snags, is unwound, snags again, is cut to round off the corners (in the dark, by feel), and then smoothly transitions onto the reel.
I emerge from the little room with all the confidence and awkwardness of a twelve year old boy who just picked out his first pair of jeans at the Gap. Not too snug in the crotch. Equal parts swagger and cringe.
From there my experience begins to reassert itself. Temperatures are checked. Chemistry poured in.
When developing film you have to agitate the tank its in every thirty seconds or so. To keep fresh chemistry moving along the film. You can't shake the tank too much or you risk making bubbles that will settle on the film and ruin it. So there is a rolling of the wrist that turns the tank around. Then I tap it against the side of the sink to dislodge any wayward air pockets. I set the tank down and wait twenty five seconds to repeat it. For eight minutes I give this my undivided attention.
I love it. The very act is meditative. The tap tap. The rolling of the tank. The smell of stop bath is bilious and sharp. It's unpleasant to anyone who's never lost an afternoon to the dim red lights of a darkroom. To me it smells like being sixteen and doing something that feels almost occult in my high school darkroom. It smells of being twenty one, at college, and having the whole world before me. It smells of being thirty, making do in a makeshift darkroom, knowing that this wasn't going to be the life I thought it was, but doing it anyway, as a place to shelter in while life raged on outside in the light.
And now. It's smells of being forty two, finding my way back to it, developing pictures of my children that sixteen year old me never thought I'd have.
About twenty minutes later the rolling and tapping has ceased. I remove my now developed film from the wash, hold it up to the light, and laid out before me is my whole story.
My children, my neighborhood, campaign signs, the cello concert my neighbors put on in their yard, the small memories that slip so quietly through our lives, seen through the eyes of all the years that brought me here. Sixteen. Twenty one. Thirty. Forty two. Forever burned in grains of silver by the light that made them.
It's magic. It really is.
Once my film is dry I safely pack it up. I thank the darkroom attendant for her time and tell her I'll be back again soon.
My car is where I left it. No tickets. I still can't find the hanging tag, but it's fine.
I get home and show my kids these pictures I made of them year's ago. I can't tell if they are humoring me. Soon their interest is lost in stories about their day. Then dinner and a bath.
That night I go to sleep with the smell of stop bath just barely a whisper in the air around me as I fall asleep.
And Favorite Ice Cream Flavors.
Couranteer Finished
The finished Couranteer from my last post. This will be the last one I do for a while. As I’m expanding into new mediums and opportunities the drag on my resources these become is too much. It’s one thing when I’m doing nothing but bags. It’s another when I’ve got a lot of balls in the air and have to drop everything to work on a bag. So for now at least they are on hold.
I try not to get too in the weeds about how I run my business. Sometimes there is an idea that I’m wrapping my head around that I think is worth sharing. This time it’s about ice cream.
I remember hearing this story about when Jenni’s Ice Cream was just getting started. Her initial plan was to only offer a few flavors but make them innovative and change them every week. Each week would be a whole new menu of crazy ideas.
She quickly ran into a problem. She could get people in the door but she was having trouble keeping them coming back. She eventually realized it was because of the constantly changing menu.
People need to have their favorites and they want to know they can reliably get that favorite from you. By constantly changing her menu she was keeping people from creating a connection with what she was offering.
Why am I thinking about this? Because that’s what I’ve been doing with my work since I started. Every collection is a new idea. I usually do one of each design.
I’m starting to realize that I’ve made all of these things that people love, had exactly one chance to buy, and then never again. So I’m thinking about how to fix this.
One idea is that I could revisit some of my favorite collections over the years. The other is that I could make more than one of each design.
For now I’m starting small. One of my favorites from the Millstream collection from a few years ago. I made a handful of them in the same pattern. A little butter pecan to balance out the new flavors.
Couranteer in the Works.
I’ve been working away on bags for the last few weeks, This Couranteer being one of the last few in this batch. I’m a about a week and a half’s worth of work in on this one. Once I get to this point it all comes together pretty quickly. Relatively speaking
As I work away I’m thinking about all that has changed with the way I make these. I dye all this leather by hand. It is a three day process that has to take place before I even start making anything out of it.
