Every year I do my best to make as much art as I can to give away as gifts. As in years past we're doing hundreds and hundreds of pieces for the One Thousand Thousand project that feature Burning Man related imagery but this year I'm taking it a bit further and doing some larger screen printed posters.

The posters are about 13" by 21" and are collage-style screen prints that incorporate a hodge-podge of Burning Man related imagery. They are hand-pulled and no two are alike. Some have as little as two or three separate images while the more complex ones incorporate close to 10 or so images using as many colors. Others are monotone while some are glow in the dark.

In a perfect world I'd have more of these to pass out and as it stands I've just got 110 of them. The people that end up with these end up with one for a reason. They’ve done something or said something or made something or have been something out in the desert that was meaningful to me in a big way and this is just my way to say thanks. That's not to say that if you don't get one that these things don't apply to you. Obviously. 

Anyway, some are better than others but over all I really do like the way they turned out and I wanted to show the progress of these things as they were being made and I hope to see you out on the playa and give you one of them. The image gallery is just below the Read More break and the full album with new images being added constantly is here: ​https://goo.gl/photos/1Up2nw1yVvSsECJv6

The little set that I did yesterday is one I'm really pretty happy with. It's been a little while since I was genuinely pleased by a particular batch and it was fun seeing how these took shape. 

I'm still stuck on using the fluorescent pink Sakura solid paint markers. The pink is just something I'm drawn to lately and the Sakura solid paint markers are great. 

I added some small areas of encaustic for texture and depth and even though I'm sure I'm not doing a proper encaustic technique I'm winging it and getting what I want out of the process.

Scans of the individual pieces along with some overview photos showing some of the progress are just below.

A small set completed on February 6, 2015. A very good friend of mine welcomed his new daughter Frances into the world on this same day and I welcome her too.

Still catching up on a lot of the busywork that I'd hoped would be done weeks ago. I'm getting closer to having all of the completed pieces documented and numbered and all the rest. 

I thought I'd already finished with this small set from June 9, 2014 but just found them stuck in a bin full of pencils. You truly wouldn't believe the number pieces that are tucked away all of the house and studio and car and it's taken days just hunting them down to get them all in one place.

Anyway, so this little set was a weird one where they started out okay and had potential but stalled. I decided to give the first stage a bit more depth and tried some collage-type approach but with photo image transfers instead of paper. 

Katherine was doing some of her review/editing work on some photos she took that day and I asked to see the shots she wasn't into at all. I liked the idea of using ones that she wasn't happy with and wouldn't ever use and thought it was nice to give them a chance somewhere else.

I chose just a few random areas of the shots and printed them onto acetate sheets. That process allows you to end up with something close to the original photo just suspended in ink on the non-porous surface of the plastic sheets. Hurrying before the ink dries you just flip the sheet over onto the surface and that's it. The image transfers. Or it's supposed to. In this case some of the first layer of paint was covered with another experimental product I found in a garage. It's some sort of hobby clear-coat but it dried and turned out to be really brittle. If you touch it with, say, a pencil it'll just chip and give away. So the combination of these two things made the results really ghostly and faded and I actually like them a lot looking back on them. 

[I think at one point I didn't like them at all.]

Okay. Here they are:

This evening I found a random box of mostly completed pieces stuck way up on the top shelf of a cabinet in the office. I sort of think I remember sticking it up there a while ago but can't be sure of when or why I did that.

Sometimes having so many pieces of art laying around can be a little wearing on your psyche.  Especially when they are all in some varying stages of completion or if they are old enough that you don't wanna look at them anymore. Or they need to be scanned/counted/documented in some way and you don't want to deal with that.

[The pieces in this recently discovered box are probably all of those things.]

Sometimes all of the 'busywork' is a welcome task and it allows you to sort of forget the creative side of things and just do the math basically. But I do feel like having a robot to help with this stuff would make life easier.

The numbering is the really tricky part and while it is getting to be a lot easier than it ever was before it's still not as simple as you'd think. At least not for me. To this day I am generally not trusted to keep a balanced checkbook. [It's a memo pad of doom.] I'll never be as diligent as I should be about entering in the line items as they come and instead stuff bar napkins with scribbled notes into my wallet where I tell myself I'll organize them for sure later on.

And, yeah, the thing is that while I am sure I complain in my head and out loud about the drudgery that comes with scanning and numbering these things I genuinely don't mind it as much as I think I do. The fact is that even though I uncovered a box of pieces I didn't necessarily account for [or am not sure where and when or if I did] and there is some backlog of busywork still left to do I like seeing things in this state. 

