Entry 20: In Defense of Urban Sketching

Or how to slow down and appreciate the world around you

Having just spent a month in France with my mom and sister after college, I was riding an artistic high with my new degree in design. We’d spent ample time in Paris and the countryside, and after my family had flown home, I was set loose upon Britain for another month without supervision. Not wanting to squander my time, I decided to hold myself to a new discipline to mark the days passing: urban sketching.

Having been involved with ARTspot for four years, I was at least vaguely aware of urban sketching but not so much that I felt boxed in by rules and expectations(1). This was years before Sketcherfest, PxP, or even the 365 Challenge at ARTspot, but I held myself(2) to try and do one drawing every day I was on my own. What happened next was one of the most informative creative periods of my life.

My reasoning was simple. My totally neurotypical brain(3) always had difficulties with photographs, and it only got worse with my phone involved. Like anyone else, I enjoy having good memories to remember, but once those memories are locked away in my phone or the cloud I generally forget to keep remembering them. The fact that it takes mere seconds to snap a photo does nothing to cement a memory. I needed a different strategy.

Sketching takes time(4), and that’s exactly what I had in ample supply while traveling at my own pace. I quickly learned that even a two-minute(5) sketch while waiting for coffee did a lot. Catch me sitting in Trafalgar Square for almost an hour(6), and I have one of my favorite drawings ever. When you don’t know exactly how much time you’ll have before you have to hop on a bus, get out of the rain, or any other unforeseen circumstances, there are two possible ways I approach a satisfying drawing.

One way to achieve this is to start loose and continue to noodle in detail the longer you’re inclined or are able to stay in the same spot. Big shapes, the rough lines of perspective, and contrast are all key. Getting these aspects on paper would at the very least allow me to revisit the drawing later if I wanted, and everything else beyond that was just frosting. Recording the details of architecture, the bustle of passerby, and foliage all add to the detail of the memory, but just sitting with a perspective for just a few minutes would do so much to cement the idea of that specific moment and place. This is also a great exercise in drawing what you see(7) coupled with prioritizing what’s going to be detailed out first.

Another way to approach this kind of time crunch is by focusing on a single object. A cup of coffee, someone’s shoes, or an interesting building are all great options I’ve explored among nearly infinite others. This is an exercise in elevating a potentially mundane item(8) as a solid anchor to an experience(9). With these drawings in particular, I like to make written notes to highlight what my other senses are picking up and what thoughts are going through my head as I sit in the moment(10). Highlighting many little details is how I recorded a sunburned hike up to Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, noting the rock sculptures I found(11), a kid playing Pokemon Go atop the eponymous seat itself, or the odd buildings of Calton Hill in the distance that I never managed to see up close. All these little details combined made for a very memorable day!

The real kick in the head for me with all this is that I no longer have the photos I did end up taking on my trip. A few exist here and there, but that phone ended up breaking just before I’d set up my google account. Those drawings I have are all I have from that trip. Though because I took the time to sit with those moments, I remember the heat of the open air markets, the flats shared with my new punk friends, the art I saw, and the paths I trod.

(1) No super good art is made by following rules and expectations. Ew, gross.

(2) And largely I stayed true to my goal

(3) It’s not. In case you couldn’t tell, don’t feel bad. I just spent the first 27 years of my life just thinking I was a little stupid, had a hard time focusing on things that didn’t hold my fascination, and pretty much every other sign of neurodivergence as it’s understood today. In practicing my sketches, I accidentally stumbled into a way of working with my neurology rather than keep trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

(4) Half the reason why people are intimidated from taking up the practice in my opinion. Like meditation, it’s hard to convince yourself to set aside 5-15 minutes a day to do something genuinely good for you because who has that kind of time in economy? You absolutely do, but somehow these things feel like huge endeavors as opposed to watching an hour of TV.

(5) Sometimes I would do a bit more work on these when I got back to where I was staying when the memories were fresh, but often I’d just let them be a record of a small moment.

(6) I didn’t know I was being stood up for a date, but I remember sunlight hitting the rows of buildings down Whitehall, the smell of August in Westminster, and how excited I was for a free museum date that I ended up having to take myself on.

(7) This was the first, hardest lesson I had to learn when I was starting to take my art more seriously. The sooner you learn not to filter what you’re seeing while making art, the sooner you can start to depart from realism with intention.

(8) One of my favorite series of sketches I’ve seen from a customer was a daily record of what the weather looked like outside the window of the space she was staying in. Given that the place was an island off the coast of Scotland, the weather was predictably bleak for the most part, but the really fascinating part of the series was the collection of objects on the windowsill that changed from day to day. Whether they had been staged on some days or not, this was a beautiful way to mark the passing of time during a trip worth remembering. 

(9) This also helps to prove that under the right circumstances, just about anything or any moment can be significant if you take a few minutes to let yourself see it.

(10) This aspect is transferable to the previous method as well, but I found it suits me better to fill in the gaps with this kind of drawing.

(11) And the ones I made along the way

Entry 19: Art in the Open Air

Where we choose to create says a lot about how we create

If I told you to picture in your mind’s eye a painter at work, I’m sure you creative readers could conjure a vast array of different concepts. Some may imagine a Pollock-type hard at work in the organized chaos of a studio. Others may even picture an elusive Banksy stealing glances over their shoulders for any Bristol police. Chances are, however, that a good number you pictured an artist set up with a folding easel, paint tubes, and weather-appropriate clothes painting outdoors. This archetypal image of the painter is a vision of painting En Plein Air.

In a short view of historical context, landscape painting has been around as long as anyone alive can remember. However, in the grand scheme of western art history it’s practically still a novelty to paint nature for nature’s sake. The rise of plein air painting and the happenstantial popularity of the impressionists was by its very nature an act of rebellion against a system that restricted what art was and what it most certainly was not.

Western painting had, for centuries, been contained to the studios and workshops of master painters. Instruction had more in common with the trades and subject matter was tightly controlled through the whims of patrons. The French Academy instructed students in the same neoclassical tenets that had guided visual artists since the renaissance. Compelling art was being made, but a cadre of creatives clearly couldn’t help but feel there was something left yet unexplored. 

Advancements in available materials finally made it possible for artists to create finished paintings outdoors. Field easels and especially tubed paints allowed artists to freely explore, interpret, and record the natural world. Treating the landscape as a subject worthy of the artist was a radically new concept that represented the shift away from the primacy of human accomplishment towards recognizing the elegance of nature. Despite the upset to traditional forms of art education, creation, and patronage it ended up transforming public perception of art and artists. No longer was the artist only a trademaster at work in a studio surrounded by apprentices. Now you also got to see them waving a brush around outside and trespassing on your farms and forests.

Painting en plein air is inseparable from the rise of impressionism, so it’s worth discussing here. One could say that all formal impressionism starts en plein air but not all plein air work is impressionistic. European outdoor painting was pioneered by the Barbizon School and I Macchiaioli, which directly influenced early impressionists. In North America, however, painting outdoors was born largely from the western expansion with the Hudson River School active as early as 1830. Impressionism on both sides of the ocean is most easily identifiable by its loose abstraction of broken color, which again further reflects the movement away from the rigid structures and barriers around the creation of art. In the west, the impressionists took some of the first steps away from stark realism as the mode and ironically went to paint the real natural world free from the “perfection” enforced on it by humankind to redefine ideal beauty.

Advances in art materials may have made it possible for artists to effectively work in the field, but it was a shifting mindset that made people want to work outdoors. It’s a common thread to ask what defines art and what drives humans to create. It’s maybe impossible to create a lasting characterization because people seem always to be driven to what’s new and changing, yet old and familiar. What, then, could meet those requirements better than the natural world around us?

(1) For much longer, you’d only see natural landscapes as a backdrop for a subject and rarely the subject itself. Even then, although sketches of local physical features may have been done as reference, finished works would rarely feature a true representation of actual landscapes

(2) This is a thing I regularly, and understandably, hear angst from especially in the community of actually-starving young artists: Rich people used to PAY artists a living stipend to make art. Unfortunately, this did come with a lot of strings attached in reality. Do we really want to paint another portrait of our Medici sugar-daddy in the exact same style as the last thirty? Do we really want to paint another depiction of the same religious scene for the pope that’s been done and done again for centuries? Idk. We take the good with the bad.

(3) A famously fun, groovy, and forward-thinking organization.

(4) And if there’s anything creative types hate, it’s being told what they can and cannot do.

(5) Because, again, my special interest at its heart is the art materials lol. Other people can definitely tell you more about the technique and even about the cultural ramifications of changes brought on by the introduction and adoption of plein air painting as a valuable technique. For me, the interesting thing is always going to be how a new artistic doodad facilitated those changes. In this case, the big player was paint tubes. They allowed for two very big changes in that artists no longer were exclusively responsible to mix their own paint from raw pigment and that they then had an easy way to transport and preserve that paint beyond their indoor workspace. This opened the door for art suppliers to operate and for artists to create with greater flexibility.

(6) This is something I’m realizing I have big thoughts and feelings about that I don’t want to sacrifice word count for in the main body of the post. A major aspect of the classical mindset that we see in everything from visual art to architecture and cultural beliefs is that nature is only good and beautiful if carefully tamed by humanity. Rigid, but compelling, proportions. Perfection. The elimination of mystery and fear and danger from the wild was a reflection of the very real dangers faced by Europeans in the late middle ages as well as those posed to early colonial efforts by organized heathen societies. The slow distancing of this mindset by the artistic community was mirrored by the rebellion of artists from the confines of traditional structures of how art should be taught, how it should be created, and what it should be about. This period of the latter 1800’s saw a rise in interest and appreciation for the natural beauty of the land as well as the normal people who lived there. This updated mindset regarding the inherent balance of raw nature was represented in everything from art and gardening practices to the Origin of Species.

(7) A very cool sounding term that effectively means that the colors are left unmixed on the canvas. Does this make comic books impressionist art? Discuss.

(8) Damn, I definitely said this was going to be focused on art materials but the word count completely got eaten up talking around the inherent beauty of change. Oh well, I reckon that might resonate with more people on a soul level than talking about how cool metal tubes of paint are if you really think about it.

(9) Check out my blog post on Tolkein and Bob Ross because I *really* like thinking about why on earth people feel compelled to create and so few other species seem to have any kind of similar drive to the degree we do. I’m not a big fan of the concept that creativity is some kind of divine gift, but it’s hard not to look at humans with some degree of exceptionalism and awe at the things we have created, are making now, and have yet to conceive.

(10) Probably something, it’s not a riddle with one specific answer, but that’s kinda the point isn’t it?

Entry 18: Art like Water and Oil

You’d think it wouldn’t work, but here we are

A phrase I don’t oftentime say in the art supply industry is “what will they think of next?” Change generally comes slowly to the world of art materials, and some things may hardly ever really change(1) at all. 

That said, some of the biggest changes came to the arts via the industrial revolution in the form of chemistry(2). Sometimes by accident, chemists were inventing new pigments and enhancing their refining processes. Newly opened markets(3) provided an economic incentive to try new things and invest in widespread distribution. Today, we get to enjoy the close marriage between chemistry and the arts in ways we rarely think of as anything but the status quo. 

Oil paints have long been the standard by which many artists have measured themselves. Acrylics hit the scene around the mid-century to shake things up with a water soluble medium that’s fast to work with and offers amazing dimensionality. Still though, I’ve found a lot of artists talk about oil paints as if they were a high school sweetheart you can’t ever quite forget. But similarly, oils do tend to come with their own issues to overcome.

Although painters didn’t always have access to solvents now commonplace in oil painting, these new staples have made the medium more accessible at the cost of potential long term health drawbacks. The offgassing of the solvents and the paints can be overwhelming in the short term as well. Then in the 1990’s(4), chemistry once again came to the rescue to further diversify the artist’s toolbox and invent the subject of this post(5): water-mixable oil paint.

It sounds like a complete contradiction; water doesn’t mix with oil. To spare y’all most of the science(6), several companies have developed methods of achieving the impossible. These paints are still oil paints with pigment bound together with a modified seed oil. They’ll perform like traditional oils with a similar drying time, and even blend(7) together with any traditional oils you already have. In short, they’re a great substitute for anyone looking to have the experience of working in oils without quite as much risk(8). 

We’ve carried water-mixable oils at ArtSpot since our beginning, furnishing students for everything from impressionist fingerpainting classes to oil experimentalists trying something different. For that whole while we’ve been providing Holbein paints from Japan, but I dropped some pretty big news last month at our fourth Saturday Deep Dive Demo. We’re getting a new line of paint!

If change comes slowly to the industry, changes come even slower here at ArtSpot. Bringing in a new product line, shifting displays, and setting the tone of the store in general tends to eat up a lot of time and resources. In short, we don’t really make changes unless we’re all on board thinking they’re the right changes to make in keeping with our philosophy(9). 

Shrewd buyers of art supplies may have realized Holbein products have gotten pretty expensive(10) in the past few years. There’s a number of reasons(11) for this, but it boils down to the paints becoming too expensive for us to want to sell at the price we’d need to make our money back. Despite them being great products, we started looking into acceptable alternatives.

Keep your eyes peeled for the arrival of our new rack of Cobra Water Mixable Oils in the next few weeks(12)! These artist grade paints offer a fantastic oil painting experience comparable to any other line of the same quality. The best news is that we’ll be able to offer them to you at 20-30% less than what you’re used to paying for Holbein Duo Aqua.

