Something about color.....

 ...that keeps me returning to this piece.

When I first designed it, I had taken inspirations from Jasper John's numbers piece, a gorgeous sketch drawn in charcoal. Please see post:

https://democracyspokenhere.blogspot.com/2022/10/time-flies-when-youre-not-having-fun.html

But the five letters and plus sign superimposed didn't do well. I never printed it. However, I redesigned it; some software issues came up when processing the files for plates. Also, bids to silkscreen the CMYK came back expensive, so I designed it again, this time in black & white. Thinking about printing both.

Perhaps Most Disturbing....

Miss Mrs. Mom, 2024. RISO print, 8 x 8 in.

...is the entrenched belief, still pervasive in many societies, that a woman can be considered property. The horrific case of Giséle Pelicot in France underscores this reality, revealing that even in so-called "evolved" societies, women are often treated as second-class citizens.

If unfamiliar with the 10-year-long, videotaped gang rape of an Avignon woman by her husband and over 70 invited perpetrators, I urge you to read more here https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/19/style/gisele-pelicot-rape-trial-verdict-image.html.

Equally troubling is the glaring absence of male voices in the reporting and opinion pieces surrounding this case. Where is the male perspective? Why has there been so little commentary or engagement from men on an issue of such profound international significance?

A Woman First

 Long ago I went to a Right to Choose march in Washington DC. I went with a friend and her young daughters. I was telling a makeup artist who occasionally worked at my studio about my upcoming trip.

This woman was an observant orthodox woman. She was inspired that I was going to Washington; she couldn't go because the march was on a Saturday. My surprise came when she told me she was decidedly Pro Choice. 

I was under the impression people of strong convictions would be quite the opposite. However, she explained: "I'm religious, and I'm looking forward to a large family. Chances are strong I'd never have an abortion or question God's will for me. But life isn't black and white. Life is all about the grey area. And though God and my belief is at the center of my existence, I'm a Woman First". 

A Woman First, 2024. 2-color 
RISO print. 10 x 10 inches.

Time Races Without Pause

A re-design of RDWB -- Ringing Doorbell While Black was accepted throughout the US in numerous exhibitions, and in surprising areas...who would have thought that a 2-color letterpress print about gun violence would be hanging in a university museum in Laramie, Wyoming or a gallery in Austin, Texas?

Us and Them

After walking from Venezuela through the insane lawlessness Colombian border, trudging further north though Narcoville--8 Central American countries--might seem like a cakewalk, if you ignore any human, drug, weapon, automobile traffickers. Then you get to the US where your kids used to be taken away from you with the intention of deterring your emigration, but we've gotten away from that.

Once you get here, you're crammed on a bus or charter plane in Texas or Florida and end up in freezing New York, where you're promptly shipped to where...? tropical Canada in April? 

The political stunts keep getting worse. 70,000 migrants came to New York City in the Spring, 100,000 since August of last year, exhausting even the most liberal NY-ers dealing with a--remember?--resurgent Covid wave. 

And, many more are emigrating from other frightening areas around the world: Haiti, warring countries in Africa, and, the US's favorite, the Ukraine. 

   13 x 18" 2-color letterpress print.

Where will they live? What will they eat? Where will they work? 

The Mayor is a wreck with confrontations from all sides. The governor will give $1B to feed and temporarily house the great number of people before their application for asylum (which could take 3 years  to process) is approved. A temporary work permit may be issued--get this!--150 days after the application for asylum was filed and the mayor is pushing the Biden administration to shorten the wait (awwww, how nice. You wait over four months to work landscaping, construction, or meat processing if you're lucky.)

I feel horrible that the only thing I can do is donate a few bucks and make a print. My Catholic parish has maintained a shelter for years, opened during the Trump years when ICE hounds crawled our sanctuary city. But now? What are we (all) going to do?

