december 2023 | mixed media collage

november 2023 | printed leaves

October 2023 | everything will be ok, just call

On the back - Callin Oates Emergency hotline: 719-26-OATES

september 2023 | menhaden

Tetra-pak prints, pulled on pasta machine

august 2023 | The APOCALYPSE pigeon of august

Me: List the top five animals that will survive climate change

AI Robot: Predicting the exact animals that will survive climate change is complex, but some resilient species are likely to include:

1. Cockroaches

2. Rats

3. Pigeons

4. Bedbugs

5. Certain jellyfish species

Me: Rate in order of cuteness

AI Robot: Rating them by cuteness is subjective, but if I had to, it might go:

1. Pigeons

2. Certain jellyfish species

3. Rats

4. Cockroaches

5. Bedbugs

july 2023 | Beet and potato prints

june 2023 | buzz butt mcgee

Pink eraser carving print, inspired by Serena Rios McRae

Insta: @cactuscloudart and @pinkeraserart

may 2023 | this is not at gun

Tribute zine to the Cara Levine’s work

https://thisisnotagun.com/about

april 2023 | 9th street rookery

9th Street rookery - Know what great egrets, snowy egrets, black-crowned night-herons and cattle egrets all have in common? For over 25 years these four species have returned to Santa Rosa’s 9th Street Rookery to nest high above the traffic. Just a few eucalyptus trees on a slim meridian are home to hundreds of birds every spring and summer. The scene is smelly, cacophonous, magical and a bit dangerous. It’s worth a visit if you’re local, they’re just getting going this season.

Xerox transfers are a low-tech easy printmaking process
1.     Print an image using a regular laser printer (not an inkjet printer). I like to start with a collage but any image will do
2.     Tape your image face down on a flat surface. Paper, cardboard, fabric, and even wood all work well
3.     Cover the image in tea tree oil
4.     Rub it with something hard like the back of a spoon until the toner has transferred to your surface

Voila - you’ve got a print!

March 2023 | cow cards

Back of postcard: Hello Friends! In 2018 I obtained a PO Box and I quickly learned that it had previously belonged to a man named Joe. To this day, I receive Joe’s bi-annual cow catalogs. I have saved every single one.

They are magnificent, with deep cow lingo and beautiful cow portraits. They make me feel connected to Joe, and to humanity in general. Receiving Joe’s cow catalogs has become a tiny little sparkly part of my life that I thoroughly enjoy, but never could have predicted. This is the first art I’ve made with them; it took me years of absorbing the wonderful-ness of what was happening, before I was ready to create something from it.   XO - JYR

february 2023 | quilt piece

“Quilts were made for people to stay warm, they’re this thing of comfort. A lot of people say, ‘my grandmother sewed, my mother sewed,’’ so it reminds you of home, of that maternal care. The quilt arts have this loving part to them that makes people think about their own life…I’m making this portrait but I’m also reminding you of the love you were surrounded with or maybe even the love you wanted to have.” - Bisa Butler, discussing her textile portraits with Katy Hessel on The Great Women Artists podcast | BisaButler.com | @bisabutler

This piece was made with quilt scraps, gifted to me by quilt artist, Sabel Rose Regalia | SabelRoseRegalia.com | @sabelroseup

January 2023 | The golden nugget

There once was a truck, trusty & gold
Cute from nose, to exhaust manifold
But not a button worked right
Except the check engine light  
So off! Into the sunset it rolled

This month, I’m retiring my 1998 Nissan Frontier pickup with the California buy-back program to get polluters off the road. I’ve had the truck for over a decade, a somewhat tumultuous one. I relied on it for 8 moves, 5 regular part-time jobs, and 4 part-time jobs not reported to the IRS. This limerick and small artwork are my ode to the truck that served me well. 

I drew the image in pro-create to get a true likeness, then sent the image through my vinyl cutter creating a sticker in four parts. I bought gold vinyl for the perfect color of my truck, and used various scrap blacks for the tires. After cutting Bristol paper into squares, I stuck the stickers on for a sweet little piece!