(1) Going back to look at the old cave paintings in Lascaux, France, the pigments used were things like ochre, bone black, and iron oxide. These are all pigments you’ll still see as widely available today.

(2) Like, obviously people have been practicing forms of chemistry for a long time whether it was called magic, alchemy, or making soup as a five year old from whatever was readily available in the kitchen (Sorry mom for wasting a whole bottle of almond extract that one time. Now that I have to buy my own, I completely understand your frustration.).

(3) Yikes, colonialism. It’s one of the big problems with some older paint companies directly benefiting from violent imperialism. On the one hand there's no ethical consumption under capitalism, and on the other hand there’s sending in the marines to secure a new mine in India to source pigment from. We all share a bit of that guilt, and it behooves us to study our history and learn ways we might do better and make art more ethically.

(4) When I said earlier how change comes slowly, it means the 90’s were effectively yesterday in the grand scheme of things. This is especially true considering that, as far as my research could turn up, this was when water-mixable oils first started hitting the market. Since then, different brands have introduced their own takes on the medium and improved their formulations to be better and better. Since we live in a world of copyrights, there’s a fair bit of variance on a chemical level to how they’ve figured out how to achieve water-solubility, but the outcome is generally the same. 

(5) It only took me about 300 words, so now we’re gonna have to really blast through some facts and figures about these new(ish) paints

(6) Partly because I don’t fully understand the chemistry myself and partly because companies keep this stuff very close to the chest. Paints like oils, watercolors, and tempera predate copyrights by a few centuries, but developments with this new medium are closely kept trade secrets. As such, the differences in composition from company to company seem to vary widely. There’s a reasonable amount of academic writing on the subject, mostly from university research because there’s not much real money in this very specific medium on fine art material, and the general consensus is that different companies achieve water solubility through a wide variety of means. This seems to be done either by modifying the hydrophobic fatty acid molecule in most drying oils, eliminating aspects of it altogether, or adding in an emulsifier.  

(7) They’ll blend, but the more traditional oils that end up in the mix the soluble they’ll be in water. In my experience, as long as about 75% of the blend is water soluble they’ll still clean pretty well. Anything beyond that and you’ll want to work with them as if they’re properly just traditional oils.

(8) Despite the lack of solvents and the associated offgassing, I always recommend people wear gloves while handling artist-grade paints. The things that make them so vibrant are also sometimes not great for us. Cadmium, Cobalt, Manganese, Chromium, and even Copper can be toxic, and our bodies have a hard time filtering them out. Let’s all be good to our livers!

(9) To quote the ArtSpot Philosophy page of our website: “At ARTspot, our goal is to provide access to quality materials, professional artist’s advice and support for those seeking the expression of their artistic voice.” and “We are proud to charge a fair price for our goods, as it allows us to exist to continue our mission. We do not participate in bait-and-switch advertising, misleading promotions or substandard products that can be sold super cheap.”

(10) At least 20% in the past four years, which is well-ahead of the curve that many of our other needed price increases have roughly followed. Some 40ml (1.35oz) tubes of paint have gotten as expensive as $64, which is about where I drew the line of ridiculousness. 

(11) Namely some pretty aggressive and less-than-friendly changes to the importation of Holbein products to North America. Not to dish, but it recently became pretty apparent that this trend for Holbein is likely only going to get worse

(12) If you read the footnotes, you also get to know that the Holbein Duo Aqua are on a 20% off sale til whenever we’ve sold them all.

Entry 17: A Third Place with No Talent

Where truly all are welcome

Who wants to kill two birds with one stone? For all the good and happiness we get to spread around Edmonds through the arts, there’s always something nagging at us: folks who don’t think they’ve got what it takes to be an artist(1). Whether that’s because of misconceptions about art, lacking space or community to be creative, or not having access to materials to work with, ARTspot may have just the solution for you!

The No Talent Art Club started as a joke I thought only its creator(2) would find funny. I chalked up a sidewalk sign and later a custom sticker urging people to “Join the No-Talent Art Club(3).” I didn’t expect passerby to then come in the store and ask how they could join the club(4). Two years later we’ve actually been able to make it a reality! Details to follow.

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When new folks are being trained at ARTspot, one of the archetypical customers I advise them to keep an eye out for are the survivors of creative trauma(5). We’re oftentimes the first point of contact for someone who may be peeking over the trench for the first time in years or even decades and I think we’re pretty good at getting people over the top to pick out their first pencil. The second step, however, is far more daunting: practice.

Practicing something you’re not skilled at can be tedious(6) at best. At worst it can be a downright humiliating experience without the right environment and community in a bubble around you. For years that was something we couldn’t offer people, especially if they don’t have the resources or ability to pay for an expensive class or an in-home studio. Spaces where folks can hang out without a required financial transaction(7) are far and few between. That’s particularly true for kids. Folks who’re new to a skill need people around who can encourage, point out the good aspects of their work, and offer advice as requested. At the very least, newcomers to a skill need people around they can trust not to tear them down.

Stick all that in a pot, stir it around, and we get the actual No Talent Art Club(8)! It’s a weekly event at ARTspot after regular business hours every Friday. The event encourages people from all walks of life(9) to hang out, make some art, try something new, and generally just practice the skill of creativity. When tedious repetition(10) is the best, tangible way to improve a skill, the best way to set yourself up for success is to try and make the repetition a little bit fun(11)! Surrounding yourself with friends, watching some old art TV shows, and removing the burden of financial stress(12) from the situation is our attempt to encourage everyone to engage with their creative selves.

At this point, the No Talent Art Club has been running for about two months and is going strong(13). We generally have a good crowd of folks who've returned from previous weeks as well as first-timers. I’ve seen people work on papercrafting, spend their time blending watercolors, practice their dollmaking, work on commissions, or just play with pencils and paper. I’m usually playing trash legos or touching up the paint on my skates behind the counter if it’s a more crowded night, but on quieter Fridays I like to sit out with y’all and gab while I play. Folks can bring their own projects, play with the pencils and paper we have around, or rent from our art materials library(14). We hope to see you there soon!

(1) A good artist, a bad artist, or even just an artist who enjoys making a mess that makes them happy!

(2) That’s me.

(3) “All art is good art! Make Bad Art! Disappoint your Family!”

(4) At the time, I’d just tell people they were probably already secretly a member and were doing a great job. These interactions were portentous, however.

(5) It’s nothing too overtly dramatic, but it’s very common for us to help out folks who have dealt with really negative feedback about their art from mentors and peers very early on in life. Even if they avoided these direct interactions, there’s certainly an omnipresent cultural weirdness surrounding creativity. If you’re not somehow identified as “gifted” or “talented” from the get-go then you’ll “never amount to anything.” The thing that blows my mind is that there aren’t many other skills that fall into this trap. We don’t expect a small child who’s bad at sports, math, or science to be skilled without practice. Nobody starts off as Lionel Messi, Ada Lovelace, or Marie Curie, but with practice people can get pretty good at mostly anything.

(6) A word my mom taught me and my sister circa age four or five in regards to practicing our drawing skills.

(7) I went down a big rabbit hole a few months back about Third Places and how they’re vanishing. That’s what really kicked me in the butt to start putting resources and energy towards this whole endeavor. A Third Place is somewhere people can congregate to share ideas, socialize, or otherwise just hang out without spending a lot of money. Third Places tend not to make a lot of money because of this, so unless they’re subsidized and loved by the communities they serve these places tend to disappear.

(8) We often abbreviate it to NTAC on the back end of the store because it’s a lot of words. I neither love nor hate this abbreviation, but it doesn’t quite spark joy for me. That’s the way things go when you don’t name a thing backwards to have an intentionally cute abbreviation ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(9) We chose the time slot for this event kinda carefully to line up with some of the few buses that run through downtown Edmonds. There’s only so much we can do to encourage accessibility, but we’ll do what we can! If there’s a barrier that’s keeping you from coming by that we might have overlooked and could help with, let us know! We’ll see what we can do.

(10) This is genuinely how I’ve gotten good at any kind of art I’m ok at now as a thirty year old. People don’t like to hear that I’d spend a day in college with a ream of paper drawing the same thing 500 times. People want to hear that I’m the descendant of an ancient bloodline of artists and was born with a pencil in my hand (ouch!). 

(11) It’s the same thing as having a tv show on or music playing when you’re lifting weights. Nobody (I think) is all like “ahh cool, yes, lifting this metal rock over and over again is SO FUN and ENGAGING.” Throw on some good tunes though, get in the groove, and you realize that a few months have gone by and you’re lifting way bigger metal rocks than before. It’s a bit of a crude comparison, but getting good at art is basically just the same. If you’re not happy with what you’re making, try a new material, emulate a different artist, and follow whatever is the most fun. Practice, and you will get better.

(12) i.e. “I’ve paid X amount of dollars, so I have to be Y amount better or get Z amount of fun out of this or I’m wasting my monopoly money.”

(13) My fiancé (appropriately) gets after me for not promoting the No Talent Art Club with enough spirit, but I’m expecting this blog post will meet that expectation. Love you!

(14) On a sliding scale! We had a lot of these materials donated from our community, or had just been sitting in our basement gathering dust, so we ask for $5-15 or whatever more you can throw our way to help keep the lights on. If you don’t have that, anything helps. Our primary goal is just to help y’all access some new, fun materials!

Entry 16: Burning Hot Art,

2000 Years in the making

Anything older than the span of several lifespans can be increasingly difficult to comprehend. Old things just seem old, and the people who made them could be aliens for all we know. Historical works of art, however, offer us a valuable insight into what life was like at the time of creation. The older the better(1)!

This brings us to one of the downsides of time passing: objects and materials age, decay, and disappear just as we do. As such, it’s safe to assume that any artifacts we rediscover are merely a fraction of the sum of everything that has been created. The chances that a piece of art from as far back as the early Roman empire would be practically untouched by age are virtually zero. However, this is where encaustic painting helps.

Encaustic painting uses hot beeswax as a medium for pigment. It has great utility in layering and texture, but the most remarkable aspect(2) of the medium is its ability to preserve. Beeswax is weird(3), and under the right conditions it can age for hundreds or thousands of years before showing meaningful signs of decay. Seeing someone paint with it is almost as much performance art as anything else. Like a blacksmith, the artist is working with heat and special tools. They create effects unachievable by other materials, and whether they know it or not, their work could be enjoyed for generations to come!

My background with encaustics is mostly in having seen my mom work with them. She began experimenting with them in the early 2010’s(4), and it really seemed to hit the spot with the mixed media work she’d been branching out into. For me, everything clicked in 2016 when we got to go spend a day at the Louvre(5). We rushed to a smaller gallery on one of the lower levels where several encaustic portraits were waiting for us.

Combining several aspects of the Louvre’s collection(6) were several truly ancient pieces of art: a small collection of Fayun mummy portraits dating from the 1st to 3rd century CE. Unlike the mummies from the ancient kingdoms of Egypt, these were a product of syncretization(7) between local traditions and those from Greece and then Rome. The ornate, golden sarcophagi of the pharaohs had been supplanted with more modest burial conditions fit for a wider range of people, and elaborate funeral masks(8) were made as portraits on wood panel using encaustic(9). Being far more familiar with the far more recent artistic traditions of the middle ages I was shocked both by the degree of realism achieved by the ancient artists and the lack of decomposition after nearly two millennia. These people looked like regular people(10), and the paintings were exceptionally(11) preserved. It was like looking in a 2000 year old mirror.

I like to tell people when they’re browsing the encaustic department at ARTspot that they have the opportunity to create something that could last for centuries(12). For most people, however, encaustics offer an experience and end product that’s difficult to replicate with different materials. The start-up cost can be a bit steep(13), so it’s nice to find someone willing to lend some of their materials and expertise to find your footing(14).

Luckily, that chance is rapidly approaching! Whitney Buckingham-Beechie will be at ARTspot this Thursday the 21st(15) to demo some encaustic techniques. I’m sure she’d love to talk with you about her upcoming class offerings. Whether you’re interested in creating unique abstract works of art, adding an extra tool to your mixed media repertoire, or maybe adding to the archaeological record, maybe it’s worth checking out!

(1) My background in historical costume design greatly benefitted from the study of art history. It's not until relatively recently that people have been recording what people, especially the lower classes, wear in writing if that writing has even been preserved and is accessible. Art is one of the greatest gifts to someone in my position, since it de facto tends to record trends in style. Either how people actually looked or at the very least a record of the ideal of how a society thought people ought to look. However, as art is further and further removed from the present and historical context gets muddied. The opportunity to see exceptionally realistic depictions of people from so long ago actually thrills me.

(2) To me at least! People often ask me at the store about what kind of art I like to make, and I jokingly respond “selling art supplies,” but it’s pretty true. The effects people can create with the materials sold at ARTspot continue to amaze and delight me, but there’s SO much to the mechanical and historical aspects of the materials that has always engaged me. How does one binding medium compare to another and in what terms? Why does one pigment fade more quickly than another? There’s no shortage of ad-blasted articles or deep forum posts on artistic technique, I’ve always aimed for this blog to be a probably mostly true repository of information about my special interest: art supplies.

(3) Like everything else that bees produce, it’s, like, WAY too complex to make sense given that it’s made by the best little bugs. An approximate formula for beeswax is C15H31COOC30H61 . Despite looking like a pretty bonkers molecule, this combination of hydrogen and carbon with a sprinkle of oxygen thrown in is extremely stable! Because it’s an organic byproduct of bees doing their bee-jobs, each species makes a slightly different kind of wax. It makes sense, but that’s about as far down the rabbit hole of biochem that I’m going before I start saying things that are less and less likely to be scientifically correct.