There isn’t really anyway to recycle leather. I can’t melt it down, or kneed it back into a mound and start again. Once I start cutting the leather down every step I take is one I’m committed to. If the knife slips a little while I’m cutting out the edge of the body of a bag I can’t call my customer and ask if it’s okay to deliver a Couranteer that’s 13.5” wide instead of 14”. If the knife slips I have to start over. Hopefully it’s early on in the process. Rather than a few weeks in.
The knife has slipped more times that I’d like to admit. When it happens there is a whole grieving process. At first I can’t believe it happened. Then I try to convince myself that it’s fixable. Finally comes acceptance and I start over.
Ten years in I’m cutting out the parts slower than I ever have. I’ve done this hundreds of times at this point. Yet still in my head I’m double checking every step I’m taking. I have an itemized list in front of me with each little step written out. I check it as I go. Like an anxious novice looking over a recipe.
The knife makes a cut following along a groove I’ve made to demarcate the borders of the body panel. This first pass with the knife makes the trench deeper. The next pass with the knife will make the trench deep enough to hold the knife to the line. The third cut will pass the knife all the way through the leather. Slowly. Slowly progress is made. One pass at a time.
It has become a mantra I recite to my students in class. Go slow. Pay attention to what your hands are doing. Get each step right. It all adds up. Go slow to go fast.
The body panels are cut out and I’ve moved on to the pockets and gussets that will make the sides of the bag. This is what I’ve done for weeks now. This level of concentration requires all other work to stop in the studio.
As I cut and shape I’m thinking about the future of these bags. Three different weights of leather. Hardware. Strap leather. The commitment to dyeing all that leather. The concentration required. Thousands of spent dollars sitting around me waiting to be made into a bag. This system works when I’m doing nothing but bag making. When I’m doing anything else it’s thousands of spent dollars sitting around not doing anything. Slowly drying out and becoming stiffer and harder to work with.
I honestly don’t know where the future lays with these. I’m proud of my designs. I’ve never had to be pushy with selling them because there really isn’t anything else out there quite like what I make, If you want a nice bag there are lots of options. If you want one like what I make there really aren’t.
At the same time they are so resource intensive that I can’t really experiment with them. In every other area of my practice I’m making progress. Advancing my style. These haven’t changed.
In these few weeks of bag making I’ve done little else. All my other work is on hold while I do them. It’s coming down to math between sticking with what’s comfortable and safe in the past and what holds promise and potential for the future. I wish I could do both but it is becoming increasingly obvious to me that I can’t. There aren’t enough hours.
On any other decision the math is easy. I move forward. It’s what I’ve always done. These are different. I use these bags every day. I get stopped on the street and asked about them. I still catch myself looking across to studio at the display models thinking “Damn. I made that.”
But to stay on that path means giving up the one that I’m headed down. I just don’t think I’m the kind of person that can stay in one place like that.
It would be nice to end this with a clean ending. I don’t have one though. As I work through this bag I’m working through what to do about them. Slowly. With patience. Committed to each step. Watching my hands, checking the plan, thinking of the finished picture, trying to not let the knife slip.
Some of my most recent work featuring some of my oldest work. Cyanotypes and toned cyanotypes.
In a box, in the rarely used closet, in the extra bedroom that has become the kid's den, there is a binder filled with negatives.
A few weeks ago I dug the binder out and started scanning its contents. All the photographs I'd taken going all the way back to the summer of 2001.
It is interesting the things which are significant to me in them now. The cars on the streets. The way people dressed. All this work I did, but never did anything with. I can remember how I felt taking them. It is a visceral feeling, looking off onto my old horizons. Forgotten and found in a box in the back of a closet.
I'm slowly scanning my way through the binder. Uploading them into the digital era. I don't know what I'm going to do with them yet. I love the idea of making something with these old negatives. It feels like picking up lost threads. Coming full circle to finish that which I wasn't able to finish back then.