RDWB

As if the gun crisis wasn't a bushel of insanity all on its own, the Stand Your Ground law tops the heap. According to Bradyunited.org, "They allow anyone who believes their life to be in danger to use lethal force in an act of self-defense, completely removing the duty to retreat in a public space." (https://www.bradyunited.org/fact-sheets/what-are-stand-your-ground-laws)

Further, it states that these laws:

"are made more lethal by our nation’s history of racism, are reinforced by our nation’s weak gun laws, and are galvanized by outside influence by gun rights groups like the NRA."

Sixteen-year-old Ralph Yarl, a high school junior, sent by his parent to pick up his younger siblings from their friends' house, made the mistake of ringing the doorbell at an incorrect address. 

He was met with a bullet to the head, shot through the glass door, where the shooter could easily see the teenager was just ringing the doorbell. When the boy fell to the ground, the shooter advanced and shot him a second time in the arm.

2-color planned letterpress print

Wounded, the boy got up and ran to three different locations seeking help, until a neighbor on the street told him to lay face down with his hand extended (never mind that his arm was bleeding) until the police responded to the 911 call. The shooter was arrested but freed after 24 hours on the Stand Your Ground law. 

Wrap your head around this: Only after national outrage did the police return to arrest an 84-year old white man, Andrew Lester, and charge him with assault--not attempted murder or a hate crime.

I won't show this creep's picture, but NPR, posted it. 

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/17/1170479923/ralph-yarl-kansas-city-teen-shooting

Plan B

The strongest image of the RISO series on reproductive rights, in my opinion, is Plan B, right. When sifting through the images readily found online and digging a little deeper on pharmaceutical websites and medical journals, I found an NTY article that noted the rush many women have made to purchase Plan B medications and other forms of birth control in the event that restrictions will eventually apply to these areas of reproductive rights as well. 

Get this one: a group called Students For Life Of America is planning to test water "in several large U.S. cities, searching for contaminants that  result from medication abortion." Is this where their financial aid money is going to? Don't these students have something else to do (like...having sex?) https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/14/abortion-pills-bans-dobbs-roe/

A Full Redesign, and Now to Print

Since  the original LGBTQ+ was illegible, I had to reconsider the visuals. I redesigned the letters, still in outline, still in process colors, but in a row.

The printer who I'd wanted to print it went out of business as I was waiting for him to quote the job. Grrr. The disappointment is that the fellows over at Highland Press didn't mind me rolling into town to oversee the job to see it print, whereas other presses, would.

Soliciting bids from printers in the NYC area is a drag. "You don't want to print this digitally? Do you know the difference between inkjet and offset?" The usual condescending crap from combed-over print salesmen, although they've mostly graduated from the wood-paneled office with fax machine, bald eagle inspirational posters and  male desk chachkas.

I miss the days of when I was fore(wo)man at a small, fairly horrible press in Long Island City. I'd get the guys there to print just about anything in between runs for BAM membership offers.

Tracey Moffat, from Scarred for Life, offset print
1994. Tate Gallery, London.

Another issue with printing my job offset is the size press. The press where I was a foreman, we had a 4-color Heidelberg GTO (see above), an awesome press that was perfect for small and short runs. The college where I work had three 1-color GTOs, but had to dismantle its printing lab for many reasons--the most obvious one that offset printing is no longer relevant. Shame, but not a shame. And, using it as a fine art machine is beyond what most pressmen want to do; and nothing associated with offset printing is environmentally friendly.

That's not to say that offset was never used as a fine art medium. Tracey Moffat, an Australian artist and filmmaker, used offset printing to create her Scarred For Life I and II series among many other works that was wildly popular in the mid-1990s. At the Art Institute of Chicago, they had a 1-color press (not sure the brand), available to execute prints. Other than E, printing my contact with offset has been limited. However, it's interesting to report that a product now exists to create plastic offset plates that can be made from a laser printer and produce up to 10,000 impressions. The drawback is that the resolution is 133 dpi--lower than the sharpness of a newspaper image.