(4) 2 BA (Before ArtSpot)

(5) My mom and I both share a love and appreciation for art history, and I’d just graduated with an incidental minor in archaeology due to my special interest. This was a good trip for us!

(6) Art and artifacts that may or may not be there at the behest of the people and cultures who created them.

(7) I love this word, and it just doesn’t see enough use. For those not in the know, this is the process by which most popular Christian holidays seem, and are, extremely pagan-coded.When different cultures meet, there’s a lot of different forces that encourage syncretization whether they be the passive blending of cultures or through the intentional pressures of an institution.

(8) A practice mainly attributed to Hellenistic culture. This goes back to old Mycenean (Bronze Age) Greece or earlier. I reckon that folks are most likely to know the “Gold Funeral Mask of Agamemnon,” which may or may not belong to the actual face of the maybe-real king, but it’s a good representation of someone after they’ve passed. Gold, like wax, is also a particularly durable material that ages well. It’s unfortunately also quite malleable, but it’s kinda uncanny how fresh 5000 year old jewelry made of pure gold can look. Pro tip: if you’re going to make a funeral mask for someone important, use gold or beeswax. Whichever is more convenient.

(9) And some with tempera, but that’s not what this blog post is about. Maybe later. Paints made from egg is also fun for me.

(10) Albeit super wealthy and posh. Egypt was the breadbasket of the mediterranean world even before its subjugation by Alexander in 332 BCE. When Rome came in to overthrow the Ptolemaic dynasty, there was big business to be done in keeping the masses of the Eternal City fed. Still though, these people weren’t build-a-massive-burial-complex-to-house-your-god-king levels of wealthy.

(11) I know not many people may have as good a reference for how most things look after 2000 years but it’s generally NOT pretty. Metal is oxidized and corroded, a victim of its own chemical amalgams. Most things organic, like wood, have been long gone for a long time unless highly specific conditions are met. Most paints and dyes have faded or at best become discolored, only traceable by trace elements and compounds. Stone does pretty good under good conditions, but even so it’ll usually be a sad, beige shadow of its brightly colored past. A big part of archaeology, to me, is imagining how much beauty has been lost never to be experienced again.

(12) Honestly I think this might intimidate people more than anything. If you’re suffering from similar symptoms, I recommend attending the No Talent Art Club every Friday at ARTspot from 6:00-8:00pm.

(13) In addition to the paints and mediums, a beginner must also find a way to reliably heat the material to a constant temperature. A pancake griddle usually works great but is henceforth not to be used for pancakes. It’s also not recommended to expose synthetic (plastic) brushes to high heat. Try it out, and then come back to buy some horse or goat hair brushes.

(14) Prepare for an unabashed plug here for our good friend Whitney. Despite running an art supply store, I really don’t like using these blog posts to try and sell stuff but rather inform y’all about how absolutely weird and dramatic all the stories behind these materials are. However, we love Whitney, and she’s very much taken up the torch of bringing hot wax training and instruction to the unsuspecting people of Edmonds.She’s a party, and you’d do well to stop by to meet her.

(15) Also my birthday (toot toot!)

In the beginning there was nothing...

…And then we cobbled something together

So I’ve got a confession to make. It’s pretty often that I’ll get very excited and invested in a new thing(1), and the thing this past week has been scratch crafting. Creative types will regularly accrue more brikabrak than they know what to do with(2), so what do we do with it all?? My solution to save all this stuff eventually ending up in a free pile or the landfill is to simply turn my house into a landfill, albeit with a bit of panache.

The new obsession began with a little innocent surfing of the world wide web. A youtuber I watch who sometimes paints minis mentioned Gaslands, a tabletop game where matchbox cars are converted into Mad Max(3) monstrosities. If you read that footnote, you’ll understand my love for the road warrior, and if you’ve read previous blog entries you’ll know my love for painting teeny things. I fell into a burning ring of fire eternal, and I’m still falling and tinkering with all my old toy cars. It’s right up my alley!

There are many videos and resources online to give you some starting ideas, but the important thing is to start looking at your unused supplies and trash(4) as solid gold rather than something clogging your bins and drawers(5). With the right adhesives, mechanical connections, and a bit of luck, it can be transformed into sculpture, birdhouses, or apocalyptic death machines!

First things first(6), give yourself permission to make beautiful, ugly things. Even if it ends up being a warmup piece, making something truly awful helps you reset your bar and get you moving and making. I mostly make ugly(7) things, and I wholly believe that when you joyfully lean into that process it’s very rewarding and honestly beautiful. I’ll keep hammering this point until I see more ugly art from y’all.

Coming up with an idea is the hardest part of a project, so I always put off committing to that as long as possible. Just start dry-fitting and putting things together and explore interesting combinations of shapes(8). It’s easier if you never stopped playing imaginary games, but I promise you can relearn if needed. Eventually the idea you need(9) will emerge, and then you unapologetically run with it.

Next up is when you start to really dial in what you’re working with. You’ve been gluing(10), maybe even started on painting, and you can start telling a story based on your subject(11). Good art comes from good design(12), and design is about communication, and if you’re already communicating then you might as well be weaving a story that can engage both yourself and anyone lucky enough to witness your work. You don’t need to know the whole story all at once, but it’s easier to stick bits together with reason even if it’s just in your head.

To be conscious of space, I need to get to the point beyond just scratch crafting(13). This methodology is something I use in my art, but there’s no reason it can’t be extended whatever medium you prefer whether that be more traditional sculpture, painting, drawing, getting dressed in the morning, or otherwise. If the elements to your piece can make narrative sense, then that can be communicated to a viewer. Be creative with the elements that go into your work, and let nothing go to waste(14). And for the love of god if you’re using superglue, have a window open. If you’re cutting or gently melting plastic into the shape you need it to be, PLEASE wear one of those big masks with the filter thingies. Otherwise, go crazy and make art. Ideally in that order.

(1) Thing truly being the most concise noun to use here. Sometimes it’s a new skill or field of knowledge, creative activity, or a person. It’s not a problem; it’s just left me knowing a little bit about a lot of different things!

(2) A common lamentation at ARTspot. Whether it’s the result of projects left unfinished, overestimating the supplies needed for a task, or plain impulse buys, we hear pretty often “I have TOO much art supplies.” Not to flex on y’all, but honestly I bet I have more art supplies than most of you all combined. Hence why I’m in this predicament. 

(3) Ok, quick digression to talk about Mad Max: Fury Road. It came out sometime around 2012 or something, and I’m still waiting for a movie to be released that I like as much. Theater school kinda ruined my enjoyment of most movies that obviously just aren’t trying very hard to make the most of the medium. It’s rare for a movie to be produced where the acting is understated but effective, the narrative is plotted out to be compelling, and the design is both inspired and beautiful. I definitely wasn’t expecting a Mad Max movie of all things to tick all those boxes for me. If you haven’t seen it, witness it.

(4) Literally trash. I wasn’t exaggerating when I was talking about saving things from the landfill. Plastic, especially, is such a shame to add to the neverending, flaming pile of climate catastrophe. Doubly so if it’s been made into interesting shapes at or around the scale you’re working at!

(5) I promise I’m not trying to find ways for you to use what you have to make room for other cool, reasonably priced items maybe bought from your friendly, beautiful, and local art supply store.

(6) I know I write this a lot. Not, “first things first,” but rather what I’m about to write.

(7) Rusty, misproportioned, visually grating, and otherwise very punk rock

(8) I might be misremembering exactly a tip I picked up a while back, but keep your eye open for Pre-Manufactured Advantages (PMAs). Although the many plastic widgets and metal whatsits that litter our drawers and bins are rarely intended to be married by superglue, it feels like manufacturers tend to like to use parts that unintentionally align with each other. Parts will fit in holes (no pun intended), and surfaces will have harmonious dimensions. Just keep an eye out and smoosh parts together like my nephew learning to line up  a Fisher-Price star into a Fisher-Price star-shaped hole just to learn what happens.

(9) Maybe what you’re putting together looks like the lower corner of a building? Or an arm? Maybe it looks like the side of a door that a little creature would be happy to fit through?

(10) On appropriately scored, scratched, or otherwise roughed-up surfaces. Glue does NOT like sticking to flat, featureless surfaces. It may like to trick you and say “hey, yeah, that feels like a good bond. You can totally move on,” only to then fail you at the least convenient time. Do not kid yourself about an adhesive bond; if you’re concerned, fix it.

(11) To plug someone who’s neither asking for nor expecting it, Mike O’Day is honestly a master of this. (This is his website, which feels like the right thing to share given that I’m secretly fangirling about his narrative design https://odayart.com/ ) For those not local to the Edmonds art scene, Mike is a ceramic artist and focuses on what is honestly such a delightful, whimsical style of sculpture. Whether the subject is an elusive Cheetalope, a small bird flying an airplane shaped like a bigger bird, or a handstanding gymnast on a birdbath, everyone has a narrative. Although they’re maybe not quite as developed and nuanced as the narrative of Mad Max: Fury Road, which I looked up and actually was released in 2015, they’re every bit as personalized and beautiful and add to the piece if you know them or if you can invent your own stories just by looking at them.

(12) I’m literally so sorry for so many footnotes so geographically clustered, but this methodology in creativity hearkens back to my illustrious entry #7 on the Bauhaus school. Although the school’s pedagogy didn’t talk about narrative, they preached the gospel of the unity of art and design.  

(13) Although, believe me, I’d love nothing more than to rant at people and run everyone through my process on this. Raise your hand if you’d take a class.

(14) I like to treat my art supplies a bit like how I treat my produce in the fridge: the older stuff must be used first. 

Why yes, they *are* natural

These pigments, that is…

Color is all around us, often in synthesized shades and intensities that would befuddle our ancestors. However, the world before these new, chemically-derived pigments was far from monochrome. Humans have been experimenting with adding colors to our existing palette since well beyond the beginning of recorded history. Our eyes have the amazing ability to see a wide range of wavelengths of light, and the colors they’re interpreted as have been a part of the human story since beyond antiquity.

A new take on a color wheel using old colors

So first things first, in my opinion there’s a fuzzy line between natural and synthetic paints. Like many things, you tend to know it when you see it, but there are a fair few conflicting definitions that differentiate them. Humans have a knack for manipulating our environment, and all pigments tend to benefit from just a bit of meddling(1). In general, the differentiation that I generally accept is that naturally derived pigments are a material that exists in a natural state that can be turned into a usable paint through very few steps. Synthetic paints are derived via chemistry to combine elements that wouldn’t naturally occur. They also usually have absolutely bonkers names(2). Even by this definition, people have been making “synthetic,” paints for over 5000 years!

Natural pigments can come from three different sources. Minerals, plants(3), and animals are the three primary origins and were responsible for most(4) of the thousands and thousands of paintings, murals, drawings, and doodles that have been made and lost over the millennia. 

Pigments derived from minerals include such hits as: ochres, siennas, and iron oxides. People figured out pretty early on that some simple processes could purify and intensify the colors that already existed, either through washing or roasting. Loamy earth could be processed into greens. Some clays into yellow. A good rule of thumb for these paints is that if it’s something you dig directly out from the earth, it’s usually an earth tone. Other minerals such as lapis lazuli and cobalt were expensive or dangerous to source but also provided vibrancy or shades we otherwise wouldn’t easily obtain until the industrial revolution(5).

Plants offer a huge variety of pigments than an artist can use to diversify their natural palette. If you(6) have ever encountered a pickled beet, you may know how much power plants can pack. Madder, woad, indigo, sumac, and even something as common as blueberries can be processed pretty easily to create colors that we recognize as alizarin, gamboge, and Indian yellow(7). Colors in this variety of source have been the most displaced by advances in synthetic pigments, largely due to their natural fugitive qualities(8).

Colors derived from animals are less numerous and aren’t exactly being actively innovated with(9). The only colors I could find that are still made and widely used are carmine, the natural variety of which is derived from an insect, and bone black, which I’m sure you can imagine the source of(10). In a world where we’re continuing to learn about the ecological impacts people have on the environment, it becomes increasingly difficult to justify the things needed to turn animals into paint(11).

So are naturally derived paints better or worse than synthetics? Where do we even draw the line between the two? After all, all the carbon chains and molecular gubbins(12) are just the result of more complex human interactions with elements that come from the world around us. Nothing is better or worse than anything else; some things are just better suited for particular projects. I hope this short article sparks some thought when you’re next looking to fill a hole in your palette!

(1) I promised myself I wouldn’t go into a huge rant about the difference between dyes and pigments in the main article, but I’m doing a short one down here since it’s always fascinated me. There, that’s it. That’s the whole rant. Brevity is the soul of wit.

(2) Phthalocyanine, quinacridone, dioxazine, and benzimidazolone don’t sounds like your standard, garden variety pigments.

(3) Ok, y’all I just stood at the precipice of a massive internet hole that I’m calling “Can you make pigments out of fungus?” and decided NOT to jump into it. The short answer is overwhelmingly yes. There’s a LOT of nerdy scientists out there (who we love and treasure as artists for giving us colorful presents) talking about this and the potential benefits.

