Heart of LA CicLAvia - 10/18/2015

Yay! Yesterday, October 18, 2015 was once again a heart of LA CicLAvia in downtown LA and was the 15th(!!!!) CicLAvia in the last 5 years! My love for CicLAvia was immediate at the first event. Although the fun that comes from the newness of a route isn't quite there with this downtown LA route, I still never grow tired of the happy people, the number of attendees, the chances to explore and see new things, dog in bike baskets, simply enjoy the act of biking and spending time with friends. In these last 5 years I've seen CicLAvia outside my front door of my home in the Valley and work in Pasadena, downtown LA, up Wilshire, East Hollywood to Boyle Heights and East LA and down to the fashion district and little Tokyo, out to Venice and Culver City, down to South LA and so many little spots in between. I've biked with more friends at CicLAvia events than outside of them. They make LA seem like a smaller place to me in a good way... people suddenly realize that the challenges of biking in LA aren't necessarily the distances, but more of the lack of infrastructure and over reliance/encouraging of car usage. As it turns out, the trains DO go where you want to go and once you pull people out of their cars and let them interact on a more human level, it turns out we all have a gushy, happy humaness that was hiding inside that cage of steel all this time.

at the Boyle heights hub there was a flower making booth, so we sat down a crafted for a bit!

like I said, I never grow tired of dogs in bike baskets. These guys even had a little grass patch!

it was interesting to see how the birds interacted with the lake full of balls... they definitely segregated themselves and as you can see, seagulls enjoyed these dividers... I think I only saw seagulls perching on the balls

feeding squirrels in MacArthur Park (the squirrels did eat from his hand!)

This bike shop a little off the route seemed to be doing great business! Yay!

Finally made it to the Bradbury building! It was much smaller than I thought, but still awesomely impressive and worth visiting if you enjoy looking at architectural details of the past...

my friend and I were admiring the tile work in the Bradbury building and then noticed that this mural (as viewed from inside the Bradbury building) was depicting a man inside of the building we were standing in... the tiles were the same and you can see the slight arch framing the photo is the same as what's in the mural!

detour at Grand Central Market

GCM was packed and based on the biked outside, CicLAvia had at least something to do with it...

This Ghost Bike (#downtowndia Fall Bicyclists Tribute) art piece was stunning and yet heartbreaking. The care with which it was constructed was obvious from all the details from the ghost bike and skeleton, the sugar skull helmets arranged all around the bicyclist offerings and the individuals remembered. Seeing this ghost bike and remembering all these bicyclists that lost their lives was in stark contrast to the joy and safety all of the CicLAvia bicyclists were enjoying this day. Each of the bells along the railing in the foreground had a person's name and age on it... someone that lost their life while biking. This is how they are able to participate in events like CicLAvia now. Nearly everyone that stopped to see this art knew what safe bicyclist infrastructure looked like and felt like. And with Los Angeles city hall in the background, it was a way of saying "Come on LA, the ball's in your court. This isn't the kind of blood you want on your hands. If you build it, we will come." LA has adopted Vision Zero to eliminate traffic deaths in 10 years, by 2025. I hope leaders and residents of Los Angeles take it seriously so these types of tributes become a thing of the past and we can all live in the happiness of the CicLAvia all the time.

after the heaviness of the Ghost Bike display (it was the first time I nearly cried at CicLAvia), it was awesome to discover countless ways to express yourself artistically at Grand Park called "The Big Draw LA" & was sponsored by the nearby Ryman Arts. I'm not sure who sponsored this, but there were art stations all over the place! Weaving (seen above), drawing (including w/ live models), painting, tape for decorating the sidewalks and all sorts of activities were laid out and much enjoyed by many.

Venice CicLAvia, August 8, 2015, fishy

Few more CicLAvia photos, this time from the Culver City to Venice route back in August. I took the Red and Expo Lines out to the Culver City end of the route and met with some friends. I ended up riding with one down the whole way to Venice. It was a wonderfully pleasant ride, relatively stress free with perfect temperatures and an overcast skies (good for comfort, not the best for photos.) Once we arrived in Venice we decided to follow the bike path north/west. While it was somewhat congested next to the CicLAvia route end, parking lot and the Santa Monica Pier, once we got beyond that, the traffic became more sparse and we just kept going for about 6 miles until we hit Pacific Palisades. After locking up our bikes and leaving behind our shoes, we wandered down a relatively empty stretch of the the beach for another 1/2 mile before heading back to meet up with more people and having lunch. It was definitely an awesome, calming day for me filled with fun exploration on a low stress path along the beach, feeling like a perfect version of life in Los Angeles you always see on TV, but rarely actually experience while here.

