Lichens In Their Unnatural Habitat



Last year for the holidays, one of my favorite gifts that I received was the giant tome "Lichens of North America". It was published in 2001 and is the most comprehensive guide on North American species of lichens and lichen biology. It's giant, and has mounds of gorgeous photographs. It came in handy recently for a rather strange project. In September I will be going to Hamburg, Germany to participate in Flatstock Europe to sell my gigposters. One of my fellow artists, Nick Rhodes from Manchester, is putting together an art exhibit that will coincide with Flatstock. Each participating artist, as we are all screenprinters, are submitting a squeegee that we have painted on or customized in some way. Seeing as I don't hand print any longer, and use a screen printing auto press, I had to scrounge up an old hand squeegee. I found a box of old ones at Jay's shop, and chose the "Joe Lally". Joe is a nice medium sized squeegee that has seen some better days. The name "Joe Lally" is the name of the bass player from the band Fugazi, in case you were wondering. After that I have no more answers for you. I looked over the squeegee trying to decide what to paint, and noticed the wood handle had splotches of ink on it that somewhat resembled lichen (yes, yes, I know; bit of a stretch, eh). Well I went with it and began covering it with paintings of lichens. Perhaps it is a desire to return the wood on the tired old squeegee back to nature, but more likely, it's just an excuse to paint lichens. Hmmmm.

Comments

  1. Really cool Diana!

    Did I tell you about the beautiful aqua blue reindeer lichen I came across at the top of a cliff in Downeast coastal Maine? They clearly had been undisturbed for many many years (decades?) and were about 4" - 6" deep (or so I recall). Old growth! My friends with me were not nearly so impressed. Bah, nothing but riffraff they are!

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  2. No! I'm sure it was beautiful. To see something like that in the midwest, I would have to go up near Lake Superior. Eh- who needs friends like that? I would have been so totally impressed.

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  3. I love the lichens. Especially against the black of the squeegy, it's looks great.

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  4. the name on the squeegee was from a time when the print shop had about 15 different squeegees of various sizes. as opposed to saying "hand me the 14 inch squeegee", we decided to start naming them after real people. the longest one was abe, the shortest was thumby. various middle sizes were named after women that worked at the coffee shop down the street, or after pets. as diana noted, joe lally is (was) the bass player of fugazi, a great band from washington DC.

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  5. what a beauty.
    i'm a girl who loves her squeegees
    and this one is amazing!
    also love the post by jay ryan about the names! so good!

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