Needle In The Hay

Our long dry spell at the thrift store was happily ended by a sweet find last week. While looking for frames we spotted a cute little woodcut of a girl with some birds in a nice frame. It was not priced so when we went to inquire the lady said “Um, I don’t know, $1.50!”.  Around here when things are not priced they usually won’t sell it to you but Focus Flea is especially nice! She was not counting the art (which she obviously thought was junk) and just the frame. (plus I think she was just being nice because we were the only ones in there) So we bought it.  The back of the frame had a little piece of paper from the 60’s that told a bit about the artist and the print. Turns out our little print was by Kaoru Kawano, a very famous modern Japanese woodblock artist, and the print should have cost around a $250 (it is unsigned, but an actual impression from his block) The  monetary worth doesn’t really matter, since we love it, but it was exciting to find out about this really great Japanese artist  via a thrifting trip.  I also got a nice dress and a skirt. All of the profits from this thrift store benefit our local Focus women’s resource center. Score!

Kaoru Kawano was born in Otaru, Hokkaido in 1916, and studied at Kawabata art school in 1934. Because his earlier works showed such great promise, they were displayed at the Nihon Hanga Kyokai Exhibition (Japan Print Society) in 1944. He interrupted his print-making activities to join the army, but later was unfortunate to become a prisoner of war in Siberia. In 1949 he resumed exhibiting with Nihon Hanga Kyokai, and subsequently with Kokugakai in 1952. He moved to Tokyo in 1958, and participated in international competitions and solo exhibitions in New York, Seattle, Chicago, and elsewhere. His works are characterised by highly textured abstract representations of children.

biographical information taken from this collector's great website on Kawano: http://www.ohmigallery.com/Gallery/Kawano/Kawano.html

cabin fever!!!

As I write this more snow is falling in Virginia. It's the mean spirited kind, icy and prone to starting and stopping but never quite going away. Supposedly we will have this until late tonight and then more fluffy snow. I am ready for sun and spring gardening! We made our garden plan these last few days and we are excited to start planting. Jeremy made a beautiful map of what the spring and summer plantings will look like. I will look forward to posting pics of that in the coming months. We are going to try to grow some new tomatoes this year, ones that are still organic/heirloom but also disease resistant. (aka we learned our lesson last year with rare heirlooms & hours of disease management!) Over the weekend our next door neighbor's 60 year old willow tree came down... it was sad but also amazing, the thing had no roots and must have been dormant for a long time, its underside looked like the roots of a large houseplant. Pretty crazy. Jeremy took this picture with me in it for scale.

Last night, after a rather unexpected snow day, I embarked on making a 'scannermation' I am posting the first and last drawings and will hopefully post the whole thing once I figure out a bunch of computer technicalities! I was feeling a tinge of artist block and I figured doing something that I don't normally do (animation) and just generally messing around would be good... I think it helped. I have also been procrastination baking and cleaning... chocolate walnut banana bread and newly washed wood floors anyone?!!! I also did ALL of the laundry.

Lastly, I was super happy and honored to be asked to do a process/inspiration post at My Love For You Is A Stampede Of Horses blog. I showed some of the new stuff I am working on for Cinders in the fall, some in-progress stuff, and inspirational things like... Fricky! and the ocean!  I really admire Meighan and her blog and highly recommend checking it out on a daily basis if you don't already! Its awesome! Here's the link to my little bit: http://myloveforyou.typepad.com/my_love_for_you/2010/02/processinspiration-allyson-mellbrrgtaylor.html


wherever you are, I hope you are warm and safe!

xo,
Allyson

As soon as the ground is workable...

