Yesterday I walked half a mile down the hill to Berkeley's Live Oak Fair, so named because it takes place in Live Oak Park, a block up from Wavy Gravy's house. I go every year. It's free. And fun.

All manner of crafts are on display, from ceramics to exotic clothing to handmade jewelry to vibrant framed photos of bears, coastal fog, and mountain tops. (That's scuplture made of forks to the right.) Four aisles of booths. This being Berkeley, the shoppers wore Birkenstocks, dashikis, face paint, Free Tibet t-shirts, mu-mu's, peace symbols, tie-dye, and other proto-hippy accoutrements.

On the other side of the creek, a four-piece combo played wonderful music while people noshed on smoked salmon caesar salad, pesto pizza, and Polish sausages. Kids splashed around in the creek itself. (The creek comes above ground a block upstream and disappears back underground at the perimeter of the park. Environmental activists are "daylighting" Berkeley's five major creeks.)

Finding Tom Killion and his woodcut prints of Hawaii and the California coast was a treat. I first admired Tom's work in a beautiful book, The High Sierra of California.

From Tom's http://www.tomkillion.com:

"Tom Killion describes his technique, tongue-in-cheek, as "faux ukiyo-ë" to emphasize his aesthetic debt to the landscape prints of early 19th century Japan, but also to acknowledge his embrace of early 20th century European / American wood-engraving and book illustration techniques and styles as well. Among his influences are both the Japanese ukiyo-ë landscape masters Hokusai and Hiroshige, but also European and American wood-engravers such as Eric Gill and Rockwell Kent. Killion carves his images into cherry, all-shina plywood, Amsterdam linoleum and other block materials using Japanese handtools. He prints his often elaborate, multi-colored images on handmade Japanese kozo papers using oil-based inks and a German hand-cranked proofing press."

 

 

Killion	Hosukai

At the booth, Tom had a set of proofs showing each stage of the making of the print you can see over his left shoulder in the photo. I took a photo of each proof, thinking they'd make a nifty animation. Unfortunately, I'd need to use a camera stand to do this right. The results (caution: large files) are in the Comments section below.