Monochromatic Outlook

I’m a bit cha­grinned to admit that hav­ing been mired in details I failed to see the obvious.

In stan­dard paper sizes (ISO 216) and pen-point sizes (ISO 128 &c), the square root of two is used as the inter­val between sizes, and between the short and long sides in the case of paper. This makes good sense for the pur­pos­es of mechan­i­cal enlarge­ment or reduc­tion. If you draw or write some­thing with a #2 pen (0… Read the rest

It’s morn­ing in El Cer­ri­to — or is it Albany? I’ve nev­er been cer­tain about the bor­ders here in the East Bay. I stopped at a Shell sta­tion to get fuel for the Guzzi and a lit­tle caf­feine for myself.

Across San Pablo from me is a police­man who has pulled over a bicy­clist. The bicy­clist has a trail­er attached to her bike, and the trail­er has a trash bar­rel on it and some rakes and tools.

It looks like the … Read the rest

Pilot is quick­ly becom­ing my favorite pen man­u­fac­tur­er and my least favorite pen com­pa­ny at the same time. Their design and atten­tion to detail is remark­able, their qual­i­ty con­trol appears to be cur­rent­ly unpar­al­leled in the indus­try, and their prices run on the low side com­pared to pens of sim­i­lar qual­i­ty of design. In these regards, Pilot is mak­ing most of the rest of the indus­try look bad. What’s the catch? Pilot USA won’t sell these pens.

The newest addi­tion to … Read the rest

I’d orig­i­nal­ly thought to title this post «Back to Paper», but the thing is, I’ve nev­er before real­ly used a paper orga­niz­er or cal­en­dar. I’ve tried a few over the years, of course, but noth­ing real­ly took. In 1993 I gave up on keep­ing a paper address book and began record­ing names, num­bers, birth­days and address­es on my desk­top com­put­er using OS/2 2.0’s «Data­base», a rudi­men­ta­ry form-builder that was part of its col­lec­tion of pro­duc­tiv­i­ty appli­ca­tions, … Read the rest

I came across a very small repro­duc­tion of this adver­tise­ment while read­ing David and Mark Shep­herd’s Park­er ‘51’. Although the Park­er 61 foun­tain pen is men­tioned only briefly in their book about the icon­ic ‘51’, the use of Nor­man Rock­well illus­tra­tions in Park­er’s adver­tise­ments was too impor­tant to ignore even if they were for the «wrong» pen. The 61 is one of my favorite pens, and I dare­say I like mine bet­ter than my ‘… Read the rest

Mark this down in your cal­en­dars, OK?

…and that means mark it down in your cal­en­dar and show up.

Once again, the Mis­sion Arts Foun­da­tion will be host­ing a week­end of Open Stu­dios, and once again I’ll be there in my stu­dio answer­ing ques­tions and hope­ful­ly sell­ing art­work. I’m at Stu­dio 16 at the 17^th Street Art Explo­sion loca­tion. There will be wine and crack­ers and a zil­lion artists oth­er than me par­tic­i­pat­ing, so it’s sure to be a blast. … Read the rest

I’m pulling out all the stops on this piece. When it’s fin­ished I may have to title it «Swap Space» or «Scratch Disk».

It may not be as bad as that. Right now I’m try­ing a fin­er line­screen than the one I start­ed work­ing with. That means increas­ing the image res­o­lu­tion for each chan­nel as I screen it. The final res­o­lu­tion will be the same (which is twice the res­o­lu­tion of any of my pre­vi­ous large-for­mat lux­o­graph­ic prints) but the … Read the rest

Remem­ber how proud I was of myself last night for exceed­ing my sys­tem resources? Well, I’m over it now. This is get­ting annoy­ing. I closed all the files and shut­down and restart­ed my machine to make sure I was­n’t using mem­o­ry from oth­er appli­ca­tions or mem­o­ry leaks or any­thing like that. I brought the sys­tem back up with rough­ly 20GB of disk space free. I tried to open the work­ing file of that one col­or chan­nel in Pho­to­shop, which … Read the rest