biking along the beach....

more CicLAvia photos

Gelli Women

My gelli plate has been a little neglected recently... tossed aside for wooden eyeball paintings the last few months and stunted by my perpetual hope for the 12' x 14" one to appear at Dick Blick so I can use a 40% off coupon on it (dreams!) But as I am apt to do and fueled by a couple new stencils, this weekend it was time to bring the gelli plate back out again for some fun! Also, out of curiosity, I decided to do a time lapse video of the process. It's weird to watch it myself for many reasons... The fact that I was only really working on the 8 prints (and a couple more that weren't finished) for about 90 minutes based on the number of photos (I would have guessed a few hours.) Some of the breaks are me just wandering off to do something else including cutting quite a few stencils, letting things dry, sleeping or putting on more music. The fact that I work on so many prints simultaneously and the ways the resulting prints are similar and different.

Ok, too much rambling! Time for some art!

The process.....

...and the results!

Pasadena CicLAvia 5/31/2015, Colorado Old Town

Partially in celebration of the upcoming CicLAvia next week and partially because I finally got them developed (the delay of film! Sometimes it's like leaving little presents around for your future self.) here's a  few more photos from the Pasadena CicLAvia at the end of May as shot with my medium format TLR Yashica Mat. These were all shot along Colorado in the Old Town area.

Art Recently, Oct 15

I still have SO many photos to go through and scan, but that doesn't stop me from also working on many other things at the same time! Never! My brain pretty much never stops when it comes to coming up with new things to try out. Part of it is just due to me being me, but I also have some things I've been working on that I hope to make happen this month (well sooner, hopefully), so we shall see. Here's some of the arty things I've been working on in the last couple of weeks...

I found these napkins at the store (I'm always scouting for awesome bat related things in the Halloween aisles!) At first I glanced at them and passed them over as they were just a Dia de Los Muertos skull with the decorations printed with black on a white napkin. Then I realized I could paint them and scooped a stack up and have been painting away for the last week. I really love how they turned out and how painting them differently brings out different shapes & patterns. Pretty awesome. I still have some more napkins and different color combinations I'd like to try out. Each painted skull  area is about 14 x 10 inches.




Most of this eye was painted as part of the batch I took to Burning Man. I didn't really like it though, which is why it was left behind. Then I decided to paint it with a slit pupil, which I think fits it much better and is nice and creepyish as well! I would like to make more of these.











Why do I need another book to work in? Who knows! But I'm doing it! This is actually the large Dylusions Creative Journal. I have a weird thing about some of my art books and have aversions to trying random things in a given book (i.e. a collage book is for collages ONLY. I've deviated from it and I don't really like it.), so I picked this journal (w/ 50% off coupon at Michael's) with the express purpose of really just EXPERIMENTING in it. I literally just scribbled on the first page and then turned it into something. On this right page, I ripped up a few different types of paper, dropped them on the page and then spattered alcohol inks on them. The papers are actually glued on another page I didn't photograph, the random dots that ended up on the book page itself were doodle fodder (right) and then I discovered my previous issues with alcohol inks were due to the papers I was using, and so I played around with them on a full sheet of vellum (left). Whew. So I think the book is serving it's purpose.

So once I discovered how much of a difference using non-porous paper made for alcohol ink fun (I've had some of the bottles sitting around for I don't know how many years), I pulled out a little notebook of "water resistant paper" that I got at Daiso (Japanese $1.50 store.) I have no idea what it's made of, but it's a little plasticy and it allows the alcohol inks to flow nicely without soaking it. My next experiment is to finally jump onto Yupo with these.

 And finally, some paperclay bits including some eyes, bird heads and mammal heads. This is actually my first time using the DAS air dry paperclay as I usually use the Creative Paperclay (Blick was out of the Creative one day and an employee suggested this one.) It was weird because it it definitely had an intense, almost almond like smell, but I'm hoping that dissipates as it dries. I just made these last night and it's been rather humid/raining here the last day, so they aren't quite ready for sanding/painting yet. I think I like the experience of working with the Creative Paperclay more so far, but I'll wait to make a decision once I've actually finished some projects. (Photographed on top of my "Wreck This Journal", which I've also been working on a little, but going into that is it's own set of posts/video or something... it's maybe half completed.)

I know I've been working on tons of other things as well.. jewelry I didn't photograph, decorating my apartment for Halloween, finally framing and hanging some photos, cooking. Sounds about right!