February 26, 2009
My Obama Print in the L.A. Times.
For Guillermo Maciel, the Obama image is a 24-by-32-inch linocut that he purchased from [Valerie Wallace] at a fundraiser last summer. (The artist sold it to him at a discount after learning that Maciel was working as a field organizer for Obama.) Maciel loves the linocut because it depicts Obama as a regular guy — wrinkles on his brow and around his eyes, a little tie at his throat.
“It’s like, when you go to an old United Farm Worker’s house and they have a picture of [Cesar] Chavez with candles around it, or an old civil rights activist’s house and they have Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, or an old Catholic family with JFK,” said Maciel, who lives in Portland, Ore. “I was joking with my wife, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if we had an Obama shrine?’ “
They fell in love with the linocut because they felt it normalizes the man rather than deifies him. They decided to hang it in their dining room, among photos taken by his wife’s uncle, a photographer for National Geographic. Does it feel weird to have Obama on their wall?
“I don’t think of him as my friend or part of my family, but I think of every other person I met on the campaign,” Maciel said. “And some day my kids will look at it and they’ll say, ‘Who is that?’ And I’ll be like, ‘That was then-Sen. Barack Obama, now the president, who I helped elect.’ “
http://www.latimes.com/features/home/la-hm-obama17-2009jan17,0,6229338.story
February 26, 2009
Happy 200th Birthday, Abe!
Check out the 200 Lincolns Show at the Chicago Art Department.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chicagoartdepartment/3251971188/
February 26, 2009
Large Scale Printmaking at Portland State University
Pete Yahnke and my class printing one of his gigantic lino cuts at Portland State University.
http://www.justseeds.org/blog/2008/11/large_scale_printmaking_at_por_2.html 
