Here you are.
- The Matisse Aesthetic
Before heading off to burning man a couple weeks ago… I put the finishing touches on a blog for my friends Nicole and Zanetha Matisse and their company, Matisse Design Studio. It’s definitely still a work in progress… The look they wanted meant that I finally got to play around with watercolors (heavily inspired by Stina Persson, whose painting appears as the thumbnail image for the Matisses’ first post). Take a look: The Matisse Aesthetic.
A quote they have chosen from the Slow Food Manifesto as their first blog post pretty much sums up what the Matisse Aesthetic is about:
“May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency.”
Good luck Matisses!
- Site Launch: Full Circle Farm Blog
Maggie at Full Circle Farm approached my friends/colleagues at the Web Collective wanting a website where the company could begin to tell its unique story in blog format.
Taking advantage of the existing branding Full Circle Farms, one of the largest organic farms in Washington, I pulled together this logo and an simple customized wordpress blog (temporarily being hosted on wordpress.com).
- Site Launch: Generation Gatherings
Identity and web development for a new venture by Brian Cisneros and me, Generation Gatherings. More on this soon… check out the website for now.
For the website, we took advantage of the open source Joomla platform for content management. The logo features a colorful sunburst around the first G, which turns out to be a trail of adults leading children leading adults.
- James Brown
At a fund-raising event for the Art Monastery Project last night, I was so intrigued by a couple of the paintings being auctioned off that I accidentally stole a catalog of the artist’s work. Look at this stuff:

I was further impressed after chatting with the very modest James Justin Brown, whose wife had informed me that the catalogs were for sale (I promised to send a check as soon as I solved my liquidity problems). As an architect by day, prolific artist otherwise, Brown has created a large body of colorful, alive, and sometimes violent abstract art over the last decade. Less afraid of form than the abstract expressionists, he says his work is nonetheless influenced by artists like Kandinsky.

I wish I were in a position to buy some of the stuff, but at the very least I shall deliver a check to Brown’s Seattle studio ASAP for the catalog.
- NW Chocolate Festival 1.0 is live
Check it out.

- Design for Northwest Chocolate Festival
[singlepic=98,320,240,,]
- Adapt Apparel website up
and under fierce construction.
We have shirts for sale. Go there to find out how to call us and buy buy buy.
- Seattle Urban Farm Company
This month, I’ll be volunteering with the Seattle Urban Farm Company, learning about permaculture and the local food movement.
I mentioned them once before in a post for Worldchanging. Come check them out at the Northwest Flower and Garden Show (Feb 20- 24th at Seattle Convention Center). Look for the t-shirts I printed, (bearing this logo designed by owner Colin McCrate and friends) soon!

In honor of all this, here’s “Farmer in the City,” from Scott Walker’s amazing Tilt (1995).
- New Jim Woodring

“Jesus and the Bear” is a fantastic new painting by Seattle’s Jim Woodring (see the full thing, over at his blog). A scene as moving as it is gruesome.






