Lichens In Their Unnatural Habitat

Last year for the holidays, one of my favorite gifts that I received was the giant tome "Lichens of North America". It was published in 2001 and is the most comprehensive guide on North American species of lichens and lichen biology. It's giant, and has mounds of gorgeous photographs. It came in handy recently for a rather strange project. In September I will be going to Hamburg, Germany to participate in Flatstock Europe to sell my gigposters. One of my fellow artists, Nick Rhodes from Manchester, is putting together an art exhibit that will coincide with Flatstock. Each participating artist, as we are all screenprinters, are submitting a squeegee that we have painted on or customized in some way. Seeing as I don't hand print any longer, and use a screen printing auto press, I had to scrounge up an old hand squeegee. I found a box of old ones at Jay's shop, and chose the "Joe Lally". Joe is a nice medium sized squeegee that has seen some better days. The name "Joe Lally" is the name of the bass player from the band Fugazi, in case you were wondering. After that I have no more answers for you. I looked over the squeegee trying to decide what to paint, and noticed the wood handle had splotches of ink on it that somewhat resembled lichen (yes, yes, I know; bit of a stretch, eh). Well I went with it and began covering it with paintings of lichens. Perhaps it is a desire to return the wood on the tired old squeegee back to nature, but more likely, it's just an excuse to paint lichens. Hmmmm.