Right to not be a Slave

I just finished these three and will send them to print this week. A number of iterations were done since I designed the first one in August when Justice Alito leaked that Dobbs and therefore Roe was on the chopping block.

I've been too busy to write about it's development. I had sat down and designed them planning to make RISO prints out of them. The printer who had printed "78" is no longer in business, and finding another printer who could do these was proving difficult.

I had a sneaking suspicion that what I wanted to do wasn't going to be possible using RISO; namely the blending quality doesn't lend itself to RISO giving predictable results. A printer in PA told me to either silkscreen it or print it digitally. Digital printing was out of the question, since digital printing as a printmaking art form is a no-go. And, screening something like these, forget it. Blend upon blend upon blend. I could do it and would so it, I just don't have the facilities.

Two paths taken: Line files were created, and a RISO printer who would take the chance was also sought, with success. Meanwhile, the work was submitted to Woman Made Gallery's ROE 2.0 show and accepted. Off to Chicago at the end of January.

Time flies when you're not having fun

As far as I can remember, I had a fascination with the typeface Clarendon. Turns out, so did one of my painting heroes, Jasper Johns.

I've been a follower of his since I was in high school when I saw a show of his I-forget-where. He inspired me a lot when I was still taking pictures, opening the door to creating layered images. But as I searched the memory banks, I knew I'd seen something he did long ago that resonated with me.

Jasper Johns, 0-9, 1960. Printed by 

Robert Blackburn.

With the gradual chiseling out from the pandemic, I have had a lot of ideas influenced by the constant barrage of news media. For one, the continuous assault on the LGBTQ+ population. 

Bizarre as it is, and that the majority of the nation is absolutely fine with same-sex marriage, the idea of transgender is flipping people out. Laws are attempting to be passed in states about the un-ending battle of transgender individuals in school athletics. 

Why does this matter? Have children been reduced to entertainment such that they need to perform at sporting events? So what if a 5th grade trans kid can jump higher than your daughter in gymnastics? What does that impact?

Most egregiously, however, is that now, parents who help their children with their identity exploration by providing medical care and medications are being investigated for child abuse. The governor of Texas, Greg Abbot (R), has issued directives for Child Proctive Services of Lubbock, TX to begin criminal investigations into the family of a transitioning adolescent who has requested hormone treatment to delay puberty. (https://www.reuters.com/world/us/texas-investigating-parents-transgender-youth-child-abuse-2022-03-02/)

Again. What does this matter? What business is it of a politician in a far-away state mansion to tell parents and their children what to do/not to do? Parents know what their child wants, needs and how best to support them. A transitioning child is an uncertain situation in most families. Why make it worse by someone else--in government, no less?

All this got me thinking, of the freedoms we do have, at least (most of the time) here in New York. As a spectator, the most I can do is support legislation, show up to rallies and create art pieces. The newest is a further consideration of the layering of ideas, using the layering of the 4-color process used in E.  I could write volumes about this, but here's the piece instead, in progress.   

To see E, please visit https://democracyspokenhere.blogspot.com/2019/10/athol-massachusetts.html                              

anti REP/anti DEM

Total new burn-out.

The mask and wax sitch has numbed everyone. Pandemic burn-out. Quarantine burn-out. Zoom burn-out.  The mask/vax print bombed. It's making fun of a serious issue; and the wrong crowd was digging it. 

So I changed gears.

Right now Joe and Kamala are trying their best, but losing sleep at the direction we're going is a logical transition. The border is still a mess while the tides of nuts are getting stronger as $millions pour in as donations. According to New York Magazine, the well-of-science Republican representative Marjory Taylor Greene, "on April 10, she announced that she had raised $3.2 million in the first quarter, which is a record in fundraising for a House freshman during an off-year election quarter."

OOO-kay. Make-an-artpiece time. 

