Just add lettering - Truck Gallery in Sausalito emerges as a spelling board for magnetic punk rock ransom font lettering

Here are some closer photos:

The Truck Gallery emerges just in time for the Sausalito Art Festival

It started out as an art cage, but by the end of the night it almost made sense and looked like an art wall. I started off in the morning with some grid wall and connecters. I just kept adding a piece of wood here and bracket there and by 3pm I was able to put on actual photo fresco pieces. As I added the actual framed pieces to the structure I was able to remove most of the grid wall and the printed frames themselves tightened up the structure. I hardly stopped throughout the day, except to help my daughter for 15 minutes paint her car with chalkboard paint, and worked up a good sweat jumping up and down on the truck. My battery for the drill was worn out and by the end of the day I was only able to do one or two screws before I had to put the battery back in the charger.

I didn't have to go to the hardware store at all and was able to use wood from other projects and bent nails. Some of the brackets and screws had already been purchased, but I felt like I didn't want to stop and just moved forward with the things I had. I hand sawed the 2 X 4s and found nails in the leaves around the yard. My anxiety increased throughout the day when I realized the Sausalito Art Show was starting Friday and I would need to get a parking spot on the street in order to have a chance at displaying this work in the area that I like to park.

I removed most of the original grid wall and put some diagonal strips of wood all around the structure for additional support, then nervously pulled from my driveway and onto Highway 1. I drove extremely slow and held my breath on every dog legged turn down the mountain. Traffic looked like a nightmare going North because the Bay Bridge is closed this weekend, but it wasn't bad in my direction. I didn't have to merge onto the main freeway and was able to get off the freeways as fast as I got on since I was barely going one exit. I found a parking spot where the sun would hit the truck and then sat down on the side of the road and thought about how the truck would do the rest of the work by just sitting there.

Building an art cage

On the back of the truck.

Never Been Shown - New work going out on the street this weekend

16" X 19" Recycled Screen Printing Frame with epoxy acrylic and rusted background print.

I'm not a real sort of artist that touts my credentials and has stuff shown in a gallery. The best I have done over the years is sit on the streets in the late Eighties and sell a bunch of pieces, hang some quasi-political stuff in my own space in Hollywood, show and sell a few things in my store in Los Angeles and put some of my photo-fresco pieces on my truck and park it around Sausalito. I've sold a few things over the years and the process of getting something out of my system is complete once I either let things weather outside on my truck or once the pieces I've made have been subjected to the hot sun of the front window of Y-Que in Los Angeles. If the work survives those challenges by then I have moved on to a new attempt at the same concept, but with different materials to fix whatever problems came about through the process.

Create, Expose, Destroy; is the cycle of my craft. I've got a shellmound in my backyard that is the final resting place of pieces that can't survive a good toss. I've got a storage warehouse with cracked and separated pieces that didn't make the cut. It's a workout moving these things around, but each time I go through them it's a reminder of what not to do. This is what keeps me mixing, pouring and painting on epoxy and cement, acrylic and fiberglass, wood and screws; testing and printing until every possible combination has been had. Still my work no more complex than the stuff I did in the 90's, except for the inks and the background materials. Instead of canvas I use epoxy and instead of gesso I use rusted steel. I like the quantity of consistent pieces that I have recently made and now comes the time to put it out on the street and down into the store.

This weekend is the Sausalito Art Show and I somehow like vaguely being on the edge of a recognized art community, sort of the same with many things in my life. Are these my peeps? Wine drinkers, yes, craftspeople, yes, fun loving rich people, not so much. That's where the edge comes in because I can't really hang with regular stable successful people who are the patrons of the craft art world. I call it craft art because to sell it you have to go the whole route and set up a booth to show your stuff, like a craft fair. I've seen some well presented exotic work from the edge looking in at these events and realize that it's just like a trade show and by the second day I might be too hung over to talk about my work or too let down to want to try. Still I feel drawn to want to get my stuff out and that means mounting some wood and created a sort of wall on the back of my F250 and parking it on the street.

In my head it's like a statement, "I'm still here doing stuff!" As if to say, I'm alive and I don't need your stinkin' walls. It's true, but for some reason I do need viewers and I can't get that by sitting in my backyard or on Etsy. It's never been overly gratifying to watch people walk by and not even notice the large bright colorful pieces mounted all over my truck, but I still want to do it. I keep thinking that I have done something different that will make a difference and cause people to stop and look, even for a moment, or to raise their head from their iphone and glimpse at my truck for a second. Maybe I have this time, I have a bigger truck and can go higher, to eye level and possibly two levels of paintings making it 12 pieces on each side of the truck. It's gonna' be big, I say, dangerously so.

