Woman – 4 August 2009

Woman 4 August 2009, about 6"x10", watercolor on paper

One of my urban scenes. I’ve been thinking about multiplicity – how there are multiple points of view, multiple perceptions, multiple voices, etc. – and tried to depict it a little here – with the double face and the three arms.

Not sure it’s all that successful. Her overall posture is a bit staid. Her own verticals echoed a bit too much in the lines of the frame and the building behind her. Her outstretched (waving?) arm has some energy, though, and seems to be powerful – breaking the frame, the brick wall, the surroundings.

Man with Coin – 12 August 2009

Man with Coin, watercolor and India Ink on paper, approx 7"x10"

I don’t think that this piece is especially remarkable or meaningful… but it is something I picked up and finished after not working so much on my art (as evidenced by very few postings here recently.) I’ve been doing some work in my sketchbook, but haven’t made enough time on my other artwork lately.

Though it works ok overall, the image has some flaws that jump out for me – the upper lip is too fat, the top of the head too flat, some of the lines too straight to be organic human contours… Perhaps those straight lines form nice diagonals that make for a somewhat interesting composition… ay… better that I write less about my art and let you all decide for yourselves.

The subject of the piece might have something to do with my relationship with money… which isn’t all that great. I do ok… but I am not all that good at keeping up with my meager finances. I find myself much more motivated by things I feel passionately about than I do by money. I recently saw a talk on ted.com that made some sense to me regarding money as a motivator. There are studies that when money is the motivator, we perform worse some out-of-the-box creative-thinking tasks.

4th Street Bicycle Boulevard Drawings – August 2009

I did this series of drawings to help with the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition’s campaign for creating a bicycle boulevard on 4th Street in Los Angeles. The LACBC campaign builds on earlier efforts for “4SBB.”

These images are definitely more illustration than fine art. The photos below are by Will Campbell. I did the drawings on tracing paper placed over printouts of the photos. These appeared at the Bicycle Coalition’s blog, but I figured that I’d post them here at my art blog, too. One of the tricks with drawings like these is to be specific enough to give people a sense for what is being proposed, but not so specific that they think they don’t have any input on the proposal… so they’re deliberately a little rough and drafty.

4th Street is already a bicycle route… which means relatively little – just some signs are posted. In the city’s current less-than-stellar proposed bike plan, it’s designated as a planned “Bike Friendly Street” which means it would be eligible for various treatments including traffic calming, bicycle boulevard, sharrows, etc. It is in the city’s planned pilot program to receive painted sharrows – or “shared lane markings.” I see sharrows as an inital step toward a future bicycle boulevard.

So… what’s a bicycle boulevard? If you’ve never heard of them, then I recommend watching this video to give you a feel for what bike boulevards are. Bike boulevards are relatively quiet streets that are shared by bicycles and bicycles (and, of course, pedestrians, too.) They often have some street treatments like traffic circles and/or traffic chokers/diverters that slow car traffic a bit, making it easier for cars and bikes to share the space. Sometimes bikes are allowed to continue straight through, while cars are forced to turn – that way cut-through traffic is reduced. They’re common in various places, including Palo Alto, Portland, and Berkeley. Today, there aren’t any examples that I am aware of in Southern California, but there are plans for one to implemented in early 2009 on Vista Street in Long Beach.

The overall 4th Street Bicycle Boulevard project would extend from Hoover Street (in the Lafayette Park neighborhood) to the end of 4th Street at Cochran Avenue (at Park La Brea.)

Here are the photos and drawings – it’s all a draft – for discussion – not any kind of final designs.

1) T-intersection at 4th and Westmoreland

EXISTING: 4th Street at Westmoreland Avenue, looking east

PROPOSED 1 of 2: triangular mini-park diverting eastbound car traffic south onto Westmoreland

PROPOSED 2 of 2: traffic circle

2) 4-way intersection at 4th Street and New Hampshire Avenue. (Note: New Hampshire is also a potential bike boulevard, per the draft bike plan.)

EXISTING: 4th at New Hampshire, looking west

PROPOSED: small roundabout

3) Jogging 4-way intersection at 4th Street and Catalina Street.

