So salon style it had to be lest there be hundreds of horizontally centered, framed pieces made instantly obsolete. And, besides, I knew how rad salon style was gonna look. [You saw how great it looked, yeah?]

So many people gave so many pieces a new home that after the first few days I had to get more work into frames and hung to keep up. That's a remarkably humbling and cool thing to be sure. By the last week of the show there were about 120 more pieces added to the overall show. [I think the number of framed works that were on display maxed out at well over  520 or so? We're getting that stuff worked out now but it's all just a whole lot.]

So, anyway, yeah, since the regular display at Kaleid Gallery is hung grid style using only the vertical pieces I'm wondering what to do with all the horizontal pieces there are left over? I'd say I've got about 75 or so and a chunk of them came from contributions from Kim Keek Richardson, Isadora Cryer, Angelica Paez and KatherineOgg. [Who all seem to have not firm preference for which way they orient the blank boards. There's enough, I'd say, for even a South First Fridays Double Header so if you have any ideas you should text/call 520-955-9025.  

I've been working on the One Thousand Thousand project for a long, long time. In years past a big part of the process involved working with other artists to sort of push one another to do things they'd not normally/immediately consider and having other styles and techniques kind of imposed on you definitely facilitates growth. So it's been a collaborative effort for sure. I've roped a lot of people in to participate in the project and if you know me then chances are I've stuck a paintbrush in your hands and said to have a go at it.

There have been plenty of instances where other artists took to the project and produced a series of pieces on their own and the cool part of it is to see how it takes on a life of its own with them. One recent example is when I last visited my Very Good Friend Kim in St. Louis. I'd been hounding her for years to consider doing some work for the project. She was gracious enough years ago to have worked on a piece I did for my 52 Weeks project [She did Week 36. ] and I hoped to have her do the same for the One Thousand Thousand project.

I did this little set of 8 pieces and I went back and forth between loving it and hating it and once I got it to a place that was not hating it I stopped. I've learned to quit while I'm ahead and am even able to do that every once in a while and rather than risk ruining the entire set I paused to figure out what was missing. 

There are a variety of ways to do photo image transfers and the way I know how is to print off some images onto acetate using an inkjet printer. From there you smear a little alcohol-based hand sanitizer onto the surface you want to transfer to and then flip the printed acetate over onto the alcohol gel you smeared on and then press down. The hand sanitizer gel lifts off the ink and it evaporates pretty quickly and the results are this ghosted image of the original. 

I don't like going for a perfect transfer and prefer that there is some hazy looking residue of an image left behind. [As opposed to some crisp or clean image.] It helps to add something to the pieces that are not quite completed and in this case it had the exact result I was hoping for. 

I used some vintage images of the Northern Lights and some meteor showers and volcanoes erupting and one from an old photo-postcard of the Golden Gate bridge. Scans of the finished pieces as well as some overview shots plus a few of the source images are just below. 

[Not sure what I'm doing wrong that the scans just never show the neon pink like they should. But, trust me on this one, these are incredible looking in person and are some of my new favorites.]

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 of pieces from Katherine that were completed on December 26, 2015. She used some image transfers of her photos from Europe over an acrylic background then topped that off with some layers of beeswax. 

These are really rich and lovely and the stuff done in encaustics is hard to beat.

I've been working on the One Thousand Thousand project for a long, long time. In years past a big part of the process involved working with other artists to sort of push one another to do things they'd not normally/immediately consider and having other styles and techniques kind of imposed on you definitely facilitates growth. So as much as it has been a personal project it's also been a hugely collaborative effort for sure. I've roped a lot of people in to participate in the project and if you know me then chances are I've stuck a paintbrush in your hands and said to have a go at it.

There have been plenty of instances where other artists took to the project and produced a series of pieces on their own and the cool part of it is to see how it takes on a new life with them. One recent example is when I last visited my Very Good Friend Kim in St. Louis. I'd been hounding her for years to consider doing some work for the project. She was gracious enough years ago to have worked on a piece I did for my 52 Weeks project [She did Week 36 here:  ] and I hoped to have her do the same for the One Thousand Thousand project.

This was especially important as I had just reached the milestone of 333,333 pieces and was hoping for some shift in things after The First Third. As I saw/see it this next phase on the way to a million would almost require other work from other artists. I was getting burned out to a degree and was worried I'd end up making crummy work or repeating myself or whatever. So the Second Third seemed like a great time to kind of just be kind of a curator for the project and usher in a phase where I really sat back some and included more work that was done by other artists in contribution towards the edition. And when I was in St. Louis visiting friends and family I really ramped up my pitch with Kim. I left her with supplies and some additional pieces I'd not yet completed she agreed to give it a shot.

I asked Dyer the other day to describe the early days of the One Thousand Thousand project. This is what he sent:

​This project started out of that leftover optimistic field of vision you have when you were a kid, a mindset in which fireman, astronaut, and fighter pilot were completely reasonable occupational goals that in your teenage years wears just as dumb and unrealistic into lofty audacity of writing the great American novel, start the next beat generation, redefine rock & roll or in the case of McHenry and I, “let’s make a million paintings.”
 
In our minds, at the time, that was a completely rational and bulletproof idea. On the level of that idealistic horse blinder mentality that generals in battle subscribe to when they keep telling the troops “we will all be home by Christmas.”
 
We honestly believed this project would take no more than a couple of years. What the hell were we thinking? A million? Holy christ ghost! As Jason has said while “a million” is a low end term nowadays, in actual production it’s a goddamn feat of unbelievable endurance.
 
I can assure you that we are going to see this through however long it takes. We are of stubborn Missouri “show me” stock and fueled by a dumb blind work ethic best stated by a quote from Hemingway:
 
 “Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.”
 
Dares and determination aside, what I have come to find of great beauty with this project is that it provides me with a lasting connection with my dearest friend Jason. We all have had rare snow leopard, real deal holyfield friendships that with time, distance and difference have faded into a background of fond memory. That has never happened to us. Want to keep someone in your life hell or high water, my advice – agree to make a million paintings with them.
 
Over the years, this project has afforded us opportunities to connect with a great vast cross section of truly amazing people who thought making art a foreign concept. What I have always thought grand about this project is the vaudeville magic trick element to it that reveals the mildly uncelebrated fact that we all have at least one good painting in us (or maybe even a million.)

We expect there to be a couple of hundred pieces done for this set and maybe more depending on time. Some of the pieces are being scanned now and we're including some of them here. [Along with some assorted photos of the overall process.]

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.

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:

I'm never going to be good at scanning. I sort of just expect a decent scanner to do the job and quite often it just doesn't even come close. There is this little series of 5 consecutive pieces that I want to keep together and when I scanned them they just end up looking just kind of like the originals.

It doesn't matter with these as they are going to be part of the next load of new work I drop off at the gallery and they'll be better there so people can see them in person.

There are 5 of them in this set and they were done on 5/5/14 and it's cool that they happened like that.

I took some photos of the set to try and show you what I mean by the difference between the scans and the originals. Although with these even the photos are not even very accurate.

Maybe it's the sections of high-gloss medium I applied to some of the areas? And maybe the camera should have never been considered for use after the beating it took out in the Black Rock Desert last year?

Anyway, these are way more white and crisp when you have them in front of you.

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 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.