We've made a lot of art over the years. Just a whole lot. Any dread that may come is easily enough diminished when I'm reminded that whether the results are good or bad or both or neither there have always been results. And that's one of the more important things to have come from all of this. 

[Okay. Off to the grind.]

I love vintage ephemera. Like, I really, really love it. Old photographs and postcards and periodicals and publications and vintage paper of all sorts just fascinates me to no real end. And over the years I’ve collected just tons and tons of it. Very literally tons of it. At estate sales and auctions I’ll frequently just try and get the whole entire lot of paper stuff and at any given time there will be a couple of boxes full of this stuff in my house or studio or garage. 

Discarded scrapbooks and photo albums and letters and postcards are particularly cool and there is this romantic and lovely and tragic vibe to this sort of thing that I appreciate more than I can say.

I collect this stuff because I love it so much that I feel compelled in a very real way to make sure it’s not forgotten or lost forever. I’ll frequently use a lot of it to make other pieces of art with and much of what I collect I’ll end up using as collage materials. And what I don’t end up using to make art out of or that I don’t keep as part of my own personal collection I’ll frequently pass along to others that will appreciate it. 

About five years ago I met Angelica Paez after I scored a pretty large cache of vintage ephemera that included a lot of photographs and postcards and was trying to find a good home for it all. And you’d be seriously hard pressed to find a better home for this sort of thing than Angelica.

I’m the sort of weird person that would rather hold onto something forever before letting it go to someone that doesn’t really appreciate it in some way and I’ve sent her boxes of stuff since then. 

So just recently when I went to another estate sale and ended up bringing home a car full of vintage ephemera I made sure to get some of it to her.

And when I sent her a box of the ephemera I also included a small stack of blank paper boards that we use for the pieces in the One Thousand Thousand project in hopes that, maybe, she'd consider doing a piece or two for the project. 

Look, the One Thousand Thousand project is nearing the First Third and after 20 years of going at this thing I really feel like it’s reaching some point of real transition. It’s not that I’m giving up on the things but more that I am getting less excited by having it continue in the same way that it has over the years. Christopher feels the same way too and we talk about it a lot and you can only do the same thing for so long until it kind of runs its course for us in many ways.

We’ve always done a bulk of the work either on our own individually or together [either at the same time or by sending stuff back and forth to one another in the mail] and collaboration has been a main point of the whole project. At the same time we’ve also made sure to rope as many people into it as we could. We'd do this for art groups or at dinner parties or at Burning Man or wherever else we could set up shop and encourage others to just start painting. It's just plain fun. It really is.

But lately we both are pretty set on the idea of seeing the project through until the 333,333 point and then opening up the next stage a bit more widely for other artists to contribute their own work. 

So reaching out to Angelica this last time was also a way for me to really take a firm step towards this goal of making this stage of the One Thousand Thousand project open to other artists. 

The notion of this has always been unnerving in a lot of ways and after doing something for so long you become kind of protective of it and you want the results to be perfect. So that means it's critical to find artists you really appreciate and who you trust will make meaningful contributions to the project. Plenty of artists are willing to do the work but, yeah, their work just doesn’t do it for me and I just don’t want it included in the edition is all. And other artists do some fantastic pieces and would make a terrific addition to the project but trying to get them to commit to doing a certain number of pieces and then be accountable for whatever numbers in the series they’re signed on to do is a hassle. For everyone.

But Angelica has made this part of things just unbelievably easy for us and I'm unbelievably grateful to her for that.

So, yeah, when it comes to artists, and specifically collage artists, Angelica Paez is just as good as they get. Her work is masterful and lovely and for me personally when I think of collage artists I put her body of work up there with the best of them. It’s remarkable for sure. And she's not only good at what she does she's incredibly passionate about it too. 

[And the term collage artist, by the way, can mean a lot of things and collage itself comes in a lot of different forms. What I’m talking about here are genuine ‘paper and scissors’ collage artists. There are magnifying glasses and X-acto blades involved. There will be glue. Nothing digital about any of it save for scanning it when it’s done.]

I could go on a great length about all of this [and already have to some degree anyway] but the main point I want to make is that I’m beyond excited that Angelica has agreed to contribute some work to the One Thousand Thousand project. 

She sent along these first pieces just the other day:

You can find out more about these pieces as well as Angelica's other work over at her website. She's also on ipernity and you'll probably wanna follow her on Pinterest too. 

Back in November SFMOMA presented Everything Is Perfect by Kateřina Šedá as part of their multisite exhibition Project Los Altos. Kateřina's project centered around the idea of celebrating the everyday attributes that make each of us unique.