EXISTING: 4th Street at Catalina, looking east

PROPOSED: Close streets to through car traffic, create mini-park. Peds and bike could continue straight. Eastbound car traffic on 4th would turn right (south) onto Catalina. Westbound car traffic would turn right (north) onto Catalina. Similarly car traffic on Catalina would be diverted onto 4th.

4) 4-way intersection at 4th Street and Normandie Avenue. Note one of the more common and effective tactics for an effective bicycle boulevard is to prevent traffic from entering the smaller street from major streets – such as is shown here.

EXISTING: 4th at Normandie, looking east

PROPOSED: extend sidewalks to create diverter mini-parks. Car traffic could turn right onto Normandie, but no cars could turn from Normandie onto 4th. Bicycles and pedestrians could continue straight through.

5) 4-way intersection at 4th Street and Highland Avenue.

EXISTING: 4th at Highland, looking east

PROPOSED: Extend center median to prevent through car traffic, but allow bikes to pass through. Enhance bike and pedestrian crossings with a bike/ped signal.

If you’re interested in getting involved in the campaign, leave a comment below, and/or contact the LACBC.

Intersection Repair Painting – 12 September 2009

That's me, feathering the edge between the lighter green and darker green on the salamander's belly! - Photo by Kathy Hill

This one was highly collaborative, so I can’t claim it as my artwork… but I had a big hand in it. The piece is located in my neighborhood at the intersection of Bimini Place and White House Place in Los Angeles, 90004 – it’s a place called Los Angeles Eco-Village. The idea of “intersection repair” paintings is from a Portland Oregon group called City Repair. Many eco-villagers including Jimmy Lizama, Lara Morrison, Melba Thorne, Doran McGee, Michelle Wong, Bobby Gadda, Kwanwoo Yu and others – had input on the overall design (which was somewhat based on an earlier collaborative design that Andrea Solk, Mark Lakeman, I, and many others came up with.)   The activity of painting was done by many many hands!

A photo showing much of the mural - including a salamader circling around a bicycle wheel (photo by Yuki Kidokoro)

See blog entries at Los Angeles Eco-Village and at Homegrown Evolution for more information and more photos. Some of the design sketches are here.

my early salamander sketch (based on an idea by Jimmy Lizama)

 At the end of the day, painters big and small put our hand and foot prints in the crosswalks:

many painters' hands and feet - we made a big impression that day!

Here’s mine, in great company between Doran McGee and Mark Lakeman!

my footprint among many

 

Bicycling Stork Baby Shower Invitation – August 2009

Baby Shower Invitation

This blog entry contains way more detail than you ever really wanted to know about my work on the above design. It’s for a wedding shower that my friend Jessica is hosting for another friend of ours Damien and his wife Marybeth. Damien writes the excellent local alternative transportation resource L.A. StreetsBlog. I contribute articles there now and then, too.

The  version above really just exists on the internet… something I guess I should get used to, but it is still pretty new to me. I am used to actually holding a final printed copy of things… I usually keep 5-10 copies for my piles portfolios.

The wonderful background and border were designed by Colleen Corcoran, a skilled graphic designer I met through the L.A. County Bicycle Coalition’s committee working to bring a ciclovia to Los Angeles. A ciclovia is a kind of recurring street festival where we set aside streets for bicycles and pedestrians - if you’re not familiar with it, I recommend this short film. I think Colleen’s design does a nice job of feeling both old fashioned and contemporary.

I am still very 20th century with my art and design work. I do everything by hand on paper… I don’t even really like to scan it… because sometimes the scan will pick up artifacts or will appear to alter the color or contrast slightly. Below is what the scan of my drawing looked like. It would have been possible to circulate this… but I felt that, as a black and white image it might not really pop out of a black and white email. So I asked Colleen to help me out. I honestly don’t even know a straightforward way to manipulate the background color. (I guess I could xerox it onto color paper, then scan it… but that seems like a lot of work for something that should take a few seconds for someone who knows what they’re doing.)

Baby Shower for Marybeth and Damien, ink on paper, about 7"x7"

And here are a few blurry cell phone photos to show you some of my process. Pay close attention so that you, too, can spend inordinate amounts of time filling in crooked hand lettering The Linton Way.

