Sophianotloren

Mary Nohl’s house and garden (photo by Tina Prigge, captured by Salon Vagabond)

MILWAUKEE — From the 1400s to the 1700s, many thousands of individuals, mostly women, were burned, hanged, or drowned as witches in the United States and Europe. The witch represented an inversion of moral order: she was sexually indiscreet, used powders and unguents to elicit disease, ate children, could fly and transform herself into other creatures. The majority of women who were labeled as witches were single (widowed or never married) and older.

Today we think of this as ludicrous. These primitive superstitions seem remote. And yet, witch hunts persist. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is currently battling to save an art environment built, ostensibly, by a witch.

Over a period of 50 years, the artist Mary Nohl transformed her yard as well as the interior and exterior of her cottage into an environment that stands in conversation with the surrounding land, lake, and her childhood memories. Almost immediately after the first cement sculptures materialized in the 1960s, she became known as “The Witch.” Elaborate myths grew from her industrious acreage. Stories of murder, mayhem, and longing were broadly considered fact by a cross-section of the local populous. Nohl worked alone, from her home. Lacking a husband and prescribed social role, she was a very suspicious character, indeed.

Mary Nohl with one of her yard sculptures (photo source unknown)

Mary Nohl (1914–2001) graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1937. She grew up in Milwaukee, spending frequent weekends at a small cottage along the shores of Lake Michigan. After college, she taught art at several schools but really wanted to focus on her own work. She moved back home and lived in the cottage with her mother and father, while running a commercial pottery studio.

Once her father died and her mother entered a nursing home, Nohl had full run of the house. From the 1960s until her death in 2001 at age 87, Nohl transformed the place into an expansive work of art that was inspired by her childhood roots in this charmed setting. She mixed concrete from sand and stones from the beach to create the many yard sculptures. She cut out wooden reliefs of swimmers and boaters to attach in patterns on the house. Wind chimes hung in the trees, translating the significant breezes into aural compositions. Nohl used what was on hand for her artwork, being both resourceful and inspired by the process of making something from the land. All of her endeavors, be they jewelry making and painting during the winter months or yard work in the summers, emanated from the inspiration of this particular site.

Inside Nohl’s house (photo by Linda Wervey Vitamvas) (click to enlarge)

Nohl worked in an interdisciplinary manner (before the term was coined), and yet her diverse output connects thematically. Floating figures, fish, and men with top hats drift from silver jewelry compositions into paintings and yard sculptures. Everything inside and outside the home, from the stippled ceilings to the drip-painted chairs, is joyously embellished with designs that suggest the diverse resources of her education as well as her frequent travels: Hans Arp, Surrealism, the cross-cultural theory laid out by professor Helen Gardner. Kitchen compositions made of chicken bones, woven jute figures, faux stained glass windows, carved wooden totems, abstract collages, assemblages, pen drawings, clay figures, and oil paintings re-envision the traditional concept of ‘home’ as a place of infinite creative potential — a place where personal history has solid authorship.

From the time she built the first concrete sculptures, stories began circulating about the curious person responsible. By the 1960s, most of the property along this private enclave of beach had been subdivided into acre lots, expensive suburban homes replacing the original quaint cottages of Nohl’s generation. In sharp contrast to this newly conceived American dream, wherein a surging economy allowed women to stay home, have children, and be ideal housewives, Nohl lived alone at the end of Beach Drive. Most of her neighbors mowed their giant lawns every Sunday in a shared ritual of conformity, a nod to man’s mastery of nature.  In contrast, Nohl wove the sky, lake, beach, wind, and her childhood memories of unfettered play into a self-styled art environment.

Over four decades, Mary Nohl kept making and building. Stories took hold, about how she’d murdered her family and buried them under the sculptures, or how her husband had been lost in the lake and the sculptures were to beckon him home. All the stories inserted the “missing” husband and children. The cottage became a frequent late-night stop for teens drawn to the counterculture strangeness of the place. Others came and left notes of gratitude in her mailbox.

Inside Nohl’s house (photo by Linda Wervey Vitamvas)

Nohl died in 2001. She left nearly $10 million dollars (her attorney father had invested well) to a foundation to award yearly fellowships to individual artists in Milwaukee and nearby counties. She donated her house and all of its contents to the Kohler Foundation, which preserves art environments. Thirteen years later, however, little has been done to secure the site. The Kohler ran into opposition from Nohl’s wealthy neighbors — they objected to even the most restricted use of the house as a museum or study center. The building fell into disrepair and with each new winter has become increasingly fragile, weathered, marooned in uncertainty. Then, in March of this year, the property’s current owner, the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, issued a press release stating that it had given up preservation efforts and will move the house and yard sculptures to Sheboygan County, where it is located. The center will sell the land to fund the move.

In the world, there are very few preserved art environments built by women. Two other significant sites are Grandma Prisbrey’s Bottle Village in Simi Valley, California, and Helen Martin’s Owl House in South Africa (which had the benefit of Athol Fugard writing a play about it, The Road to Mecca). Nohl and these two female builders owned their own land, which is not an insignificant detail. Land ownership confers independence and power. Women are still often denied this gentry status. It’s probably the single reason why there aren’t more art environments built by women.