Here's my latest creation:

It's a diptych, a stencil print. An edition of five, if that many. Bridges to accommodate the bowls in the a, D, R and P; the design work is silent and compensates for some of the quirks I expect. The piece has to look seamless or will fall flat.

It's a tiny piece, with the print surface being a 2-1/2-inch square. It has to be small. I have another, similar file in the works, a 5-inch square for each print surface. I think if it's big it will lose its message in sensationalism, very much like anti MASK and anti VAX did.

The digital print lab opened my eyes to something interesting, since I had built the files as layers in the application so they would line up. I copied the layers, crop lines registration marksand sent out the three files. 

The phone call from the digital rep came quick, since the RIP couldn't read a few visible layers among eight hidden ones. So, that was fixed and sent out. I got back proofs this morning, the burned (digital cut) plates will be coming in later.

I'll be looking for tiny hinges for the final framing, but right now I'm thinking about the design and how it will translate to the files and hence, the printing. 

Interesting, large and public is the work of other stencil artists. Banksy is the leader of the movement, and there are others: (left) DotDotDot from Norway  and Christian Guémy (C215),  an established graffiti artist from Paris. 

                                                                                                                         

Logan Hicks, left, is a former screen printer from New York. Note the fine hand-stenciling work.

Interesting is that among the artists I found, the female stencil artists are not afraid to highlight women's issues. 

The online art site Wide Walls (https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/10-female-street-artists) highlights ten, lists them as street artists and also points out that they are among the few that have broken through the traditionally all-male art practice. Shown here is a mural-in-progress by South African artist Faith 47.

Also surprising--I might not have looked hard enough--I found that very little typography is utilized in the work. 

I'll report on my endeavors soon.

STAY SAFE!

[Thanks to Befront magazine for the report: https://befrontmag.com/2016/06/21/the-7-most-influential-stencil-artists-of-our-time/]

No End to the Project

The Election was a disaster. And so was the aftermath. I don't need to write about it. We were all injected with the daily trauma. Weekly displays on SNL weren't funny because they mirrored the reality we were seeing on the news. We laughed because it we've become cynical and macabre. 

A friend and I were zoom-watching the certification of the vote and instead saw in horror as the Capitol was breached by a mob of angry yahoos. True, when I talk like this, I'm seen as a pretentious, elitist liberal, but hey, I didn't beat up a cop with an American flag. 

"We love you, you're very special." Print
available at Diamondxpres.com.

The dress rehearsal for this event was in Lansing a few months before. Frustrated, fully armed white men saw they could get away with yelling in cops' faces at the Michigan capitol building. So, they figured Washington DC would be a piece of cake. 

The Republicans I know were stunned; they backed away as carefully as they could. After speaking with a politically-savvy relative in a far-away land, we both came to the conclusion that this hideous event wasn't going to disappear for a long time. Ten years. Maybe more. 

The second impeachment trial promised to take a week or so. It's almost old hat since we've been through the constant barrage of insane news in the last five years that we're burnt out. Even the senate minority leader is numb. A strategy if I ever saw one.

So now I'm back to work on a list of new ideas, on a list of issues.

COVID hangs over us like the grim reaper on a cold, damp night. The scores of people hanging out without PPE is astounding. You don't see anything like that in NYC. Not only do we have some major mandates, but, like 9/11, we took the hit for the rest of the country. We suffered so horribly in the spring that we're not taking any more chances.

More astounding is the vaccine debacle. We'll never know what happened there. Why didn't we order enough? 350 million people at 2 doses, you'd think those greedy pharma execs would have looked ahead (read: at their wallets) if our health officials were sleeping at the wheel.

And then, there's the distribution, a sssssit show just as rancid as the anti-vaxxers and their hand-written posters trolling those in their cars at vax sites, grasping at their chance to go back to life as it was before. 

Fat Chance. Invest in masks. Everyone's gonna need two to trick the variant(s). Vaccine or not. 