As I sit here, scanner purring away, I'm thinking about how value changes over time. Maybe it is because I'm in my midlife crisis era, or because I've got a little distance from the gaping maw of Instagram, but I'm thinking about how temporary many of the artifacts we would leave behind are.
Having been promoting myself on Instagram for almost a decade a remarkable amount of my history is there. All it would take is a shift in ownership, or terms of service, and that would all be gone.
I've got backups, sure, but no one is going to find my old photo editing apps in the back of a closet.
Nostalgia can be dangerous, wishing for a return to a place that never was, but it can also be the roots that keep us from washing away in the stream of time.
As I load another strip of negatives into the carrier for scanning I'm thinking about the Spotify playlists that won't be thumbed through in the back of dusty record shops by future generations. The clothes we wear for a season and then discard not lining the rack of vintage shops. Our collective digital memories sitting in an abandoned server farms. All of these things we'd leave behind washed away in the current.
My latest Leather Like Pottery collection is coming out this Saturday. I continue to enjoy working in this form. The simple shapes allow for a lot of experimentation with dyeing and coloring this surface. This is the first time I’ve tried using leather paint on an item I’ve produced. At first I was worried the opaqueness of the paint wouldn’t work with the hand dyed nature of my work, but I think I found a way for it to all come together.
A Second Narrative
One hot day in the middle of a summer two decades ago I received my art degree in the mail. When it arrived I was either away at work, a bar job I got while in college, or was asleep, because I was in my twenties and worked at a bar. I didn't go to my graduation.
A few weeks prior I'd had my final critique with my photography professor and mentor. The meeting was supposed to be a review of the work I'd done during the independent study course I'd taken that year. What followed was a three hour meeting in which we didn't really talk about the art I'd made. Instead Masumi asked me what I was planning for my future and repeatedly told me "Go to grad school. Don't do anything else. Don't stop along the way. You need to go to grad school."
I had another important conversation that week. I told my boss that I loved working for him, loved my job, but even with all the hours I was working and all the cutting back I'd done I couldn't afford to pay my rent. I told him I wanted to keep working for him if he could help me figure out a way to stay. He made me a bartender.
So I didn't go to grad school. I became a bartender. I don't remember giving up on my dreams. I just took one little step away from them, one day at a time, each necessary.
At some point I convinced myself that this was what being a grown up was like. Art was something I used to do. It wasn't a career. Careers are serious, hard, and require sacrifice. So I sacrificed.
It took me ten years to reach my limit. Working at a restaurant when I was in my twenties felt exciting and adult. Working the same job in my thirties, when I wanted to own a house and start a family, felt different. I was tired of missing New Years, Mother's Day, Saturday nights, Sunday mornings. I'd had my head down for so long, taking one necessary step at a time, that when I finally looked up I realized I didn't know where I was going.
So I quit.
I started Wright & Rede. A place where I could be creative, but sell things. Serious things that people could use. Adult things. Not art. Practical things.
In doing so I had to learn social media. How to promote and market myself. I started documenting my work. Business stuff. Not art. I was selling a product.
But sometimes, when I had my camera out, the light would hit just right or I'd be driving my son home from preschool and we'd stop at a park. I'd bring my camera with me just in case there were some pictures I could take to help define my brand. Definitely not for making art.
Then another decade passed and now I'm making art. To be clear, I wasn't making art. I stopped, but now I was making art again. Which I wasn't doing before. Definitely.
And then.
Last night I was looking through all of those pictures. The ones I took because the light was nice. The ones I shot when I had my camera out. The ones to show my kids what I used to use when I made art.
There, hidden in with all the pictures I'd taken telling my narrative of Wright & Rede, was a second narrative. A story about a parent. Someone who stopped to watch the sunrise. Celebrated the bitter sweet moments of watching his children grow up. Knowing that these were moments we'd never be able to return to. Memories we were living in. Pictures where the light was just right, the composition was perfect, and it all came together with how it made me feel. When combined it made something more than the sum of its parts. Art.
I am an artist. I always have been.
Looking back now I can see an unbroken chain of pictures. Taken when my guard was down. When I thought they didn't matter. Just because. Capturing this fleeting feeling I have. To savor life, all the little quiet moments, because they are always slipping away and I can never have them back.
