Christopher and I have been best friends for decades and we've sent packages back and forth for about the entire time. So it was easy for him to send along the pieces that he did for the One Thousand Thousand project for me to scan and number and all the rest. 

Another set from him came in the mail the other day and included a note saying how much he liked the particular set and that one of the pieces was maybe his favorite of all time. So I figured I'd use a numbering stamp that wasn't used as often and I busted out this vintage numbering stamp I had laying around. And why it isn't used as often is because it's clunky and the ink is usually botched and it advances incorrectly. But it's really cool.

I didn't want to ruin the set and did a few test stamps to make sure it printed properly and then had at it. I'm glad they turned out at least okay. They're not as legible as the modern rubber stamps are but they have a whole lot more soul and are fitting for this really nice set. 

I've included a scan of the note as well as some of the test stamps and a photo of the set as they were being numbered. 

Back in October I got a call from my kid sister saying that my mom was being rushed to the hospital after suffering three heart attacks. I didn't think about anything and just hopped on a plane. At LAX I got word that she was undergoing triple bypass surgery and the whole trip to STL was filled with dread that I'd land to bad news. [I didn't.] My mom pulled through like a champ and I spent the next three weeks or so with her and my family.

Growing up I attended the Ferguson-Florissant school district and I spent decades in Ferguson. I know that city well and after hospital visiting hours were over I'd just spend the nights driving around and looking at the places where I grew up and I was able to see the protests that were planned for the month of October. I'd not been back for about a decade and it was surreal in so many ways.

I had a small set that was unfinished and since I hadn't made any new pieces for the project during my trip back home I finished these to fill in those empty slots.

I dated them each separately for every day I spent back home and the imagery I used is obvious. There's probably not some representation of the Gateway Arch in each piece. It's not typical of me to beat people over the head with my work but I felt like I wanted to at least recognize what I was feeling. I even added some titles to many from this set. [Kinloch, Canfield, Cornel, Spanish Lake, et cetera.]

Anyway, I'm not sure what I'll do with these but I really am happy with how they turned out. 

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.]

Handling the logistics of how to manage a number of additional artists contributing their work to this project can be overwhelming and un-fun. After trying to get this part worked out for a while now the best idea we can come up with is to just wing it and see how it goes from there.

There are already a handful of other artists who have signed on to contribute work towards the edition of a million and we want to make it as easy as possible for others to do the same. 

Here is where we're at on all of this:

• The size of the work would ideally be the same. [The dimensions and all of the other supplies are detailed HERE.] If you have access to a similar card stock then feel free to use your own materials. If you have your own number and date stamps that's terrific. If you have another idea of how you'd like to number and date them that's also terrific. But using the example image at left [and referencing the other pieces from the project] we'd like to maintain some measure of continuity across the pieces. 
  
  
• We need to document the specific numbers that you're planning on doing and at this point you're free to pick any numbers after #333,534. [Consecutive blocks of numbers are preferred as it'll be easier to keep track of things but if you are a numerology-oriented person and are drawn to specific numbers then have at it.] We'll post a shared spreadsheet as time goes on that has the claimed numbers and available slots.
   
• The dates are open and can be added once the pieces are completed but they aren't as important as the specific numbers.
  
  
• Use whatever medium you'd like. Collage, oils, image transfers, needlepoint, lithography, linocut, letterpress, mixed-media galore. Go tiny. Go bold. It's your work. The only 'requirement' we'd have is that they be individually unique works done by hand and not mechanically reproduced.  [They can incorporate aspects of mechanical reproduction but, again, each piece needs to be wholly unique.]
  
  
• Once the pieces are completed and numbers are assigned we'll need to have scans or photos of the finished work. You can do this yourself or we can do it for you. 
  
  
• We'd prefer if you were to submit your work under the same Creative Commons license as the rest of the pieces in the project. This is a non-commercial license and you'd always be the owner of your original works. [The thing is that we're not doing this for money and if you are concerned about copyright issues let us know.] Once we have scans of your work we'll post them online and attribute them to you in whatever way you'd prefer.
  
