Category: favourites

hbd lithoman

senefelder

It’s that time of year again when we here at Levigator Press celebrate the birthday of Alois Senefelder, born November 6, 1771, playwright, actor, connoisseur of girls, inventor of lithography. My pretend boyfriend.

Listen to a podcast about Senefelder and his achievements at this link: Engines of Our Ingenuity no. 791: Senefelder and Lithography

Read Senefelder’s book about lithography at this link: Alois Senefelder, The Invention of Lithography, at Project Gutenberg

Celebrating Senefelder’s birthday is something my mentor in lithography, Daniel W. Dingler, used to do in his classroom at the University of Windsor, and I carried on this tradition in my own classroom as a graduate student teaching litho at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia, and later in my storefront printmaking studio Levigator Press. Nowadays we celebrate at home. I just need to decide what to bake.

the captain’s new hat

a head and shoulders view of a child sized mannequin wearing a striped engineer hat covered in badges from steam shows, in front of a window with plants on shelves.

My brother gave me a wonderful gift yesterday: our granddad’s steam show hat. It’s the hat Granddad always wore to steam shows, which he went to nearly every weekend during the season, with engines from his collection to display and often with my brother in tow. It’s covered in badges from just a few of those shows, all dated between 1982 and 1986. It’s got a patch on the front that says “Pioneer Steam Railroad” which you can barely see for all the badges. My brother has had the hat since Granddad died in spring 1995.

It just barely fits my huge head but that’s okay, because it looks great on my plastic pal, the Captain of the Tiny Print Shop. They look just like a real captain now.

clown

Clowns have been all over the news lately and it reminded me of my favourite clown sighting. Perhaps it’s actually more of a skeleton sighting, but either way you have to admit this kid is amazing.

Meditating clown/skeleton kid, Kentucky Welcome Center, spring 2009.

My second favourite clown sighting happened last month at Dragon Con, when I overheard a man in the street yelling into a cellphone: “Aw shit! Aw SHIT! They got IT here man, they got IT here!” while around the corner, a clown with a balloon slipped off into the crowd.