So on Thursday I went with my museum buddy, Marvel’s X-Men’s female clone of Wolverine (X-23), to the Tacoma Art Museum to see their “Edo to Tacoma” exhibit of Japanese woodblock prints. I thoroughly enjoyed that experience. It’s one thing to see reproductions of prints, but its another to see the original paper from the 1600s with the original ink on it.
In case you didn’t know: woodblock prints involve carving a block of wood for EACH color. So a ten-color print (including black but excluding white) takes ten separate woodblocks to print. And these prints are generally no larger than an 8.5″ × 11″ piece of paper. So the carving work is incredibly intricate. It’s also a fascinating process in that practically off of the prints are commissioned by a publisher who hires the artist to draw something. Once the publisher approves the drawing (and the colors), it’s handed over to the carvers who do the actual carving work. Then the prints are mass-produced and sold, sometimes bound in a volume, especially the “series” works (like the 100 Famous Views of Edo and Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji series (which contains “The Great Wave off Kanagawa“) of prints). So it was really a commerce-driven industry, not artist-driven.
I got this swell postcard!
After leaving the museum, we swung by the Fulcrum Gallery in Hilltop to see their latest exhibition, “Seasonal Affective” by Sean Alexander. Mr. Alexander (who has a very sparse website) suffers from seasonal affective disorder (which is pretty common here in the Northwest), and allows it to inform his art. His artwork is intensively, minutely detailed with excruciating and teeny-tiny linework. Like this postcard I picked up at the gallery:
So if for some reason you find yourself in the area during Fulcrum’s business hours, you should definitely pop in and look at them up close. And then after that I came back home.
Yesterday I did many things in Tacoma in the evening. Let’s kick it:
Tacoma Art Museum
Carrie had to teach in the evening, but fortunately I did not have to go it alone. I picked up our friend Laura and we headed on down to the Tacoma Art Museum. Why? Well, for one thing it’s free on the third Thursday of every month (in the evening). For another—more important—reason, it was the opening celebration of the Mighty Tacoma exhibit, which involved an exhibit of a whole bunch of photos taken by local Tacoma artists, including our good buddy Neighbor Gary. He had six photos up—three black-and-white (silvered gel prints) and three rather large color prints. Gary was there schmoozing with all the people who came to gaze at his photos, and so, coincidentally, were my in-laws. They were on their way to their wedding dinner and had decided to stop at the museum.
One part of the exhibit was the opportunity to get your picture taken with a digital camera that then uploaded your image to Tacoma Art Museum’s Flickr stream. A slideshow of all the photos taken was transmitted to a big flat screen monitor mounted to a wall of the exhibit, so that you could be a part of the show! Carrie’s dad had absolutely no interest in being a part of this, so I posed instead with Carrie’s mum. She wanted me to do something “silly,” so I struck a pose that I think is rather indicative of our relationship:
She thought it was very funny.
Laura photo taken as well, and also participated in another interactive part of the exhibit where you wrote down your thoughts about Tacoma on a sticky note, then read your note out loud into a camera before sticking it on a wall of all the other sticky notes. I assume that the videos will all be edited together at some point.
At 6:00 our friend Katie was s’posed to be dancing across the street from TAM in Tollefson plaza, so Laura & I headed over there but nothing was yet happening. So we went back to TAM where there was a beer garden put on by the Harmon. They were showcasing a steamed beer, which was tasty but a little flat.
After the beer we went back to Tollefson and watched the dance, which was put on by a troupe called BQdanza, which unfortunately does NOT have anything to do with Tony Danza. Much dancing took place in the water in Tollefson, which must have been very cold by that time in the evening.
Dorky’s
The show was over by 6:30, which was a bit early to call it a night. So instead Laura & I hiked the nine blocks up Pacific to Dorky’s Bar Arcade, which right now is only Dorky’s Arcade because they haven’t gotten their liquor license yet. We played many a game of pinball, including Cyclone, Bride of Pinbot, Evel Knievel, Supersonic, and Space Riders. Culture at its finest.
After we ran outta coin we walked back down Pacific to my car and I proceeded to drive Laura back home… or so I thought. While en route, she got a text message and asked me, “Do you wanna go to an art gallery?” Seems a couple of her friends were going to go. And the gallery was two blocks from where we were.
Fulcrum Gallery
The gallery was the Fulcrum Gallery in Hilltop. They were showing the “Street Botany” series by Maria Jost. I’d love to give you a link to her blog or website or whatnot, but I just can’t seem to find anything. So here are a couple of images from them:
They’re these incredibly detailed illustrations of plants that grow in urban areas, but there’s usually something whimsical or odd about them. Like if you look closely at the dandelion one, you’ll notice that whole, tiny dandelion plants are actually growing on the little ball at the center of all the puffs. Another one was an illustration of various mosses arranged to look like clouds. In recent weeks posters had been made of the whole series and plastered up around town. I like them. They’re science and they’re fun.
After looking around the gallery for a while (and having a bite of cheese) we left before Laura’s friends ever showed up. I took her home then came home myself. The ey-end.