This brings up the next set of issues, which is to make is stable and safe. I have a schedule and a parking problem, 3 days, 72 hours and a very busy town. I may or may not be able to get a parking spot that can go from Friday to Monday unless I finish the truck and get it down there Thursday night late. I could do all of this work and then drive by and not be able to find a place to put my vehicle. There isn't any reason to go check though if I can't leave the truck, so for now I am going to get my butt in gear and put together a truck gallery.

link to old truck gallery work on my smaller truck. http://williamwyatt.org/

Collage or Montage? That is the question.

The collage and montage description seem similar to me, but I think what I am doing is more of a montage. I have developed a background piece for working on, which are my used screen printing frames that I recycle and clean the old ink out of then coat with shellac to create a base to paint and print on. In some cases I fill the back with wire and cement to create a strong durable backing and then I remove the screen printing mesh entirely from the front of the frame. In other cases I coat the screen with epoxy or water based urethane mixed with steel pigments, then cause them to rust which creates a brownish metal looking background. Lastly I work through my screen printing designs that I used for t-shirt printing and mix them randomly creating compositions from the various images on each individual frame and this is a finished piece.

I am going to post a batch of photo jpegs of my first production run of 12-15 pieces.

Now I have a bunch of finished pieces

Finished a bunch, finally.

All this work and nothing to show

I keep making frames and finding materials to print and press onto them, but I'm yet to finish a single piece.

The original plan; make some recycled screen printing frames into prints

When the new stuff fails, just go back to the original plan. I had no success in building a thermocouple using the atomized metals and printing them onto a surface. There was not enough contact between the powder to even conduct electricity on it's own, so I have had to move on from that. Actual metal pieces would need to be put in contact with each other to make a thermocouple and without melting the metal pigments that I am using there is not way to force them together enough with binders. I did order a thermocouple online, like the one shown in a previous post, and I am waiting for it to arrive to play with it. Unless I have something that I can use electricity for, there isn't much need in trying to build a thermocouple anyway.

My original plan was to simply clean off and recycle old screen printing frames to use for new projects. I would like a completely waterproof durable final piece and have been using a combination of paint and cement to fill the frames and create a flat solid surface where the dirty screen once was. The methods of cleaning out the frames has changed over the last week to where I am hardly cleaning the frames any longer and spending more time providing some structure using screws and chicken wire before pouring the cement.

My cost are approximately $12 a bag for cement from Home Depot (12 frames) or $1/ea for a , $5 for a box of screws (15 frames) or $0.35/ea, and I am going to estimate the chicken wire at $0.50/ea and paint at $0.15/ea. This brings my recycling cost per frame to $2.00/ea without using any epoxy to create a waterproof top surface. If I did use epoxy I think it would take approximately 3-5 ounces and some pigment, so it would add at least $3.00/ea to the frame cost. None of these cost include any labor as my work is worth nothing.

The original plan was to simply recycle the frames into something that could be used as a decorative piece and then resell them cheap to get rid of frames and make a little money. Without using epoxy I could sell these for ten bucks, but I have to put a design on them next. My daughter and others really like the frames when they are coated with epoxy, but I have to consider the design first since the epoxy is just a top coat that can be added later. I have put a painted latex exterior paint as the top surface without filling small holes or sanding, but the color is a flat green and my next layer needs to be something that bonds with the latex.

To keep the cost low I could just use an acrylic, but that would cause weathering problems unless I coat the top surface with epoxy. I could use epoxy directly with pigment, but when I paint it the top surface is shiny and glossy and no other paints will bond to that. I have mixed some multi-purpose screen printing inks with pigments and gotten a decent finish, but those inks are a little pricey. I have even used some plastisol screen printing inks, which has a great thickness, but I am not sure that the latex can handle the heat required to make the plastisol dry. I kinda like the plastisol concept because of it's thickness, but if I remember correctly, the cool temperature of the cement underlay keep the plastisol from reaching the 300 degrees required for it to set properly. In some cases the plastisol may not need to set, especially if I am going to cover it with epoxy. The plastisol could remain in a semi-liquid state and hold it's shape or design until the epoxy is layered on top, but this is probably not a good idea. The exterior paint may be the best solution because it is made for being outside, unlike the acrylics. I have been getting cheap mixed exterior paints for $7 a gallon, so you can't beat the price, but the color has a lot to be desired. I am going to try and put pigment on top of the paint today and see if I can get rid of the ugly paint color from the can.