  
• If you make a number of pieces we'd love to trade you some of ours for yours and have some of the originals as part of the 'permanent collection' to show in a gallery setting. If you want to keep all of the originals yourself and just send us scans of the work that's cool by us.

Hopefully some of that stuff makes sense and rather than spending more time creating some more formal document we're posting this to get things started.

Thanks for all of the amazing inquiries and the monumentally kind words. We don't take it lightly in the least that you're interested in doing some work together in this and be sure to Contact Us with any questions you might have.

This set is one of the very few that I've have to genuinely talk myself out of tossing in the trash. It's just the nature of the project that some of the pieces will be sort of sucky and others will be sort of strong. All things considered you get way more lucky than not and if I had to put a number on it I'd say that somewhere around 75-80% of the pieces I've ever done for this project have been at least okay. 

Even the really boring pieces often have at least some aspect of them that I like and that's somehow close to the point of it all to begin with. You can't expect them all to always be amazing. I'm consistently pretty happy with how they mostly turn out and in some cases I'm even knocked out by how terrific many of them end up being. 

But this one never felt right for me and took forever to finally number and scan and I'm really happy to be done with them. 

I'd been plugging away at these for weeks and I can tell the results are gonna be crap when I end up spending too much time laboring over the work. Like always, there are a few that I don't hate and a handful that are just awful. But there are some good things across them all that I think will be useful the next time around. 


[The texture is the best part for sure.]

I found this old sketch I'd done of the Leshan Buddha and figured it might be nice to try and use it to print over some of the One Thousand Thousand pieces that needed something more to be finished.

The results were not the best but I learned a lot about the process. And that's what counts mostly.

The white pieces that I printed over were sort of doomed from the start. I came close to trashing the whole set and that's something I haven't done in a long, long time. 

I eventually left them out in the yard where they baked in the sun and they were warped and covered in layers of assorted paints.

So they weren't the best candidates to use to print over. 

The test prints that were done on paper turned out okay. The image was a bit too complicated and didn't burn properly but I like that part of it.

Anyway, here are some from that experiment.

It's never been easy documenting the One Thousand Thousand project and in some ways producing the pieces is the easy part.

Seems like when there is a big exhibition of the project we tend to get into some more hyper-focused mindset and really do a more thorough inventory of the past pieces. Make sure everything is scanned and numbered and accounted for.

In preparation for the recent show Christopher sent some of the pieces he had and I've been scanning those over the last week or so.

These are from 2010 and I'm not sure they've been scanned before now.

Some recent pieces were made especially for an event held by the Silicon Valley Symphony Orchestra. Some symphony-related images were printed over some pieces and the results were sort of mixed.

There were three separate types of printing techniques used and the surfaces that were printed on were widely varied. 

Another small handful of pieces were done using an image transfer technique and then hand-painted and colored afterward. 

Still, the experimentation is a bulk of the fun and the results are okay too. I think.

In preparation for SubZERO Festival I made sure to scan all of the pieces that were being shown. I'm just now getting around to cropping them and all the rest.

This is batch one of many. 

Scanning is a total drag.

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.

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.

I feel like I'm kind of trying too hard in a lot of ways. And that's entirely contradictory to what the whole idea of the One Thousand Thousand project is all about. So I'll stop doing that. Or at least work on it.

I rarely set out with any real intentions for a certain set and I was purposely trying not to think of anything 'Valentine's Day-ish" for the pieces I was doing on the 14th. I'd talked about doing a set specifically intended for use as a Valentine's Day card but talked myself out of it as I didn't have the time and I ended up thinking it was too expected in some way. [Not sure why I am so set on expected being something to avoid. I could be wrong.] 