Nohl’s house (photo by Tina Prigge, captured by Salon Vagabond)

To witness the loss of Mary Nohl’s house and yard is to witness how history is written. Despite decades of feminist thought, queer theory, interest in authenticity and authorship, heightened awareness of exclusionary practice and prejudice, the “domestic” remains a contested, touchy, demeaned place of production. Important ideas cannot emanate and take form from the kitchen or the baby’s room. Art that fully stitches one’s life and daily rhythms to place, home, and domestic labor remains radical, and Mary Nohl’s work rewrites these moral codes of capitalist functionality. When Nohl refused to mow her lawn or buy new clothes (until the old ones wore out), she was thinking independently about the aberrative demands of consumption.

Although not branded a witch, another midwestern artist who works from home, Michelle Grabner (one of the curators of the 2014 Whitney Biennial), was recently criticized in the New York Times for being a “soccer mom.” While Nohl’s work took place outside the art world infrastructure and Grabner’s work resides decidedly at its center, they share a commitment to not sever the meaningful parts of their daily existence from their professional artist roles. Grabner’s 2013 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland was insistently titled I Work From Home.

Nohl’s yard sculptures (click to enlarge)

Mary Nohl liked power tools; she repaired her own roof. When teenagers threw rocks at her house she didn’t get bitter, she just tried to solve the problem. When asked why she had never married like so many of her high school and college girl friends, she said she wasn’t opposed to it but that men tended to be wary of women who could fix their own cars.

A woman is a witch when she bends her role, when caring and tending coexist with inventing and building, when she claims and wields power that has not been granted by a curator, a professional figure, or any other infrastructure.

Nohl never believed that art existed in a separate sphere, corralled into museums, labeled with text or swept into the marketplace of privilege. On Beach Drive, she created a place where any passerby might stop, marvel, and feel a little freer, especially if you are a woman. The power of Nohl’s lifelong endeavor emanates from its site and her personal history there. They might as well burn the witch’s house down, because turning it into a facsimile museum in another county would destroy what makes it monumental — power, authority and difference arising from a single woman who was determined to live inquisitively.

(photo by Linda Wervey Vitamvas)

(photo by Linda Wervey Vitamvas)

(photo by Tina Prigge, captured by Salon Vagabond)

(photo by Tina Prigge, captured by Salon Vagabond)

(photo by Tina Prigge, captured by Salon Vagabond)

(photo by Tina Prigge, captured by Salon Vagabond)

(photo by Tina Prigge, captured by Salon Vagabond)

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  Nihilism

It is a holiday season here — we are pagans of the humanistic/naturalistic sort in this household.  (I often discuss the ins and outs of that here.)  I sometimes self-describe as a polydeist.  We beg, borrow, and steal symbols and metaphors from various traditions ranging from Hellenic to Nordic to Amerindian and feel entitled to do so due to being what I have called “American mongrel” — our bloodlines and ancestral “homes” as mixed and tangled as the average Heinz 57 puppy!

So, once upon a distant Catholic/Christian time, we celebrated this day as “St. Lucia’s Day” and I’d be up before dawn making “Lucy Cats” buns for my daughter to deliver (with or without the candle crown) to other family members.  Now, we simply call it “Little Yule” and this year I am instituting it as the day to give gifts of alcohol and possibly do movie marathons.

Of course, even in those days that my uber-up-tight Baptist neighbor called “pagan Catholic” days — I knew Lucia and Lucy Cats had little to do with Christ or his Mass for us – those buns are clearly the rune Sowilo — the rune of the Sun, for the coming Winter Solstice when the days lengthened again promising spring and life in the future.  It was a comfortable segue into actual pagan life.  I had been personally pagan since late 1985; I came out to my family in 1994 after Pope John Paul II told the Catholic world that human conscience was trumped by his decree.  Although I loved our socially active parish for the political and justice related works, at that point I had to be officially done.

That is what this post is about, in a way: being officially ‘done’.  No, no, I am not again attempting to flounce off in despair to sulk about what the world/my country is doing to my ideals and hopes for the world.  But there are smaller ‘dones’ aren’t there?  When you just know you’ve had your fill of beating your head against walls of apathy and ignorance?  When you need to refuel and refresh and you don’t know how long it will take?

That is where I am.  So, I laid my hearth altar today for “Mothers’ Night” (celebrated 20 Dec.) — a Nordic pagan tradition honoring the “disir” – though what, you ask, can all that clan mother stuff have to do with a humanist?  Well, this year, considering it as I looked for a way to make obvious what I felt inside, it occurred to me it is useful to consider all the “mothers”, all the women who went before me.  How I am them and they are me in ways that never change, as well as considering what has changed, and what remains in need of change.

