Prints of 2025

2025 was a slightly less productive year than 2024, in large part due to a two month lull I mention later. Despite that, I’m significantly happier with almost everything I’ve made compared to last year.

This year also marked my first time tabling to sell my art, which was an informative experience I’ll write about later. Selling prints, as opposed to gifting them, has been gratifying in off-putting in ways I hadn’t anticipated. I don’t intend to make any significant shift toward selling prints, but will probably do some opportunistically when it means being able to hang out with friends who’re also tabling.

untitled new years card

This was the first piece I worked on at a local art making gathering. I’d tried to carve the greeting of 新年快樂, but it failed pretty poorly. Hence the pretty poor hand-writing on this one. The rest were mercifully left without the greeting.

Season’s Fleeting

Inspired by the piles of discarded trees lining the street in the weeks after Christmas. I also decided to take a bit of a Rocko’s Modern Life approach on the trashcan. This I didn’t end up gifting to anyone, but was big hit later in the year when I tabled at a holiday market.

Claw

Night At The Little Roxie

One of my favorites of the year. At some point later in the year I learned about the 100 Views Of New Tokyo (新東京百景) and Onchi Koshiro’s (恩地孝四郎) print of a theater within that set, and was pleased by the similarity.

On review, I should have swapped the color of the rim lighting on the heads and chairs. The magenta is brighter against the purple than the cyan, and I’d prefer the figures to stand out more than they do (even if it doesn’t make sense from a light reflection perspective).

Forms

Forms: Garf

I was carved and printed in one night at Friend’s And Neighbors just to have something to work on. One of my friends who attended with me drew a Garfield face on one of the forms and created a special one-of-a-kind piece.

Alemany

There’s a freeway overpass near my dentist that has, since childhood, always intrigued me with its shapes. Foolishly, I drew from a reference photo directly onto the block, not thinking about how it’d get reversed.

Vecino

Probably my most popular print of the year. Someone I follow online used to periodically take pictures of dogs in windows that she encountered as she walked around the city, captioned simply with “vecino”. On a walk earlier in the year I encountered a neighbor dog of my own hanging out in the window, and snapped a photo, with no real plan in mind. That served as the basis for this, drawn, carved, and printed in one day.

Conviction

At a concert, after one band finished playing, the drummer of the next band went and sat at the drum kit early. He closed his eyes, gently bowed his head, and stayed there absolutely still for perhaps a whole minute. I grabbed my phone to take a picture but the very dim lighting meant I captured nothing. Regardless, the particular expression and shape of his body remained with me. I reduced the elements in the sketch over and over, from multiple colors to single black. Eliminated the line work. Until all that was left was his shape, his face, and his hands.

Untitled (after Ruth Asawa)

I went to see SFMOMA’s Ruth Asawa retrospective, and left most interested in her 2D works. Still, there was something about the sculptures, and the visual flattening that occurs when viewed against a distant, stark white wall that I found compelling.

Threading The Needle

I had an empty, unproductive couple of months after a friend’s wedding. I wanted to make a card for them, capturing my friend’s husband singing The Cure at the post-dinner attendee karaoke. I was frustrated and disappointed in everything, and kept scrapping designs.

At this point, I’d begun to host regular art making afternoons with a different friend of mine, and I needed something to work on, so I quickly threw this together. My wife, who does sew, mocked me for seemingly never having threaded a needle in my life, and having no idea how hands curled when doing it properly. The matchstick emerged naturally at some point, perhaps before, perhaps after, those conversations. When selling this later, everyone assumed the match stick was a sewing needle.

Plovers

Easily my favorite of the year. I wish I’d had more of a plan for the wings, I winged it during carving.

Ósland

The first of several pieces I still plan to do from my trip to Iceland. This is adapted from a sculture just outside of Höfn, on a former island named Ósland, now connected by a smelly landfill isthmus. The sculpture is a memorial to seamen. Presumably those lost at sea. I couldn’t find much information on site, but what struck me were the contorted shapes of these figures.

Hallgrímskirkja

A Starry Night

I wanted to continue my cat-themed end-of-year card tradition.