I’ve just returned to Portland from a swing through the high plateaus of the southwest, escaping the Portland cloud and retaining social distance. Being away from the studio meant that I couldn’t work on all the big print things I have lined up for myself, so I spent most of the time writing.

I’m working on a big, weird thing that I guess is going to be a book, but it’s a really confusing pile of stuff at the moment. It covers family history, US foreign policy and imperialism and its discontents, the evolution of the brain, the history of human land use, and about a million other things. It’s been nice to be working on something that’s so big I can’t see the end of it.

Back in Portland for a week, I’m trying to catch up on some more material projects. I laid out and painted a banner for Rogue Climate’s campaign against the Jordan Cove Liquefied Natural Gas terminal project, which keeps having its permits denied, but refuses to just go away for good. That’s the image above. It was a satisfying thing to accomplish in an afternoon. I’m going to make them a few more to replace all the ones that burned up this summer.

I’ve been working on an artist’s book project for our good friends at Bookyln, the powerhouse entity that distributes most of the Justseeds portoflios (and a number of awesome projects from individual Justseeds members). The project is a series of reduction linocuts about the elementary forces that capitalist accumulation has liberated onto the landscape, and how we’re going to have to dream up new ways of dealing with them. Originally it was a pretty straightforward idea but I’ve been mixing in some of the ideas I’ve been getting during the writing process and am trying now to make it a bit stranger, in the hopes that it will have a bit more of an emotional impact, as opposed to the drier intellectual matter that I often unintentionally fall back on in a lot of creative projects. I’ve found quotes that relate to each of the elemental forces and have been carving them in lino and printing them on the letterpress (a few of them are below). They look nice, I think. It’s therapeutic to carve a lot of text.

Next week I’m going to be printing and editioning some of the big linocuts I’ve made over the past few years, and I’ll post those on here when they’re done.

Hope everyone’s staying safe out there.