(4) When I said earlier that people have been making synthetic pigments for over 5000 years, I was referring to Egyptian Blue. This color, called caeruleum by the Romans, fell out of use during the middle ages because helpful chemistry was put on hold in favor of gargling mercury and stuff. The chemical composition, CaCuSi4O10 or CaOCuO(SiO2)4 definitely doesn’t feel like something that’s dug up, strained, and dried and was a majorly cool thing. Progress isn’t linear. If those molecular gubbins got mixed up, blame squarespace and my brain made up significantly of freeze-dried ramen.

(5) Most good science has, unfortunately, historically been the result of capitalist greed or war. The industrial revolution saw not only changes in how science was practiced and codified, but also these powerful forces that drove it either intentionally or accidentally. Alas, science follows funding!

(6) Or an article of your clothing

(7) Unlike other plant-based pigments that were often grown, dried, and ground, Indian Yellow was instead processed by cows. It’s a kinda weird and wild adventure that lasted from 1883 until 2018. I didn’t really know whether to put this color under plant or animal derived because nature is weird and wild. You can read about it here: https://www.winsornewton.com/uk/articles/colours/spotlight-on-indian-yellow/

(8) The colors themselves aren’t criminals or on the run in particular, but they do fade more quickly under sunlight than their lightfast cousins. I stood on stood at the precipice of another massive internet hole that I’m calling “photochemisry and lightfastness,” and I accidentally dipped my toe in before remembering that’s not really what this article is about. 

(9) It’s a hard sell in today’s age to swing “I decided to kill and crush up all these creatures and make paint out of them,” as an ecologically mindful thing.

(10) Hint: it’s bone. That’s been blackened. With fire.

(11) The famed Tyrian Purple, or Royal Purple, of the Roman emperors was labor intensive and would require as many as 250,000 shellfish in order to make one ounce of purple. It’s not hard, knowing what we know now, to imagine a better way of doing things.

(12) A technical term used by organic chemists, alchemists, and me

Creating through Covid

News about the novel Coronavirus that made big waves isn’t so novel anymore.

It’s been almost exactly three years since Washington state entered as full a lockdown as it could manage, which seems both thankfully distant and eerily recent. While the pandemic has eliminated or changed our ability to safely work, play, and create in the ways we used to, I’ve been so happy to see how many people have chosen to redirect some of their energy towards creativity and the arts! During these past three years, we’ve been honored at ARTspot to offer some guidance to those looking to take their first artistic steps, rediscover an earlier skill, or keep pushing to create through the changing times. 

Adept readers of this blog may have noticed a three week unplanned hiatus in my posting. I wasn’t taking a complete break from the store for my birthday or anything fun like that; I was sick with Covid and then rushing to catch up for lost time at the store. This was my second time getting sick, and this wasn’t nearly as unpleasant as my first go around. I was, however, quarantined at home with a variety of fun symptoms(1) with an ever-shrinking pool of things to keep me busy and my spirits up.

Adept followers of me and my life may know that my chief artistic outlet is painting miniatures for tabletop games. Fantasy, sci-fi, or historical, Warhammer, Star Wars, and Dungeons & Dragons. Each presents its own challenges and triumphs. Do I play any of these games? Hardly, if at all, but I do enjoy the hobby aspect of cutting out tiny pieces, filing them down just so, gluing, priming, and my favorite, painting(2). 

Every miniature painter out there can probably relate to the accrual phenomenon, the “stack of shame,” of unassembled models and boxes of half-used bits(3). After finishing two video games, exhausting my YouTube content, grinding my way through some remote data entry, and eating lots of leftover soup(4), I started to notice how tall my own stack of shame had been getting. About one year ago I ran a demo for Artwalk and painted one heck of a large mini(5), but that was the last time I’d really gotten any work done. 

My personal Stack of Shame

I don’t believe that people need to constantly work at a hobby to consider themselves a practitioner. Yes, regular and routine practice will help build skill(6), but without attaching the need to generate money, the primary goal of things like this is to find some joy(7). The more the better! I’m a huge supporter of making ugly art(8); my favorite part of painting minis is weathering them to make them look like they’ve just trudged through the mud, been fighting a war, or on a quest that’s taken them to the farthest reaches of the world. Weathering like this may not look traditionally “good,” but it definitely looks cool(9). It’s a kind of ugly that still gets to tell a story!

A Mordor Uruk

LotR Strategy Battle Game

Amdur, Lord of Blades

LotR Strategy Battle Game

Phil the Mordor Orc

LotR Strategy Battle Game

The Void Dragon

Warhammer 40K: Necrons

The Void Dragon

Warhammer 40K: Necrons

Paragon Warsuit - In Progress

Warhammer 40K: Adepta Soritas

Gandalf

LotR Strategy Battle Game - Painted by Tracy Felix

Trade Federation AAT

Star Wars: Legion

Although it may have taken a pervasive and nasty virus to make me make the time for art, I’m feeling hopeful I can keep the momentum up and keep working insofar as I’m finding joy in it. I’m reminded that putting your energy into something as abstract as art can feel like a questionable choice when you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired, but it’s a good way to find some satisfaction and joy in an otherwise somewhat sucky time. I wish you all success with your own artsy endeavors and hope we can all keep rediscovering the joy the painting(10)!

(1) With hits including sore throat, cough, occasional wheezing, headache, fatigue, inability to focus, and joint pain

(2) My grandfather on my mother’s side was an adept maker of miniature things, and I grew up getting to see whatever weird project he was figuring out whenever they visited us or when we got to see them down in Texas. I think he made all sorts of things, but what I remember best is his model R/C airplanes. He made everything from little ten inch model kits to a monstrosity with a six foot wingspan that he must have made parts for himself. I was terrible at the patience required and was a liability in his workshop, but I did love the process and endlessly appreciated him having taken real time to always show me what he was working on.

(3) As it goes, even though they can be quite expensive, it’s much easier (and still very fun) to buy model kits than it is to actually follow through and finish them.

(4) For anyone struggling to find the joy of cooking, I recommend trying soup. Just get some broth and whatever’s in your fridge teetering on the edge of expired oblivion, and make it into soup. It’s not labor intensive, and it’s legitimately difficult to screw up badly.

(5) The enormous and intricate Void Dragon from Warhammer 40k. I took the opportunity to demo for work as an excuse to buy something I probably wouldn’t have budgeted for otherwise!

(6) I got a lot of that out of the way thirteen years ago in High School where I comparatively didn’t have any work to do besides painting up a few more tiny dudes for my Lord of the Rings armies so I could keep pace with my friends. For anyone with illusions of my always being cool and stylish, please know that I am and always have been a huge stinking nerd. It does mean that I got a lot of my repetitions taken care of early in life and made a lot of my mistakes early on, so whenever I do end up getting some work done nowadays it feels like I still have a decade of mistakes that I don’t need to make again. It’s a little like riding a bike.

(7) Notably a very valuable and ever-dwindling commodity while you’re stuck in bed for two weeks.

(8) And I want to write an entry about this specifically after having danced around it a bunch. The ever changing aesthetic philosophy behind what is “good” art shouldn’t be a barrier to anyone looking to express their voice.

(9) If you ever find yourself painting a mini and make a mistake, I highly recommend getting very quick at wiping off a layer of paint or getting comfortable with that mistake and using it. No crisp, rank-and-file army has ever survived first contact with a muddy forced march, and it’s a thing I find somewhat freeing. There’s cool aspects to uniformity beyond uniforms, like maybe three tiny dudes in a unit have matching black armbands, and one carries a fourth to honor a fallen comrade? Does that affect how these units make decisions in tabletop strategy?

This is a huge tangent, but in all of the Dungeons and Dragons games I ran in college, there was one Mordor Orc mini that had been one of many in my high school army of darkness. We started affectionately referring to him as “Phil” the Orc and more often than not performed better than was statistically probable. In our games the mini might represent a goblin, a gnoll, a troll, a snake, or any other kind of foe, but I did start using that specific mini to subtly communicate to the players not to underestimate whatever foe it came to represent.

(10) Or anything else we do to flex and stretch our creativity!

Artemisia Gentileschi? Never Heard of Him

As a content warning, this postwill briefly mention sexual assault and physical torture, but we’re not going to fixate on it.

If I had been asked as a child to list the most interesting artists of the Renaissance, it would have been a cast list for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Michelangelo, Leonardo, Donatello, and Raphael. While towering figures in the arts make for the perfect allegory of apex teenage turtle masculinity, giants like these have a tendency to overshadow other less-studied figures.

Great Man theory is a method of understanding history with the idea that certain individuals were born with or developed the traits necessary to alter the path of history. In addition to overlooking the innumerable contributions to history made by everyone, the theory’s name also spells out the bias of gender expression that overwhelmingly defines this group of great men. The trouble is that the more history gets published about a certain event or figure, the more likely that more exploration of the topic will happen(1). As it happens, interest in the 17th century artist Artemisia Gentileschi really took off during the peak of second wave feminism in the 1970’s.

Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (1638-1639)

Scholarship surrounding Gentileschi suffers from some of the same drawbacks to the Great Man approach to history as well as the politics(2) of the era. Feminist art historians were keen to contribute to a larger body of work(3), but it leaves me with a nagging feeling. So much of the discussion is beleaguered in attempts to portray the narrative of Gentileschi’s life and the impact of her work to make a point. There are plenty of points of debate that deserve discussion, but I hate to see a beautiful and meaningful lifetime of creativity and resolve trapped in a perpetual ideological tug-of-war. 

Ok, so I’m clearly frustrated in my research. It’s difficult to talk about a female artist in the 17th century without making a whole thing about it(4), so here’s the facts as I see them. In the context of today, Artemisia would be considered a child prodigy, selling her work professionally by her mid teens. Her father, Orazio, was an established artist who ensured she learned to paint. She lived past 60, which is pretty wild for a single mother(5) of that period, and there’s evidence she was accepting commissions until almost the end of her life. Her early career was tragically overshadowed for a time by a lengthy and brutal trial concerning her sexual assault at the hands of a fellow artist. He was sentenced to exile from Rome, which was never carried out, whereas Artemisia was tortured with thumbscrews to verify her testimony(6).

The Inscription reads: “Made in Rome by Pierre Dumonstier, Parisian, the last day of December, 1625, after the worthy hand of the excellent and skilful Artemisia, gentlewoman of Rome. The hands of Aurora are praised and renowned for their rare beauty. But this one is a thousand times more worthy for knowing how to make marvels that send the most judicious eyes into raptures.”

Artemisia was a court artist in Florence(7), and found success back in Rome, London(8), and then Naples. Her foundations were set by her father’s style to avoid idealizing the human form, but she displayed a fluidity of style that changed to fit the tastes and techniques of the specific areas she was working in. 

Gentileschi had a tendency to insert her own image into the roles of her subjects(9), which tend to favor the Power of Women trope(10) of medieval and renaissance Europe. By and large though, she has all the hallmarks of what we would think of today as a professional working artist. She occasionally created for herself but often painted subjects that she would be able to sell. With cultural patronage as it was(11), she was able to build a stable life for herself despite the instability inherent between her chosen path and her expected role in society. In her own words, in a letter to a potential patron, "with me Your Illustrious Lordship will not lose and you will find the spirit of Caesar in the soul of a woman."

(1) Good history is written from primary source documents. However, these secondary sources can serve as inspiration to spark further interest in a specific subject as well as a source for later histories to cite. Generally the more secondary sources cited by any academic works, the more you ought to look at exactly what those sources and their authors are all about, and this has been today’s lesson on lateral reading and research. 

(2) Just like good comedy, good history doesn’t punch down the power structure of society. Whenever you find yourself confronted with an opinion or interpretation of fact, ask yourself who the story benefits and, more importantly, who it harms, and this has been the last lesson today about lateral reading and research I pretty promise unless I think of something else. 

(3) One of the only secondary sources available about Artemisia Gentileschi from before this time was written by Roberto Longhi in 1916, which included such hit passages (hot takes) as: 

“Who could think in fact that over a sheet so candid, a so brutal and terrible massacre could happen [...] but—it's natural to say—this is a terrible woman! A woman painted all this?”

You can see why this discussion perhaps stood to benefit from a more diverse set of perspectives.

(4) A problem that frankly just literally wouldn’t exist in nearly the same way if we were discussing a man.

(5) She did marry during her time in Florence, had an affair with a patron her husband knew about and supported because Mr. Patron was loaded and influential. A while after they returned to Rome, her husband just stopped appearing in any documentation related to Artemisia, but she does seem to have maintained close ties with her single surviving child, Prudentia.

(6) I do love a fair trial. Then and now. But seriously, putting an artist in thumbscrews feels particularly brutal, since her hands were literally part of her livelihood. A cool thing though is that Pierre Dumonstier drew a portrait of her right hand with the inscription: “Made in Rome by Pierre Dumonstier, Parisian, the last day of December, 1625, after the worthy hand of the excellent and skilful Artemisia, gentlewoman of Rome. The hands of Aurora are praised and renowned for their rare beauty. But this one is a thousand times more worthy for knowing how to make marvels that send the most judicious eyes into raptures.”

The drawing is at the British Museum but not currently on display. You can see it on their website with the ID Nn,7.51.3 and it’s worth it.

(7) It’s interesting and worth noting that she casually had an ongoing correspondence with Galileo Galilei, which isn’t super relevant to her career as an artist, but like hot damn it seems like her squad would have been absolutely epic to bop around with in Florence.

(8) Up until Charles the First started a civil war over having overly-fabulous hair and underly-fabulous appreciation for the democratic process. I do however like how wealthy despots of the time did at least spend lavishly on the arts.