So, while I am “done” in a sense of burn-out presently; I am certainly not done in terms of searching for healing for the self, the family, the world at large.  But for a while, from today until at least January 1st, I am going to literally practice the time I call the “Fallows”…for my personal new year began in November; but I have to catch up with my society’s calendar.  I will do this by avoiding the news, and likely even favorite blogs for a time.  I’ll spend the next week looking at those “matrushka” dolls — women, women, women, connecting to the feminine, divine and human.  I will rest, baking and eating cookies, and sitt in holiday lit rooms with candles enhanced by drops of Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs oils.  I will listen to family laughter; we will eventually open gifts and eat a Winter Solstice dinner.  We will step outside the world in a way not quite what other pagans (Wiccans for instance) had in mind — a functional human stepping away to revive ourselves and celebrate the putting together our own family Humpty Dumpty this past year.

May you find light and merriment in this season by whatever name you celebrate it!  See you in 2015 — unless I pop in to post photographs alone, which may or may not happen.

El Greco, “The Resurrection” (1596-1600), oil on canvas, 275 x 127 cm. Museo del Prado, Madrid (all images via Web Gallery of Art)

El Greco came back from the dead. “The Greek,” his real name, Domenikos Theotokopoulos, moved to Venice and Rome before finally settling in Toledo, where he became one of Spain’s most well known painters. But when he died, his artwork and reputation died with him. Two centuries later, he inspired writers like Baudelaire and painters like Manet, Cézanne, Picasso, Giacometti, Orozco, and many others, to resurrect him.

Now through February 1st, his life continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in an exhibition entitled El Greco in New York. This exhibit, like one I recently saw in Madrid’s Prado Museum, El Greco and Modern Painting, commemorates the artist’s death 400 years ago. That show provided a vivid sense of the Master of Toledo’s lasting influence. Placed next to homages by Jackson Pollock and Francis Bacon, the image that most moved me was “The Resurrection” (1597–1600).

When I first saw this painting in 1974 – the largest canvas I had ever seen – the top edge seemed to challenge the Prado’s sky-high ceiling, as the bottom plunged into a chasm in the gallery floor. But 40 years later in Spain, standing in the same museum before the same image, the painting is no longer the same. It’s still tall, but nine feet high now, not nineteen or ninety. And there are no chasms in the Prado floor. I looked. Clearly, the impact a work of art makes has more to do with personal takes than tape measures.

Square footage aside, the actual canvas is a pain in the neck. At least it gives me one. You see, it makes me look up … a lot. My neck torques like the soldiers’ necks zigzagging to behold the Head of the Church, who is both the detonator and target of the explosion below, rising to the top of the painting. In “The Resurrection,” Christ sucks up all the calm on the planet, leaving tomb and tumult in his wake. Of the nine figures portrayed, the only soles that touch terra firma are those of the sentry wearing the blue cloak. One minute all is low-key. Then a powerful highlight drapes the grounded man, as a flash of rebirth whirls the soldiers out of darkness and disbelief.

Hand in hand with his steadfast yet upward stride, the star of the show officiates at this painting’s marriage of form and content. The content part: depending on your point of view, Christ’s resurrection is about a mythical character or a Houdini Most High, or a concept, spirit, or god escaping from his tomb to juggle sun, moon, earth, and stars for . . . ever. I’ve seen this New Testament story portrayed many times by many artists. But regarding the form part: that this artist moves me to participate physically in the idea of going from here to eternity by mimicking with my head the motion of Christ’s ascension . . . that’s rare.

A few thoughts on how he does it. To begin with, El Greco chose a tall, narrow canvas, which lends itself to up and down motion, as opposed, for example, to Piero della Francesca’s square-format take on the same subject, which lends itself to calm. In Piero’s version, Jesus out-unblinks four uninformed, uniformed Rip Van Winkles, who’ve barely budged in centuries. The only action, a trickle of blood from the wound in Christ’s ribcage. In El Greco’s version, on the other hand, the large, compelling forms of Christ and the banners he holds float to the top, sucking toward them the legions of screaming details that make up the awestruck guards, bug-eyed and blinking, all. Well, except for the feather-helmeted one who offers a nod to Piero. Dream on, little man; we’ll get back to you later.

Piero della Francesca, “Resurrection” (1463-65), mural in fresco and tempera, 225 x 200 cm. Pinacoteca Comunale, Sansepolcro.

El Greco halves his composition vertically. But he provides numerous unifying elements, such as the echoing raised arms of the soldiers–especially the skewed triangle formed between Jesus and the two guards in blue bordering him below. Another unifier: all but one of the sentries look up, taking our gaze with them. And then there are those coy elbows, toes, and strips of cloth, hailing from a long line of fig leaves, which create a rhythm of bleeps that lead us up and down. The only time Christ’s body is overlapped, by the edge of the white banner, represents the most obvious and least inventive example of censorship. El Greco painted psychology and religion like no one else. He took revolutionary liberties with sinuous, sensuous forms. But El Greco, a believer, believed in discretion over description.

