Blue Mouse Monkey Blog

From L to R: Not Noticing, Three Comets Arrive, Thought and Spirit, and 40 pieces from the Symbols Inventory. Julia Stoops, 2012 – 2013

Blue Mouse Monkey’s own Julia Stoops is a web designer by day and an artist by night. For her first major exhibit since 2007, she  teamed up with Portland artist Meg Peterson for The Space Between, a two-person painting exhibit at the North View Gallery at PCC Sylvania.

Julia and Meg were awarded a project grant from RACC to fund the production of a catalogue. With design by Meris Brown of Fancypants Design, and an essay by Amy Bernstein, the catalogue is almost as good as seeing the show live.

The Space Between is up through April 27th. Gallery hours are  8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday, and 12 to 4 p.m., Saturday. The North View Gallery is located in Room 214, CT (Communications Technology) Building, PCC Sylvania. (Same building as the theater) See PCC Sylvania in Google Maps »

Here’s an excerpt from Amy Bernstein’s essay:

“The Space Between is an exhibition of investigations. Stoops and Peterson play upon the tropes of science fiction, landscape, and contemporary spirituality to subtly subvert our ideas of the physical evidence of existence. Through their shared fascination with the mechanisms and laws that govern the material world, they create scenarios in their work that examine the discrepancies and similarities between microcosm and macrocosm. Stoopsʼ paintings are littered with a visual particulate energy that is frenetic yet highly ordered: the delineated evidence of thought and the lyric play of creation. She uses sets of symbols consistently, designing them as tiny oracles to float through her protagonistsʼ worlds of revelation and transformation.”

I was one of the first visual artists I know to get an art portfolio website. A student at PNCA did it for me as a project back in 1998. And he did a nice job, for what was available in web technologies in 1998. Then I learned how to make websites myself, and took charge of remaking my portfolio site. The second iteration used Frames (!) and what I thought at the time was an innovative horizontal scrolling navigation. Silly me. (This was before jQuery and all that good stuff, of course.) Then I did iteration #3 in Flash. Which was nice for a few years, but I won’t waste space on why Flash is no longer a good choice for making websites. Besides, the background was black (remember when that was sorta cool on a website?) and the images were small (remember when you had to take dialup users into account?). After a while I stopped mentioning my art portfolio site because it was getting a little embarrassing.

But this winter has seen the great makeover, and now I’m proud to announce the launch of iteration #4 of my art portfolio website, built in HTML5, and all clean and nice looking.

Now it’s time to present a personal project! Parts Per Million is a novel about a group of Portland environmental and media activists. I’ve been working on it for a decade, finished it this year, and am in the process of seeking agent representation. Check out the site for photo galleries, excerpts, illustrations by Ryan Alexander-Tanner, and more.

After a hectic spring and summer at Blue Mouse Monkey, projects are wrapping up and my workload is decreasing. And I’m loving it. All of a sudden I have time for family and friends. I have time to just poke around the web, or stroll around outside. And time to get working on my second novel.

Okay, there I said it. Yes, I am working on a second novel. The first one, which took me 10+ years to write, is in the process of being queried to agents. Many readers tell me it’s an important story that needs to get out there, and I do hope it finds its way in the wider world. Learn more about Parts Per Million here. This second novel won’t take me 10 years. This time I’m starting with plot and moving towards crafting sentences, instead of the other way around. And its going to be more of a literary thriller. Parts Per Million has some thrillerish aspects of uncovering secrets and facing dangerous repercussions, but I wouldn’t call it a bumper-to-bumper thriller.

The new novel is going to be about a rogue biohacker. I’ve started research (which means amassing folders of related articles Thank you New Scientist) and am sketching out plot. I’m also working on making my rogue protagonist sympathetic. You’re going to be on her side, even while she wreaks havoc, because, well… I don’t want to give it all away!