So, here's my latest. A little miniature diptych. Just gotta get the hinges and I'm set. I'll post when it's done.

Stay safe.

Goals Are Relative

Gladly, I made my goal a few days ago.

I bemoan my ignorance of web analytics, search engine optimization, and search engine marketing. I had a full two weeks to go and could have really made a strong promotional push, but I don't know the works. When I ran a campaign five years ago, I had cancelled the first try for Steel Ice & Stone. 

I then pounded social media daily for three months. Daily. Multiple platforms. And, two, sometimes three postings on the blog every week. Users were directed first to the KS then to the website, then back to the KS. I was relentless. However, that goal was much larger, and for a highly experimental piece. 

I underestimated the appeal of a salient issue to sell/promote an idea/project. It's all in the marketing. 

Interestingly, four--count'em--crowd funding marketing services wrote to me offering their services to help me surpass my expectations. One even offered a $50 pledge to my project. I paid them no mind. 

Another thing I have to say, however...I came up with the design and immediately planned and launched the campaign--in a week. It took KS longer to approve the project than it did to prepare the campaign. Maybe that could be the issue. More planning next time.

A little easier this time around....or so I thought...

Today's posting in KS.

As I worked my strategy in the past, I launched a Twitter announcement that day between 11:00 - 1:00. I already posted on FB last night, but at the moment didn't get any hits. I got more attention for posting my new profile photo. Go figure.

In less than 12 hours, my project was almost 50% funded on Kickstarter. While I was requesting a $5.00 pledge for a postcard,a number of people pledged $ 25.00, which is awesome.

The funding came to a abrupt halt a few days later. I mean abrupt. I didn't get a single pledge. For a week. Flipping as usual, I made some changes, and a few more pledges came in.And then, another stop. It's possible that the Robert Indiana similarity isn't resonating. A trusted colleague emailed me to warm that his estate is very strict about the LOVE use; I didn't get back any objections. So, just about 90% funding, I'm calculating my next move. I'm thinking about a voice-over video.

I'm almost there and just might make it. I need a knight in shaping armor. Keeping a positive attitude, the minute I make the funding goal, I'm thinking of printing even if it's in advance of the closing date. 

This is quite unlike the other KS I did a few years back, because the amount requested is so much smaller and the rewards are so much more manageable. But, I'm learning, without the major marketing, it's an uphill battle, doesn't matter how much or how little the goal.

Kickstarter--Yet Again

Without any nail biting and tapping on my experience and that of others, I launched a Kickstarter this evening to fund the printing of the VOTE Postcard I designed. 

I'm printing-on-demand, and my goal is large enough for me to print and mail the first batch and have a little left over to print a 22 x 17-inch letterpress of this image, and small enough to hopefully make goal.  

Allow me to explain: The idea of making a postcard--a mailed item--and using an image inspired by Robert Indiana's piece on a postage stamp--is the concept of the piece. 

I swiped the image to the left from an ETSY vendor who is offering 10 unused stamps for sale on their site. At such close range, it's fun to see the imperfections in the perforated tear; even in its reduced image state, the colors still vibrate after all these years.

Within minutes of launching I had two backers. Very exciting. 

What this has taught me, yet again, is how much text needs to be considered and edited when launching any kind of campaign. 

Parading it by colleagues, there was a bit of confusion about the meaning and purpose of the work;  others were concerned that I was encouraging people to participate in a system that just might lose their vote. I saw it as a way to send out a message relating to voting safely--by mail. 

Hope I make my goal. At $ 5.00--the price of a pledge--at a time, it could be a long road to $ 250.00. Yet another chapter in this journey.

Here's the postcard:

The Vote

No one is happy.

Everyone is on edge. Left and Right.

The vote by mail was an attempt to circumvent the pandemic which is still rampant; more on that later. People are worried that their vote--for or against--won't come or go as planned. Or discounted if not delivered according to a strict protocol. 