Like storm-blown trees, the soldiers ring around a spiritual rose. El Greco portrays the individual guards from many expressive angles, but to further differentiate Christ from the sentries, the artist adheres to an “ideal form.” Jesus differs most from the guard collapsed directly beneath his feet. They share the painting’s central vertical axis, but little else. The star of the show, upright and ascending, is sublime; the strongly foreshortened guard beneath him is a great big crumpled doormat to trip over. By exaggerating contrasts and by radically twisting space and color, El Greco pumps up the emotional and spiritual qualities of his subjects while playing down conventional depiction.

Talking about up and down, I don’t see this canvas as necessarily setting up a contrast between the Christ figure on top (holy and important) and the falling soldier below (unholy and unimportant), although I suspect that’s what El Greco had in mind. I respond to the guard sympathetically. Given the circumstances, he sees the world from a distinctive, understandably tumultuous point of view, and he deserves to be seen with distinction and understanding. He is you. He is me. He is a toppled tree, and his twining roots pass beneath Christ, an angel with draping wings, a rose with cloth petals red and white. The soldier is full of passion, awe, fear, and flaws. Ya gotta love him. Yeah, he and his team blew their assignment of making sure a dead man stayed put. But it wasn’t their fault. Eight against one; the eight of ‘em never stood a chance. Haven’t we all been thrown off course by circumstances beyond our control? Granted, the beyond-control bar is higher here, but that shouldn’t prevent us from identifying with the faceless toppler. Maybe in the future I will think about him less and look to one of the other seven guards more.

Without the upside-down guard, the painting floats away. Also, without him, there’d be too much celestial sugar. (Picture Renoir painting for the church in the sixteenth-century.) The guards yo-yo from spellbound to panic-stricken in one fell swoop. But even while pulling us down, Christ’s fallen counterpart leads us into the picture. Look at the distance between his head and foot. And to put an even more emphatic stomp on the matter, look at how he kicks his comrade right where the poor guy is most vulnerable, whacking us into the very deepest part of the composition. Then, without even turning around, our sentry introduces us to the host and silent life of the party.

We arrive as Christ leaves. Above, the passage is clear, and we can imagine the slow, sonorous tones of Pablo Casals’ cello accompanying his departure. Below, starting at our greeter’s left arm, our entrance into the picture is stacked with too big or too small limbs (clearly, “too” can be a good thing) that recede and advance like burning branches across a stuttering, yet rapid, diagonal embellished through electric variations of scale, color, gesture, direction, intervals and pauses, all woven into patterns of light and shape and rising and falling forms. Jimi Hendrix would have had a ball with this passage. Hendrix and Casals – I’d pay to hear that duo! Stop and smell the smoke while you listen to the waistband fringe of the falling soldier’s gold tunic braise in the blaze below the white flow of Christ’s banner declaring victory over death. Then follow a saber point to the snoring, way-too-little fellow whom El Greco tucks into a cozy pocket of space, tops with a silly-looking helmet, and blankets within a miracle.

This guy sleeps past the alarm and misses the party. Comic relief? A symbol of preoccupation or melancholy? Perhaps he’s just exhausted from being up all night keeping watch. Could be this sentry is dreaming about a storm-swept tree and a rose with cloth petals. He does not appear to be a believer — unless all that we see in this canvas is meant to stem from this sentry’s imagination. Like the Christ figure, like the overturned guard, perhaps like everyone pictured or heard here, he could be the narrator of “The Resurrection,” each crafting a unique story. If we lighten up and lower our sights, this painting can be regarded as a kind of spiraling cartoon bubble popping out of the “Little Nemo-like” head of the man with the feathers. Why not? After all, aren’t dreams and stories created by the wacky, high-minded, thoughtful, mean, young, old, involved, or distant pains-in-the-neck gods and artists in us all?

El Greco in New York continues at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1000 5th Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through February 1, 2015.

Amy Barnes was jailed and held in solitary in 2012 when she called out "fuck the police" as she bicycled past Cobb County cops who were questioning a suspect by the roadside. Read the rest

welpppppp

seriouslyamerica:

The Rugrats don’t have time for your gender-essentialist bullshit.

fun fact: this actually happens in studies about gender stereotypes projected onto babies

The Eyes of Eric Garner

the-chubby-nerd:

sixpenceee:

Victor Noir is more famous for his death and his grave than for his life. He was a journalist who was shot dead. To mark his grave, a bronze statue of the man lying down as if just shot was erected. This statue has since become something of a fertility symbol.

Due to the naturalistic style of the sculpture there is a fold in Noir’s trousers which make him appear to be aroused. Myth says that placing a flower in the top hat after kissing the statue on the lips and rubbing its genital area will enhance fertility, bring a blissful sex life, or, in some versions, a husband within the year. This is located at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris

"Honey our pregnancy test came back negative we have to go rub the statue’s dick again"

frontier001:

*Does not compute*

The thing I hate most about x-mas is wrapping things.

I am AWFUL at it.

AWFUL.

I've never done any "best of" posts, so this year, I'm gonna! Hold on to your hats, wrecky minions, 'cuz I'm about to unleash my personal favorites from over six years and 10,000 wrecks, throughout the rest of the month. Enjoy!

