At this June’s Art at the Source I’ll be showing new hanami images – specifically looking at the cherry blossom bursts of April 2025 in the villages and forests of Japan’s rural Kiso Valley and part of the Nakasendō highway.

This portrait, made among the blossoms at Nagoya Castle, won’t be one of them – it’s a happily related personal extra.

A few weeks ago I realized that the entire print run for my small book Graffiti Generations had sold out – I only had my own copy remaining!

The stack had evaporated over about six months, a process which had snuck up on me by ones and twos.

Just in time for Sonoma County’s Art at the Source 2025 event, a small run of Graffiti Generations has been reprinted. The same format and same 47 photographs, several of which you may have seen exhibited at galleries around the Bay Area.

Copies of Graffiti Generations purchased in-person are signed and studio-stamped. After the summer art fair copies will also be available online, though without those handmade marks.

In this case, $0.01 – after a wait of eighteen years.

The prodigal URL: kevinbjorke.com has come home. And with it, a new site.

Sixteen selected photos from my ongoing “Chinese Sonoma” project are on display at Santa Rosa’s Finley Center throughout January 2025.

A couple of days after October’s Art Trails 2024 we packed up the SD cards and have been out of town (to Kentucky, obviously). So posts may have been thin, but days are dense.

With the New Year approaching, expect new changes on botzilla.com, including the return of a long-lost URL.

It’s easy to be busier thinking about sales tax and framing and not about making new pictures. Yet somehow a few new prints have snuck in, between Spring’s Art at the Source 2024 and October’s Art Trails 2024.

This was the day for sending out the first batch of Art Trails promotional postcards – basically, as many as I had stamps. There are five card designs, ordered pretty randomly.

A positive sign: when I brought these to the post office to mail them out (and to buy more stamps), the postal clerk gave both sides of the cards a long look, then enthusiastically exclaimed “wow!” and said they’d try to come to the studio too.

That’s one, at least!

If you’d like to be on the mailing list, let me know!

Just like that, it’s Open Studio season again.

This time, Sonoma County Art Trails 2024.

The main opening reception at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts is on the 28th of this month, with Open Studio days following in mid/late October, in Petaluma (Studio #145).

But this first preview reception is already upon me, tomorrow evening at Corrick’s & My Daughter the Framer in downtown Santa Rosa.

I spent the much of July traveling internationally with a Brompton bicycle – the trip involved city riding, country riding, air travel, rail travel – but no automobiles.

This was much easier than I anticipated.

In response to some queries about riding and some of my kit, here’s a recap of the days and the gear: bicycle, luggage, camera, and rambling reflections on riding along the farms, the sheep, the coast, and in two European capitals: Amsterdam and London.

What worked, what could be better?

Once again:

"Art does not reproduce the visible. Rather, it makes visible." - Paul Klee

Rembrandt knew.

Illustration detail from Forgotten Signs: "Year of the Journey"

Answering some questions about my experience in the Art at the Source 2024 exhibition and open studio events.

Would I Do It Again?

Yes, I’m already signed-up and now preparing for Art Trails 2024 in October. This was my plan all along, really: do both a spring and autumn event, the first one as a complete naif and the next one as a nearly-complete naif.

During Art at the Source, I learned… many things. About people, about my art, about expectations and gratitude.

The exhibition space for Art Trails will be different: in Petaluma, not Sebastopol, larger, more controllable, and not in a shared space. Some learnings from Art at the Source will apply, some won’t. Some of those learnings were expected, some were surprises:

After the Final Weekend, Before the Post-Mortem

The pace of the final days of preparation and weekends for Art at the Source 2024 kept me away from these entries, so now, in the final days before the artists and administrators gather for a final assessment for 2024, here are some reflections and ramblings on the experience at Studio 16B in Sebastopol.

It will come in two posts: this one that just covers the direct goings-on and tasks, and a second post to reflect on what worked, what didn’t, and how to apply it looking forward.