DECEMBER 2022 | The Queen eats for us

Linocut print, with accompanying blurb:

The queen bumblebee feeds heavily before digging an underground winter den where she hibernates for several months. When she emerges in the spring, she lays broods of worker bees first, followed by new queens and male bees. At the end of the season, she dies along with her worker bees.

 New queens prepare for hibernation and the cycle begins again.

November 2022 | ZINE STYLE CATALOG

A catalog of my assemblage exhibit at the Spinster Sisters. I wanted to share this other side of my art practice with Va Va Vortex subscribers, so I made this mini catalog featuring these assemblage pieces ✨ It includes a pretty fun list of every material I used: mimeograph paper, lace, crochet, doilies, furniture nails, book covers, seven types of paper, fabric, scraps, encaustic wax, antique info band for reels, gel medium, string, tulle, tacks, paint, ink, player, piano paper, wood glue, old wallpaper, hacksaw blade, elmers glue, plastic dots, xerox transferred images, unidentified seedpods, broken chair, letter from 1912 signed your father, wood blocks, glass plate negative

October 2022 | Spinster

Handprinted linocut in the spirit of Halloween, orb weavers, witches, and spinsters. 

Blurb sent with art, “The word spinster originally described women who spun wool for a living, work which was commonly available to unmarried women at the time. Occupations stood in for surnames and the correlation stuck. And of course, there’s just a long history of pejorative names for single women. I found a couple gems while reading up, including “superannuated virgins” (obsolete virgins) and “Christmas cakes” (unsold goods). Whew! It’s almost like society at large has something against “single” (independent) women or something. Anyway, harpy Halloween!" 

September 2022 | Hydra

From accompanying blurb, “Hydra, a small fresh water invertebrate related to jellyfish and coral, has constantly regenerating cells, which means their bodies don’t degrade over time. They do not appear to die of old age, or to age at all. They can even regenerate body parts and clone themselves I first heard of Hydra on an Invisibilia podcast episode called The Reluctant Immortalist. I highly recommend it!

This postcard piece is a gentle nudge. It’s ok to let your Va Va Vortex pieces go, to send them on their way after they’ve done their duty. Send it to a friend, lose it at a café, collage with it, or gasp - recycle it!

It’s ok more art will grow in its place I promise.”

August 2022 | Fart Art

I’m increasingly drawn to art that makes me say, “…is that…art?”

“Oh, she says, well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I'll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is - we're here on Earth to fart around.” - Kurt Vonnegut

july 2022 | crows

Caw-caw-caw! The Va Va Vortex July art piece was all about crows. The blurb included info from corvid expert and total bird babe Kaeli Swift PhD, as well as crow poetry by Mary Oliver and a bit about my personal experience with my backyard crow family!

I also included crow feather stickers I made at home using procreate and a silhouette cutting machine.

Process video HERE

June 2022 | Nonfungible Tulip

Ok, I take a shot at NFTs in this piece but I will admit here and now, I’ve minted an NFT or two, I dabbled in crypto. The ‘genius’ of the machinery is it’s so flippin complicated that people jump before/without fully comprehending it - because ‘the ship is sailing it’s your only chance now or never!’

I had a lot of fun printing these and maybe even more fun writing about the connection between Tulipmania & NFTs! Check out the full blurb HERE

Or if you’re interested in learning more about NFTs, watch this video essay by Dan Olson.

may 2022 | Your body still

Go to ShoutYourAbortion.com to download free abortion rights protest materials:

https://shoutyourabortion.com/materials/

As our reproductive rights are being stripped away at breakneck speed in the US, Kruger’s well known screen-print, Your body is a battleground, has been nagging at me to revisit it. It’s a masterful fusion of art and protest. Kruger made this iconic image 30 years ago for the Women’s March on Washington in 1989 after a string of anti-abortion laws began to undermine Roe v. Wade.