There were categories that covered just about everything and the art-related records had quite a few nominees already and at first I didn't want to include the One Thousand Thousand project. It felt crummy to think of competing with other artists for whatever reason. So I went with my monkeys.

And you can't lose when you go with your monkeys.

The SFMOMA closing reception thing was this weekend and I went to that. Part of the Everything is Perfect project included the publication of a little book that included all the records. And these books were just terrific. They each had a different cover with the photo of the respective record. Just incredibly well done.

Kateřina was gracious enough to insist that the One Thousand Thousand project also be included and we settled on the record of Longest-Running Art Project. 

A few artists and their work and ideas were kind of instrumental in inspiring the One Thousand Thousand project and Ray Johnson was certainly one of them. 

A quote from a new article I'm bookmarking:

In the 1950s, the Conceptual and Pop artist Ray Johnson pioneered the practice of mail art, in which he would send artworks to friends and acquaintances via the US Postal Service, asking the recipients to add to or alter his work and then send it to someone else. As Jeanne Marie Kusinan so aptly put it in her 2005 Contemporary Aesthetics article, “The Evolution and Revolutions of the Networked Art Aesthetic,”

[Johnson’s mail art was a reaction against] the official art world, with its institutional hierarchies and gallery elitism [representing] a fundamental move away from the paradigm of art produced to sell or own. This was art to give, send, and potentially lose or destroy by the very process of mailing.

For Johnson, the process was the art; the object was just a byproduct. As Johnson’s work shifted away from object-oriented art towards this more conceptual, collaborative form of art-making, the fact that his mail art was never supposed to be sold brought up many new questions, such as: How can one collect an object as an artwork when the work is actually a series of events taking place over time?

Compared to the problem faced by today’s digital artists, Johnson encountered the opposite: his work was not supposed to be collected in the traditional sense, but some people collected or sold the pieces created by the mail art network, regardless of his creative intention. Since physical objects existed, the official art world desired them; the allure of the art object cannot be denied, for better or worse. 

[I just figured I'd bookmark this out loud.]

I've never been much of a video game kind of person and haven't played anything close to one in years and years. Last year I was invited to play Ingress before it was in open release and have been playing it ever since.

If you're not familiar with it the game is basically an overlay for Google Maps that shows specific locations in your immediate area. These locations are primarily public art, murals, sculptures, significant architecture and other unique and notable places. 

You can read a lot more about it HERE but It's a remarkably cool way to interact with your environment and as an artist and an heroic lover of art it's especially cool. You'll absolutely discover things in your neighborhood and city that you've never noticed before and the game allows for information about the respective locations to be added. Plus you'll have to physically walk around a whole lot and I'm seriously down two belt sizes from last year.

Ingress is a totally free app and is currently available for Android devices and should be ready for iPhone release very, very soon. And you should totally choose to join the Enlightened faction. 

And KALEID Gallery in San Jose is one of those portals. And so it the One Thousand Thousand project. 

So, for example, this painting on a utility box in San Jose is titled Oso's Rebirth.

Clicking on that image brings up additional photos as well as some information on the artist. You can add to this information as well and in some way this game has the potential to become a decent database of art.

Some additional portal locations:

I've been getting sort of stuck lately and when that happens I know from experience that this usually means it's time for me to move on to some new set of materials or medium. I've been in this really bold and graphic stage for a while now and really want to do something else.

I have been looking at using some little sheets of balsa wood in some way and had done one or two pieces a bit ago where I tried my hand at it. I tried it out again on a couple of pieces from this little set I did on June 3, 2014.

The texture and the added depth that the thin sheet of balsa wood adds is really pleasing to me and the one at left is one of the pieces I've ended up keeping for myself. 

I used some more beeswax on this set too and that cool mint green color is the beeswax. I added some weird clear coat to areas of these too and that gave me some good ideas as well. I've included a few overview photos of the set as it was being completed and I really like them placed together as a larger piece.

Ultimately this whole project is just a long series of little experiments with color and texture and composition and media and this set in particular is a nice example of this fact. 

I'm frequently undecided as to what I feel about them all but I'm invariably grateful for the chance to have something to look at that serves as some road map to future work.

The individual pieces and the overview photos are posted just below.

Finally getting around to scanning a backlog of pieces and am into some from May just now. I tried more beeswax painting and I never seem to get the results that I'm looking for but I'm still okay with how they turn out.

And, yeah, these things smell so good it's crazy.

All along this project has been one in which we'd encourage others to join in to some degree. I recently signed on to do a series of appearances for South First Fridays in San Jose. The shows are done in conjunction with the Silicon Valley Music Festival and The Sliding Door Company and I set up to show recent pieces and do new work right there on the spot while a classical music performer was playing. [I'll probably have to go into that a bit more later on.] But the first show was last month and I met some other artists that were into the idea of the project and I sent them home with a small stack of supplies. And they came back a month later for the next show with the pieces they'd created. 