Hi all! Happy New Year! We have been really horrible about posting on our blog! For some reason the middle of winter always puts both of us in a weird way. I guess its just cabin fever, but with the recent bouts of snow in Virginia it feels like winter will never end! This is good for indoor projects like recording music, sewing, drawing (of course), alphabetizing the sock drawer... etc! But we Taylor's like to be outside and running around unhindered by winter apparel. 20 more inches of snow are predicted for VA this weekend, so I guess we had better brace ourselves! On the upside it is really pretty and winter-wonderland-y here and I have been able to show off my fancy WI native snow driving skills.
In the meantime, here are some highlights from the first month of 2010. Jeremy and I got snowed in right before Christmas by 24 inches of snow! we were stuck for 3 days. We ate every bit of food in our house! Then in January, J did some ghost writing/recording with our friend Thomas's band (very awesome!), we managed to get some good writing time in on our book (hopefully more of that soon) and I started work on a new sketchbook (made by Jeremy - best sketchbook ever!) and some new large drawings as I prepare for my next show at Cinders in the fall. This time of the year one thing that really keeps me optimistic about the weather is garden planning... phrases from the seed catalog like, "as soon as the ground is workable", and "will thrive after over-wintering" remind me how early gardening can start and its that wonderful, defiant, growing stuff in cold weather that really makes me feel happy amongst all of this grayness! After the 24 inches in December we thought our garden was toast. When it finally melted like a week ago we went to look under the garden cloth and cold-frames and were met with very happy spinach and lettuce! What a treat! Here are some pics from the winter...

Blue Blue Everywhere.

Oh it was so nice to have a week off for Thanksgiving! Jeremy and I stayed home and were able to make an entire suite of screenprints for the craft fair we are doing this weekend in Charlottesville, the one next weekend in Chapel Hill, and our Etsy store! We also picked up an old thread from Jeremy's research and combined it with some of our new discoveries.

Back in 2001 when J first started experimenting with natural, and non-toxic pigments he did a lot of tests with things like tea, onion skin, purple cabbage, beets,  turmeric, and walnut (which we both still use extensively). These experiments filled sketchbooks and were tested out on large drawings, prints, and paintings (and some love notes!) but some of them were fugitive and faded a bit. Recently, Jeremy found some Katagame (traditional kimono stencil printing process) information from a master printer in Hawaii and we had become interested in pursuing a rice base to replace the acrylic polymer typically used in silkscreen ink. In Katagame the rice base that is used is fairly labor intensive to make and involves a real steamer, which we don't currently have.  I did some research on other ways to make a rice base and found a nori paste recipe that seemed viable. This weekend we mixed the base with some pigment concentrations that Jeremy made,  one was pokeberry, paprika, and beets (red!) and the other was purple cabbage and japanese seaweed (blue!). We also mixed in an alum to help fix the color. The cabbage still looked purple when it was wet and we were worried that it was not going to come out blue but after sticking some paper testers in the mix and letting them sit we realized that they dry blue! Its a beautiful rich blue and the alum should help it to last a little bit longer.

Jeremy made these beautiful 2-color process prints with those inks. I am so proud of him because for years he has been trying to figure out a way to make completely biodegradable, natural silkscreen ink AND use it to make process prints. As we get this figured out a little better we are hoping to get all the plastic out of our art. Pretty cool J.

In other blue news... On my way to work today 4 hours from the ocean, in the mountains, I saw a big great blue heron. My first though was "oh shit I am totally asleep and dreaming at the wheel" followed by the following revelation... Me and that bird were both far away from where we belong at the ocean and should try our best to get back. We have barely been to the beach this fall because of being extra busy and the weather being colder than normal. I hope to remedy this over the holiday break!

Last but not least, Jeremy and I are VERY stoked because we are looking at studios tomorrow! A studio outside of our house has been a dream of ours since we got out of graduate school, but has been hard to find in Charlottesville because there aren't a lot of industrial spaces here that might be used for that kind of stuff. Wish us luck... we are super stoked to have a cat hair free art making space. More on that soon. Oh my goodness!

Circle of Plenty (a little later!)

Jeremy and I were in this great show at Cinders last month and have been so busy with our other shows and work that we haven't had time to share any work on our blog. Here are a few images : we got the chance to  make some collaborative images which is always fun. Midterms are over here now and I can feel my brain settling down. Jeremy has some workshops he is giving this week but AFTER that we should really have some quality studio time! And I just bought the vegan yum yum cookbook after wanting it and reading her blog all the time! Renaissance lecture tomorrow... always fun. Lastly, I just ate a vegan chicken sandwich for lunch, I am going to go reclaim some silkscreens, and I am ready to party!

