My Lunch With Sarah

Just got home from having a wonderful time with Sarah Parsons over lunch at Claire's, the restaurant overlooking the ocean at the Long Beach Museum of Art. She and I have done this a few times through the years to catch up on each other's lives, and it is now our very own tradition.

TIPS FROM SARAH:

1. How to make slime - mix Elmer's glue and water in equal amounts and then add a tablespoon of Borax mixed into a cup of warm water. You can add paint or food coloring for color; food coloring will stain your hands and paint won't. You can play with it in your hands; you can press it out and cut forms with cookie cutters; you can put it in empty plastic strawberry baskets, hang the baskets from the ceiling and watch the slime seep out through the holes. Then, you can even cut the seeping strands of slime with scissors! (Sarah works with toddlers and they love the stuff.)

2. Where The Wild Things Are, the movie, is terrific.

3. Wolves can be very scary.

Crown of Thorns Plant (Euphorbia E. Milii)

Native to Africa, this lovely plant grows splendidly in Southern California, too. Exotic looking with clustered pairs of red bracts, Crown of Thorns needs little water after established and very little attention, other than standing over it saying, "Ah... how BEEUUUTEEE ful!" And isn't that something we all like to hear?

Creative Energy In The Air

At this point in the course, students in my introductory screenprinting class have learned basic skills and are now adding their own creative elements to the assignments. This is one of my favorite times of the semester: I love to see individualized and diverse approaches to assignments taking shape. I'll post some of those images later, but here are some photos of students at work during project development stages.


Joey Luck works at the light table to perfect the transparency he'll use later to create a photo-emulsion stencil.


Carmen Ortega and Allison Porterfield are turning sketches into final drawings.

Zavijava Smith is washing out her screen after a successful photo-emulsion image exposure.


Roger O'Leary-Archer, in the advanced section, is curating a finished print edition.


Traci Durfee, another advanced student, beams agreeably for the camera as she begins to prepare her screen for printing.

It's Official: Rain in Southern California

It rained steadily all night and we are still feeling a gentle blanket of wet this morning. Very nice for dry, water-starved areas of So Cal like ours. But the storm might cause mudslides in hillsides around the L.A. basin where the fires raged recently, so this weather provokes both thankfulness and worries.

Cloudy Sky Over My Studio

Looks and feels like it could rain - a bit early, still, for So Cal. Our rainy season is usually in the winter months, with no rain at all during the rest of the year.

Pink

...is the color of the day. Here is a scene from the beautiful Japanese Gardens located on a hill above Portland, Oregon.

Test Your Eyesight

This card is to be viewed through a Telebinocular. If the viewer sees both pig and dog at the same time, eyesight is sufficient. Even better, though, is to see the dog over the pig. Complete failure, according to the instructions, is to see a dog only, a pig only, or both a dog and a pig, but not at the same time.


This is a warm-up card. When looking at it through the Telebinocular, the viewer will see the turkey behind bars. (A sad image, though, don't you think?)


This card tests color blindness.

All three cards are part of the Keystone Diagnostic Series created by the Keystone View Company in Meadville, Pennsylvania. Era unknown. (Yes, another swap find. Can you see how much fun the swap is? One never knows what interesting thing might appear...)