(9) Some of her most recognizable work is of women taking righteous revenge on men, understandably leading to theories that maybe her work became part of coping with her trauma. Looking at the wider body of her work, commissioned or not, it seems to me that her preferred subject could be more broadly described as that of female joy and success. It’s only sometimes that it comes at the expense of some guy’s severed head ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(10) This is actually a pretty fun thing to look into. Expressions of the trope range from silly to serious, the latter as is the case in the work of Gentileschi, but always follows a theme of subversion. It reminds me in concept of Saturnalia, the Roman festival ~December 17th that inverted many social and legal norms for a week. I think it’s healthy for a society to set aside existing norms to question why we do the things we do and explore alternatives.

(11) Notably, Artemisia Gentileschi, did very little work on behalf of the church either in Catholic Italy or Protestant England. Maybe because religious art trends were focused on less in the way of paintings done at the easel. But she seems to have been very well known to wealthy patrons of the secular variety.

Art of the Feminine; Art by the Feminine

About six years ago I started coming to terms that the terms “boy,” “man,” or “sir,” radically didn’t apply to me(1), and I started a deeper exploration…

…of the history and background(2) of a historically loaded term: femininity. In addition to tapping the immediately available human resources in my life for thoughts and opinions, I was immediately drawn to consider femininity through art and the people who make it.

My mom had participated in several shows and personal projects that had centered around or skirted the subject. Goddess forms, vessels, and such had been a somewhat common abstract form in her work since moving away from still life(3) in the mid 2000’s. Art of the feminine spirit, by the feminine, is disappointingly difficult to find in a field historically saturated by male perspectives. The female form has been relegated simply to that of the subject in western art for centuries as the norm. This does, however, make the gems all the shinier. I was lucky to have been raised by Tracy, who bridged some of the gaps between second and third wave feminism. I was lucky she also happened to be a visual artist with a body of art that literally surrounded me at all times while growing up.

When we take a step back to consider the wider context, this blog’s rough generalization of art and history(4) considers a notable shift in the vibes(5) between the truly ancient and the times of agriculture and written history. There is a veritable terracotta army’s worth of figurines from prehistory that depict the feminine form. The best guess that archaeologists have about their function(6) and symbolism may indicate that many pre-agricultural groups of people may have been matriarchal or at least more egalitarian. If that were true, it may be reasonable to think that the women of those groups would have some control over how their form was represented and how those representations are used. As it happens, many objects like this have been assigned religious significance. To me, it follows that contemporary art with themes of femininity seek to reconnect with this idea of “The Divine Feminine.”

Female divinity and spirit, though under varying levels of attack and suppression for most of written history, has never and will not be squashed. A somewhat disappointing reality, however, is that the feminine experience has mostly been represented through a masculine lens(7) for most of recorded history. There’s a lot of thoughts and opinions on why and how men achieved a generally dominant position for many centuries(8). One definite outcome of this, however, is that men are grossly overrepresented as artists in the past(9) and present. With multiple waves of feminism rocking the world in recent decades, I think it makes sense for artists who lean towards femininity themselves to look towards these artifacts from the distant past as a connection not just to divinity and power, but especially the power to create(10).

I recognize that I stand to make a bit of an ass of myself this month on account of my relatively recent calling away from strict masculinity. It’s fully my intention to use the time during Women’s History Month to amplify the creative voices of those leaning toward femininity(11) in the arts. I’m aiming to make entries on Artemisia Gentileschi, Kara Walker, and Betye Saar so as not to give the whole spotlight to artists who’ve already made their grand exits. If any readers have any other suggestions, comment on this post or message ARTspot on Instagram(12). I’d love to put together a few mini bios of other great femme artists!

(1) My full royal title is Transfeminine Genderqueer. It means I was assigned male at birth, don’t recognize the validity of a gender binary as it would apply to me, lean femme on any given day, but sometimes I do grow a beard for the fun of it and to make certain people reckon with the uncomfortable truths surrounding most binary arrangements.  

(2) Trust me to have a big feeling and immediately start researching to put it in a historical context. Costume history class was a great gateway to lure me back into the arts in college, but I’d initially gone to school for history and teaching.

(3) I grew up in a house with a lot of art of pears on the wall. They were and still are good pears.

(4) Six hundred words and some generously verbose footnotes is NOT enough space to dedicate to a thorough breakdown of these topics. Feminism and art history are both complicated, nuanced, and vast. These blog posts are little more than hot takes. I greatly encourage you to do some lateral reading about any topics you have a strong reaction to!

(5) The spirit, the soul

Of that which we consider.

The vibe is the thing.

(6) Fun fact: I minored in archaeology in college because I couldn’t let the arts take me fully. It’s a bit of an inside joke in the field when things are labeled “ritual objects,” as a sort of code for “we have no idea what this was for.” It’s infuriatingly hard to classify things without a lot of context, which is increasingly sparse the further down one digs. Imagine an archaeologist 10,000 years from now trying to classify a crucifix found in the outline foundation of a cathedral that happened to be found nearby to a garbage bin. That’s a ritual object just like the remnants of the smartphone next to it. Long story short, we weren’t there 26,000 years ago and have no actual idea what the Venus of Willendorf was all about. We just have some educated guesses.

(7) I was hoping not to write the words “male gaze,” in this entry, but here we are with the Legally Distinct “Masculine Lense.”

(8) I don’t often throw my sources out there because I’m a lazy art person, not a proper academic. However, I’d highly recommend giving Caliban and the Witch (Silvia Federici, 2004) a read. It largely focuses on primitive accumulation in pre-capitalist systems, but generally explores some motivations for why western society turned against itself in the middle ages and burned a bunch of people. 

(9) If you’re not aware, just take a look at Michelangelo’s many hilarious attempts at breasts. The guy did dudes just fine, but wow I wish I could say for certain what we all wonder (whether or not he had literally ever seen a nude woman.).

(10) See last week’s blog post about human beings and creativity. The fact that some people can actually create other people is pretty wild. I’m not a particularly spiritual person, but I do think that’s pretty neat for the people who can and want to take on that particular challenge.

(11) I will not write about Frida Khalo because she already has a lot of visibility, but I will say that my money says she was absolutely in charge of things when she was living with Diego Rivera and Leon Trotsky in the ultimate commie power throuple.

(12) We’re @artspotedmonds on Instagram. Check us out if you don’t already follow us!

John and Bob's Take on Creativity

The idea of a blank canvas is daunting to some and promising to others…

You stare at an 18x24” field of nothing(1), and it has a tendency to stare back. For some this may be the journey’s end, but I sincerely hope that won’t be your experience dear reader. 

A major pillar of ARTspot’s philosophy, as well as my own, is not that everyone can be an artist but rather that everyone is an artist. For someone who’s dedicated a significant amount of their identity to the arts(2), I don’t spend a lot of my time casually painting. This philosophy of creativity helps to sustain me during periods like the past three years(3) when it’s been a struggle to sit down and just be creative in the ways I often used to. 

t art doesn’t need to be good. It doesn’t even really need to be anything beyond an experience or a process. Art can look like so many different things, and I look to two different philosophies of art and creation to guide myself: those of Bob Ross and JRR Tolkien.

Although they both worked in different fields, both Bob Ross and Tolkien had something in common: the belief that all people ought to have access to the act of creation. From Tolkien, we see the idea of “sub-creation,” as outlined in his very long poem, Mythopoeia(4), or that all humans have been endowed with the ability to imagine and create. Granted, his belief in this was derived from his understanding that his God made humans in their image. We, through “refracted light,” could endlessly combine and recombine ideas and ought to keep that tradition alive and well.

Bob Ross, on the other hand, looked to explore creativity through visual mediums. While stationed in Alaska(5), he learned techniques to quickly paint the empty(6), snowy landscapes that were so new to him. Bob Ross took his newfound philosophies about art back with him after leaving the military. Everyone could be an artist if they wanted(7). Everyone should be an artist to teach themselves how to use the “happy accidents,” to their advantage in life. It’s absolutely unreal how many of his off the cuff remarks made during 31 seasons of free, televised instruction. He kept his palette and tools simple, just enough to get the job done. He didn’t just make art more accessible to more people, but also desirable and fun! 

Saint of Former Drill Sergeants, Rescue Animals, and Happy Accidents

In my own creativity, and how I’ve continued to work with people who come through ARTspot(8), I’ve synthesized these two philosophies(9).  Everyone could, and should exercise their creativity; it’s one of the coolest and most radical things we as human beings can do. Be receptive and curious about the creativity of others, but if you don’t exercise it yourself, then all you have is others exercising theirs on you. Art should be accessible(10) as widely as it should be participated in. 

Anyone who’s ever made the critical mistake of walking into ARTspot on a day I’m working the floor and started self-deprecating their creative ability has gotten an earful(11) that I think would have made Bob Ross proud. Technical skill in art, like many other things, is a learned skill acquired through repetitive practice. Bob Ross completed over 30,000 paintings during his life. Tolkien, a university professor, published 29 books, translated 36 more, and contributed to many periodicals. Just starting with creativity is the hard part, then continuing on is also the hard part, but wherever you end up is where you want to be(12). Just make art!

(1) I hardly ever work on anything larger than 9x12”. Art doesn’t have to be big to be cool!

(2) The other part of my identity is being very, very queer.

(3) Coincidentally that’s also been the amount of time the Covid-19 pandemic has affected the USA! For some, this has been the opportunity to set aside the traditional responsibilities of the before times to get in touch with creativity. For many others, the stress, worry, and expendability in the workforce has been a major obstacle to creativity. 

(4) This is a verbose smackdown of C.S Lewis, a friend and compatriot of Tolkien, who said in a conversation that myths were nothing but “lies breathed through silver,” or essentially worthless ramblings with little to no value (assumedly except for the Bible and the myths accepted as truths therein). It feels pretty wild to compose a seven page poem in heroic couplets used by Enlightenment English philosophers, but I guess these are the things you do for friends. If you ever have a fundamental disagreement with a friend, I suggest composing a poetic smackdown to get your point across or maybe a riddle.

(5) This probably isn’t news to many people at this point, but Bob Ross was a master sergeant in the US Air Force. He worked in a medical office but also had to be that guy who screamed at you for being late, being messy, or otherwise a bad example of military discipline. As someone who grew up rescuing little Floridian critters and nursing them back to health, that had to have really sucked, and he decided he never wanted to raise his voice again after leaving the military. 

(6) Something I realized while researching this entry is that neither people nor evidence of active humanity ever appear in any of his paintings. Occasionally you’ll get a happy little cabin, but never with smoke coming out of the happy little chimney. 

(7) One of my favorite bits of Bob Ross wisdom is “I really believe that if you practice enough, you could paint the Mona Lisa with a two-inch brush.” Aside from thinking that’s true, I think it’s a concise summary of his outlook on art..

(8) Customers, visitors, tourists, fellow employees, or otherwise.

(9) I’m a certifiably larger-than-average Tolkien nut. My mom read us the entire Lord of the Rings when I was, like, six or something. Despite the problematic aspects of his works, most everything he’s written has spoken to me in some way. I run a lot of Dungeons & Dragons games in a variety of settings, and feeling confident in my ability to create a world in which an interesting and meaningful narrative can play out is integral to the success of those games. Bob Ross, on the other hand, I only really started looking into during his resurgence of popularity in 2015-2017 because I wanted to host an impressive oil painting date with my now-partner babe despite not knowing anything about oil painting. I also watched a lot of his show when I was sick with COVID last year and couldn’t move, which was nice.

(10) I was recently accepted into my very first art show as an Adult™, and my accepted work was made with ballpoint pen on printer paper, crumpled and forgotten probably in my car for a few months, moved between two houses, stuck in a frame, and photographed for submission on the last day it was open. Yes, I do sell art supplies that are varied, beautiful, and expensive, but to make visual art you never need more than a mark-making device and something to make that mark on. In some cases, you don’t even need that. Idk, go stack some rocks on top of each other in an interesting way or something, look at it, and knock it down. You’ll have a great time, I promise. 

(11) A soft-spoken, but passionate earful.

(12) To quote Amanda Palmer from the absolute bop that is the Ukulele Anthem: “Quit the bitching on your blog / Stop pretending art is hard / Just limit yourself to three chords / and do not practice daily

On haus, two haus, red haus, Bauhaus

What Does art do for us? What’s the point of it all?

And what does an art school that only existed for Fourteen years have to do with it?

Have you ever found yourself at a museum of contemporary art wondering “why is this art good?” or more accurately “why have so many different people all decided this art is good?” You may not even have to be in a museum to experience this symptom. We live in a world, thankfully, surrounded by art for better and for worse. The buildings we walk by, the cups we drink from, and the advertisements we skip past aren’t always good art, but what if they were? Or worse yet, what if they were all weren’t?

Something special happened in Germany in 1919. Life was changing for many, and many had never returned from a war that was promised to last no longer than two years and be the war to end all wars. In the midst of this reshuffle, an architect from Berlin was recommended to restart and head a combination of two premiere German art schools that had languished during wartime. Walter Gropius established the Bauhaus school, and within a few short months this school began educating razor sharp artists and craftspeople like a machine.

Bauhaus doesn’t really have a mega-perfect English translation, but loosely it means “House of Architecture.” Bauen: to build. Haus: House

The school’s founding manifesto pulled no punches and is steeped in analogies between the crafts and a literal spiritual awakening(1). 

