Look, it's been a TIME, ok? This is brief (or way too long), and I'm tired. I'm writing this blog post in part to remember that I actually did a lot of cool art stuff in 2024 besides tear my hair out. I'm also doing it to prove I have a consistent art practice (looking at you, MSAC).
January through March was pretty cool. I had a birthday in Iceland, visited family in Zurich, and went to see an incredibly cool community art space called Drukwerk Basel.
...Y'all, I COLD CALLED these folks. Basically called up and said, "Hi. I'm a printmaker visiting your country. May I please come see your studio?" And Margarit Lehmann very kindly said yes, helped me not get lost once I got there, showed me around, and then gave me some advice about other stuff to check out in Basel. LOOK AT THIS BEAUTIFUL SPACE!!
It was incredible.
April...had loss. That's a different blog, even though parsing it out is the most unnatural feeling in the world. Much like parsing art out of the whole of my life feels unnatural...
...Anyway, April also had me at the Southern Graphics Council International conference in Providence, RI, where I did a cool mokulito demo. @art.prof came and did a video about it.
I also kept deciding to make larger works. Check out this heretofore untitled in-progress giant honkin' woodcut proof with a mokulito layer! It's four feet long. It's also part of a triptych I'm working on. Why have I yeeted a figure across the sky in this image? Excellent question. When I figure that out, I'll let you know. When I proofed this and hung it up in my studio, I looked around and noticed that I seem to be yeeting a lot of figures across the sky lately. Maybe it's related to a feeling of un-groundedness.
Spring also saw Art-O-Matic, in which I did my first-ever installation piece with a digital component. That was fun. I also now have a porch desk. Here are some of the other drawers from said desk.
Spring also included a primary election in Maryland. Working it gave me hives.
Summer happened somehow.
Fall rolled around, and I was a Visiting Artist at the University of Missouri, St. Louis! Staying on theme with larger work and yeeting people across the picture plane, here are pics of the stone I used and the print that came off of it, The Siren and the Sea Lion.
Oh hey, I was also in some shows this year!
As of this writing, you can still view my piece, The Proof Is In the Pudding - Hold Up Now in Conversations in Yellow at Virginia Beach Art Center.
Other shows include Monstrous and Miniscule at Riverviews Art Center in Lynchburg, VA; The annual Member Mashup show at Pyramid Atlantic, where this mokulito and woodcut was shown:
...And a solo show at the Ottobar in November that I did not document well! Between the Election and Thanksgiving, things were a little stupid. BUT THE WAY THIS SHOW WAS CREATED WAS RAD! I've been taking some new approaches to my work, which is inherently somewhat narrative. I've always loved sequential pictorial narratives (I.e., comics). So after a visit to the Small Press Expo in September, I started a ruthless and methodical practice of translating ideas into six panel comics that I learned from Dan Nott and Sophie Yanow. It involves timed free-writes, timed doodles, strict edits, and placing the words on the page before the pictures. So I did this on a large scale based on my experiences in St. Louis. Before I knew it I had a bunch of large narrative drawings that looked a heck of a lot like a show. (...Boy, do I need to carve time to document my work better...). And I crammed them in frames before taking any proper photos and hung those suckers on the wall!
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