Blue Heron Lake

To celebrate the renaming of Golden Gate Park’s Stow Lake to Blue Heron Lake I created an artist stamp for this month’s meeting of the San Francisco Correspondence Coop.

What to do with Add-n-Passes? Make a Zine!

There was a time when I liked add-n-passes as part of receiving and sending mail art.   The idea is that you add something to a piece of mail art and then send it on and so forth.  Eventually it returns to the original sender.   I even started a few myself.   In 2012 I launched an add-n-pass based on geological layers that got a great response.  I have always found the better ones have some sort of theme.

But like many mail artists, I have gone off the add-n-pass. In my opinion, scrawling “add-n-pass” on a piece of paper and mailing it to me, is far from the idea of mail art.  It all reminds me of those cursed chain letters when I was a kid.
I still like doing truly collaborative pieces with other mail artists, but the add-n-pass is usually annoying.  On a rare occasion when I receive one that is all but finished, I will complete it and return to the original sender.  Nowadays I scavenge the good bits for one of mail art, artist scrapbooks (see image below ).
The new year began with a brilliant solution to the add-n-pass problem.   I received this little zine from Josh Ronsen made from add-n-pass scraps and I LOVE it.   Josh has come up with a great way to start my mail art year.   

Yosemite Falls

 Yosemite Falls inspired my latest hand-carved rubber stamps for a new mail art series to celebrate the holidays.   

Welcomed Home by Mail Art

After a few weeks in the tropics, I was welcomed by all sorts of mail art treats in my post office box.  This is a list of the artists shown here: 

1. Lubomyr Tymkiv - Ukraine
2. MiM – Virginia
3. Sabela Baña – Spain 
4. Wabi Sabi Sews – California 
5. The Sticker Dude – New York 
6. Sally Wassink – California 
7. Jennie Hinchcliff – California
8. Jon Foster – North Carolina 
9. Debra Mulnick – Idaho
10. Gregg Biggs – Museum of Unclaimed Ephemera – California

Ticket! Ticket!

 In May 1986 I was living in St. Gallen, Switzerland. I took a day trip to Schaffhausen and decided to keep the train ticket.   Recently I sent it to Jack Latteman at Cascadia Artpost for Series 12 of the “Ticket! Ticket!”collaborative mail art project.  Very excited to receive the sheet of artist stamps in the mail.

A watched pot, or is it a watched P.O. Box, never boils?

Go out of town for a week and when you come back the post office box is overflowing.  I even had to wait at the counter to pick up the overflow.  All sorts of mail art including incredible artist stamps and a new, handmade, artists book of Ryosuke Cohen’s Brain Cells too.  Amazing!  This is a list of the artists shown here: 

1. Peter Müller – Germany
2. Fleur Helsingor – California
3. Pamela Gerard (California)
4. Debra Mulnick – Idaho
5. Artist in Seine (aka Dean Marks) – France 
6. Birgitta Jonnson – Sweden
7. Heather Ferguson – California
8. Matt Ferranto – New York 
9. The Sticker Dude – New York 
10. Nancy Bodkin – California 
11. Keiichi Nakamura – Japan
12. Maria Quiroga – Argentina 
13. Jack Latteman - Cascadia Artpost – Oregon 
14. Gregg Biggs – Museum of Unclaimed Ephemera – California
15. Jürgen Greissbach – Germany 
16. Ryosuke Cohen – Japan
17. Mindaugas Žuromskas – Lithuania 

The Colors of the Dahlia Dell

 

All summer long I keeping stopping by the Dahlia Dell.  It is right next to the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park.  Each week the flowers are bigger and bigger and exploding with more and more colors.   They have inspired my art before, and this year I wanted to use the palette for this latest piece in my ongoing Lines and Color Series.