painting between prints

In prints, sad penguins November 16, 2014

Location: Portland Oregon
Date:Feb-May 2011
Description: ink paintings on various sized scraps of paper

I began to regularly paint small sad penguins on scraps of paper. The painting of small sad penguins was a way to keep going when discouraged. I was printing serigraphs and making visuals for climate justice campaigns. Basically, the collective print studio where I was working, Flight 64, had piles of thin strips of really nice paper. Sometimes when friends came over to my house or studio, their attention would be drawn to small strips of paper, off cuts of serigraphs, painted with small sad penguins. I would be surprised and slightly annoyed. Why weren’t they focusing on my prints? Hard to believe from my fuzzy documentation but, the clumps and clusters of ink sad penguins had uncanny appeal.

Besides making art prints, I was also printing and painting visuals as part of climate justice organizing with Risingtide Portland. I was involved in campaigns to disrupt/stop tar sands modules being shipped up up the Columbia River and organizing against a coal export terminal.

placards painted at my studio for coal port protest

i made the graphics for this filier- scanned paper cuts

A couple of other members of Risingtide and I went out to Salt Lake City to participate in the Peaceful Uprising around the sentencing of Tim DeChristopher. The “Singing in Solidarity” banner exemplifies some of the kind of work I was doing in the climate justice movement.

peaceful uprising: i helped paint the banner "singing in solidarity" — peaceful uprising: i helped paint the banner “singing in solidarity”

Having followed climate science and global politics closely since around 2006, climate justice activism is difficult for me. The political horizon of possible speech cannot honestly describe the miserable situations proliferating from global heating and its industrial causes.