- Jen

*****

When a card just isn't enough.

Now for extra fun, go back and read all these imagining they're from the same person, TO the same person, over the course of a single weekend. That's like the next Adam Sandler movie script, writing itself.

Thanks to Ian S., Casey H., Sara W., Kris K., Rachel B., Michelle B., Andrew C., Brooke J., Micah C., & Adam Sandler, who I'm sure will be sending me a fruit basket.

*****

Thank you for using our Amazon links to shop! USA, UK, Canada.

pearls-for-cats:

best one yet

androidelf:

(lays back all sexy for u on the bed) (bangs my fuckign head on the headboard)

thebeautifulcomics:

Here (1989) by Richard mcguire (raw magazine)

I AM HUGGING YOU BECAUSE I LOVE YOU

ALSO SOMEONE ATE ONE OF YOUR SHOES BUT THIS IS NOT ABOUT THAT

feministingforchange:

the-worthy:

allthingshyper:

gehayi:

hiddlesbatchlove:

forever-falling-forward:

platredeparis:

bnycolew:

mannysiege:

Progress

What

Imma just let this sit here

MOTHA FUCKIN SCIENCE

sources:

Engagdget

DailyTech

CBS

They turned RNA into an anti-virus program. That is amazing.

Let me restate this in case it didn’t sink in the first time

Researchers physically DELETED ALL TRACES of the HIV virus from a human cell.

ALL OF IT.

IF YOU ARE NOT EXCITED ABOUT THAT I DON’T THINK YOU KNOW WHAT HIV IS

For every human tragedy, we get a triumph

“MOTHA FUCKIN SCIENCE”

RNA has always been an anti-virus program. This is the purpose of siRNAs (short interfering RNAs). RNA is used to defend cells against foreign sequences; it’s used to regulate host cell processes (miRNAs = microRNAs); even mRNA is more complicated than just “I encode message lol!”. Prokaryotes use RNA to defend themselves against phage (CRISPR).

RNA is badass and if you do not agree then you are wrong.

3D printing keeps getting bigger, better and more accessible every day--you can now buy a MakerBot or Dremel 3D printer at Home Depot. Plastic filament printers are, by far, the most common type you will find at makerspaces and home garages, but high-resolution resin printers are slowly creeping into the mainstream. One of the most promising, is the Formlabs Form 1+ SLA printer developed by a team from the MIT Media Lab. I had the chance to put a Form 1+ through it’s paces for two months and here’s how it went.

You will need a dedicated, clean workspace for the Form 1+.

First, a little backstory on the company. Formlabs was founded in 2011 by a group of MIT grads who were frustrated by the fact that there was no economical way for most people to experience the highly-detailed prints that SLA and DLP resin printing offered. Unlike filament printers, which were popping up everywhere at relatively consumer-friendly prices, SLA printers cost tens of thousands of dollars and were simply out of reach of most users. Formlabs set out to make a desktop SLA printer that would rival the big machines and cost only slightly more than many filament printers. At the end of 2012 they successfully completed a $100,000 Kickstarter campaign, eventually bringing in over 2.9 million dollars. Nothing like being too successful--now the pressure was on with a lot of machines to build. Production delays happened and then they got hit by a patent infringement lawsuit from 3D Systems, the inventors of SLA printing. I am happy to hear that the parties have settled, and the case was just dismissed with prejudice on December 1. Formlabs is free to forge ahead.

Photo CREDIT: Formlabs

Having met the Formlabs team a few times at Maker Faire and other events, I have always been impressed. Everyone at the booth knew their stuff, answering in-depth anything I threw at them. One particular staffer was really killing it with thorough and informative answers--turns out she was their material scientist. The machine was sharp looking and all the prints looked great--I really wanted to buy one, almost backed the Kickstarter for an early unit, but chickened out. Recently I contacted Formlabs to request a sample unit to test. So for the past few months, I've had a Form 1+ in my possession and was able to put it through it’s paces!

How It Works

Photo CREDIT: Formlabs

The Form 1+ SLA printer makes a good first impression--sleek and simple design, using quality materials. It just looks cool. It takes up a little more room than a large coffee maker, but it also comes with a cleaning station that you will need to make room for. The on-board interface has one button that does everything with a variety of taps and holds, mostly you use it to simply start and stop prints. PreForm is the easy-to-use model processing software that can be downloaded from the Formlabs website.

The build envelope is 4.9” x 4.9” x 6.5”, which may sound tiny when compared to filament print beds, but prints can be positioned in ways to maximize the space. There are three print resolutions available: 100, 50 and 25 microns (.1, .05, .025mm). As a comparison, 100 microns is typically the finest resolution available with filament printers and a professional printer such as the ProJet 7000 (which I used for the Millenbaugh Motivator) can print at 125-50 microns. “A-ha!” you say--the Form 1+ can do even finer resolution than the pro machine! Yes, it can technically print a finer layer thickness, but you also have to consider feature resolution, which is the smallest detail the printer can accurately reproduce. This is where the pro machine wins out. The ProJet can accurately reproduce details down to 50 microns, where the Form 1+ does 300 microns. Don’t get me wrong, 300 microns is still really small and the Form 1+ can do details just great, but you can start to see what a lot more money will get you.