Throughout his tenure, Gropius promoted the Gesamtkunstwerk (ge-samt-KUNST-werk), or comprehensive artwork(2). This divergence of more traditional aesthetic philosophy may be interpreted almost as a criticism of creativity, but in practice it prompted creative people not to view the only path available as an artist to be cloistered in a studio. In addition to a foundational education in the fine arts, the school taught courses in everything from cabinetry to costuming, textiles to typography, and ceramics to carpentry. Its aim was to elevate the design and craft of the world we create around us and reduce the gap of class between craftspeople and artists. At Bauhaus, art was design and design was art.

As with many things of the period, this experiment in creativity was diminished and then destroyed entirely by the destabilizing rise of far-right politics(3). In 1933, after relocating several times, the school was forced to close. Artists, whether staff or students, were compelled to either conform to the new regime or emigrate. Lucky for us now, many chose the latter option. The design concepts of the Bauhaus were welcomed internationally, took root, and continued to blossom.

The artists of the Bauhaus never quite managed to attain their ideal of the comprehensive artwork. This radical idea did, however, succeed in combining the creativity of artists with the practical applications of craftspeople(4). With a focus on creating for mass production and communication, this way of thinking had set everything up for us to enjoy the many beautiful aspects(5) of the relatively beautiful world in which we live today.

Think what you will about the current mass production of consumer goods(6), but communities today would have a difficult time maintaining current expectations of comfort solely by the cottage industry that met these needs before. In this previous era, the craftsperson could create artisan work for everything from a bowl to a building. To meet those needs today, we rely on the mass manufacturing that the Bauhaus planned for a century ago.

There’s a lot to like and dislike about the modern movement of art that peaked throughout the 20th century(7). Regardless of opinion, these ideas do create a through-line to the ubiquity of design around us today. Regardless of what we may like as individuals, we can count ourselves lucky for the efforts of the artists around us(8).

(1) “Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all return to the crafts! For art is not a “profession.” There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman. The artist is an exalted craftsman. In rare moments of inspiration, transcending the consciousness of his will, the grace of heaven may cause his work to blossom into art. But proficiency in a craft is essential to every artist. Therein lies the prime source of creative imagination.” -Walter Gropius, Bauhaus Manifesto (1919)

(2) I had a professor in college who taught scenic design for the stage as well as general design communication. It’s safe to say he was obsessed with the Bauhaus school and probably just wanted to teach architecture specifically because that’s what he usually did anyways. Despite initially feeling like he was a crazy person, I eventually really began to understand where he was coming from, and now here I am writing an incredibly condensed soapbox piece on why the Bauhaus is the best and saved the 20th century from mundanity. I think that studying Bauhaus design and philosophy was particularly helpful in academic theater, since a work of theater succeeds or fails by the collective efforts of every designer, actor, and the director trying to keep everyone on the same page. Although generally no single person oversees all these disparate aspects, the end product is a comprehensive artwork meant to be seen as a single piece. 

(3) The Nazis were super into art and design as long as it, and everything and everyone else, never disagreed with them and made them look super cool and smart. A tall order.

(4) Art was, and still is in many regards, a practice reserved for the higher classes. As a huge generalization, typical people have had to work at other tasks to generate enough wealth to feed themselves and their families. On the one hand, we saw artists like Van Gogh and Vermeer who constantly sat at the edge of destitution during their careers, yet since about the 1600s the work of creating art had shifted from accomplishing a physical task to an intellectual one. This is all on top of the shift in humanist philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries away from justification of ‘nobility by birth’ to ‘nobility by character and culture.’ I think the Bauhaus ideal of bringing art and craftsmanship together again is quite a beautiful conclusion to that arc at the start of the 20th century.

(5) I feel like I keep managing to talk around this point in the main body without ever really hitting it right on the head, so here it is: We are so lucky to live in a world with artists, and everything that threatens to devalue the arts also risks such an egregious cascading effect. If you follow the thought through to its conclusion of what a world without art would be like, it’s pretty horrible. There would be no need for color, we would all be either dressed the same or for whatever specialized task we were expected to do. There would be no need for advertisements as there may be only one tool available to accomplish a task. No television. No music. It all sounds incredibly silly, like the Vogons from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, because there’s something in us deeply attuned to aesthetics. I don’t think we’ll ever really achieve this nightmare situation, but I’m always disappointed when the job of a creative is replaced by something else or when the most resources go to projects simply meant to achieve the best return for investors rather than contribute to culture in a meaningful way. The focus of art in design that spread from interwar Germany may have done a lot towards saving us from a blander world today, but artists need to be allowed to continue doing our part!

(6) If you wanted MY two cents, I’d love to see consumer goods able to be used for a longer period of time. Things made by dedicated craftspeople generally last SO much longer, but paying them a fair rate is incredibly prohibitive for many consumers. I just spent the weekend with some people in the 1%, but for me, there’s unfortunately no choice to be had between a mass manufactured bed frame that will break in five years versus a handmade one that would last a lifetime. This is kinda like that argument about a poor person having to spend more on many pairs of cheap boots compared to a rich person spending less on a single pair of more expensive boots. Products, clothes, computers, and everything else designed to be obsolete or in tatters in a matter of months or years is bad for the people at the end of the supply chain as well as for the planet.

(7) Speaking from personal experience. We can each have our own personal interests that inform what we like and don’t like. I have a hard time getting anything from uninspired prints thrown together en masse and available at big box stores, but it’s rare that I’ll be in a museum or gallery room and see absolutely nothing worth seeing. Even if it’s just an aspect or two of someone’s work. 

(8) If you’re an artist reading this, thank you for whatever it is that you do. If you’re an underappreciated artist, doubly so. If you're not an artist, SURPRISE you actually are. I don’t make the rules ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

How to Win Friends and Influence (Among the Crows)

What is it like to get in tune with the place you live and work?

Poptart, my weird orange cat, has been sitting with me and taking up her half of the chair for the entirety of writing this entry to the blog. As sleepy co-author, she still deserves some credit. Especially since we both like to watch the crows building their nests (likely for different reasons).

It’s been three weeks since I made a big move from Lynnwood down into Edmonds, and I’m starting to feel pretty well set up. We’re painting the walls(1) one by one as we get to them, my bedroom is close to being in its final form(2), and we’ve been making good use of the Coleman hot tub we put behind the house. We have plans for the backyard that I’ve been looking forward to(3), but even moreso I’d been anticipating getting to walk to work.

When I realized that a change of residence was in my near future, I started the well-practiced routine of asking my friends and partners for any leads on housing. Rental markets aren’t ever really that friendly, but my options were particularly limited. I didn’t want to live right in downtown Edmonds and be tied to the store at the hip(4), but I also wasn’t particularly interested in going even further afield with this move than I already was(5). Luck and a lot of lifting and scheduling and such landed me a place about a half hour walk from the store, and I couldn’t have been happier.

I used to walk everywhere when I was in school in Bellingham. Granted, my world was a little smaller back then, and I barely even used the car I’d gotten on the cheap(6) until after graduating. Walking was a time to sit with my quiet mind, hum my way through songs that’ve been trying to be heard, and see the world far more slowly(7) than I possibly could while focusing on driving with all the perils and speed it brings with it.

Views from my walk to work

I had been looking forward to this because, in the past, walking for extended periods almost daily was good for my mental health. A forced reset in stillness as I make my way slowly to my destination. What I didn’t count on as a matter of fact was the company I’d end up keeping.

I’d noticed the first couple of times I walked that several of the copses of trees along the route were alive with sound. There had been crows I knew that frequented the quiet road out front of my mom’s house(8). Had I found some of my very own?

There’s a surprisingly robust body of literature online surrounding the topic of befriending crows. In short, though, they like to latch on to the same things as me: patience and routine. They have a stronger taste for peanuts than I do, so I decided to trade a bag from Winco (unsalted) for friendship. In just three weeks, they’ve grown from initially trusting that the food wasn’t going to hurt them to congregating in the tree in my front yard when I leave for the day. I sometimes whistle for them(9), but it’s not my intention to treat them as pets or have them treat me as their only source of food. Still though, it’s lovely to see a crow go absolutely nuts for nuts and call out to its family. Soon three or more crows are all joining in its happy dance. For the next few hours at least, they have one fewer thing to worry about.

The crows are just one thing that I’ve gotten to be more in tune with as I’ve settled into my new spot so close to Edmonds. I’m getting to be more in tune with the store and able to jump in as needed when needed at shorter notice. I’ve worried a lot over where I want to be and live, but I think for now I’m happy.

A bonus picture of my outfit for Crow Fest 2022 in Bothell this past October. It’s not even a big deal, but me and my friends DID win best group costume this year.

(1) If every wall is an accent color, then they’re all equally special.

(2) The lump on the back of my head from assembling my bed frame has just about receded. The chunk of wood that was knocked loose by my head is gone for good.

(3) I’m going to gush just a little bit that my partner and I have plans to start growing a reasonable amount of our own food. We’re just about to start turning up ground to plant, we’ll hopefully be set up to keep quails here soon enough to hatch them soon, and next year they offered to build me boxes and frames to keep bees. Homemade encaustic paints anyone?

(4) I love the store a lot; I wouldn’t be taking over ownership if I didn’t. I do value having a bit of distance though while still being close enough to run in at short notice if needed.

(5) If I had taken my budget and had to live on my own, I’d probably be looking at a 30-45 minute commute to Edmonds at least. I do love a long drive. I listened to the entire Witcher series of books while driving from Lynnwood this past year, but at a certain point I just don’t want to be giving that many hours of my life to sitting in a car burning fuel.

(6) My fantastic red Ford Escape was the only other car I owned, and I drove it all the way into the ground before giving it up for the care I have now. Someday I hope to have a car that isn’t 20 years old, but nobody is ever going to get rich selling art supplies.

(7) I think often of a Robert Frost poem, A Passing Glimpse (1928) with lines that include:

I often see flowers from a passing car

That are gone before I can tell what they are.

and

Heaven gives it glimpses only to those

Not in position to look too close.

(8) Agnes, the crow, went by as many different names as there were people who fed her, but that’s how I knew her. She was easy to recognize with a broken wing that prevented her from ever even attempting flight. As far as I know, she hasn’t been seen in at least a few months, which doesn’t look good for her.

(9) The same combination of notes every time. Patience and routine.

A Tale of Two Skates:

Running a serious business in a Very serious way

It’s a well-established fact…

…that ARTspot is one of the coolest spots in downtown Edmonds(1). That’s said not as a business owner, but as someone who was eight years old when the Wishing Stone opened a store in Edmonds down by the waterfront and there was finally something interesting to see in the early 2000s. I grew up in Edmonds(2). Despite traveling around a bunch and considering myself a somewhat worldly person I was always perplexed in my earlier twenties that I somehow always ended up back in Edmonds. I think it’s because I actually really like it here? Edmonds is really special to me for many reasons. One of the big reasons is the kernel of wonderful weirdness that lives in the community of artists that have made Edmonds their home(3).

To anyone outside that community, the arts may seem like a foreign concept reserved for others. The terrible truth, though, is that someone you know, and probably even someone you love, is an artist(4). And artists are weird. The weirder the better. Weirdness helps you find comfort in taking the risk of creating something genuinely awful. If you’re already weird then what do you have to lose? It’s ARTspot’s mission to provide artists with the tools and expert advice to find success in what they’re doing, but I also view it as an integral part of what we do here to encourage taking comfort in weirdness.

Just a normal guy doing normal things in a normal way.

Salvador Dali Walking an Anteater through Paris (1969)

To pivot the subject slightly, in the winter of 2021 we had all been weathering the COVID-19 pandemic to the point where the new normal felt pretty normal. It also kinda felt like we were still trudging through a swamp that fewer and fewer people wanted to acknowledge. It had been a weird time, but not in a particularly good way, and I hadn’t really made art or felt any creative drive in months by then(5). I was working at the art store, which at least afforded me the joy of being around other creative people and sharing in their joy, but it wasn’t a great time for me(6). 

My background in the arts is in costume design, which is all about nudging and pushing viewers’ perceptions for one reason or another. I was stuck in a major rut, so I decided to nudge my own perception as a viewer of myself. 

Wouldn’t it be fun to get really good at roller skating? (7)

So I’ve been wearing roller skates around the store almost every day for a year and a bit!(8) I started very slowly and cautiously after closing while running inventory reports, and to date I’ve never collided with a person or fallen on a display. My black Impala(9) skates, even when they were unadorned at first, were a great icebreaker for anyone coming into ARTspot with a serious attitude or expecting a serious store staffed by serious people. We take creativity seriously, but a big part of that is embracing the weird and wonderful.

These are my skates as of today! February 6th, 2023

Subject to change at an artistic whim. I could have taken a better photo of them, but I didn’t want to take them off.

By now, I’ve used POSCA acrylic markers(10) to cover my skates with more and more bits. Quotes from David Bowie and Ai Wei Wei(11), a Sex Pistols logo, and a guillotine for no reason in particular(12). They all wear off because the canvas in this case is something that gets used hard and regularly, and the only thing I always replace just the same is the bright yellow and pink of the Pistols. Acrylics are pretty durable, but if you think I skate hard at ARTspot, you ought to come out to the Lynnwood Bowl and Skate sometime for an 18+ night(13).

(1) Not for lack of competition! It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about Edmonds as Deadmonds, and I think that’s only partially because of my advancing age. Though I must say there’s still nobody down here that sells Pokemon cards, which is what I primarily thought was cool at age 5.

