CASCADIA ARTPOST ADDRESS

Please note that the Cascadia Artpost Post Office Mailbox is now closed. All postings should be sent to the following address:

CASCADIA ARTPOST

2649 NW 64th Street

Seattle, WA 98107-2456

U.S.A.

Spring in Cascadia

Spring is our favorite time of the year, and not just because this is the month of our birthday. This is the season of rebirth, of the new start. Spring is the season of hope. It is the time when gardens start to come alive. Here in Cascadia, our climate is moderate, so our transition of the seasons at this time of year is more gradual: longer days, enough warmth in the soil to cause seeds to sprout, more breaks in our cloudy weather regime. To celebrate Spring in Cascadia, Cascadia Artpost presents four artistamps illustrating flowers from last year's spring garden: Dicentra uniflora (common name: bleeding heart), Helleboras ericsmithii (common name: hellebore), Phlox paniculata (common name: phlox), and Crocus vernus (common name: crocus).

One of our favorite poets of Cascadia, the late William Stafford (1914-1993), more often was inspired by the other three seasons, but here is a poem of his fitting for spring. It is taken from the collection Learning to Live in the World, Earth Poems by William Stafford:

THE DREAM OF NOW

When you wake to the dream of now

from night and its other dream,

you carry day out of the dark

like a flame.

When spring comes north, and flowers

unfold from earth and its even sleep,

you lift summer on with your breath

lest it be lost ever so deep.

Your life you live by the light you find

and follow it on as well as you can,

carrying through darkness wherever you go

your one little fire that will start again.

~ William Stafford, 1991

Security Flap

Security flaps have come to dominate U.S. media attention. We are a nation preoccupied with security. The latest attempt to ignite explosives on an airliner destined for the United States has precipitated another round of recriminations and ruminations about security. Commentators such as the scholar Chalmers Johnson say that this is the natural cycle of blowback, retaliations and counter retaliations to the American overstretch of maintaining an empire of a thousand military bases around the world. Cascadia Artpost calls attention to the latest Security Flap by reproducing the patterns found on "security envelopes" carrying mail art received during 2009. What does security mean for you?

PEACE 2009

Two artistamps close 2009 with the theme of Peace. The stamp in the horizontal format is an update of a typographic design created in 2006. It shares the background color and Cascadia Artpost font with a second stamp in vertical format portraying the sockmonkey LoJack, dressed in a tunic decorated with peace emblems. Sockmonkeys are a popular folk art in parts of the United States that dates from the 1930's, made from socks stuffed in the image of a monkey. The most common sock is the red-heeled "Rockford" work sock manufactured by Fox River Mills (which bought out the former manufacturer, the Nelson Knitting Company) in Rockford, Illinois. The red heel gives the sockmonkey its distinctive red lips.

FLUXUS SEATTLE

The first black-and-white FluXus artistamp originated from a design by Wolfgang Feelisch in 1974 that was used by Ken Friedman in mail art exchanges, according to Chuck Welch's Eternal Network, A Mail Art Anthology (University of Calgary Press, 1995). The logo was quickly adapted and spread in the mail art network. Friedman used Feelisch's design along with an emblem for Fluxus Zone West by Joseph Beuys in a 1974 artistamp commemorative, and both designs were later copied for a Fluxus Postal Kit.

In this tradition, Cascadia Artpost produced its Fluxus Seattle artistamp in November 2009. Also designed and printed was a similar Fluxus Bellingham stamp for Rudi Rubberoid in Bellingham, Washington to facilitate exchanges in the Cascadia network.

Both the 1974 Fluxus West stamp and the Fluxus Seattle stamp are illustrated above.

GOOD MAIL DAY

Highly recommended by Cascadia Artpost for the bookshelf of every mail art creator or anyone curious about artistamps and postal art is a new softcover book by San Francisco artists Jennie Hinchcliff and Carolee Gilligan Wheeler, Good Mail Day (Quarry Books, 2009, $19.95 U.S.).

Filled with how-to pointers and abundantly illustrated, Good Mail Day brings together a lot of information in one place about mail art. The book's chapters cover topics such as:

• Getting started with mail art


• How to put together a traveling mail art kit


• Drawing ideas and raw materials from the environment around us


• How to make and illustrate envelopes


• Working with paper


• Postal experiments


• Creating artistamps


• Developing one's postal personality


• Mail art projects and networking

As added inspiration, bound with the book in the back are some blank postcards and postal stickers.

For more information, see the website http://www.good-mail-day.com. The artists also have a website for their Podpost at http://www.podpodpost.com.

FLUXUS II

The Fluxus movement - the word "Fluxus" means literally "to flow" - creates art directly from the world and invites the audience to participate directly in perception, cognition, and creation.

This second Fluxus commemoration by Cascadia Artpost was released on a "Fluxus Card" designed from an arithmetic flash card originally intended as a teaching tool for math lessons in grade school. The flash card was part of a set discovered in an antiques store in Edmonds, Washington in January 2009. The bendable figure shown on the artistamp is shown in an evening pose striding through some postcard trimmings on the Cascadia Artpost layout table.