TESTERS

While Allyson and I were at the beach I gave those homemade alaia surfboards/bodyboards a test drive. The one that seemed to work the best is the beloved "Whale" that Allyson helped me design. You could only ride it prone like a bodyboard, but it hauls ass. (see pics) The "Ironing Board" had trouble floating and was an overall doozy. "Mutsy" is good for riding prone and was the best for surfing. Although surfing "Mutsy" is a very difficult task due to its lack of buoyancy, but my friend Brian was better at it than I... and caught a couple of rides. I think that I will make one more alaia board before the end of summer...this time it will be made out of paulownia instead of pine so that the board has more buoyancy. I also think making the board thicker and slightly longer (like 6"2) will give it the length for better east coast surfing. During our visit at the beach Allyson did a drawing of a bearded lady on my fishboard. It is beautiful. I now call it my "Bearded Lady". I think it rides better with the drawing on it...for real!
xo
j

Oh Garden Woe...

Oh my! Well Jeremy and I returned from the beach we found our garden ravaged by thunderstorms and rain once again! Ahhhhh! This is the third or fourth time this summer. Our weather here in Charlottesville has been unusually cool and wet for a Virginia summer and the garden has paid for it. The first time this happened we got 5 inches of rain in a little under one week. This caused early tomato blight which we had to treat with a natural fungicide and pruning. Its conservative to say that we freaked out... we were both pretty bummed. If you don't have a garden, tomatoes like sun and heat and watering in moderation. Then it happened again!!! Four more inches of rain in a short period of time!!! We were equally bummed, on both instances we spent two full days in the garden working really hard to re-stake the toppled plants, prune the affected leaves, and clean up the situation. All of this was advanced by the fact that we had put down straw earlier in the summer (thinking it would not rain or be so cool) and that held in the moisture and encouraged the moldy blight. Geez! So we finally had a spell of hot weather, things started to dry up and ripen, and look better. We went to the beach last week... and guess what happened!!! You got it. (we had an awesome time at the beach!) Our plants were toppled, black and blighted, things were straight up rotting on the ground. (insert cuss words here) But there was one difference this morning as we surveyed the damage...We sort of gave up resistance. This is part of being a gardener... the unpredictable, rewarding, frustrating, amazing process of trying to grow food. We have been so lucky in the past years with our gardens here and in Virgina Beach that we sort of forgot that sometimes stuff gets messed up and theres nothing you can do about it but pick up the things that DID ripen and eat them with a grain of salt... literally! So this morning while checking things out we did harvest some amazing things, including: two dead sunflower heads which we are drying for seeds, a bunch of green beans (also reserving some for seeds for next year), some chioggia beets, green peppers, jalepeno peppers, and a variety of heirloom tomatoes (green zebra, mr. stripey, cherokee purple, garden peach, yellow pear, etc.) We also discovered amongst the wreckage that our cantaloupe and newer young tomato plants were doing very well. And our cover crop, german millet, was doing great and is nearly a foot tall now. This whole experience, our summer garden, has been hard and at times really stressful but we have learned a lot about gardening and our particular plot of soil. Our garden soil is very heavy clay - its bright orange! It can get super hard, to the point that when we grow things like radishes and onions they push so hard against the soil that when they get bigger they literally pick themselves! Also, the drainage in certain areas of the plot is not so good. For our fall garden plan we have decided to experiment with some raised beds on top of our garden plot so that we can do things our garden soil would not accomodate, like growing leeks! Our garden at Jeremy's Mom's house is a raised bed and it is doing much better this wet weird summer, mostly because the drainage is good and we worked really hard to make the soil rich. Hopefully this means that we will have a little more control over the fall garden... not accounting for the weather! (nervous laugh here)
Shortly after the second blight episode, we read the news headline about blight messing up farms and gardens all over our country (we posted this link a couple posts back if you want to read it) and felt a sense of solidarity with other east coast gardeners... At least we are lucky enough to live in a temperate area where there is more than one gardening season. So if you have a garden this summer and have had some of the same troubles... keep your heads up!