By day I'm a software engineer, and the whole point of my job is to make things ship as fast as they possibly can. Naturally somewhere along the way I noticed that my personal life craved the opposite, that I wanted to slow down, savor what was in front of me, and actually see what was around me.

I'm a believer in intentional boredom i.e. if you sit somewhere long enough without reaching for anything, the world starts offering up its details, and that turns out to be the real gift of it, a habit of observation that follows you indoors and outdoors and through the rest of life. Bark has a pattern, water has moods, and a hummingbird holds its place in the air effortlessly.

Still Press started during a sabbatical, when I finally had long unhurried hours to take printmaking seriously, and it has been the most rewarding hobby I've had in a long time. I'm self-taught, and I love that you can carve something with your hands, roll ink over it, pull the paper back, and find it there in full focus.

The work encompasses stillness in all its forms, the proof of it in bark and stone and texture, the disruption of it in the moment something moves and you see the stillness clearly for the first time, and the interaction of it when still things keep company with other still things.

I work out of my tiny home studio in the East Bay, California.

The process

Everything here is carved by hand into linoleum and printed by hand.

I'm intentional about materials and I experiment constantly with papers, inks, and techniques. My favorite technique is the ghost print, also called the second pull, where you print a block and then print it again without re-inking so a fainter twin appears. I build whole series from it, following a process I call chain printing in which the ghost impression left by one print becomes the first layer of the next, so every print in an edition carries a trace of the one before it.

When a print is made to be kept, it goes on heavy, acid-free archival paper, the kind measured in reassuring GSM numbers, so it outlasts trends and moves and most furniture.