It all started with a quick sketch in my sketchbook:

Step 1 - Sketchbook

In this case I just did one sketch and decided that it was a promising enough composition (though I ended up leaving off the messenger bag that the stork wears in the sketch.) Often I will do a dozen or more sketch ideas, then sometimes end up drawing something completely different for the final design.

From there, I roughed the design in in pencil. For this one I actually didn’t use any guides – no ruler and no compass. I just roughly put in lines that appeared to be more or less parallel to the edge of the paper. I did a rough measurement making a mark on a piece of paper to get a rough square. I penciled in lettering and rough guidelines, then I inked in the outlines of the lettering. I used an Itoya finepoint system .2 pen – which had been on sale the last time I went to the art store, which was out of the gray rapidograph pens that I like best for this sort of design work.

Here’s what it looked like after I had inked in the outlines of the lettering:

Step 2 - Outlined Lettering

I then erase the pencil guidelines, and I begin the painstaking process of filling in the blacks of the lettering. For this I use the same pen as I used for the outline… which means it takes a while… but it’s a kind of meditative thing. Also, it’s a chance for me to refine and rework the lettering (which I can only do if I am using the same pen – otherwise the contour wouldn’t be consistent.) Often I will bulk letters up a bit a this step, and close excess s p a c e between them.

Step 3 - Filling in the Blacks

In the image above, you can see that I’ve filled in the outer parts of the lettering, and left some white in the middle. I sometimes do this and come back in with a thicker pen or a brush… but often I just use that same pen to keep filling in.

Step 4 - Inking In the Drawing

After penciling in the image of the bicycling stork, I begin inking it in. I usually put down a single line, then go over it to make it thicker.  On the above image you can see the difference between the thicker finished line on the top of the baby’s head, compared to the initial line on the bottom of the stork’s neck.

Step 5 - Still Inking the Drawing

I keep inking the lines thicker and thicker until they get interesting (unlike this excessively long blog entry)

Step 6 - Inking in More Lettering

Then I inked in more of the lettering on the bottom of the flier. Note that I keep a piece of scrap paper under my hand to prevent me from rubbing, sweating on or smearing the image. It functions similar to a mahl stick.

Then I drew the border square.

Step 7 - Drawing the Border

At that point, the drawing work… and I handed it off to be scanned and manipulated electronically… which is something I hope to learn how to do someday… so I can make different kinds of mistakes! One day perhaps I can document my process in a more interesting way… perhaps more like this cool stop-animation video that my friend Federico did.

Man – 11 May 2009

Man, 11 May 2009, India ink and watercolor on paper, 9"x12"

This one was pretty labored. There are quite a few layers of paint that ended up on the page. I started with a wash that was mostly Payne’s gray – which you can just barely still see (as a dark blue) outside the black frame in the upper left corner and the lower right side. From there I used opaque watercolor to build up lighter skin colors, and I whited out the background. At one point I gave him an orange shirt, but it had some yellowish highlights, and that yellow started to take over, so I just made the shirt yellow (with some orange showing in the darker spots.) Then once I had lightened the shirt, there wasn’t enough contrast between the shirt and the background… so I thought that I’d cool the background by adding some blue. I ended up adding a lot of blue to all the background then actually lightening it by adding lighter blues (with more titanium white added.) It ended up looking somewhat like Van Gogh’s The Starry Night. Once I got yellow and blue in the picture, I decided to add some red, as I like to balance the primary colors with eachother, so I added some more warmer redder colors to the table.

(That one orange spot in the background is a mistake… from putting the piece in a folder with another piece which I didn’t realize had some orange paint on its back. I plan to touch it up.)

Man – 4 August 2009

 

Man, 4 August 2009, India ink and watercolor on paper, about 6"x9"

Here’s a piece I did fairly quickly. I liked the energy in the lines of the drawing and the initial washes (with some nice strong oranges in the left side,) so I didn’t do so much watercolor that it became opaque. I dropped in a very dark deep blue background, and the outline of the head disappeared (because there was no value contrast between the dark brown hair and the dark blue background.) So, I used water and a napkin to soak up some of the background blue, lightening it. Though I liked that effect (it gives a sort of mottled texture which you can see still in the blue background,) there still wasn’t enough contrast, so I added the halo.