And they were really great.

Bre Contreras and Maya Perez totally get the whole idea. We did another small set that evening and it was about as much fun as I had making these little paintings in a long time.  The pieces from March 5, 2014 were done by Maya and Bre and the March 7th set is mostly theirs. I'm seriously excited to see what they do next.

I'll post more about the whole thing later on but wanted to get these pieces posted.

A few days ago Stephen Layton sent me an email requesting time to get together and talk about the One Thousand Thousand project. We arranged to meet out in Castro Valley where I'd been turning the giant garage there into a studio space. 

After well over four hours of basically hanging out and painting we managed to finish a couple of really nice sets.  The photo over there is an overview from that session and I'll be scanning and posting the individual pieces sometime this week.

The article is here:
http://www.sanjose.com/2014/02/05/dont-be-a-darling-about-it-jason-mchenrys-one-million-paintings/

When you're making so many pieces you'll have no choice but to use various materials and mediums and a couple of times I've given the old beeswax painting a try. My friend Kim has used encaustic for as long as I've known her and she's just amazing at it. I've always been envious of her that way and I recently tried using it for a couple of sets.

The set done on May 16, 2013 was one of those beeswax painting attempts and I pretty much played it by ear.

I didn't have a proper plan at all and ended up commandeering one of Katherine's little mini-loaf baking pans to melt the wax. In the future I'll find something with a handle at least. I had to use an oven glove as I held this pan of beeswax over the stove to melt it. I played with the amounts of oil paint that I added to color the wax.

So the results of these little experiments were actually pretty nice. I used oil paintsticks to add some additional colors and I did some carving and scraping on the beeswax surface and I was really happy with the way they turned out.

I found a little stash of pieces from the set done on May 16, 2013 and I'll include them just below. And when I have time I'll post these over on the Etsy shop.

[I've already added at least one of them.]

A ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.

His grading procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scale and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pounds of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot - albeit a perfect one - to get an "A".

When the class came to an end and when the grading began and a curious fact emerged: the works of the highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.

It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes - the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

[This little anecdote is attributed to David Bayles and Ted Orland and I'm not sure of much more than that.]

The set that was done on July 19, 2013 is kind of a mixed bag for me. About exactly half of them I am incredibly happy with and the other half don't entirely work for me. I dunno. It happens like that sometimes.

I used a portion of the colors that I had still laying out from the set done earlier and in that sense they look like they are related to the July 18, 2013 set.

I have learned a lot from making art over the years and one thing for sure is that just because I love a piece doesn't mean everyone else will. And just because I'm not entirely won over by some of the work doesn't mean that others will feel the same way. Whatever. I don't know why I feel the need to make excuses for any of my work. It's ridiculous.

The rest of the pieces from this set as well as a couple of overview photos are just below.

A set completed on July 18, 2013.

I cannot tell you how much I like these pieces. Just all of them.

The rest are just below behind the good old Read More link.

This little group was one of three sets that were completed at KALEID Gallery. They were actually done on July 16, 2013 but I accidentally stamped them with the wrong date.

Working in collaboration is pretty great in a lot of ways and it forces you to contend with outside input and produces results that you'd probably not achieve on your own. This was a fun set to do and some of the pieces turned out to be really, really nice. A few still need a little bit of work and I'm planning on adding a lino-cut print over them. Maybe.

The rest are just below behind the good old Read More link.

This little set was done on June 19, 2013 and I'm only just now finished goofing around with them. I used beeswax as the primary medium. I say this as I wouldn't yet be comfortable labeling these as something more formal like encaustic pieces. Not even close. Just beeswax.

The wax is pretty thick in some areas and I carved into them a bit and they have a really nice texture to them.

Still, after about a month of fooling around with them I'm finally satisfied with how they turned out. They are nice enough to look at.

The rest are just below behind the good old Read More link.

Sometimes when you're making so many paintings in such a short amount of time you'll invariably feel like some of the pieces just don't click for you. It happens all of the time. To every artist regardless of some project.

A solution for this is to pass the work on to someone else. But it's mainly just to get them out of your mind in some way.

I frequently send my pieces like this off to Christopher and he'll do the same. So recently Christopher completed a set and he just didn't feel like they were somehow finished so he sent them to me. He asked that I add something to them. But when I got them I really liked them the way that they were and wasn't inclined to really add anything more to them. So they sat around until just now and Katherine and I used some of them to print over.

The image gallery is just below.