It has taken me twenty years to understand what Masumi was trying to tell me. Don't stop. Take it seriously. Take the next step, but in the right direction.
Part two
Sowing Seeds in the Dark
How do you know when an idea has run its course?
For me it just fizzles out one day. The last set of images I made for this collection worked that way. As I took them from between the blotter sheets I was drying them between I could see the spark had gone out. I think I knew it while I was making them.
An idea runs it's course. They grow from little seeds, blossom, ripen, and then die off, hopefully leaving a few new seeds behind.
For now I'm done thinking about developing these images. When I started this project I had an idea of mostly white images with ghostly hints of leaves. What I ended up with was different and I think more satisfying.
I made a few pieces that have that ghostly quality.
What I really fell in love with was what happens when I toned them. You can't tell when you look at the images but the way the light hits the paper as it comes through the window makes a subtle gradient.
If I soak the paper in washing soda the image fades. The lightest areas going first. The darkest areas come along much slower. Its possible to pull the images out in the middle of this split. The highlights running away from the shadows. Suddenly the gradient is there.
A second exposure of blue over the top of this gradient brings out the potential of the idea. Two images, both faint and barely there, but combined to make something new.
They look like pastel drawings. Not cyanotypes.
I've done my best to photograph them but I already know they are going to be difficult to capture. They are very quiet images. Reflections of the time in which I made them.
It's midmorning on a quiet Sunday and I'm in my basement workshop coating paper. The neon yellow liquid pools in little gullies as I slowly brush it back and forth across the surface of the paper.
It is quiet. The kids are out and I've got the house to myself. The lights are off to keep the paper I'm coating with light sensitive chemistry from reacting while I'm still working on it.
This paper is a prayer. Cyanotypes require rich, warm, yellow sunlight. Something the winter grey skies of Cleveland haven't provided much of. I just want to make something. So I'm coating paper.
I am an evangelist of limitations. My best work comes from not having everything I want and having to figure out how to make the most of what I have.
What I have is the wan wash of light coming in through the glass block window over my workbench. So I ask myself what can I do to take advantage of this weak light.
In the bright light of summer sun a cyanotype will expose properly at around twenty minutes for me. Here in my basement, with my eyes fully adjusted to the dark, the light still looks dim. How long would it take to get enough light on the paper down here to make an image?
So as I pack the still drying paper into the old coal room, it's sole window covered to block outside light, I leave one sheet sitting out on my work bench. I set a few ginkgo leaves on it to see if I can capture anything.
The next morning I lift one of the leaves to see if the paper has started to change. Nothing. So I rearrange all of the leaves and leave it sitting out. I repeat the process the next morning and again every morning for the next week.
As I work I can see the faintest hints of where a leaf was sitting. Every time I move a leaf to a new spot the now uncovered paper begins to expose. Slowly erasing the memory of the leaf that once sat there. But it's slow. So slow. Three or four days after I moved the first set of leaves I can still make out a faint outline of where they sat on that first day.
When I finally wash the print, to see what the developed image will look like, two weeks have gone by. As the paper sinks down into the water I can see a cloud of inky blue lift away from its surface leaving almost nothing behind. But not quite nothing. A ghost of an image. Like a memory.
It occurs to me then that I've discovered something to explore. I thought I was working on an idea about making an image with very little light. What I realize is that I'm actually making an image with a great deal of time. Two full weeks of my life, the slow gentle days of winter, recorded on the surface of this paper.
My workbench is now covered in sheets of paper, quiescent as they turn first green then a tarnished navy. As the images slowly develop so does my understanding of this body of work.
I'm thinking about patience. The patience required to wait a few more days lest I wash it too early an end up with nothing. The patience of doing what I can with the light I have while I wait for brighter days. Being patient with my creativity, my ideas yowling in the corners of my mind, waiting to be let out.
This work is also about longing. The images look like memories of what you'd see laying in the shade of a tree, looking up at the bright sun as it passes through the translucent green canopy above. A faded memory eroded by the colorless days of February.
