January is breezing by, and it looks like the rainy season has finally caught up with us in the Bay Area. I’ve been busy at work, but am doing my best to chip away at progress on a large painting. Time is always a struggle!

Something I really love about January is hearing about everyone’s fresh outlook, big ideas, new ambitions. Amazing people in my life have launched some great new labors of love and ingenuity. Check them out!

Folk Fibers – Textile artist and organic farmer Maura Grace sources and creates beautiful, handmade goods that both progress and pay homage to the great tradition of American craftsmen and women.

Liberty + Lunch – Lover of life and food, designer Katie Inglis shares in all her adventuring, whether it be geographical, philosophical, or gastronomical.

Ink Meets Paper – Entrepreneurial couple Daniel and Allison Nadeau have launched a new website for their letterpress studio. Not only do they create beautiful products, but they take great care to share the story and process behind the projects they undertake.

Eureka Coffee – Photographer and all around amazing lady Jessica Caisse is gearing up to launch a mobile coffee cart that serves up brew from the best micro-roasters around. Um, yes please. Follow her progress and get ready to sample some amazing coffee, folks!

Rigamaru -  Chris Sasaki (the love of my life) and myself have launched a new online store for the little company that we began together in Portland. Art shows, collaborative projects, and new products are in the works, so it’s shaping up to be an exciting year!

We were also able to catch the de Kooning retrospective at the MoMA while we were there. It’s a very penetrating examination of his life’s work. Really excellent. See it if you can.

Happy New Year!

New studio postcards just arrived. If you’d like one, send me an address and I’ll drop one in the mail to you.

Here are some photos from the past few days. I’ve picked up again on a large piece that I had started earlier this year and then set aside while I tackled a few other projects.

At dusk, just outside the studio.

I recently moved into a new studio space in Jack London Square. So much better than the garage! Better light, better neighbors, fewer spiders. And dangerously close to Blue Bottle Coffee. You can see some new work in progress in the photo.

Because of our schedules this year, Chris and I have decided not to exhibit at APE. I was planning to compile some recent sketchbook images and mini-comics in a book for the show, but I’ll share some of them here instead.

Lake Merritt, Oakland, CA

Disneyland, CA, circa 1985. I’m on my way, still little more than a twinkle.

Napa Valley, CA

Presidio, San Francisco, CA

Berkeley, CA

Sausalito, CA

Lake Merritt, Oakland, CA

I wish I could be a giant, then I could lie with my head near the snows on one of the Alps, lie there among the goats, with my toes splashing below in the deep lake. So I would lie there and never get up again, between my fingers the bushes would grow, and the wild roses of the Alps in my hair, my knees would be alpine foothills, and vineyards would stand on my body, and houses, and chapels. And so for ten thousand years I lie there, and gaze into the heavens, and gaze into the lake. When I sneeze, there’s a thunderstorm. When I breathe the snow melts, and the waterfalls dance. When I die, the whole world dies. Then I journey across the world’s ocean, to bring back a new sun.

Where am I going to sleep tonight? Who cares! What is the world doing? Have new gods been discovered, new laws, new freedoms? Who cares! But up here a primrose is blossoming and bearing silver fuzz on its leaves, and the light sweet wind is singing below me in the poplars, and between my eyes and heaven a dark golden bee is hovering and humming–I care about that. It is humming the song of happiness, humming the song of eternity. Its song is my history of the world.

– Hermann Hesse

So I want to try something new around here. I take a good amount of pictures throughout the week. Sometimes it’s because certain colors or architecture catch my eye, maybe an interesting texture, or something ironic. And while I don’t have any sort of secret ambition to become a photography wiz, it would be nice to catalogue them somehow, somewhere.

I think it’s a valuable exercise to take photos. It offers a nearly instant process for experimenting with things like framing a composition, observing the principles of natural phenomena like light and physics, and manipulating the perception of those phenomena. Not to mention, capturing and expressing narrative.

I thought a little bit about starting an entirely separate blog to share the photos, but honestly, when I see other artists compartmentalize their work across various blogs, it makes me crazy. There is already too much to keep track of in life, people! This is why they invented tagging. And anyway, since this blog in large part is to record and share my process, I think the photos have a valid place here. I hope you all think so, too.

So I’ll be cataloging all my photo ventures under the ‘Secret City’ tag. Look out, San Francisco.

A couple of weeks ago I got my wish and fatty snow flakes started drifting down onto Portland rooftops in the middle of the afternoon. By the time daylight was gone, the city was a wreck. It took chris more than 5 hours to get home from work. He swears to me there were zombies on the road. Later that night we walked to a nearby bar and cozied up with friends over hot food and drink. Not particularly unusual, but I remember thinking, this is a great night. I think snow is magic that way.

“As I walked away from the Eagle Lunar Module, Neil said ‘Hold it, Buzz’, so I stopped and turned around, and then he took what has become known as the ‘Visor’ photo. I like this photo because it captures the moment of a solitary human figure against the horizon of the Moon, along with a reflection in my helmet’s visor of our home away from home, the Eagle, and of Neil snapping the photo. Here we were, farther away from the rest of humanity than any two humans had ever ventured. Yet, in another sense, we became inextricably connected to the hundreds of millions watching us more than 240,000 miles away. In this one moment, the world came together in peace for all mankind.”

- Buzz Aldrin in Apollo Through the Eyes of the Astronauts

I have tremendous respect for astronauts. To be so empirically brilliant and yet still have that ferocious spirit of adventure–extreme sports ain’t got nothin’ on ‘em, if you ask me. Most astronauts devote their entire lives to the study of space and keep up rigorous physical training without knowing if they’ll ever get the chance to even be part of a mission. See more of these amazing Apollo images here.

I’ve been going through some old family photos lately. The above photograph is of a car that my grandfather built, with some kind of registration number written on the back. He carried this around with him in his wallet for years. Unfortunately, when he was older and living in an assisted living home, one of the nurses accidentally washed his wallet along with his pants, damaging the photo.