The Form 1+ uses a laser to ‘draw’ and cure each layer of the print in a UV-curable, liquid resin. An amber acrylic cover encases the print area to keep sunlight out, which would cure the resin and to protect you from the laser. The print adheres to a removable print platform that clamps into the machine, at the top of the z-axis spindle. Below the platform is a removable, acrylic resin tray, which has an optically clear silicone bottom and mounts into a pivot mechanism that rocks the tray up and down, during printing, in order to peel the print off. The trays are also amber and come with a lid so they can be safely stored without curing the resin inside. Upon removing the resin tray, you can see the large mirror mounted at a 45 degree angle which the rear-mounted laser bounces off of and into the bottom of the resin tray.

I was able to get the Form 1+ up and printing in no time--faster setup than a filament printer. With a filament printer there’s a lot more moving parts and the filament has to be loaded, which requires preheating the machine. Typically some kind of covering or coating has to be put on the print bed and it has to be leveled and then the machine has to preheat. With the Form 1+, I filled the resin tray to the line, uploaded the model and printing began immediately. With a filament printer, if you want to change materials, the machine must heat up, the filament extracted, the new filament loaded and then the system needs to be flushed to remove any traces of the prior filament. With the Form 1+, simply remove the tray and insert a new one with a different resin, this is assuming you have an extra tray (more on that later).

Resin comes in a light-tight bottle that needs a good shake, if it’s a pigmented material. It’s poured into the resin tray to the to the ‘max’ fill line, which should be adhered to closely, as the level of the resin rises dramatically as the platform submerges. Carelessly overfilling the tray would result in an overflow that would end up inside the machine. I would let the resin sit for a little to allow bubbles to work their way out. Once a print is initiated, the platform lowers into the resin and sits on the bottom of the tray. The laser immediately starts darting around, curing a thick layer of resin and supports that the entire print hangs from and adheres to the aluminum print bed. When a layer is finished, the resin tray, which is mounted to a hinge, dips down thereby peeling the print off the bottom of the tank. The print platform then moves up slightly for the next layer and the tray moves back into position. It does this for every layer and is the only noise the machine makes and while not silent, it’s far quieter than my MakerBot. Once the print finishes, the platform will move to it’s home position at the top of the z-axis spindle, with the print hanging, bat-like, from the bottom. I would recommend allowing the print to rest for a few minutes, as there is still liquid resin clinging to it that will drip back into the tray.

Like any 3D printer, prints can take a long time. The Form 1+ is the updated version of the original Form 1 and is twice as fast and has a laser four times as powerful. At the medium, 50 micron setting, a 1:64 scale jetcar took around 8 hours and the larger 1:48 scale took around 12 hours. A long time, but not for this type of printing and the wait is worth the details.

8 hours for a small print, 12 hours for the medium sized one.

Once a print is finished, it’s onto the cleaning station where we remove any liquid resin remaining on the print. Formlabs put together a nice vacuum-formed tray that has a place for the platform, two cleaning tanks and an absorbent pad to rest models on while they dry. A squeeze bottle, blunt scraper, flush cutters, tweezers and rubber gloves are also included. You will have to purchase isopropyl alcohol for cleaning the models. I would recommend getting at least a gallon can from your local mega mart as it takes a good bit to fill all the tanks and it will get dirty fairly quick. The print has to be pried off the print platform using the included scraper. It can be a tough job but the PreForm software wisely adds little notches to the base of each print which makes getting the scraper in and under the print much easier.

Cleaning station--it's sticky.

Once removed, the print goes in the first tank with alcohol and gets shaken gently for a minute or two, then it soaks for around 10 minutes. The print is removed, using the convenient basket and moved to the second tank for a repeat shake and soak and then to absorbent pad to dry. At this point, the print is not 100% cured and will be slightly soft and flexible, so be careful not to bend, break or scratch anything. I confirmed with Formlabs that they will usually zap the finished print in a UV oven for a few minutes for a full cure. For the rest of us, the print could be put in the sun for a few minutes or it will cure on it’s own over a few days. I found putting prints in the sun a risky business as I had some thin features severely warp from rapid curing.

Removing supports.

This is a good point to remind everyone that prints are UV-reactant, so you don’t want them sitting in the sun or under a halogen lamp as they will discolor and become brittle. This is not unique to the Form 1+, but true of most resin printers, so prints should be painted or at least clear coated to protect them. You will also need to remove the model from the supports, which attaches the model to the print bed (more on this in the Software section). Supports can be removed with the included flush cutters or an x-acto knife and any remaining marks can be sanded once the model is cured.

