… at least the part of the season where I stand around near a table & have all my prints on display for people to look at. yeah!!!
I’m pretty wiped out from being so extended into the public/social realm for the past two weeks, printing with a bunch of friends/visitors at my house/studio, then selling work last weekend at the RISD sale and this (just) past weekend at Cardboard Pankakes at NUA. But A) it was important to sell stuff & make the money, which you gotta do to stay alive… and B) it was really all lots of fun. Though I was really tired for some of the sale days, it is always great to talk to lots of people (some friends, many strangers) & ask them about their relationships with Providence & their lives and experiences (for example, someone told me about being a teenage night janitor in the Industrial Trust Building in the 1970s & smoking weed in the middle of the night up in the observation tower… what!!??).
Also it’s amazing when people come up to me & say “I saw your print on the wall of my friend’s house in Dublin!” or “My professor had us over to her house for the final class of the semester & her kitchen was full of your work…” or when people get a certain look in their eye when they’re buying something & you know that it connected with them on a very specific & personal level. It is strange, super humbling, and magical. What just happened? I had an idea for something, and made this thing that I thought of, and now it’s gonna be on someone’s kitchen wall for a year & they’re going to look at it every day & think about it every day… or it’s gonna fade into the backdrop of their daily life, but still be there in the corner of their eyes when they cook eggs and drink coffee with their friends… or their kids will grow up with this poster on their bedroom wall & it will be “that poster that I had on the wall when I was a kid” for somebody…
Anyways I don’t want to exaggerate the importance of what I do cause it’s just posters & letters & graphics & colors. But I also want to acknowledge that it has a power and it is important to our identities and that we choose graphic material to be around us because we feel the meaning of it or we want to be reminded of what it is telling us… I have lots of thoughts about this & they’re all garbled right now because I’m still exhausted, but the simple upshot is that I’m super honored that people choose my work to be around them! thanks everybody! it’s really amazing & I’m glad you like the work.
[... at the RISD sale, I was tabling alongside traditional glass-worker/high-tech 'maker' Jenine Bressner (Fireworks/Flowerclouds), across the aisle from fabric artist Cynthia Treen & photographer Karen Philippi, and I got to hang out for one too-brief moment with screenprinter colleague/pal Liz Squillace from Bridgeport, above! ... and NUA, of course, was full of wonderful people actually too numerous to mention, many of whom can be spotted here in Max Binder's photos.]
Okay and in self-promotion mode… if you somehow missed corralling me in person while I was standing behind that pile of paper, but you still want a print! Both Craftland and Frog & Toad have some of my prints & postcards at their stores… It’s getting close to the wire for Christmas-eve-arrival mail-order but here’s the WEBSTORE anyways, if you’re in the northeast USA a mailing tube will probably still get to you in time for that holiday! OR, if you’re in Providence you can come over & look through *all* the prints here at the studio & take some home with you, get in touch: secretdoorprojects (a) gmail.com. yet another OR, if you’re in Philadelphia I’ll be heading down there on the 22nd or so, get in touch & we can arrange a pickup / drop off.
OKAY BEDTIME