(2) And Lynnwood a little bit. And what I think was unincorporated Snohomish County when I was really little, but I’m pretty sure there’s a Park & Ride and a Fred Meyer there now. I know it’s just going to get more pronounced as I continue to age in the same location, but it blows my mind how much this area has changed. There were horses down the street from my first house in Edmonds. Horses! In Edmonds!

(3) It’s lowkey very cool that downtown Edmonds was marked as the first Creative District in Washington. I think that opened up some funding for further cultural development. With all this development, I’m really hopeful that people from all walks of life will find ways to visit Edmonds, contribute to the culture here, and then hopefully help to enrich wherever they call home.

(4) It’s a pillar of the ARTspot philosophy that everyone has a creative side and a right to be able to access it. It may not take the form of visual art, but we love it when it does!

(5) I think the last bit of fun I had making art for a long while was back in April of 2020 when the business I was working at at the time (not ARTspot) was compelled by the state to send its workers home on lockdown as nonessential. I ordered, assembled, and painted a custom 3-D printed miniature of Darth Vader for a tabletop game I played hoping that I’d be able to play with my friends soon and impress them all. We’ve still not been able to get back together for a real game night.

(6) And I’m the author here so my feelings matter.

(7) Like, really good. Like Gene Kelly in It’s Always Fair Weather levels of good. I think about this routine a lot and marvel at how flat the street is despite being pretty sure it has to be a 1950s MGM soundstage. If any readers have ever attempted to skate a set of quads down an Edmonds sidewalk, you’d have a new appreciation for well maintained pedestrian infrastructure.

(8) Taking off my skates at the end of the day has become the worst part of any day. To go from gliding and swooping around with little effort to manually plodding around is such a wid shift. I haven’t needed to rearrange anything at ARTspot to accommodate my skating, but I totally have started to view the layout of things as a series of arcs and straightaways I can maneuver through, each with their own speeds to be able to stop nimbly to avoid something or someone.

(9) I am, unfortunately, not sponsored or affiliated in any way with Impala skates, but they do have some very cute designs and pretty good prices considering how well they’re built. If you or anyone you know may work for Impala or a similar roller skate-making company, please consider making more of your styles in sizes larger than a US Women's 9. All my fellow Amazonian transfemme skater babes will thank you and sing your praises until our deaths.

(10) I initially wrote this entire post as an Ode to POSCA, which felt a bit too much like a smelly sales pitch. That’s not really the goal of these posts, but if y’all ever want to listen to someone wax poetic about POSCA like Lieutenant Commander Data talks about his cat, please come in and speak to either myself or Vincent.

(11) “The purpose of art is the fight for freedom,” is a powerful reminder that art and creativity is not just for looking pretty or for making people happy. While curating the Intersections show last spring, I made a point to ask for and include art that I knew may spark an uncomfortable feeling for some viewers despite being shown in a setting that is ultimately safe for them. Art can be so many different things! Whether you’re making it (and you should) or seeking it out to take in through your senses, accept that it doesn’t have to look good for it to be good. I’m a huge supporter of making bad art badly!

(12) I’m a bit of a dirty anarchist, which is shocking I’m sure, but it puts me in an awkward position of also being a business owner raised up into the petite bourgeoisie by merit of knowing a lot about art supplies and coming from a family with access to enough capital to have started a business. I have a guillotine painted on my skates and also sometimes wear a guillotine necklace gifted to me by a friend when I accepted an ownership role to remind me that nobody is inherently better than anyone else and that everything is built on the efforts of others. Maybe all business owners, big and small, should have a little guillotine somewhere to remind themselves to keep humble and honest about the work they do.

(13) If you, like me, exhibit what the young folks are calling Main Character Energy, then maybe the 18+ Night at the Lynnwood Bowl and Skate is the place for you! As a certified freak, I’ve never felt less weird than when I’m surrounded by a bunch of people in their 20s-60s who all choose to go roller skating on a Monday night.

Conflating Gender and Color

Pink is for faers, blue is for zirs

That’s a butchering of neopronouns, which this entry will neither expound upon nor explain further, but i hope it got your attention

A child, maybe two years old, sits for a photograph in 1884. They have shoulder-length hair, which has not yet been cut, a ruffly white dress, patent leather shoes, and are holding a very fun-looking hat. Let not your eyes deceive you because the photograph is one of the earliest of the 32nd US president, Franklin D. Roosevelt(1). Until a certain age, children would wear white because it was easy to bleach. Dresses were practical to accommodate diaper changes. It was common for everything to be adorned with ribbons. At the time, however, children simply weren’t dressed to differentiate boys and girls. Kids were, and still are, just kids.

A normal, cutiepie boy c.1884

By medical happenstance, I grew up in a world surrounded by shades of blue. My parents were more progressive than some, so I wasn’t forced to exclusively wear or display this single color(2). Regardless, it proved impossible to navigate a life of unhappily assigned male-ness without associating it with the long history of masculinity that came before me. But if young men even just one hundred years ago generally wore white dresses, how vast could that history really be?

Not very, it turns out. Pastel shades started to become popular for children in the early 1900s(3), but it wasn’t until the 1940s that manufacturers and advertisers decided on our modern concept of blue for boys and pink for girls and pushed for normalization. The baby boomers are the first generation who grew up dressed like their mothers and fathers in pinks and blues. Coincidentally, it’s harder to pass down clothing from an older sibling to a younger one if they have mismatched gender assignments; parents would simply have to buy more things for their kids to fit in. 

My last entry was a quick dive into the color blue, which spawned the idea for this follow-up, but there’s too much to say about pink to fit into the remaining half of this post. Suffice to say, pink has a history with humanity that stretches as far back as our relationship with red. It wasn’t used to describe the color we recognize now until the very late 1700s(4), but it’s been popularized by everything from swirling scenes of opera and cabaret(5) to aristocratic mistresses(6), concentration camp victims to human rights movements(7), and punk rock aesthetic(8) to pussy-hatted protesters. 

So much PINK! It still blows my mind that the Rocky Horror Picture Show was made in 1975. Was it low budget? Yes. Did actual people still spend actual money to make this ridiculous movie almost fifty years ago? Also yes!

With all that’s changed in our perception of the meaning of color and the various forces of influence behind it all, it begs the question: is it bad that blue is for boys and pink is for girls? This may come as a shock to some who know me, but my answer is no(9). 

People seem to want group identity and seek acceptance within their chosen groups. It seems natural to follow that groups become associated with symbols, colors, flags, songs, and more to differentiate themselves. If you look at the LGBTQ+ pride movements, you’ll see a truly remarkable variety of colors used to denote broad and specific identities(10) or even as code to signal others in the know. I think it’s wrong to try and remove people’s innate sense of healthy group identity; whatever that group has chosen to assume as their symbols is theirs. I do, however, believe the trouble comes up when groups are intended to cause harm and  take away from others or when group identity is forced, rather than treated as an opportunity for exploration(11). Our shared delusion that blue is for boys and pink is for girls is harmless, or even empowering, so long as the conflation between color and gender is optional for everyone regardless of age.

(1) I’ll come out and say it, he was a very adorable kid in his dress.

(2) In actuality, I played dress-up a lot as a kid. My sister and I had an extensive variety of weird costumes, having been blessed in the 90s with a seamstress grandma. Stuff like this is pretty wildly good for kids to express and experiment outside the realm of cultural norms!

(3) As per an American trade magazine in 1918: ““The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Earnshaw's Infants' Department

(4) The word comes to us from the Dianthus plant, which is commonly referred to as a “Pink.” There are references from as far back as the 1600s to objects being “pink-coloured,” but the English language had previously relied on a few other words. Namely, incarnation, or in reference to the body of Christ as a literal flesh tone. I doubt Europeans in the 1700s were particularly focused on increasing their wokeness, but personally I’m glad the language has moved away from describing this common color as associated with a somehow inexplicably white Jesus. Not everyone looks like that.

(5) Opera Pink is one of my favorite colors and was made very dear to me by someone who used to work at ARTspot with me back in, like, 2015 or something. He was (and I think still is) fabulous, and the colors he liked were equally vibrant. This particular pink (PR 122 for those cool babes in the know) is sometimes criticized for its lightfastness and is supplanted by Permanent Rose (PV19 ew gross), which weirdly has less of a violet bias in a few lines of paint and is less fabulous.

(6) I’m talking about Madame de Pompadour, the official mistress of King Louis the 15th in France c.1750. You can try, but you’ll never be as cool as she was.

(7) Apparently the footnotes are all going to be about history for this entry. I honestly don’t know how many people outside of the affected communities realize this, but the Holocaust extended its remarkably horrifying umbrella over communities of gay and trans people as well as so many others marked as undesirable or a threat to the social order. They applied a label of a pink triangle to identify gay and bisexual men as well as trans women, which was later (and still is) reclaimed by liberation groups in Germany and then beyond. One of my favorite things in the world of media is its inclusion in one of Dr. Frank-N-Furter’s costumes in the Rocky Horror Picture Show (performed LIVE this upcoming Saturday the 4th at the Downtown Seattle Regal Cinema by the Vicarious Theater Company, including yours truly!). I’m very not sorry to be a threat to a social order that would prefer to erase delightful people like myself.

(8) I didn’t quite put this together until I was decorating my roller skates with POSCA markers. I was drawing out the Sex Pistols logo, which has lots of pink, and started noticing it came up pretty often in a lot of punk design. All the weird leftover crustpunks I made friends with in Hackney back in 2016 insisted that the only two colors are red and black. They’re great colors, don’t get me wrong, but a bright, obnoxious pink is such a good tool in the arsenal of anarchy. It’s very hard to ignore!

(9) I have a lot more thoughts about this that wouldn’t easily fit into a 600 word chunk of writing. Obviously the world and the problems therein are much more complicated than a simple yes or no binary. My reasoning in the following paragraph is brief, but I hope it resonates with some looking to claim or reclaim their masculinity in a healthy way; I know it’s something I balance on an everyday basis. In the same sense, these sorts of social systems can be very harmful to some who are trapped in them. To anyone who finds themselves in that boat, I’m very sorry and I hope you’re able to navigate your way out through your own competence and the good intentions of those you surround yourself with. I love you, and it will get better.

(10) Yes, even blue and pink. They show up in the flags for transgender pride as well as those of Demiboys and Demigirls and Lesbians as signifiers of “boy-ness,” and “girl-ness.”

(11) I hope this brief qualification helps to reinforce my earlier point. Please always continue questioning your communities regardless of whether they’re chosen or if you’ve been thrust into them. I no longer really attend, but the church I was raised in was very big on questioning authority, including its own. I’m really very glad to have seen that value demonstrated when I was a kid. No institution or social grouping is so perfect as to justify making life a worse experience for others. Those of us who have benefited from these systems have an obligation to apply those benefits for universal equity to achieve equality.

Monday Blues

What’s the deal with blue?

This color is everywhere, but where does it come from? What’s our relationship to the color blue?

A book I distinctly remember growing up is Gathering Blue by Lois Lowry. It’s part of a series of related stories(1) aimed at young people and focused on a young protagonist who learns the skills of embroidery and dyeing. A notable aspect to the story is how impossible it is to find, make, and use the color blue in her craft(2). 

Blue represents something intangible to us. The sea and sky, equally sublime(3) and both blue through a trick of the light scattering but holds no pigment of its own. Where does all the blue(4) come from?

The Aegean Sea. Homer described the crossing to Troy from the Greek mainland as a wine-dark sea. A dubious fact I once heard is that people from way back when didn’t have a good word for blue, hence the wine-darkness, but also he was just describing what was probably a pretty dark and stormy sea.

As a vast oversimplification, our eyeballs see visible light either directly emitted from a source, scattered or filtered between the source and our eyes, or by reflecting off a surface that itself absorbs some of the other perceptible colors. Some stars emit blue light by their particular fusion process, and there are molecules that filter light to appear blue as it passes through them(5). The next time you’re walking around outside, keep an eye open for the color blue coming or reflecting from a purely natural source(6). We’re surrounded by a panoply of pigments so dense and varied that it’s hard to remember they’re there, but all these pigments have to come from somewhere. Where does all the blue come from??

Pigments have been made for many thousands of years from the earth. Browns, reds and yellows can be taken directly from the ground(7). Others can be taken from the plants and animals around us and processed into usable dyes. These are more vivid greens, reds, and yellows but these colors still all come from somewhat obvious sources(8). Usable blue is harder to come by. When you do it can present a number of issues.

Ultramarine blue has been a staple in western art for hundreds of years, but the imported lapis lazuli needed for it made the pigment worth its weight in gold or more(9). Dye created from woad, which grew throughout Europe, were rare to come by in the quantities needed(10), and cobalt is a heavy metal that’s dangerous to be repeatedly exposed to(11). Indigo, though much more potent than woad and easier to grow in warm climates, didn’t become common in the west until the age of colonization. The human spirit, indomitable as it is in its creative drive, decided to make what it couldn’t find.

Girl with a Pearl Earring (1665) Johannes Vermeer. Also a movie I remember watching MANY times with my mom growing up.

The first synthetic blue pigment was created by Egyptians over 3000 years ago(12). The combination of sand, copper, and calcium create a blue glass that, when ground, becomes a pigment that is incredibly stable(13). Later, when western science began to rediscover and build on knowledge of chemistry that’d been lost, the variety of synthetic pigments exploded(14). In a post industrial-scientific revolution world, we’re surrounded by a plethora of vibrant colors, and yes, even blues(15). The vibrancy of the world we’ve surrounded ourselves with is so commonplace that it’s hard to imagine a world with less. 