Woman – 21 March 2009

 

Woman, 21 March 2009, ink and watercolor on paper, 9"x12"

I think that this one turned out pretty well. It’s along the lines of my urban scenes – like this piece and this piece - though I didn’t give it a street scene background like I usually do.  Similar to this woman with the brick wall behind her, I did the drawing of the woman by herself initially (in May) and that hung on my wall for a while, then later (this week), I added background, in this case the two men. After that more-or-less finished the drawing, I dropped in the watercolor.

The picture plays with symmetry, of course.

Some folks have mentioned that my hands look like a specific sort of hand gestures from Indian art. The hands in this image don’t correspond to any specific gesture that I am trying to convey… they’re just more interesting compositionally… and they do convey something. The two background men have gestures which have their hands and arms (and even legs) parallel with lines of the central woman.

Charlie's Angels Icon

The often-imitated "Charlie's Angels Pose"

One thing that I noticed about this piece is that it does bear a bit of  resemblance to the rather cheesy poses struck in the logo for the 1980’s? television show Charlie’s Angels (which I remember watching during my halcyon youth.) I guess that that image does have iconic power - some of this comes from its use of symmetry. It is imitated very frequently by all kinds of amateur photographers – because it works! So I take my place in a long line of folks who’ve consciously or unconsiously played with this iconic symmetry.

Carolina Caycedo’s Daytoday at g727

Daytoday installation view of the south wall

Here’s a view of an art show at g727 that featured a few pieces of mine. The view is a portion of a gallery installation by Carolina Caycedo. Caycedo is an artist whose medium is barter. I met her when she dropped by a sunday night potluck dinner at L.A. Eco-Village. We talked about alternative ways of living, about non-object art and object art. She gave me her list of items that she trades for and items that she’s interested in receiving.  I noticed scanning on her list, so I gave her a pile of my older work, which she subsequently scanned and which I’ve subsequently posted here. (If there are other folks out there who would be interested in trading scanning for art, please contact me! Email me at “linton.joe[at]gmail.com” - I have a huge backlog of stuff that I’d like to get scanned and posted someday.)

We also traded books. I gave her a copy of the book I wrote and illustrated: Down by the Los Angeles River in exchange for Almanaque Marc Emery, which she edited. I also exchanged a copy of my Drawings Old and New (xeroxed zine from 2004) for what turned out to be Creative Art Crafts: Pottery Textiles Masks Jewelry (Book 3) by Pedro deLemos – a cool illustrated book from 1948.

I only photographed one wall of three. There was an excellent map of her travels in Los Angeles on  the wall across from the one pictured. The third wall had more bartered objects, and behind that wall was a trading area where folks dropped off various things to exchange – from books, to clothing, to artwork, to knicknacks. It looked a little like a garage sale, and there were definitely folks there looking over the objects and finding things to trade for what they’d contributed.

In the above image, you can see (second from the left) the still life I drew/painted with Chayote and Feijoas (looking good framed!), and (third from the left) my zine and my book.

Still life: Chayote and Feijoas, 16 September 2004 (click for larger image)

The Temple of the Hand featuring the Museum of the Opposable Thumb – 27 June 2009

The Temple of the Hand featuring the Museum of the Opposable Thumb - ink on paper, about 8 1/2" by 11"

Here’s some lettering I did for my friend Federico and some other friends of ours.  It’s for an installation (?) that they’re doing at Burning Man later this summer.

The hand lettering was based on some other sketchbook lettering I had done – posted here (scroll down to the bottom.)  I think that the sketchbook letter is slightly better… perhaps just a little freer.  The capital T and H aren’t as strong as the lower case lettering, either. (Federico was able to quickly fix a small error of mine – he closed up excess space between the ‘H’ and the ‘a’ in Hand.)

The hand-thumb image was, like a lot of my work, improvised.  Initially the parallel lines were suposed to look like the ridges of a fingerprint, but they ended up looking more line an old linoleum block print, I think. It’s a bit like the work of Jose Guadalupe Posada – an excellent and prolific Mexican graphic artist who is perhaps best known today for his calaveras – like this one:

Calavera by J G Posada - click to enlarge - from Wikipedia