Kenzerrific
LightNews LightNews
kenzerrific.bsky.social
Kenzerrific
@kenzerrific.bsky.social
78 followers 60 following 160 posts
Art is a verb. It is a navigation of meaning and resilience. I art. I ruminate. I seek solidarity.

The gist: Colonialism and their impacts are the root of rot. We already regret the times we neglect the climate and each other.
And yet, I see beauty.
Posts Replies Media Videos
kenzerrific.bsky.social
Found in the wild
July 25, 2025 at 1:19 PM
kenzerrific.bsky.social
Once upon a time my cameras were my primary tool for expression. Now my kid wants to learn. So I pull out the old tools…and !🔥
Of course now I want to spend $$$ for a real macro lens instead of the kit lens that I wrestle with to make it pretend to be a better lens than it is. I need a patron!
June 28, 2025 at 7:43 PM
kenzerrific.bsky.social
Trump wants violence in the streets. He wants the excuse. He will create it if nothing else. Yet he is still a symptom and not the disease. He is not ‘the great man’ of historical paradigms. He is the weak puppet of our time.

The actions in LA in lead up to June 14th is NOT a coincidence.
June 10, 2025 at 8:46 PM
kenzerrific.bsky.social
#artistlabnotebook
#sketch
Last night’s high school orchestra concert.
Young female presenting high adolescent sitting upright on a stool playing upright bass. Her left foot rests on the stool with her pants draping down, her right foot is extended just past the foot of the bass peg. (I was fascinated by her posture and gesture). Her eyebrow is slightly lifted as she draws the bow across the string
June 4, 2025 at 4:40 PM
kenzerrific.bsky.social
#artistlabnotebook
#sketch
Last night’s high school orchestra concert.
Young female presenting high adolescent sitting upright on a stool playing upright bass. Her left foot rests on the stool with her pants draping down, her right foot is extended just past the foot of the bass peg. (I was fascinated by her posture and gesture). Her eyebrow is slightly lifted as she draws the bow across the string
June 4, 2025 at 4:32 PM
kenzerrific.bsky.social
Just a #sumi-e sketch of the electric guitar player from last night’s HS jazz concert
#sumi
#sketch
May 22, 2025 at 2:30 PM
kenzerrific.bsky.social
I am grateful paper torn to small canvas is cheap enough to scribble and draft. I want to level up to narratives in my art, but I have to start where I am. The herb paintings are the dopamine hits along the way.
Single ply raw xuan, sumi and copic marker
#sumi
#sumi-e
#chamomile
#artistlabnotebook
May 8, 2025 at 5:06 AM
kenzerrific.bsky.social
#sumi-e and markers on single ply raw xuan
#bloodroot
#Sanginaria
#artistlabnotebook

I have a long way to go, but it is getting easier
May 6, 2025 at 2:39 PM
kenzerrific.bsky.social
Sage in my backyard and a 1st go with single ply raw #xuan paper.

It comes in 54x27” sheets and tears to pennies a page small sheets.

I went in with color marker as I felt meh about the draft. It is unexpectedly forgiving of the addition.

#sumi-e
#sumi
#Artistlabnotebook
May 5, 2025 at 3:31 PM
kenzerrific.bsky.social
It has always been more aspirational than truth. But it is the aspiration that allowed us to see the US as having greatness within her.
As much as I feel pissy about the barbarity of our nation’s roots, I cling to this.

#wheatpaste
#LadyLiberty
#TheNewColossus
#solidarity
An ink image of the Statue of Liberty wheat pasted to a telephone pole. Below it, the poem The New Colossus is pasted to the same pole.
May 2, 2025 at 6:40 PM
kenzerrific.bsky.social
Wheat paste!!!
Telephone poles and their ruddy texture create challenges for this as a medium for art.

But I love that I am posting about posting on these posts. And these posts carry on lines into our homes and communities. They are ours to own.
Posted on a telephone pole THE NEW COLOSSUS Not like the brazen giant of green fame. With conquering limbs astride from land to land: Here at our sea-washed sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with torch whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning and her name Mother of exile. From her beacon-hand Glows worldwide welcome: her wild eyes command The air bridged harbor that twin cities frame, “Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” Cries she. With silent lips “Give me your tired, your poor Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless tempest-toast to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!” -Emma Lazarus 1883
May 2, 2025 at 4:54 AM
Reposted by Kenzerrific
xkcd.com
PhD Timeline xkcd.com/3081
April 25, 2025 at 3:32 PM
kenzerrific.bsky.social
Happy April cherry bloom season.
#sumi-e
#gansai
Practice every day and simple pleasures.
April 14, 2025 at 4:08 AM
kenzerrific.bsky.social
Sometimes my vanities compete with each other when I like my work. I want share, to resonate. to not be overly prescious, to do what art does, to feel human.

I fear losing my voice to the masses, to the noise of it all. Deaf by noise or by silence

#thyroid #MedicalIllustration
#artistlabnotebook
April 10, 2025 at 7:59 PM
Reposted by Kenzerrific
democracynow.org
Jewish Students Chain Themselves to Columbia Gates to Protest ICE Jailing of Mahmoud Khalil
Jewish Students Chain Themselves to Columbia Gates to Protest ICE Jailing of Mahmoud Khalil
Jewish students at Columbia University chained themselves to a campus gate across from the graduate School of International and Public Affairs Wednesday, braving rain and cold to demand the school release...
www.democracynow.org
April 3, 2025 at 3:01 PM
kenzerrific.bsky.social
Good morning all.
#sumi-e
#spring
#artistlabnotebook
April 7, 2025 at 2:13 PM
kenzerrific.bsky.social
Perhaps every generation bears the weight of history. We can only truly know our own.