Friends have told me that they'll show up in haz-mat suits to vote if they've got any voting insecurity, but that's no one knows how that's going to go, either. 

So many months have gone by, flown like the wind, and we're less than 90 days till the fateful one. Biden is calm and has said that the election results will be determined by January 20th, and that's the day that the US Marshalls will, if necessary, vacate the office. 

Planned as a 2-color letterpress print.

I'm waiting for the reply from Robert Indiana's estate to publish the print, left. It's a play on the stamp made from his artwork from way back. It's very interesting that when he created the work in 1970, it was done as a gentle submission to his religious beliefs. 

A devout Christian Scientist from Indiana (Robert Clark is his real name), he created the artwork not as a nod to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, but to the love that his beliefs required to extend to others. A very private man, he was miffed at the fame that the commercialization of his famous, famous art work brought him. Originally, it was a sculpture, and the original is housed in the Indianapolis Museum of Art. 

The original postage stamp was printed in color: the red letters with blue and green vibrating backgrounds. It has been reinterpreted in many sizes, materials and media over the decades, and my use of it travels on two avenues. The political one, obviously. But I am thrilled that the typeface used in the original sculpture is a form of Clarendon. How wonderful. 

For me, it's critical to keep the interplay on my message: that, in disrupting the mail delivery for the sake of the election, we must expect and demand that our vote be cast and delivered in a timely and decent matter.

However, many millions will be spent against this endeavor and ultimately hurt many millions of people. 

For example: many receive their medications by mail. Can they afford a two-week delay? What about people who send in their rent to their landlords. Will they be evicted if that check isn't delivered on time? 

While the pandemic has demonstrated how dependent we will be on electronic exchanges in the future, it has also shown the debilitating disadvantage of those who either don't have the technology or who depend on physical items to live. It puts in start relief how we've co-opted yet another public service.

Especially now, for corrupt and personal purposes of this president.

God Loves Guns

In an insane upheaval of events, our nation was thrown into a frenzy of disease, death, unemployment and poverty--in a word, horror--in a matter of weeks. Governors and mayors, with very little support from gutted public health departments at every level were left with no other choice than to lock down any and all states' public gathering areas--including most businesses, recreation areas, and all the etceteras.

Planned as a 2-color letterpress print
from polymer plate.

Abruptly, our country was held up to a horrific mirror: our level of disorganization for a crisis. It's painfully obvious we didn't learn much from the AIDS crisis, the 9/11 attacks or the Katrina Hurricane. We've played down the fact that health insurance is a need. Never addressed the inequalities of people of color with regard to health and human services, brushing their needs under the rug as a cultural issue  (as usual) rather than the exclusionary norm that has reached critical mass.

More than ever, we've exposed ourselves as a nation that lives paycheck to paycheck. If we can't sustain ourselves for 60 days without descending to homelessness and destitution, what does being great, becoming great or staying great mean? How absurd is this?

Yesterday, in Lansing Michigan, protesters entered armed with rifles entered the state office building demanding an end to the lockdown imposed by the governor. Egged on by the president to demand liberation, a female democrat was bullied by the president. Yelling angry white men with guns demanded the right to become sick from an illusive virus, about which we know so little and is still evolving.

Do we sustain ourselves in this country by tattoos, haircuts and beers? Apparently so. God and guns will keep us safe.

The Proud and Brave in Chicago

After a deep breath, I sealed the box and sent She Has Neither and 78 for exhibition to Woman Made Gallery for the Suffra-Jetting Exhibition. It opens in two weeks, and I just might jump the plane and go for the opening. I haven't been to Illinois for a while and miss the place. 

However, I'm busy preparing for another exhibition in St Louis the week after, and chugging away at some new pieces. The work for this series is taking off, with no end in sight--either for opportunities or subject matter.

I'm glad a gallery is unabashedly showing She Has Neither. It's a tough piece and while everyone who's seen it is stunned by it, groups whose eyes have fallen on it have collectively gasped. It's sobering subject matter, and it needs to be addressed in unrelenting terms.