Testing the Software

The PreForm software is simple and easy to use, while still giving the user access to some tweaks. Pick the material and layer thickness and have the software orient your model and auto generate supports. Unlike filament printers where it’s ideal to have a nice, flat surface to put on the print bed, the Form 1+ needs models at an angle. Why? Because the peeling process becomes much more difficult and prone to failure with large surfaces. It’s like trying to peel a sticker off in one piece without it ripping. If you were printing a cube with a side directly on the print bed, it has to peel that whole surface versus a square positioned corner-down which would be a much smaller area to peel. By the time the printer gets to the middle of the cube, where there is a lot of surface area, there would be enough supports and mass generated that it would probably peel ok.

I wrecked Winterfell better than the Boltons. Positioning flat on print bed caused failure.

Ideally, the cube would be hollowed-out to both save material, time and making it more likely to print successfully. Since nothing will be laid flat, everything on the Form 1+ will print with supports, unlike filament printers where certain designs can print without supports. It It’s still a good idea to design models to use as few supports as possible to save on resin and post-print clean up. PreForm will automatically generate supports and indicate possible problem areas. There is the option to tweak support settings and even manually add and remove supports, which is nice. In general, the software did a good job but it is ‘dumb’, as it does not know what is the ‘good’ or visible surface of a model. You may want to manually orient models so the downside, or unseen side, faces the supports, this way, any marks the supports may leave will be hidden.

Should have positioned supports under the car, not on side.

Familiar options such as shells (wall thickness) and fill (how solid the interior is) are absent from PreForm (and most resin printing software) since the model will print exactly how it’s modeled. A solid cube will print solid and use up a lot of material, so to save on time and materials, models should be hollowed with escape holes when possible, which will require additional modeling work. The Form 1+ needs to be connected to a computer via USB to upload the model--there is no SD card option. However, once the model is completely loaded into the printer, the computer can be disconnected. Uploading the model can take a few minutes, but nothing unreasonable and the print will start while the rest of the model uploads.

The Materials

Formlabs offers white, gray, black and clear resins which run $149 for a liter. I haven’t crunched the numbers on how this compares to filament, but it’s definitely more expensive. I filled a whole gallon bag, plus some, with prints from one bottle of resin, so it does go quite a long way. I tested the gray, black and clear which all produced nice prints. My favorite was the black which made details really pop. I didn’t like the gray as much since it was slightly translucent on many parts. The clear came out nice and can be polished to transparency, although it is prone to yellowing as it ages or if exposed to too much UV light.

I would describe the fully-cured resin as acrylic-like, as it can get brittle and I have snapped off thin pieces and edges. To confirm my suspicions, I dropped a failed print on the floor and it shattered into pieces, so prints should be handled with care. I don’t know if I would want to use them for mechanical parts, other than mock-ups, as I would feel more comfortable with ABS which has some give. Formlabs just released a castable material that can be used in ‘lost wax’ applications, which is excellent for jewelry makers. They also announced that a clear, flexible material is due anytime now and it looks promising.

I was able to print this bag of failure plus more with one bottle of resin.

The Bad Stuff First

Printer #1 - Laser test shows bad laser with halo.

Let’s get the bad out of the way first. The worst thing I can say is that in the two months I was testing the Form 1+ I went through three printers. Yep. The first one had a bad laser which caused every print to fail. The beam should normally be a pinpoint, but mine had a halo around it which was like painting with a rag versus a fine paint brush. The second had a spectacular fail with the peel motor, which moves the tray up and down. There was a horrible grinding noise and it pulled the tray down so far it rammed into the body of the printer. The tray was stuck in the down position and wouldn’t budge, meaning it couldn’t be removed or emptied easily. I had to let the printer sit open in the sunlight for a few days to cure all the resin left in the tray, so it could be shipped back.

Printer #2 - Tray just kept on going and jammed here.

The third printer worked like a champ and I got great prints on it until a few days after Norm and I shot the Form 1 video when the peel motor stopped working. This was different than the second unit, as I could move the tray up and down and even remove it. Turns out the peel motor uncoupled from the tray mechanism and could be fixed relatively easily, but it was time to send the printer back anyway.

Printer #3 - Peel motor detached from tray mechanism.

I was a bit disappointed by the failures but I will say this - these are the typical things that go wrong with the Form 1+, Formlabs is aware of the problems and have been addressing the issues. I was also getting demo units that have been shipped all over and probably used more than a typical printer. Disappointing, nonetheless. Customer service was very good, prompt and thorough, but that could be biased by the fact that I was reviewing the unit. Although, I don’t think that’s how Formlabs operates, they seem to take customer service seriously and to be doing a pretty good job. I think for a Kickstarter project that wildly outperformed expectations, with a small group of people, they are doing pretty well.

Beautiful failures: resin stuck to bottom of tray.

Aside from the hardware failures, I would have occasional print failures, where the print would not peel properly and get stuck to the tray. When this happens you get a layer of resin baked to the tray bottom, which blocks the laser from adding to the model. The print is ruined and you have to very carefully use the included scraper to remove the baked on resin. This is nerve wracking as the bottom of the tray is a soft silicone and if you gouge or scratch it, your tray is toast. I was surprised that this wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be--I managed to get it clean every time without damaging anything.