I am developing the idea as I develop the pictures. Some of them I'm toning, turning the blue images to brown, and then coating them to expose again. Capturing more time. Building up layers of days and memories. Records of who I was when I started each image and all the days that came after.
Every morning I greet them, slowly ripening under the pale light of a single basement window. Throughout the day I have to resist the urge to sneak down there and prod the leaves. Busy work for idle hands as I try to adjust what doesn't need adjusting.
Patience.
These too will be ready in time.
I remember the smell of it the most. Growing up a child of antique dealers I spent a lot of time in barns. Cloistered stacks of mismatched chairs. Bent cardboard boxes of plates wrapped in newspaper. Glass and brass doorknobs bereft of station catching sunlight from dirty dormer windows.
There is a smell to it. Dust, yes, but also wet stone and old carpet and the buttery, aged smell of old paper. Minwax. Solvents. All bundled up in a smell that says old and surplus and sacred.
There is a bit of sacrilege in these spaces. Items of personal value, deprived of their person, and left to gather dust. As a child walking down the narrow aisles I felt towered over. Their previous owners looking down at me, telling me not to bump anything, to not touch.
I have a steamer trunk in my studio from one of those barns in my childhood. It holds oil, paper, mat board, and the beginnings of work that will someday exist as not just ideas in my head.
The inside of the trunk is still lined with the fabric it came with. A blue on white floral pattern that now serves as the substrate for a topographic map of stains, and patina. The warp and weft of time wrinkled fabric making mountain ranges across its surface.
There is magic here too. In this interplay between man made intention and the chaos of time and circumstance. The pattern on its own is interesting, but it is the intersection of it and the stains that have come to inhabit it that make it singular.
I think I look for this in my own work. The uneven distribution of dye when rubbed into the surface of leather. The estuaries and tidemarks of wet chemistry brushed on heavy paper. Opportunities for collaboration with chance to make something greater than I could have on my own. Work that speaks of my carefully patterned intention and the mottled and frayed edges of the life that brought me here. The humility of ideas tarnished by reality but the more beautiful for their imperfections.
A small bit of that childhood magic found in hushed and dusty spaces.
A year ago on a sleet colored day in January, I was standing in my studio watching from the window as cold wind made waves in the winter browned lawns outside, and I was feeling lost.
At that point I'd been in business for ten years. Ten years of craftsmanship. Ten years of subverting that by sneaking a little art in there. A few less than ten years of realizing that was what I was doing, and a few years less than even that of realizing that's what I should have been doing to begin with.
I could feel the path I'd planned out for the year slipping away beneath my feet. It wasn't a bad plan. I was going to do a ten year retrospective. I'd pare down all the good idea's of the past decade and make little collections featuring each of them.
Old ingredients make for bad dishes.
The problem was that the work that had gotten me there wasn't the work that was going to get me to where I needed to go. The long arc of progress doesn't bend you back around to where you started.
In February I gave up on that plan.
The next few months were about making messy, intuitive work and then seeing if I could reign it back in. I didn't allow bad ideas. If I made something weird, ugly, or too far out from the work I was comfortable in making, I forced myself to finish it. It worked. Mistakes became seeds. Seed grew into ideas.
I messed up a lot. I remember a particularly bad day when I accidentally cemented a leather tray to the wooden form I'd used to shape it. I gave up on the piece and tried to at least rescue the form, and in doing so cut a big gouge out of the wood, ruining the form.
At the same time I was churring out cyanotypes. From from the moment the midwestern sun finally peeked out in May through the deep red embers of October I made more work in a season than I have since college. My plan was to make a lot of work. I didn't care if it was good work. Just to make work and see what happened. I came up with three big concepts for collections that summer. None of them made it to fruition.
I taught myself how to make leather bowls. The first bowl I made was a beauty. The next six months of bowls never lived up to that first one. All of them marked with lessons about what not to do along the way. Patience they whispered at me. This is an old art. Go slower.
By September I was sitting in my studio making beautiful bowls, trying not to think about how I didn't know what people would use them for. I wasn't making standard brown wallets. I'd stopped talking about the satchels and briefcases I'd spent years developing. You can't even eat out of them, these bowls.
