Steven Streisguth

Down to the wire posting this, but I’m going to be part of two shows this weekend in Philadelphia. The first is tonigh at Paradigm Gallery, titled Confidence is not a Four-Letter Word. It is sponsored by the University of the Arts’ Alumni Association.

It is a common theme for artists to never be fully satisfied with their work. Even if we find ourselves feeling confident, we do not want to appear arrogant, so we go through the game of being overly humble when receiving compliments and sometimes even cut up our own work. As a part of this group exhibition of exclusively University of the Arts Alumni, all artists involved have submitted a piece that, with confidence, each can say, “I am proud of this.”

I am showing the original artwork (or as close as it can get, being digital work) for Donovan Irven’s novel, Two Days of Dying. Donovan should be in attendance to say a bit about the novel itself, and we will have copies for sale as well. More info and rsvp on the Facebook event page.

Abstract: An existential novel about friendship and the choices we make in the face of loneliness, Two Days of Dying portrays a nostalgic weekend sojourn with the full-sweep and grandeur of human memory. Recalling a life lived together in friendship over a two day chance encounter, Eli and Chago face in each other the different people they’ve become and must choose whether or not to reconcile the long deaths of their youthful days together. Bittersweet, full of the ache of time, Two Days of Dying is a poignant character study, a eulogy to American youth, and a celebration of the human spirit in the face of death. A fitting homage to the great American novels.

Second, I have a recent piece that was also in Masthead Studio’s Monster Show II, this time in a show (and zine!) called Mutations, at the Philadelphia Mausoleum of Contemporary Art this Saturday. Featuring music from Rasputin’s Secret Police, No One and the Somebodies, Starwood, Northern Liberties, and also mind-melting projections by Eye Gate II.

Also, please check out Artificial Dissemination 2: Propaganda to Popaganda at the Phantom Hand Gallery on South Street. I regretfully couldn’t get a piece together in time, and the work I’ve seen so far for the show is amazing (business as usual for those guys).

Finally, I designed a poster for a Tinnitus Benefit at World Live Café (thanks Matt Cavanaugh for the invite). All the works had a limited color palette to Pantone 199C and 297C plus paper white.

Been very busy with what is turning out to be an awesome exhibit, Natural Process: A Study in Worn Denim at Elixr Coffee (15th and Sansom, Philadelphia). I have a lot of lookbook-style photos that didn’t make it into the promo materials that I’ll post soon, but I wanted to put up my design and photo work, and also a few photos from the installation. The show was curated by Alex Frankel of The American Classic, and the lovely baristas April Nett and Elysa DiMauro.

For printed material, we ordered 11×17 posters of the vertical image, and double sided postcards of the horizontal image. I created a custom QR code with Elixr Coffee’s logo in the middle, as a visual link to the splash page of Elixr’s website.

Bev experimentation for Friday’s show opening 8pm @ElixrCoffee sponsored by @artintheage. @elysadi @TheACtweets twitter.com/aprilnett/stat…

— April Nett (@aprilnett) January 8, 2012

thisistrovegeneralstore.wordpress.com/wp-admin/post.… @TheACtweets

— TROVEGENERALSTORE (@TROVEGENERAL) January 9, 2012

I neglected to bring my computer home for Christmas (“There’s no way I’m going to have any downtime!”), only to find myself needing to make that time for myself (“I gotta get back in the studio! I’m driving back to Phillyat 11:30 pm”). I’m slowly but surely working through a lot of disorganized photo folders (bless you Adobe Lightroom) on my computer to put together a full portfolio of the work I had been doing at Whole Foods for the last few years, as well as the Small Objects show Linnea Vegh and I had at VWVOFFKA last year. Updating the (too often neglected) Behance portfolio, and gave my photo blog 435 a bit of a facelift. I’m posting a week of waterfall photos from Schooley’s Mt. State Park in Washington Township, New Jersey over there, been playing around with longer exposures since I got a wireless remote for the Nikon.

I’m finally using Twitter to it’s full potential; follow me @SSGuth.

I’m really excited to be doing some photo and design work for the upcoming Natural Process show (curated by Alex Frankel, April Nett and Elysa DiMauro) at Elixr Coffee on 15th and Walnut St. in Philadelphia. Keep an eye out for more updates on The American Classic, and be sure to follow @Elixrcoffee on twitter.

