I've always been mildly obsessed with volcano imagery and use it quite a bit in my art. I noticed this after sorting through hundreds and hundreds of earlier pieces from the One Thousand Thousand project and it reminded me of this cool little bottle I have.

Volcanic dust collected just hours after the eruption on January 23, 1910.

Some of the pieces that were completed on June 18, 2013. There were about 17 pieces that were done in this particular group and I've scanned six of them. I've also included some more photos of these pieces as they were being produced and those are just below. [Along with a fair amount of rambling that I've been kind enough to tuck nicely behind the good old Read More tag.]

So I've been playing Ingress for a couple of months now and during that time I've become more and more into it.

If you're not familiar with the game I'll leave it to you to learn more about it if you want to and I'll admit right now that if you aren't familiar with the game then you'll probably not care one little bit about this post either.

Some quick and unedited thoughts that I want to remind myself of:

Working on the One Thousand Thousand project, as well as 52 Weeks for that matter, has really been one of the best things I could have done as an artist. The work itself isn't what I'm referring to in this. [Although that's incredibly important too.] But the process itself has been hugely beneficial in many ways.

When we were doing the 52 Weeks project we worked within certain parameters we had set for ourselves. One box each week. Starting on Sunday and ending on the following Sunday. Make sure it was done by the deadline. Pencils down. We also had to use the same little wooden shadow boxes as our starting point for each piece. [Between Christopher and myself we had 104 total boxes that were identical when we began the project.] I remember the first couple of weeks really just limiting myself to the pre-defined confines of the original boxes. It never really occurred to me that I'd end up working outside of the box. [I swear to you that there was no intention of a pun here at all. I promise.]

Scans of some of the pieces completed on June 15, 2013. There are also a few horizontal pieces in this set.

It's essentially impossible to find the time to scan each and every single piece that is produced for the One Thousand Thousand project. Instead of scanning each individual piece we've sometimes opted to just photograph [or even video] certain lots of pieces as a group.

The group of pieces that were completed on June 14, 2013 are some that probably won't all be individually scanned. At least not today.

[I started out with the intention of writing some entry about Kim Mosley that would also be able to kind of fit in with offering some history to the One Thousand Thousand project as well as the 52 Weeks series all at the same time. He's an artist that I admire a lot and he was also one of my instructors in college and I had been thinking about writing something on this for a while now.

I started at it the other evening and then ended up going, I swear to god, all the way back to my goddam childhood. Seriously? I've always done that. It's essentially impossible for me to write something short when I get on a roll. It'd take you hours and hours, maybe even days, just to read a few months of my old LiveJournal.

Anyway. I'm stopping to regroup and re-read what I have and then I'll add more and edit more still and hopefully this whole thing will make sense eventually. It's being edited right now and what is posted just below is a way to force-remind myself to stay on top of the idea and to finish it off entirely. Feel free to read what I have so far and I'll post it all here when I'm entirely finished with it.]

Frequently the pieces from the One Thousand Thousand project are created in a group of work that is essentially a sub-edition in and of itself. One example of this is the Ghosts Calling My Name series by Christopher Dyer and another good example is the Hearts in Space series.

This series of pieces was completed in 2010 by Christopher Dyer along with Jordan Hubner & Ezra Darnell of the band Hearts in Space. The paintings that were produced for this series would later be used for the cover art for their self-titled album.  A slideshow of the pieces from this series are just below.

For as long as there has been such a thing as online sales we have usually offered pieces from the One Thousand Thousand project for sale in that way. To some degree or another for sure. No kidding. [Slinging art on CompuServe, son! Peddling paintings on BBSs, baby!]

Anyway, after regular stints selling stuff on eBay and our own domains we eventually used Etsy as the primary place for selling these pieces online. Most everything about Etsy was cool and from the beginning the response we got from the Etsy shops was seriously humbling. It was as close to an instant success as we defined it. [What we posted typically sold and always to some very nice reviews.] There was almost more business than could be comfortably handled and slowly I stopped posting new pieces there at all. The goal wasn't to make money or sell a lot of pieces. A small selection at a simple price to simply make the art available online. But it became a lot of work.