And as the summer closes there’s time for pickling cucumbers and steaming home-grown edamame, and drawing on rocks with a 15 lb yellow-orange crayon. We were at Crescent Beach last weekend, and at the patch of basalt scree at the far end of the beach I discovered a rock, a piece of sandstone perhaps, that had oxidized (or something – I have no idea what I’m talking about, really) and was coated in a 1/2 inch layer of soft, crayony bright yellow…stuff.

Basalt, which Oregon is full of due to the massive basalt floods of 17–14 million years ago, is dark gray. Rather a somber stone, and not particularly inviting. But when columnar basalt breaks off it does so with smooth, slightly curved planes. Nice to draw on. I had fun brightening up the jumble of gray at the end of the beach.

And now that the anniversary of my breast cancer diagnosis has passed, I’m ready to put that difficult year behind me. When my GP broke the news to me last July, she said, “This will dominate your life for a year.” And she was right. And now I’m better, stronger, healthier, and so happy to find a soft yellow rock to draw with.

Last weekend I had the opportunity to play outside. I guess I don’t get to do that much anymore, because it felt like an incredible treat. At home I can be outside in the garden in two modes: gardening, or relaxing. The relaxing thing happens rarely, and only for a half hour, tops, then I’m off doing something else. The gardening thing is good, but purposeful. There isn’t much pure play involved in weeding beds and harvesting vegetables.

But last weekend I stayed in a log house in the Hood Canal (which is really a fjord) with three other women. We were there to share creative solitude during the day, and friendship over dinner in the evenings. The others worked on writing projects, and I made art. I expected to write, too, but earlier, while cleaning out our basement, I found a bunch of leftover bits and pieces from grad school. Plaster casts of hands, rolls of colored string and cellophane, paper cut-out shapes. On impulse I decided to take this flotsam and jetsam of a period of intense art-making up to the Hood Canal to play around with it and see what happened.

At my friend’s place I chose to work in a small meadow next to an old shed. It was more like a clearing in the forest, and filled with buttercups and light slanting through the trees. I didn’t have any particular plans other than I’d make site-specific sculptures and leave them there. (Or dismantle and discard them in my host didn’t like them, but it turned out she did :-)

The first piece I made was inspired by sun hitting tendrils of tall grass in front of the shed. They made bright vertical lines of light against the dark background. I created a set of horizontal lines to complement, using embroidery thread. Keeping the tension in the thread was the hard part, since I couldn’t pull too hard on the grass stalks or they would snap.

Then I hung from a tree pieces from an installation I did years ago called The Myriad Things. Now the very cool thing I discovered, which I had never seen when this work hung in a gallery, was how it moved in the wind. Each strand has three collaged paper or glass vesica piscis shapes strung together with fine monofilament. Instead of flapping around like a wind chime, the shapes acted like paddles, and they spun in place. It created a beautiful floating, flickering effect, especially, when seen across the clearing. (Please excuse the crappy iphone video.)

Other pieces I made included burying gold foil under the duff so it glinted through, making the earth look golden. That one was hard to photograph. I also wrapped a sapling trunk in bands of gold foil, and placed plaster hands among the buttercups.

The other more visible piece I did was a large “cellophane fin”, made by wrapping colored cellophane across the delta-shaped spaces made by low, nearly horizontal maple limbs. The cellophane was left over from some 4-color printing process, with alternating magenta, cyan, yellow and black frames. The effect was like stained glass, but delicate and fragile, and in a tree.

I got to make a sculpture garden! It was the most satisfying thing I have done in a long time. I need to get out and play more often.*

* Bucket list:
1. Experience the Calabi-Yau in all ten dimensions
2. Play outside regualrly

A depiction of John Nelson, the protagonist of Parts Per Million. The painting is titled 'Waiting for a Sign'. Mixed media on paper, mounted on panel.

There’s this other thing I’ve been doing these past few years; some people know about it, many don’t. When my writing friend Laura Stanfill posted her interview of me on her blog yesterday, it felt like a coming out of sorts. After all, what business does a visual artist and web designer have writing a novel? Well, the project started as a compulsion ten years ago, a story that took hold of me and wouldn’t let me go until I wrote it down in a rush. Then I went back and revised it. Again. And again. And again. I lost track of the number of drafts. Now Parts Per Million is a complete novel. Pared down, tight, thoroughly critiqued by many, and ready to go out into the world. The next step is finding an agent to represent the MS.