Took a hike through Schooley’s Mt. Park this thanksgiving with my mom; last year my sister and I did the same trek, only in a lot more rain and fog. I make a point to hike around this park a bit every time I’m home in NJ, no matter what the weather is. Usually, the worst weather makes the best hikes. It was a beautiful day though, and we could hear church bells sounding in the valley.

This past Saturday was the opening for the Wheatpaste Your Heart Out show at the new Aux space in Vox Populi (Philadelphia). Dietrich Meyer and Linnea Vegh curated it over the course of the last year, and I had the pleasure of hosting them in my studio as we worked 15 hour days for the week leading up to the reception. Below are photos of some of the panels in the wild, lots of artists coming by the studio to paste, then the install and finally the reception.

So… there’s been a lot going on, and I think the best thing to do is put up a ton of photos, links, and just briefly summarize the different projects I’ve been working on over the last month. All of this work is documented on Streisguth.com (which itself has seen some changes, including some consolidation into a new Design section).

First, I worked with Alex Frankel (who runs a fantastic blog: The American Classic) on some album artwork for  his band Matermathu. I completed an edition of 75 5×5″ linoleum block prints as an analog accompaniment to a digital download of their debut album (lots of alliteration on that one). Made it just in time to their album debut show at North Star Bar this past Saturday the 5th to take a lot of photos and enjoy an incredible set. Those photos are on my Flickr page here. This was the inaugural project to prompt the creation of a new Design section of my site.

Second, Donovan Irven (@donovanirven on Twitter) and I just finished up the first book published under our imprint, Streisguth | Martin. It’s called Two Days of Dying, and you can read an excerpt and more about it on Donovan’s blog here. It’s available in print on Amazon.com, and also on Kindle. Ask your local printed & bound material retailer to carry it, ISBN #9780615552767.

Fourth, I was recently in a halloween group show at Masthead Gallery called The Monster Show: Year Two. For this I completed an edition of 33 block prints of a conjoined skull named Jasper on light grey Canson printmaking paper. That print is under the Illustration > Portfolio section.

Next, I have been taking a lot of photos of musicians I am friends with. There’s a set of the Kevin Daly Quintet here and the Kevin Daly Quartet here. Photos from Matermathu’s album release show are here, and photos of Lamagier at North Star Bar can be found here.

Linnea and Dietrich have been living in my home/studio for this past week, and we’ve been working around the clock to finish up the Wheatpaste Your Heart Out show at Vox Populi this Saturday. More info and RSVP here on Facebook.

Finally, Linnea Vegh and I are working on getting a letterpress setup going. More on that later…

I was recently invited to Masthead Print Studios Monster Show: Year Two here in Philly. This piece was loosely inspired by a recent trip to the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia for the opening reception of the new Quay Brothers film, Through The Weeping Glass (dig it on NPR here). The block is 9″x12″, so the paper is about 11″x15″, edition of 33. I have a handful still available for $25 including shipping.

Without further ado, some process shots. This one started out with a thumbnail sketch that I liked a lot and was pretty attached to.

Tossed that into Photoshop at 1200 dpi, duotone, drop the opacity to 10%, then I got something I could work on top of and keep the same essential feeling.

Take it back into photoshop and drop out the right colors, leaving a clean[ish] pencil sketch. Then transfer, carve, and print by hand. Fun fact: I got a lot of good reference from a website that sells human skulls. They’re around $1,000 bucks each, even though there’s millions of skulls just out walking the street you can get for practically nothing!

A little over a week ago I shot some sets at Chris’ Jazz Café in Philly. My buddy Kevin Daly had been playing gigs pretty often while I was out on my roadtrip, and luckily when I got back he was doing two nights in a row with two different groups. I ended up with a lot more shots the second night when the Dan Hanrahan Organ Group was performing; I think I was a bit more comfortable with the space, and I had already analyzed my photos from the night before. Here are a few picks, and the links to the full sets on Flickr.

Full sets:

Dan Hanrahan Organ Group

Kevin Daly Quartet

They look a bit rough, but that’s only because each one is about  2.5 inches square.