So for the last couple of years the only time you could purchase any of the pieces from the project was if you went to a gallery show or an art festival or something like that where they were being shown. Some locals brick and mortar stores were cool enough to carry a stock of them too but that was all.

For a while now I've been trying to figure out another way to still be able to easily offer at least a small but steady supply of new work for sale online. It sucks to not be able to interact that way when people inquire about how to buy some of the pieces for themselves.

So the Etsy shop has been reopened.

http://www.etsy.com/shop/jasonwentcrazy

It's been 10 years since the completion of the 52 Weeks project. [Just thinking of this blows me away.] In talking a lot lately about the One Thousand Thousand project the subject of past projects has come up and I figure it's a lot easier to just show people the work as opposed to trying to describe it. That said, I've been compiling a lot of the old images and files relating to the 52 Weeks project and have just recently got the bulk of them sorted and posted in some manageable way.

If you're already familiar with the 52 Weeks project then feel free to skip it. There's not a lot of new stuff to say or to see. But if you've not seen the pieces from the project then, for sure, you're encouraged to check it out. The main section of the site is here.

It's crazy how doing art projects like this can be really important. Looking back at these images and re-reading the written entries brings me instantly back to those days and moments and hours that happened a decade ago. I dunno. I suppose I'm feeling nostalgic or something. What I mean to say is that I'm really grateful to be able to look back on my life and see how art has helped me through it.

So one of the things that I learned at SubZERO Festival over the weekend was that I really had a hard time trying to initially explain that the pieces in the One Thousand Thousand project were all original works of art. I kind of always assumed that 'original' meant the same thing as 'done by the hand of the artist' and not some sort of copy. Easy enough. But that's not the case right now for sure. With the increasing popularity of mechanical reproduction and even production it becomes challenging to define your work.

I was frequently asked if the pieces were prints or originals. And I'd say that they were each original and that would still not be clarification enough. "So these are prints of the paintings you made, then?" Nope. No prints. Each of these are done by me with my own fingers touching that same exact piece of board that you see there. You can see the thick contour of the paint in places. Fingerprints. Smudges. [On and on.]

And that brings to the whole giclee phenomenon again. [Sorry.] But instead of ranting on like I sometimes tend to do on the subject and ending up feeling like I've made no sense at all in explaining how I feel on the subject, I'll offer someone else's point of view instead.

I found this really nice bit by chance at after reading through an article titled Lies, Damn Lies, and Giclée Prints by David over at art-without-artifice.com.

If you are an artist and I've met you in person there is a pretty good chance that I've tried to recruit you to participate in the One Thousand Thousand project. I've even been positively pushy about it at times as I know how valuable and rewarding this whole project has been for me and I want to make that same experience available to as many other artists as possible.

The point is that I have just recently come to a point where I am able to acknowledge that this massive undertaking cannot be easily accomplished by just one or two people going at it alone. It has taken two decades to reach the first third of the way and the goal of one million pieces of original art can be achieved a lot more quickly if you were to join in.

I'm tremendously serious about the idea of other artists contributing their own work as part of this edition of one million pieces of hand made, original works on paper.

If you are interested in this then please do let me know. You can submit your info by using the contact form on this site or by making sure to Like our Facebook page and post a comment there. You really should consider doing this.

Before we had a solid system down for documenting all of the work done for the project it was incredibly confusing. Since Christopher and I live in different states and we both typically make new pieces constantly the notion of us keeping track of which chronological number to assign our new pieces becomes muddy. Until we could catch up and talk and give each other our totals for some respective week we'd make notes on the reverse of the pieces.

This piece in the photo is a decent example of the system we sort of settled into for a while. This piece was assigned the number 09.13.09.25. This was the date it was completed and the corresponding number from the work done on that day. In this case this happens to be the 25th piece out of the 76 total pieces finished that day. Later, after we'd talk and confirm the total pieces we had each done on whatever dates I'd enter it into a spreadsheet and then tally up the final total of pieces in the project to that point.

The monumental checklist for the upcoming show at subZERO Festival is looking a lot less intimidating right now. There are just a few little things to accomplish in the morning before heading down to San Jose to get the whole show set up. At last count the project has officially reached painting number 324,704. Some of the pieces being completed over the last couple of weeks are turning out to be pretty nice too. It's almost as if after all of these years I'm getting kind of good at all of this.