Laura’s a wonderful writer with a couple of novels under her belt already. I learned much for her when we sat together at Stevan and Joanna’s Pinewood Table critique group. I’m so grateful for her generosity in including me in her interview series!

Read Laura’s interview here: Novelist Julia Stoops on Anti-War Activism and Using Research to Build a Realistic Fictional World

First of all, Paul Wells is incredible. More so than that web page is letting on. He’s creative, smart, articulate, multi-talented, has a has a hybridizing mind, and is a terrific facilitator. If you ever have a chance to take a class with him or hear him speak, DO. Okay, got that over with!

The faculty at the Animation Institute are Rose Bond, Suzanne Buchan, Paul Vester, and Paul Wells. I’m in Paul Wells’ ‘stream’, but the streams come together at lunchtime and for a late afternoon session.

I’m taking this class to open up possibilities for different types of work to come together. I’ve been a visual artist since forever. Well, officially since 1986 when I graduated from art school and started showing. Then I got into the digital realm in about 1999, starting very slowly, and gradually building skills to the point where I now run my own web design company. Then a few years ago I suddenly and unexpectedly started writing fiction. (Yeah those are adverbs. Whatcha gonna do about it?) A novel sort of fell out of me and I’ve been cleaning it up ever since. I hope to have it presentable enough by the end of this year that I can start exploring ways to send it out into the world.

Event Horizon, Julia Stoops, 2007

But these things I do: 1. visual art (mostly painting), 2. website design (with a little bit of client-commissioned animation) and 3. fiction writing (mostly a novel) have not come together. They have informed each other, definitely. Each discipline enriches the others. But I still pursue the disciplines separately. The formal and technical concerns of each discipline  are demanding enough that once I’m engaged in one, it’s all I think about. Shifting gears into another discipline is hard, and is a cause for anxiety. My ‘painting brain’ does not want to think about usability and information architecture. My ‘website brain’ isn’t clued in to character development. My ‘writing brain’ never considers revealing mysterious shapes within layers of translucent color.

And why not? As soon as I wrote this, I thought, wow, that’s interesting. But when I’m in the middle of the making, the medium-specific questions I ask are already so requiring, that others get crowded out.

Why? Several reasons. Firstly because the digital and fiction writing practices are relatively new to me. I’m still looking for a level of facility that lets me step back from worrying about ‘getting it right’, into a place where I can truly play. Craft is still an issue with fiction writing and digital work, in a way that it’s not with painting. Not that I’m the world’s most facile painter, but compared with the other two disciplines, I started younger and I’ve been doing it longer. There’s a level of comfort and familiarity in painting that isn’t there yet in the other disciplines. Not to imply all my paintings come easily: they don’t. But when they don’t it’s okay. Painting does not generate the kind of anxieties I experience with fiction and digital.

Secondly, for the last few years I have also been preoccupied with a fourth thing: running a business. With no background in business, and no role models among family or friends, learning how to create and manage a business is a steep learning curve. One that’s charged with the excitement of charting ones own course, (Yeah, a cliche. Whatcha gonna do about it?) but is also labor intensive.

And my ‘business brain’ claims to be far too busy dealing with demanding practicalities to spend quality time playing with color, character, and other things that it says will have to wait. The books have to be balanced. The seminars have to be listened to. The client follow-up is intense. The options have to be weighed. The business plan must be reviewed. The router needs rebooting. The subcontractors must receive explicit instructions. And so on.

So it’s in this context, during this week-long space that I was able to carve out of my daily web design studio routine, that I am exceedingly grateful to be taking ‘Devising Narrative Structures: Script and Storyboard’ with Paul Wells, during Boundary Crossings: An Institute in Animated Arts at PNCA.