#HandsOff
#sumi-e
#Artistlabnotebook
April 6, 2025 at 1:22 AM
kenzerrific.bsky.social
#HandsOff
#Olympia
20250405
Panorama at Washington State Capitol Hands Off protest
April 5, 2025 at 11:30 PM
kenzerrific.bsky.social
Went to The campsite yesterday. It has been neglected since Covid. It was lovely to feel the memory of the space. Alder cones swim in the turf around the fire pit where there once was gravel.
#sumi-e
#artistlabnotebook
April 5, 2025 at 5:01 PM
kenzerrific.bsky.social
Deep roots penetrate.
Darkness will not defeat us.
Our wishes take flight.

#haiku
#sumi-e
#dandelion
#solidarity
March 31, 2025 at 4:50 PM
Reposted by Kenzerrific
samhalpert.bsky.social
I was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria to a family which has been displaced from their land since the 1948 Nakba. I spent my youth in proximity to yet distant from my homeland. But being Palestinian is an experience that transcends borders. I see in my circumstances similarities to Israel's use of administrative detention - imprisonment without trial or charge - to strip Palestinians of their rights. I think of our friend Omar Khatib, who was incarcerated without charge or trial by Israel as he returned home from travel. I think of Gaza hospital director and pediatrician Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, who was taken captive by the Israeli military on December 27 and remains in an Israeli torture camp today. For Palestinians, imprisonment without due process is commonplace. Thave always believed that my duty is not only to liberate myself from the oppressor, but also to liberate my oppressors from their hatred and fear. My unjust detention is indicative of the anti-Palestinian racism that both the Biden and Trump administrations have demonstrated over the past 16 months as the U.S. has continued to supply Israel with weapons to kill Palestinians and prevented international intervention. For decades, anti-Palestinian racism has driven efforts to expand U.S. laws and practices that are used to violently repress Palestinians, Arab Americans, and other communities. That is precisely why I am being targeted. 3/5 While I await legal decisions that hold the futures of my wife and child in the balance, those who enabled my targeting remain comfortably at Columbia University. Presidents Shafik, Armstrong, and Dean Yarhi-Milo laid the groundwork for the U.S. government to target me by arbitrarily disciplining pro-Palestinian students and allowing viral doxing campaigns - based on racism and disinformation - to go unchecked. Columbia targeted me for my activism, creating a new authoritarian disciplinary office to bypass due process and silence students criticizing Israel. Columbia surrendered to federal pressure by disclosing student records to Congress and yielding to the Trump administration's latest threats. My arrest, the expulsion or suspension of at least 22 Columbia students - some stripped of their B.A. degrees just weeks before graduation - and the expulsion of SWC President Grant Miner on the eve of contract negotiations, are clear examples. 4/5
March 18, 2025 at 10:05 PM
Reposted by Kenzerrific
samhalpert.bsky.social
Very good point.
Letter from a Palestinian political prisoner in Louisiana dictated over the phone from ICE detention March 18, 2025 My name is Mahmoud Khalil and I am a political prisoner. I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law. Who has the right to have rights? It is certainly not the humans crowded into the cells here. It isn't the Senegalese man I met who has been deprived of his liberty for a year, his legal situation in limbo and his family an ocean away. It isn't the 21-year-old detainee I met, who stepped foot in this country at age nine, only to be deported without so much as a hearing. Justice escapes the contours of this nation's immigration facilities. 1/5 On March 8, I was taken by DHS agents who refused to provide a warrant, and accosted my wife and me as we returned from dinner. By now, the footage of that night has been made public. Before I knew what was happening, agents handcuffed and forced me into an unmarked car. At that moment, my only concern was for Noor's safety. I had no idea if she would be taken too, since the agents had threatened to arrest her for not leaving my side. DHS would not tell me anything for hours - I did not know the cause of my arrest or if I was facing immediate deportation. At 26 Federal Plaza, I slept on the cold floor. In the early morning hours, agents transported me to another facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey. There, I slept on the ground and was refused a blanket despite my request. My arrest was a direct consequence of exercising my right to free speech as I advocated for a free Palestine and an end to the genocide in Gaza, which resumed in full force Monday night. With January's ceasefire now broken, parents in Gaza are once again cradling too-small shrouds, and families are forced to weigh starvation and displacement against bombs. It is our moral imperative to persist in the struggle for their complete freedom. 2/5
March 18, 2025 at 10:04 PM
Reposted by Kenzerrific
ccrjustice.org
Must read: Mahmoud Khalil speaks out for the first time since his arrest by the Trump administration in an exclusive letter, dictated over the phone to his family, from ICE detention in Louisiana.
March 18, 2025 at 9:50 PM
kenzerrific.bsky.social
#sumi-e #flowers
Remembering to breathe.
Two flowers framed by leaves. Sumi art in delicate greys. 250312 in the corner with initials. On the side it says ‘in spite of everything’.
March 12, 2025 at 2:45 PM
kenzerrific.bsky.social
#shodo #kanji for beautiful
#etymology : top half is a sheep, bottom is big. So it is a big fat sheep.
Ref: Heart of the Brush by Kazuaki Tanuhashi

I like this visceral hungry notion of beauty.
February 23, 2025 at 12:41 AM