1-800-Squirrel-Away!

The latest in my series of conjuring Good Squirrel
Garden Karma...
inspired by a friend's Ebay handle, this is my first foray into
combining woodcuts with screenprinting on a T-shirt.
The name sounds like it could be for an exterminator, so if you have a love-hate relationship with squirrels, this is the shirt for you! However, it is really more of an homage to my friend and
also alludes to the packrat nature of many artists and others,
myself included.
The saw-blade-like element has become a critical personal energy symbol for me, but without getting too metaphysical about it, this part of the image was also directly inspired by the Philadelphia Hidden Cities project at the Disston Saw Works, kicking off a recent re-kindling of my fascination with old factories.
I hope to further examine this interest through making and printing more woodcuts.

New Press, Fresh Ink!

The Summer Solstice of 2009 is being celebrated by the maiden voyage of
my “new” old Charles Brand etching press, ‘Magda Perylene Blue’ [a.k.a. “The
Big-Girl Press”], vintage 1971!
(Yes, for those of you who are curious, I gave my press a name, as all my really important mechanical items have names, and not “You @#$%!!”---Magda is kind of an all-purpose name inspired by many of my female ancestors and relatives, but sort of based on my Hungarian great-grandmother---plus, I once rode a beautiful horse named Magda {I was big into the horse-riding thing in my youth--apparently printing presses supplanted that interest!}; and, in the family of perylene pigments, there are many colors but I have not yet seen a “Perylene Blue,” and blue is my favorite color...
the “Big Girl” part came from the expression, “Put on your Big-Girl pants, and deal with it”...
So now I finally have the real Big Girl press to help me deal with it!)
These are the first prints of elements with woodcuts, to augment my screenprinted
images on my T-shirts.

The Hybrid Book Conference at the University of the Arts

Thanks to all my customers, new ones and old ones, for helping to make my
Hybrid Book Fair a success! (even though I stopped being a “book artist”
a long time ago...)
Now I am going back to the studio to work on some new
ideas--watch for more here!