RawHound Productions

 
This week’s Portland trip included a visit to the studio of RawHound Productions and a sneak peek at their latest projects. In 2025 they won an Audience Choice award at the Portland Festival of Cinema.

The Portland Art Museum

When I travel, I always try to make time to visit local art museums. I especially like to go to museums that are smaller, less well known, etc. I often discover real treasures, from excellent regional work, artists who should be better known and even works from very famous artists that never make the art books and travelling blockbuster museum shows. Santa Barbara, Long Beach, Tucson, Boise, just point me to the art museum.

I get up to Portland now and then but realized it has been 18 years since I visited the Portland Art Museum. The museum has tripled in size since my last visit.  This is an example where more exhibition space is better (that is not always the case).

It is always satisfying to see a lot of local artists featured in a museum. The Inkling Studio show is an excellent showcase of local printmaking.  Mark Rothko was a local artist, but most of the blockbuster work is elsewhere. As an artist, I found seeing some of his early work fascinating. There is a beach scene that reminded me of Chaïm Soutine.  The museum has Soutine’s The Little Pastry Cook — a pleasure to see as we do not have any of his work on display in the Bay Area. The photography of the Kenji Nakahashi was also well curated, it is shown with contemporary Japanese ceramics.

I must be sure not to wait 18 years to go back.

Visiting the Portland Correspondence Coop

On my visit to Portland, I got to attend the Portland Correspondence Coop monthly meeting. It was a real treat.
The meetings are hosted in this amazing place called Cargo. 
Cargo is sort of like an antique mall but for artists and makers.  Instead of antiques, you have booths filled with all kinds of groovy stuff.  Some of the artists represented are even San Francisco refugees.
How I wish we could have a space like this in San Francisco. But alas, pretty much any big warehouse like this would be snapped up by some tech company to make another useless app.   I ❤️ Portland.

City Stickers

Stickers covering the backs of street signs are not unique to any community. It happens in a lot of places. But the stickers themselves are often unique.
Can we create a portrait of a community by just looking at what gets stuck on the street signs, electrical boxes and mailboxes, buildings, etc.?  Well, let’s start with Portland, Oregon and see what we get.

Part 4: If you save it long enough you might use it in a collage

Scraps old and new have ended up in the Layout Scrapbook.  As an artist, people give me things I might use, and a collection of metro tickets from around the world finally gets used.  

If you give me a box of Niederegger Marzipan, I’ll be sure to recycle the foil wrappers.  The remains of a copy of Avant Garde, a short-lived magazine from the 1960s, are in the book after lingering in the family’s attic for decades).  

Go through boxes and find photos of young cousins eating ice cream (he now has five of his own children).  The polka twins are really one young lad who is now becoming a star down in Los Angeles and that punk with the goats is still rocking up in Portland.  You will never forget a trip to Mexico when you think about dairy products and Supradol (the best name ever for a painkiller).  

On the back cover of the book we get an illustration of Allen Hurlburt himself.  And finally, honk if you know Ken Budka.

November Mail Part I

November always feels like an intermission month to me.  This fall’s show are hung, it’s the quite before the holidays and San Francisco is a mix of warm sunny days with intermittent rain as we wait for the real, wet winter to get its start.  Here is some of the mail art that I have recently received: 

1. Jennifer Utter could not resist taking a photo of a spectacular sunset and turning it into mail art.  You might not realize this, but for all we do have in San Francisco, an impressive sunset in our foggy city is a rare thing.
2. Elaine James incorporated the San Francisco MUNI map into a Día de los Muertos card.  The papel picado stamps the USPS put out this year are some of the best for 2016. I used many.
3. Punkie Ebert has done a colorful zine featuring many of cultural icons.
4. Jacqueline Wygant sent a small little booklet from Portland that reminds me I need to make a trip up there to once again spend the day at Powell’s.
5. And a new set of awesome owl artist stamps from Darlene Altschul.

Thank you for the mail art, watch for November Mail Part II in the next post.

Beyond Pink

Putting the overwhelming Pink Mail Art response behind me, it is time to take a look at some of the non-pink mail art that has been coming in recently including a number of pieces from the folks up in Portland at the PDX Correspondence Coop.  Some recent arrivals include:

1. A mail art map card arrived from lezbag.
2. Edith Gillette also sent a card from Portland.
3. Torma Cauli continues the green theme that perhaps intentionally complements some of my own recent work.
4. Marina Salmaso sent a new collage postcard.
5. The crocodiles are feasting on the jewels in Dean Marks latest piece.
6. Steve Howell’s postcard has a nice collection of never-used old postage stamps.
7. Jodi is requesting a reply.
8. Llana Swinks postcard features the groovy little mailster.
9. Ann Symons card included an artist stamp with a cat.  You can never go wrong with cats.
10. Miss Polly sent a handmade envelope with vintage postage and a postal note inside.
11. An altered postcard from Sagebrush Moderne.
12. Some mail art greenness from A.J. Dell’Aringa
13. A minimalist postcard from e. coles in England.
14. A new image with Sutro Tower from Joshua A. Dellinger

Thank you for the mail art, more keeps arriving and I’ll post it soon.

Little Things 10

I just got a card for a show up in Portland called Little Things 10. It's at the Guardino Gallery (see link for details). The show includes work from Dan Pillers. I know Dan from his days in San Francisco and he is missed down here. Check out his work if you're up in Portland.

Dan Pillers at Guardino Gallery

San Francisco artist Dan Pillers is back living in Portland. He has a show opening this week at the Guardino Gallery. It runs from May 27 through June 20.