In the plentiful downtime at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, I took it upon myself to learn as much as I could about pigments and the science behind them as possible without having to pay anything. This turned out to be a surprising amount seeing as much of this science was deeply explored in the 1800s when a hot new color and a few textile mills was all a guy needed to make it big in the British Empire. Whenever you come by the store, please please cut me off whenever you’re done hearing about pigments, especially blues, because I can, and will, just keep going and going.

1.  Including The Giver and Messenger, these were some pretty dark, dystopian books about a future that was both grim and repressive but also somehow beautiful? I remember thinking they seemed a bit heavy for kids, but life’s heavy. They touch on themes of community, friendship, and small acts of civic disobedience making a big difference bit by bit.

2.  Before reading a synopsis for this book while researching this post, I remembered the plot being entirely centered around finding a usable blue pigment like a full-on Dungeons & Dragons quest, but I seem to have forgotten all the far more interesting parts of the book. I feel like I probably ought to give this one a re-read!

3.  I have a very amateur, hobby-level interest in societies from the past (a minor in archaeology), and it’s an interesting point of comparison to see what beings, objects, or other forces people have assigned religious significance to. The sea and the sky both tend to feature prominently among pantheons, and I don’t blame people. They are both huge, always changing, dangerous, and above all beautiful. I learned what the word sublime meant by definition just a few years ago when I was figuring out some very big things about myself and realized I wanted to settle to be nothing less.

4.  I’m blue, Da ba dee da ba di, Da ba dee da ba di, Da ba dee da ba di, Da ba dee da ba di, Da ba dee da ba di, Da ba dee da ba di, Da ba dee da ba di

5. When I was going through theater school for costume design, I was required to take a beginning lighting design class because the qualities of light bouncing off your costumes affects how they’re seen. Huge surprise, right?  Anyways by the internal machinations of the university I actually ended up in a 400-level lighting class with four graduating seniors in their field, and I learned a lot that I still use every day. It goes to show that if you aim higher than your station, even if by accident, you stand to gain a lot.

6. George Carlin did a really great standup bit, Where’s all the Blue Food, that illustrates this point nicely. I don’t know exactly how I feel about George Carlin, and honestly he was a bit before my time, but I do admire some of his statements condemning comedy that “punches down.”

7. If you haven’t seen pictures of the Lascaux Cave Paintings, look now. Or better yet, visit just east of Bordeaux where they’ve built an exact replica of the cave and its art you can walk around in without worry of damaging the irreplaceable archaeological site!

8.  I could probably do a very interesting blog post on the difference between dyes and pigments. I promise you’ll be absolutely riveted.

9. The Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer was allegedly so enamored with ultramarine blue that it drove him and his family into poverty. The opinion of this much-removed writer thinks that masterworks like Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Milkmaid were worth it as representations of less aristocratic people and an inversion of norms regarding the use of the color blue. Because of its high price and rarity, blue in paintings was generally reserved for depictions of the Virgin Mary. That’s one reason why for centuries blue was associated with femininity until at some point we decided that blue was totally macho. I could probably write another blog post just about blue and pink and how silly it all is.

10. This is the stuff we see Mel Gibson painted up with in Braveheart. Although it was grown all over Europe, woad was allegedly used by the Brigantes of ancient Britain because of blue’s association with a Celtic war goddess. That might also have just been weird Roman propaganda about the spooky, ooky barbarians, so who knows.

11. The cobalt mines of Germany were so deadly even without considering the long term impact of regular handling of heavy metals that stories began to circulate of evil creatures laying traps and killing the miners. These kobolds are mostly around these days for level 1 adventurers to beat up in Dungeons & Dragons.

12. Progress is not linear.

13.  Blue pigments tend to be stable compared to reds, oranges, and yellows because the blue molecules reflect light of a blue wavelength, which is higher energy than the red light at the other end of the visible spectrum. Higher energy light/radiation can blast apart molecules, so reds especially tend to have bigger issues with lightfastness.

14. Unfortunately my favorite pigment story doesn’t concern the color blue. In 1856 an eighteen year-old British chemist who was experimenting with a cheaper way to synthesize quinine, a treatment for malaria and integral to colonial efforts deeper into the African continent in particular, accidentally discovered the first synthetic purple dye. This made him extraordinarily rich.

15.  My second favorite pigment story is from 2009 when researchers from Oregon State University accidentally developed a new blue pigment for the first time in almost 200 years. YInMn Blue, named after the Yttrium, Indium, and Manganese atoms that make it up, is an incredibly boring name and a great reason why creative people should continue getting involved in the sciences! Because of the complex elements that go into YInMn Blue, it’s very expensive despite it being kind of commercially available. We don’t have any for sale at ARTspot, but we do have a swatch that a very cool and kind customer let me make from a 1/4oz of this new blue that cost them $40.

Pencils Have No Right to be as Cool as They Are

What even is graphite?

Where did it come from? What do we do with it now that it’s here?

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Pencils are ubiquitous in the arts for good reason

Where did they all come from??

I doubt I’ve ever met someone who has never held a bright yellow, No.2 pencil. Probably a Ticonderoga, named after a spot in New York where graphite was processed back in the day. The graphite came from Lead Mountain in Maine(1), but there’s no elemental lead to be found anywhere in a pencil(2). But the Ticonderoga pencils mostly come from Mexico(3) now, and it’s a lot of information and we haven’t even started talking about war yet. And what does any of this actually have to do with lead?

So let’s roll back to answer this lead question. Way back to when information was even more muddled and less reliable than today. There’s some accounts(4) that in Roman times, scribes would use a stylus made of lead to make various marks. However, historians of the time were less interested in the mundanities of everyday life and bureaucracy than they were in military and political epics. What I consider to be a somewhat more credible source comes from the 1500s in England. After a storm, some folks happened upon strange, dark material clinging to the roots of a fallen tree. The material was initially misidentified as lead(5), but in fact the tree had grown atop the largest, purest deposit of graphite ever found. England was first in the European pencil-making business completely by accident.

Pencils rock. You can do practically anything with them worth doing, and their utility as both writing and artistic instruments were quickly apparent. My classmates joked in middle school that NASA had spent millions to develop a pen that would work in zero gravity whereas the Kosmonauts simply used a pencil to record information(6). As graphite became more widely available, pencils outperformed the various metalpoint art techniques(7) that had been practiced for centuries in Europe.

Do not run around with sharpened pencils. A portrait of Nicolaus-Jacque (1755-1805)

So now we come to war, blockades, and a mostly-unsuccessful balloonist named Conté(8). In the midst of the Napoleonic Wars in the late 1700s and early 1800s, Britain was less interested in trading their super pure and excellent graphite with their continental rival. You know how math teachers won’t accept work unless it’s in pencil because only a madman works in ink? It’s the same idea. The necessity to turn in their math homework and anti-British artillery calculations drove Nicolas-Jacques Conté to mix more widely available graphite powder with clay and water(9). This could be dried in a kiln, encased in wood for strength, and became the model for our modern concept of a pencil. A similar method was in use by Joseph Hardmuth and the Koh-I-Noor company, who patented the process and developed the grading system of H’s and B’s we still use today(10). Companies like Hardmuth, Conté, and Derwent all date back to around this period and are still in existence today!

I always tell people that almost every other kind of visual art is built atop drawing skills(11). Working with pencils may not be as sexy as jumping straight to painting or pastels, but I can guarantee it’s hard to find a good drawing pencil for more than four dollars(12). It’s nearly impossible to find paints, brushes, and an appropriate working surface for anything close to that. Coincidentally, any of the great painters I know are also brilliant with a pencil. In the field of art where technique and style are developed through repetition(13), it pays not to spend a fortune developing your fundamental skills. Besides, how could anyone say that a pencil is anything less than extraordinary?

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(1)  Or maybe somewhere in Massachusetts? I wasn’t really expecting to have my research in the history of graphite pencil production to feel more like I was researching the enigmatic roots of a mythology. Maybe I’m the weird one for thinking pencil-history is cool enough to be worth it, and if you think that’s the case then maybe skip this blog.

(2) Thank goodness, honestly. I found some sources that lead may have been present in some pencils until as late as when consumer lead use was mostly banned in the US (1978). While I don’t support lead poisoning for babies, artists do genuinely miss lead white. If we can have it back, we promise to not put paintings in our mouths and not use it on walls and toys.

(3)  I don’t intend to bad-talk Mexican production. Dixon-Ticonderoga pencils are perfectly average, and really I’m mostly salty about Prismacolor’s drop in quality after outsourcing production to any factory with reduced tests of quality.

(4) Or no citable accounts insofar as I could find. People write about it but never conclusively.  I do love a good historical anecdote though, especially if it confirms what I already think I know.

(5) To be honest, my knowledge of chemistry is maybe about as strong as that of an educated peasant in the 16th century. If I found a strange, dark material in the dirt I might just assume it’s dirt. Not a historically impactful mineral deposit.

(6) I have no comment on what they might have done to mitigate the loose eraser dust floating around the spacious interior of a Soyuz space capsule. Maybe they used a kneaded eraser.

(7) Namely silverpoint drawings. If you think art supplies are expensive today, I can assure you that it’s cheaper than buying silver rods.

(8) To quote Al-Jabarti’s thoughts on Conte’s disappointing ballooning incident in Cairo in 1798: “Their claim that this apparatus is like a vessel in which people sit and travel to other countries in order to discover news and other falsifications did not appear to be true.” Still, the guy knew more about it than I do. Probably.

(9) British graphite was sawn from blocks, which created a lot of unusable powder as waste unusable until 1838 when Henry Bessemer invented a compression technique that is still used. Why compress when you can have a nice slurry of carbon and clay though?

(10) When I was little I thought the H stood for hard because it was harder and made a lighter line. The softer B rating was a mystery. Bsoft? In fact the H stands for Hardmuth and the B is for Budějovice in modern day Czech Republic, where the pencils were produced after 1847. The less common rating of F stands for Franz, Joseph’s grandson.

(11) In a traditional Atelier art education it can be years before students are allowed to touch paint. The artists insane enough to make it through a machine that forges skilled artists are impossibly good at drawing.

(12) It’s not impossible though. I’m looking at you, Blackwing Volumes. You can get a functionally similar pencil for about a dollar or so less, but I contend that the cool design is worth it. Side note: if anyone can find and sell me a Volume 155: Bauhaus pencil for less than $50, please let me know. I feel like I should really get into the Blackwing-scalping business.

(13) I’ll probably do another blog post about this and try really hard not to let it devolve into a rant, but the hard work that goes into becoming a skilled artist is often attributed to natural talent. I think this is a mythology supported by people who see the understandably tedious process of practicing as impossible. Unsurprisingly, a lot of the neurologically atypical folks I know who hyperfixated on drawing since childhood are coincidentally “super talented”.

What's a day like in the life of an art supply store?

Welcome to the Day in the Life of an Art Store Blog!

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My name is Ziggy (or Zigmund Felicity Fraker if you prefer formality). my aim with this blog is to translate some of the gibberish art-talk and pull back the curtain on just what it’s like to help run a small art supply store in downtown Edmonds, Washington.

There’s never a bad time or place to make art in downtown Edmonds! (Photo by Tracy Felix)

I’m an Edmonds native, but I didn’t think I’d end up here for the long haul. Growing up on top of the bowl, putting in nine years at Maplewood K-8, and making my way through high school at Meadowdale did prepare me pretty well though. Now I’m figuring out what actual adulthood looks like for me, and I can’t imagine setting down roots anywhere else. Edmonds has changed so much since I was little, for the better, I think. Selling art supplies to the people in and around Edmonds is the next part of a big adventure.

Working in art supplies has been a singularly unique experience. I’ve dipped in and out of ARTspot for all ten years of its life. I spent some time with other lines of work and lived in LA for six weird months after graduating university, but I always kept coming back to the store as a safe and fun place to work. After ten years of answering questions and researching new materials to bring in I realized that I had accidentally become somewhat of an expert, I think at least. When Tracy indicated that she was interested in transferring ownership, it felt like I’d made the choice to accept years ago without quite realizing that either.

An unfortunate reality is that art supplies are a luxury to many, although they can be of great benefit to any and everyone. To paraphrase one of the core philosophies at ARTspot: everyone has a creative spirit, and sometimes they just need a little push to find and direct it. Art of any kind has the potential to express feeling, communicate a thought, and explore aspects of our identity while we make our way through life. It’s always been a goal for ARTspot to stock various levels of quality materials to help fit the needs and means of anyone who visits us. I don’t think anyone here is going to get rich selling art supplies considering that it’s our honest goal to sell you the right thing. Not the most expensive thing.

It’s been a dream to finagle our way into a larger space someday, but I do enjoy the challenge of maintaining a beautiful space to shop in while still maintaining a healthy variety. Whenever I or my family travel anywhere we always make a point to visit a small (or large) family-owned art supply store. All over the world, it’s amazing to me just how similar we all are to each other. You’ll see the same polychromos colored pencils, princeton heritage brushes, and copic markers here at ARTspot as you’d find at Sennelier’s in Paris or Uematsu in Tokyo. Art and the supplies that make it are truly a global phenomenon!

I think that’s enough waxing poetic about ARTspot, creativity, and everything else on my mind for now. I want to use this blog to explore some of the weird intricacies of why art supplies are the way they are, why putting your resources towards supporting small businesses in your community is (not even in a selfish way) of the highest importance, and just what it’s like when every day is a day in the life of an art supply store.