Anyway, so I scrapped the notion of adding some heart imagery or anything like that and even got bugged by the use of pink and red in the set. So I consciously decided to do something dramatically different and was looking through some old collage materials and found some LIFE magazine from the 50's or 60's. There were these terrific old photos of George Washington Carver teaching a class. I am obsessed with science imagery of all sorts and saved the photos because they were black and white shots of a science classroom. But then I continued over-thinking it and realized that the photos I decided on just happened to be photos of black folks mostly and I was reminded that February is also Black History Month. So that would be some obvious conclusion for someone to make. So I stopped with that. And then I was bugged that these color choices and line gestures and design elements reminded me of some Basquiat stuff. 

It went on and on like that for a while. Trying to think of ways to not think too hard. Trying to intentionally have no intentions. It's ridiculous.

[It's not unlike what happened with Peter Venkman. Or at least it reminds me of that for sure.]

And so the little set from that day took forever to finish and it bugged me to no end. And I can always tell that I've had some similar dialogue in my head when I look back and see the finished pieces. Some just suck. And others are really nice. 

I'd absolutely say that the average rating for the work done for the project works out where almost all of the work is pretty good. Surprisingly so. When I'm working in that 'flow' space I'm almost invariably satisfied with the results. [I'd stand by what I said to Stephen Layton about 90% of the work being really solid while just 5% or so completely suck.] 

And I am positive that the whole of the suck comes from when I'm thinking too hard or trying for some end result or working towards some specific end result. 

I've scanned the pieces from this set ahead of a lot of others waiting in the Need to be Scanned stack I have staring at me all the time. I wanted to get them moving on so that I could do the same thing. 

So, yeah. There are a few from this set that I really, really like a lot. And a couple that I don't like at all and hate to include them. 

I'm not saying which ones are which. 

I've added a few process/overview photos of this set as they were being completed.

They are behind the READ MORE break right there. Click it and see what I'm talking about.

Some scans of a set completed on February 6, 2014. This set is a recent favorite and I ended up using some tile grout as texture for a few of these. The results were pretty nice and I'm really feeling like a shift in materials is going to happen really soon. 

I'm including some process and overview photos as well.

As always they are just beyond the old Read More break. Have at it.

The small set that I did on September 24, 2013 is really nice. This is an example of where I really set out to do something purposeful and almost ruined it for trying too hard. My birthday is September 23rd and when my kid sister was first pregnant she was due on my birthday and I was really excited about this. It turned out that my niece Ali wasn't born until the 24th but I was ecstatic all the same.

My niece Ali is already an adult just about. And I don't get to see her very much anymore and I was hoping to do something nice for her. I ended up overworking and over-thinking these pieces when I first began working on them and later on after just letting go of some desired outcome I just painted and the results were close to perfect.

I love this set a lot.

Included behind the old Read More link down there are the scans and some overview photos too.

So this set I finished the other day was one I labored over and I'm not sure if I like it entirely or what I really think of it at all. It's weird how things from your life kind of seep into your art and I recognize now that I subconsciously pulled in some stuff from Carl Jung and Love and Rockets.

I had been reading this Jung book that I bought the other day at an estate sale and I was listening to Love and Rockets a whole lot during this time.

The Jung book was laying out and I am sure that I pulled some stuff from it. I'd also, as I said before, been listening to a lot of Love and Rockets and had been talking about the lyrics to Express Kundalini with Katherine. They have been such a monumental influence on me in many ways and I really value their music and lyrics. [I cannot express this properly in words without sounding syrupy or contrived.]

Anyway, this set started out really fantastic and then I got frustrated with it. And then managed to save it some until I just stopped where it was before I ruined them completely. In looking at them a bit later as I scanned them I do like how they turned out though.

The scans and some progress photos are included below.

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 small set done on September 17, 2013.

I'm always really hesitant to use purples for whatever reason. Each time I do the results are always really terrific and I need to just get over it.

This whole set is fantastic.

Some overview photos are included.

A small set completed on September 16, 2013.

Some overview photos are included.