News -- Varnish Art Gallery show

Another quick announcement: One of my stencil painting will be included in Varnish Art Gallery's 30 under 30 show, which is showcasing works from 30 San Francisco artists under the age of 30. This is really cool for me because Varnish is the first gallery I went to when I first came to San Francisco, and now it's going to be the first gallery I'm going to show at.

Look for a new "Calendar" section on my website next week, detailing when and where my work will be shown.

Finished this today for our Bay to Breakers float. We're building this weekend, so hopefully I'll have some pictures next week.

It's that time of year again -- the frantic, late night building sessions, sawing wood and getting drill gun callouses in random San Francisco garages, the countless trips to the hardware store... that's right, Bay to Breakers! Bay to Breakers, for anyone not from SF, is officially a 7 mile run from the bay across San Francisco to the ocean. After six or seven actual runners dutifully get the real race out of the way in about a half an hour, somewhere in the range of 70 to 80,000 other people don costumes (or strip naked), pull kegs, and basically have a daylong party throughout the entire city. It's as close as you can get to an adult Christmas. You get really excited, you can't sleep the night before, you set your alarm clock extra early, but instead of running downstairs to open presents, you go shotgun a beer. It's an awesome time.

Two years ago, a couple of friends and I built a huge rolling mammoth float. Check it out here:





It held two kegs, the tap came out of the trunk, and can beer was held in a cooler in the back. Two people could ride it. Last year, we didn't have time to make a brand new float and the infrastructure of the mammoth was still good, so we decided to modify it into Snuffalupagus from Sesame Street, and open up the theme to the whole Muppet world. Not content with just making a cool float, we decided to add some mechanisms in the head so the driver could move the eyes left and right and blink the eyelids. Somehow, not one picture of it exists, but there is a pretty cool video on Youtube:





This year, we're going to modify it again. I actually won't have as much time to work on the float this year as I have in the past, what with all this art stuff I'm busy doing, but hopefully it'll turn out well. I don't want to jinx it by giving away the theme just yet, but I just cut this out on the bandsaw to adorn a huge pole we'll attach to it. Stay tuned.

News -- Sausalito Art Festival

A quick announcement: I just found out that my wire work got accepted into the Sausalito Art Festival. I'm stoked. It's one of the biggest art fairs in the country. It also luckily is about a 30 minute drive from my house on the north side of the San Francisco Bay in a beautiful seaside town. I'll have a booth with all my stuff and a bunch of new work, including a brand new idea I have which I'll unveil, from Friday August 29 - Monday, September 1. Everyone should stop by.

For those of you who haven't seen it, this is a picture of Sausalito. Awesome little city.



In other news, I found an awesome salvage yard in SF yesterday called Building Resources. Paradise. They have everything you could possibly ever want, only with more character and for less money. I got a bunch of materials that I'm going to work with, don't want to spoil the surprise yet, but here are a few sketches:

Just got back from the lumberyard where I got some beautiful pieces of soft maple to start on the bookshelf today. I can't even describe how much I love lumberyards. A warehouse full of gorgeous potential. There also was a pile of walnut boards on sale so I got one of those... don't really know what I'm going to do with it yet, but I'll come up with something.

The only problem with lumberyards is that wood is freaking expensive. Really really freaking expensive. That, combined with the whole environmental sustainability thing, is making me broaden my perspective to other options. So that's why I'm going to go back to an old medium: cardboard. I know that cardboard furniture has been done (and done really well -- check out Frank Gehry's awesome stuff), but as far as I can tell, it hasn't been done how I want it. We'll see. I finished my first test today and it's looking good. I'll keep you posted.

PS - Just found out about Giles Miller's work. Awesome awesome stuff.

I finished the cherry blossom sushi spoon today. I put on the second coat of shellac yesterday. I had heard that shellacking it would make it unusable with food, but today I heard that that isn't true. I also learned about where shellac comes from. Apparently, it's a secretion of the lac insect, which is found mostly in Thailand. It's edible and is used:

-- as a glazing for pills and candy
-- to recoat apples to prevent post-harvest decay

I had no idea. I had always imagined it with its incredibly shiny and almost plastic look that it had to be a chemical compound or something. Oh well. Now I know. The finished cherry blossom shamoji sushi spoon rice paddle:





I think I figured out today how exactly I'm going to make my bookshelf. If it turns out like I imagine it, it should be pretty cool. More on that later.

Wow. Long day. One of the things that the Hollywood Fringe group needs pretty quickly is a brochure that will be used primarily, I believe, for fund raising. It's been a frantic but fun design process. We've come up with several motifs, two of the major ones being a tree bursting out of concrete, sort of the idea that vital life can't be contained even by something as hard as rock... and the other are these simple shape based characters that have been come to known as the freaks. So the idea for the brochure is to combine those two motifs and do it as a sidewalk chalk drawing, then photograph it.

I've been scouting pavement for a week and just decided to it behind my work in the Bayview. It's not crowded, and the sidewalk looked good... not too new, a nice crack down the middle. I wanted to get as much daylight as possible, so I woke up at 4:45am this morning, gathered my supplies, and then took the train to work. Totally dark out. I got drawing at 7:30, thinking I'd finish by noon, and of course, didn't finish till like 3:30.

The original sketch:




If I did it again, I would've made it bigger, but with the rush, there really wasn't the time. Also, the concrete was really really rough (there's nothing like brand new concrete for this kind of thing) so it was hard to get much detail and it was tough on my fingers. Two of them are currently missing fingerprints. The concrete was so rough that I decided to outline it as much as I could in pencil to get a thin line. Concrete EATS pencils. I went through probably 6. Here's the first drawing, which will be the front of the brochure. I had to change the broken pavement to leave a spot for the logo:





Here's the drawing for the back of the brochure:




The blue guy on the far right? Where his leg is? Yeah, that's a piece of gum. I talked to a lot of friendly people today... everyone was really nice, but my favorite was this one guy who was walking by, he stopped and looked for a second. He said to me, "Do you believe in them?" "Oh, it's just a drawing. ... Believe in what?" "In Martians?" Hilarious. He did. Maybe I do too.

Both drawings:





Real quick in spoon news... I shellacked it yesterday and put another coat on today so it should be done tomorrow. Look for updated pictures and an update to the "Fabrication" section of www.gavinworth.com . I'm not totally sold on the shellac, but live and learn.