In October I decided that the bowls were used to hold a person's memories. Memories of the person they were when they got it, and dreams of the person they're going to become. I haven't told anyone that until now. But it's what I think about when I watch people pick them up, feeling them to see if it's the right container for all that they were and all that they will be.
In November I poked my head out from the teetering stacks of images I'd made and realized I'd nothing to show for it. A bunch of half finished ideas. In the waning days of November I made one last collection. An entire body of work in just one week. It was about uncertainty, and anxiety, and the chaos of being a parent, and worrying about the future, and interruptions, and changing plans, and all the noise and static and frustrations, and in all that mess finding something beautiful. Something beautiful not despite all the chaos around it, but because of it. I think it's the best work I've ever made.
In December I broke records. I brought my work out into the world for people to pick up and see in person. They all picked up the bowls. No one asked what they were for. They took them home. The weird funky trays went too. The cyanotypes went faster than anything else. I tried not to get tongue tied trying to explain that I had made them too. That both types of art were mine. That I was allowed to make them. That I was sorry they couldn't eat them, or seek shelter under them, or anything practical.
I just smiled. They made me feel something when I made them.
On my table there was quite literally no room for all the work I'd made in the past ten years. I didn't bring any bags to show people. I didn't have my standard brown line up of practical goods. Yet still. I broke records.
Now it is January again. It is still grey. The wind is picking up. I'm still looking out the window. But I am not the same person. Armed with uncertainty and the knowledge that what I'm doing is of value I'm heading out on a new path.
The driveway is a composite of crushed snow and rusty nails waiting for my tires.
It's been a long week. A week of grumpy roofers, who I did not ask to replace my roof in the snow in January, but who are replacing my roof, in the snow, in January.
She is an old house. She is loving and warm, though her joints ache more than they used to when the weather turns cold. I did not give her this old roof. For the decade I've lived under her she has kept me more dry than worried. But age finds cracks in time.
October's is-that-a-weird-shadow, turns into a that-definitely-wasn't-there-before spot, to hand wringing quick patches, to an cacophony of leaf blower wielding roofers hammering their lamentations into the downy fluff of January.
I did not ask my roof to leak. I did not ask the roofer's to come in the cold and the snow. Yet here we are.
But even in this there is magic. As I stand in the mocking snow my eyes fall on a new, dry roof. The labor for this roof paid for with labor of my own.
My job is a form of magic. I have dreams and ideas, electrons bouncing around in my head, which I take out and put form to. My half remembered childhood creek beds, transmute into the pungent ammonia/grass froth of a living indigo vat staining leather an inky blue. Which then gets molded into an object of art a weary traveler might rest their tired keys in, and for a moment think of the beach, or rain, or who they were when they bought it, filled with a little spark of half remembered childhoods of their own.
From one form to another, those electrons hop, passing from my mind, to the hands of another, to eventually the roof over my head, born from a dream I had once while I slept under it.
While I could stand here seeing the frustration, the cost, the worry of this roof, I instead make a choice. I choose to see magic. When I walk from the garage to the house I look up at my dreams made manifest, covered in a light dusting of snow.
In this too there is magic.
It starts out grey and wet. A fall morning in what should be winter. As the day sloughs off its hours the air becomes visible. It is forty five degrees out, but it's that wet cold that gets into your bones which is somehow colder than the dry air of winter.
The day is a Wednesday, but it doesn't really matter. We are in that border time between Christmas and New Year's when the kids are home, the morning is slept past, and things get done in their own time.
The fog has become a presence outside the window. The kind that makes you want to go outside and stand in it just to feel what it's like when it touches your skin. I decide it's time for a walk so we bundle into several layers of not too warm clothes. Enough to keep the wet out but let the air in.
The woods we walk in are old but manmade. A nod to the nature that stood here once. Yet the trees are tall and wet, making their own rain in big fat drops that plunk down on duff below.