The interactive invitation to the exhibition in Chicago.

Argentina, after having a reproductive rights bill narrowly defeated two years ago, stands the possibility of a new bill with a new president in office. However, I find it appalling that the bill stands in balance of other motives.

From the NYT this week: “Considering he [President Alberto Fernández] is trying to take a more orthodox path when it comes to the economy, he is using other issues to calm the demands of his voters,” said Mariel Fornoni, a political analyst. 

So, what is the motivation, helping vulnerable women in a dire, desperate time or keeping his ass in office?

Pink. Just Pink.

As I put together my guerrilla campaign to hit the streets in the coming weeks, I moved to printing You're Next as color laser prints at my local copy shop. True, it's not the luscious 22 x 30" (56 x 76 cm)  from a wide-format ink jet printer, or the imposing 24 x 36 (61 x 91 cm) offset 2-color print, but I just don't have the funds to print any other way right now. It's going up as a tabloid-size.

A printer gave me quote for 500 copies of a 2-color print on a light-weight coated stock at 24 x 36 for $ 900. Not a bad price considering the ink coverage; and at 500 prints, the sheetfed is just making ready. The ppu is pretty good considering; I could run a crowd funder to pay for it, and it would include postage and the mailing tube. Promoting it could make it a hit, or an uphill battle.

I'll talk more about the distribution later, for now, the color.

The red from a laser printer would give me a peach-colored triangle when printed; the yellow comes out strongly in the lower opacity (see the top image). So, decreasing it, the pink will be accurate in the tabloid-size print. If I ever get the offset printed, I'd go with a spot color, and the lowered opacity would produce the pink I want. Just gotta be sure that I choose a cooler red.

For the distribution, I'm thinking I'll start in my little town, putting up some at night and see if I get a reaction. I have to reach out to contacts to find the spots with the traffic that would most respond to the image.

That's one of the most interesting things about this project. The climate in this country has turned so acrid and exclusionary. It has been revealing how people respond to the individual images. Each of the works are met by gasps--but the reaction comes only from a specific group, the one targeted by the piece.

My honest hope is that the message and its design resonate so deeply that we collectively do something about the crisis our nation is in. Never did I think that as a population we were harboring so much fear and hatred toward one another. In these times of accessible communication, couldn't we stop seeing one another as groups of "them" vs. "us"? It took someone with these feral emotions to capitalize on these fears in others; sadly, as a nation we've responded badly in not rejecting the rhetoric and ousting this shell of a human being from our highest office. We most certainly face his re-election if we don't unite and act.

78, the redesign......

Even when inspiration strikes, you sometimes have to take a step back and consider the entire work. With a long standing series such as DSH, there are a number of facets that require consideration before rushing off to print.

DSH has been in the works for over two years, and many various ideas have been developed, some shelved, some still in the incubator. News events dictate a lot of what is being said, however, mulling over the aesthetics is essential to the effectiveness of the final design.

78 Cents On the Dollar was originally a four-color image, set for printing via RISO in Newburgh, NY. There are RISO printing facilities in NYC--notably Blackburn--however, the press in Newburgh can handle the size and type of paper I intend to use.

RISO, as noted before, doesn't work in CMYK. It works on a series of inks more closely modeled on RGB and the results can be unpredictable--both a good and a bad thing.

Bringing the piece to so many colors didn't seem right in the face of the others in this series--and I felt it might look like an eye sore. I also felt that the color, while off-beat, might dilute the message. Since the works are all a little confrontational, I decided to omit all the colors and instead make the work in tints of black and the RISO red.

I spoke with the pressman, and I'll be reporting soon. In the meantime, images are below. In processing the files from Ai to Acrobat, the color shifts. I have to speak with the pressman again to see what the best format is. He said the files would print well as RGB PDFs, so I'll have to see what the best processing channel will be.