Carfully removing failed print from tray.

After scraping off these baked-on bits you have to run a comb through the tank in order to sift out any stray bits that would ruin prints. Formlabs gives you every possible tool you need except for this--I used a regular fine-tooth hair comb. I asked Formlabs why they chose silicone and not glass and it comes down to the stresses that the peeling process causes on the tray. Their answer: glass would break. The biggest bummer concerning the tanks is the silicone will eventually start to cloud due to the laser. The clouding will then cause bad or failed prints and the tray must be replaced. Formlabs recommends moving the position of prints around the print platform to give all surfaces of the tank equal play, but ultimately after about 2 bottles of resin you should think about replacing your tank which costs $60. I don’t like that part at all, and hope to see improvements to extend the life of the resin trays.

Three trays cracked in same spot.

There should be a dedicated tray for each type of resin you plan on using. It is technically possible to clean out and use the same tray for different materials, but it’s unrealistic and messy.

During my tests, I had three resin trays crack, one of which I thought was my fault, but upon further inspection they all cracked at the exact same spot - the back left corner where there’s a molded pour spout. I think this is a weak spot and the stresses of the peeling process may tend to crack the trays.

A look inside reveals how easily dirt can get on optics.

Finally, for a unit that relies on lasers and optics, the open body design is a problem and I feel it should be sealed in some way. Both my apartment and shop were a torture-test for the Form 1+, between NYC dirt, old building dirt, three cats, etc., the mirror would get dirty very easily. When the resin tray is removed, the interior of the printer is completely exposed, with the large mirror directly beneath the opening. As the repair tech at NYU Film and TV, I have a lot of experience and tools for cleaning lenses and sensors, but cleaning the mirror on the Form 1+ and getting it spotless and streak-free was really tough. If dirt gets on the smaller mirrors that direct the laser back inside the machine, cleaning would be particularly difficult. With this layout, it’s relatively easy to accidently get resin on the mirror and even a drop would be very bad and difficult to clean off. I spoke with Formlabs at NYC Maker Faire about this and they indicated that they had always wanted some type of sealed unit, but there’s only so much they could address and still keep costs down and, especially while doing a startup. I hope to see this improved in future units.

While not a bad thing per se, something to keep in mind when using the Form 1+ is that a dedicated workspace is needed for the printer and cleaning station. My MakerBot is crammed into the corner of my desk and that works fine, but the Form 1+ system needs more space. Ideally it would be in a clean area (ie. not your woodshop) and it needs a fair amount of space in the back to open the lid. There needs to be a spot for the cleaning station as well and keep in mind, that no matter how hard you try, resin and alcohol will get on this work area. I was trying to be tidy, but everything around the printer eventually got a little sticky.

The Good Stuff!

Amazing detail!

The prints I produced with the Form 1+ were very, very nice. I was really impressed with the detail on the miniature jetcar and the lightsaber turned out really well. Prints generally had a nice surface finish, supports were relatively easy to remove and sanding and painting is easily done. I felt that print times for this level of detail were totally reasonable and to be expected for SLA printing. Formlabs has a nice range of materials to work with especially with their new additions. I love how the machine looks and that it’s relatively quiet. Formlabs is obviously working on improvements and have been actively listening to feedback.

Every Jedi must forge his lightsaber.

I like the PreForm software and don’t really have any bad things to say about it. It was straightforward and easy to use, it’s auto mode generally worked well, it was fast and gave just the right amount of tweaking options. Getting the printer running was a breeze and is overall easy to use, this is counterbalanced by the routine maintenance that must be done. You have to keep the mirror and bottom of the tray perfectly clean - fingerprints and excessive dust will ruin prints. You have to make sure the inside of the tank is clean and free of stray cured bits of resin. Unused trays and resin must be sealed and kept out of direct sunlight. The cleaning station will need cleaned and the alcohol changed out periodically. If you are a detail-oriented type, this should not be a problem and is worth it for excellent prints. If you run the Mr. or Ms. Messy Workshop, this is probably not the printer for you. I would not recommend this printer for most schools where students have direct access, unless highly supervised. If you are a jewelry maker, craftsman, into miniatures, a sculptor, ZBrush artist, etc, this would be an excellent printer for you.

So would I buy a Form 1+? As much as I like the prints, I personally would like to wait for their next gen machine which I hope would address some of the issues I had. I would also like to see them come out with a material that hits that sweet spot between their standard material and the flexible--something that is rigid with just a bit of give. Despite any problems I ran into, I really liked testing the Form 1+ and look forward to what Formlabs will do next. I think they have a solid foundation to work from and the Form 1+ will keep getting better. I also suspect that they will have a lot more competition down the road, especially from 3D Systems and Stratasys, the big guns in the field of 3D printing. If you would like to learn more about Formlabs (and MakerBot) I would highly recommend the Netflix Print the Legend documentary, which is an excellent behind-the-scenes look at not only 3D printing, but the world of Kickstarter and small startups.

Check out the video of Norm and I discussing the Form 1+.