you puer thing

been sick at home all week and it's pissing me off; not quite the flu but enough to keep me from venturing outside, afraid of sudden public jags of coughs and barfing. dear workplace, i'm not playing hooky, i'm home being gross, sparing you.



returned to the cold water for a second day. fox still there, still cold - is the accompanying text for this stunner image taken by Martin Usborne (the process of the capture is worth a read). found on pinterest which is turning out to be my biggest time waster. like it for its pin board sorting capabilities, but it's slightly horrible for browsing if you're not into high chickery-type things or captions that play fast and loose with superlatives and hyperbole (best cake frosting recipe EVER! I DIE!!). plus just about every day someone will re-post this as a 'tiny baby owl' and it drives me fucking bananas. otherwise, it's like treasure hunting.my pinterest.

- - -

from poking around the blogs, much has been made over Mariage Frères' Marco Polo tea, in part bcs of its tin. but the further i poked, the curiouser i got, willing to spend a ton of money to order it before finding it at my local Williams-Sonoma.. sold out. a woman, they told me, comes over EVERY MONTH from another island and buys them out. what. what is this tea. crack tea? anyway, post-wait list, this elusive Marco Polo is now mine. it's subtle, smells nice, but that is all, and i can get on with my life.

Lupicia's chocolate & strawberry puer, however! if i were to guess straight off, it wouldn't be chocolate or strawberry. but i taste it now. a nice deep color, not too heavy in flavor and smells a tiny bit like cookies baking. the best tea ever. i die.

give up the ghost

so the other day my mac gave up the ghost and backing up files i found this, a pre-degree project that doesn't make me want to gnaw my arm off. it's been leaning against my living room wall for more than ten years, but i don't think i've posted it anywhere before? - click image for larger.


how DO you know when you know what you know? me, i think i thought i was clever shit then, putting roundabout text in prints that didn't need them, a habit picked up from graphic design. i'd mostly been working in litho and this was my first large project in intaglio, and my first intaglio with people. lithos looked like this:

(final scene, maybe the very last part, from 'run, lola, run') i recall doing this in a day. but overall, litho is far less forgiving than etching and the heartbreak of fucking up the process was too frequent.

---

been trying to switch to tea again. today, purchased an affordable french press FINALLY after many failed days of looking everywhere for a simple infuser that isn't a mesh ball or over $20 or ugly. seriously, there were none. and almost immediately after? at the thrift store, jeff finds a brand new bodum teapot, $5. of course he did.

year of the rabbit, my eye

major lameness happened at the start of last year, and the result: creativity and i sort of broke up.
i drew a lizard for my nephew, colored it green, and that was it for 2010. but you guys, the beginning of this year? a total turd! don't feel sad, though. things have turned around and i'm feeling optimistic for the first time in many many months, yay!

so as with all new beginnings, some purge action is a must. initially, this blog was meant for art updates, but let's all just agree it's been a bust. i've deleted posts and moved them over to tumblr, ideal for minimalist image posting. .. and i trashed the old website for this hot new thing which i've stripped down to practically nothing. but is it too much nothing? is no title text a bad thing? and is it not obvious that one should click the rabbit?

i'm super happy with it, but i also haven't tested it on different browsers.
if you spot glitches, be sure to let me know?

also, i vow to ease up on the foxes.

----

FOR KICKS, the ghosts of webpages past..

2010. your corpse is still fresh, but you were always so very stale.


2009. awkward. but somehow it got me on netdiver and so also a ton of traffic?
thank you netdiver and awkward webpage design!


2005. ok!


2004. forever struggling with insomnia, shitty. plus an obsession with birds (hypnotized, stunned, dead, or pretending to be dead), airports, and ok computer. i did it all for you, thom.


2002. i bought Flash for a design project that never happened and only ever used it for
this front page. sleep vs caffeine; i was addicted to both and not getting enough of either.
Flash version here, ps: those links are broken. -- update: the Flash link is also broken? can't figure why or how to fix it. if reloading it won't work, copy/paste this into the address bar and hit return: http://www.jencallejo.com/OLDPAGE/2002.html


my very first webpage was a class assignment, built around a report i did on human cloning. it was illustration heavy, maze-like and tedious. it had a clicky create-a-clone feature that was a frame and rollover nightmare. and i got an A for it.


screw it, here's a fox.

it wasn't even in it

reading artist statements is sometimes a nightmare, but writing them? ALWAYS. being made to explain why i do portraits is the worst. sorting out the whys weirds me out, even when i know the stuff that come from over-analyzing aren't my actual whys at all.

there's a chapter on the National Portrait Gallery in A.A. Gill's The Angry Island that offered clarity on artists' whys, but then i lost it and reading it now i cannot find it. and anyway i might not even have read it at all. false book-related memories are not uncommon: i recently re-read a book i'd first read 22 years ago, and the ONE detail that had stayed with me all these years?.. wasn't even in it.

  
'Bag' by Hendrik Kerstens. saw this at the National Portrait Gallery's
Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize in 2008. instant favorite.


forever been meaning to do these as prints. both are meant to be diptychs (though not with each other).

cuss!

someone lifted two of my prints from the benefit print sale last weekend, for real? cuss!
well, thief, enjoy your stolen things which you stole from me. how dare you.


look what you did.

little orphan vulpes vulpes

the show at cedar street came down last month. thanks to everyone who went! one fox (below, left) still needs someone to give it a home. if you are that nice person, contact the gallery for more info. fox needs a home!



the gallery also has matt, dan, and jeff (below).
guys, why so serious?

i am fully-bushed

new works from: laura smith • maile yawata • and myself
Second Floor @ Cedar Street Galleries, July 17 thru August 16.





FOXES, SPEAKING TO YOU IN CARTOGRAPH-ESE. of all the pics i took, only the afterthought ones in frames came out NOT horrible. 'nice fox' titles also an afterthought, in reference to
a song of the same name by the rosebuds.

wheeeeeee!

doing image reference research for an upcoming show and finding some nice things:
the fox jumps over the parson's gate, illustrations by caldecott; a happy ending.


freddy the fox flickr set; oh no! unhappy ending :(