While working with Kruger’s imagery for this side by side, a lot came up: the unfathomable relevance of the message, the history of intersectional feminism in art and activism, what it means to steal imagery from someone who has been on both sides of copyright and artwork appropriation lawsuits, and the state of abortion rights.

April 2022

Map to everywhere you are

This last piece of Va Va Vortex’s first year is an omnipresent map to everywhere. It’s a play on Kandinsky’s concentric circles; he believed circles had symbolic significance relating to the mysteries of the cosmos. “The circle,” claimed Kandinsky, “is the synthesis of the greatest oppositions. It combines the concentric and the eccentric in a single form and in equilibrium. Of the three primary forms, it points most clearly to the fourth dimension.”

“All maps contain an inherent tension between going and staying. We consult maps in order to leave: which highways to merge onto, which exit to make, which turn to take. But we also make maps to know where we are: to get our bearings, to grow roots. A map is often a route to remaining.” -Renée Darline Roden

“Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too contain the unknown.” -Rebecca Solnit

FEBRUARY 2022 | Blue Seaweed

Cyanotypes are created using light sensitive paper (made with an inexpensive iron-salt solution) placed in direct contact with either photographic negatives or actual objects. Although countless artists have made iconic and masterful artworks employing this photographic medium, cyanotypes have never been granted full “photographic status” in popular culture. While other monochromatic tones like black & white or sepia have been accepted as neutral and accurate representations of the real world, we could never quite trust blue the same way.

December 2021 | The end (and beginning)

I was ruminating on the upcoming new year, the tradition of resolutions, and the two year mark of covid. I childishly feel like I already made my big changes and now I just want to stay the same and be comfy. Making a single transformation is sexy and remarkable, but doable. Continuing to transform takes all this endurance. Snakes seem like the right animal to hold in my heart while I think about it.

The circular cutouts are cut from upcycled paint sample cards. The snake was hand drawn then sent through my electronic cutting machine!

November 2021 | Trees are Invisible

This piece is a brutish interpretation of the detailed and delicate work by Susanna Bauer. She says, “Looking closely at a leaf, its uniqueness becomes apparent. Varied in tone, size and shape, no two leaves, even coming from the same tree, are ever the same, each carrying its own individual network of veins like a fingerprint. By combining crochet with such a seemingly fragile material as a leaf, I’m seeking to explore themes including the value of time and preciousness of objects, tenderness and tension in human connections, and vulnerability and resilience, found in nature as a whole as well as in the stories of individual beings.”

I recommend checking out her work! SusannaBauer.com or Insta: @susanna_bauer

October 2021 | questions (Wishes)

Hand printed with gold ink on black paper - wishes.
And the five questions Laurie Anderson asks herself.
Very important questions.

This piece came together in a whisper and a flutter. Suddenly, at the height of fire season and in the midst of terrible drought, we’re seeing floods here in the Bay Area. I feel untethered, grateful, worried. These two slippery things - Anderson’s questions, and the wishbone silkscreen print - they became one in the unexpected stormy weather.

September 2021 | Woodworms

Legend has it that when asked by a theologian what the living world could tell us about a creator, biologist J.B.S. Haldane remarked that, “If He exists the creator has an inordinate fondness for beetles.” In his writings, Haldane noted there are 300,000 species of beetles and only 10,000species of mammals. This collage is a an homage to the wood boring beetle colony I swill soon decimate by fumigation. This beetle species has resorted to infesting homes because humans have decimated their natural habitat.

Read the collage’s text, excerpts of fictional beetle trial from A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

August 2021 | Ourobananaboroslug

Though this piece referencing the ancient Ouroboros symbol is playful, it also speaks to the seemingly infinite cycles we find ourselves in. In August 2021 we saw COVID deaths spike, crisis in Afghanistan, a catastrophic hurricane in Louisiana, arcane abortion-ban laws in Texas, and the continuous wildfires on the West Coast.

July 2021

universally applicable love letter

Inspired by the brilliant Sophie Calle, who paid to have a public scribe write her a love letter, these universally applicable love letters were written especially for the recipient, whomever that was.

Read the letter and accompanying text HERE.