The three of us together are all in our own worlds. I'm ambling along listening to the air, the closeness of a train going by, my eyes scanning the tree branches for a hawk or an eagle to impress the kids with. Drinking in the empty space that is so often occupied by the motion and noise of parenting. My daughter, the youngest, is running ahead. Loud and animated, she wants to show us all the spots she explored during her summer camp here. For once to be the one with experience and secret knowledge. My son walks between the two of us. Shifting back and forth between the child he still is and the adult he will become. Sometimes he runs ahead with his sister, joining in the commotion. Sometimes he lags behind, thoughtful and observing. Serious for someone just days past his ninth birthday. As I look at him I can see hints of the man he will become. Fascinated by the world around him. I hope he remembers days like this. To buoy him when the world gets heavy. If I can give him anything it is these moments.
It's hard to keep them in this world. My daughter's legs begin to tire with her emotions. Soon we aren't going fast enough, or too slow, or not looking at the right things, or her brother is too far ahead and not waiting for her. I stop and ask her what she can smell right now. Then what she can feel touching her skin. With that I've brought her back in among the trees.
As we walk my attention is split. I'm watching for wet rocks and issuing warnings about leaning too far over to look at the running water. I'm also thinking about this border time between holidays when not much gets done. I'm well acquainted with the space between times. The expanse of responsibilities required in parenting is populated by long stretches of time where you can't do whatever you want but you have to do something. Time spent between being who you want to be and who you need to be.
Like the undefining fog we walk in, this place in time is unfocused. We walk until we feel done. When our hands become wet and cold we head back into the dry warmth of home.
In its lack of definition the fog has given rise to a quiet magic. A place where the trees foreboding loom, headlights glow in fuzzy yellow orbs, and the calls of excited children get mixed in with the cries of birds. In this undefined time we get a chance to shed our outlines and be just a little bit of nothing at all. It is here in this place that I leave memories for my children to find when they are lost on their way to defining who they will become. A quiet magic, made on an indistinct Wednesday that could have not mattered that much at all.
It snowed last night. I woke up to a wet pack of snow two inches deep. When it came down it brought most of the fall leaves with it.
It was a little sad. Bittersweet. I sat there looking out the window thinking about how soon I won't be able to hear the wind in the leaves anymore. Just the dry whistle of winter wind in the bare branches.
With the leaves buried under snow and the grey skies of Cleveland winter it will be time soon to put away to cyanotype materials. Any ambitions will have to rest until spring brings reliable sunshine back.
This could be a source of frustration, but I enjoy it. The second half of fall is like watching a friend pack their moving boxes. Every moment is savored, recorded, stored away.
For an anxious person like myself it's a chance to enjoy what is around me. I spend so much time living in the future in my head getting to stop and take a moment to smell the wet leaves is a respite to my running thoughts.
I think this is part of the reason why I make the work that I do. Good art is about saying the things we don't have words for yet. My cyanotypes are recordings of that fleeting moment when chance, and weather, and time, and personality come together and make something beautiful that will soon pass. Quiet magic gleaned from the edges of suburban lawns.
The direction my cyanotype work has been going.
I started out doing very minimal and classic images. Leaves on blue backgrounds. As I’ve gotten my feet under me over the past couple of years I’ve started to feel the need to branch out.
I still love those simple leaf pictures, but I also feel like a lot of people are already doing that well. I wanted to say something a little different with my work.
It’s so hard to set out in a different direction and not end up making work that is different for the sake of being different.
I think I’ve found some fertile ground here. My new work is created using simple geometric shapes cut from paper of varying opacity. This causes the chemistry under them to expose to sunlight at different speeds, resulting in different shades of blue. When I take it a step further and bleach and tone the cyanotype I’m able to further separate those differences. Some levels of blue will turn brown while others are left blue.
For example in the above image those blue shadows that outline the shapes can’t be seen in the original before I toned it. I pulled the paper from the bleach before that part faded. So they stayed blue when I toned them.
I also like how I’m creating meaning and interest from some otherwise meaningless bits of paper. As I look more at the work I’m making I’m starting to see landscapes and smoke covered suns. There is something there considering I was making these under a haze of wildfire smoke.
