A Winter’s Panel

I must be absorbing the muted tones of winter with this latest piece. It’s 22″x30″ on a single piece of plywood. The blue gray color is matte house paint. The darker shape in the lower left is a result of varnishing the surface of the plywood. The middle parallelogram (never thought I’d have a use for that word after sixth grade!) is raw wood. It’s called “Bulwark”. 

 

Open Studio

Here are some recent prints. All of them will be on view (and for sale!) at my open studio on Sunday, December 11, 2-5 at the Mill Building in Hartford Village.

Portfolio Proof

Every other year Two Rivers Printmaking Studio publishes a portfolio of prints by artist members and faculty. This year marks the 10th anniversary of TRPS and the third portfolio I have participated in. Here are my previous two prints from the 2006 and 2008 portfolios.

The print on the left, Isle, was in the 2006  portfolio. It is an intaglio print with hardground etching and drypoint. The colored shape was a relief roll. That was when I got really into rainbow rolls (you put two or more colors and blend them with the roller–I still think it’s pretty cool.) The print on the right is Tethered and is part of the 2008 portfolio. The key image is also intaglio, mostly hardground etching with some drypoint. The brownish color was from a polyester plate lithograph. I had recently taken a workshop with Rebekah Tolley and was inspired to use that method as a second plate rather than wiping another intaglio. The orange cloud was a rainbow relief roll.

This time around I was determined not to do an intaglio plate. The size of the edition is 37 with 6 artist proofs. I knew I wanted to do a multi-color print so I figured that printing a single color 43 times (really it was about 50 to give some wiggle room) would be much easier with a roller than with the tarleton. Prior to creating the image I also decided it would be a bleed print (no border) and that I would use Rives BFK gray paper just because I liked the color.

Lately I have been interested in the notion of creating fascimiles of three dimensional forms with woodblock printing. The facets of these geometric forms use shapes cut from thin plywood that could conceivably be used to construct boxes but are instead coated with ink and printed. The darker gray in this print illustrates what I’m talking about.For the portfolio piece I chose a fairly simple cubic form with two radiating “arms” I wanted one facet of the form where every color overlapped with one other color and then one area of overlap with all three colors. I cut three pieces out with my jigsaw.

Then came the difficult task of choosing colors. I felt like I could have proofed indefinitely. Of course I was at a disadvantage because I started proofing before my gray paper arrived. The luminescence of the background white was not going to be possible with the gray. I wanted the color of the open arms of the form to resonate or glow against the gray paper. Here are some of the test runs. (If you like any of these better than the final proof–please don’t tell me.)

This one used only two woodblocks–the third color was a spraypaint stencil. I immediately rejected this one because Ididn’t like the way it looked and I didn’t want to have to engage with the unpredictability of spraypainting.

These two are on Rives BFK buff. While I really liked the one with the pink, I knew I would have to try something different with the gray paper. For the image on the right I was trying to use the white as a luminescent contrast to the buff paper. But I decided I wanted a color that would relate more to the colors on the base of the form.

The following two prints are my attempts with the gray paper. The one on the right finally got me where I wanted to be. I had originally printed a very saturated green blue for the dark facet but I printed over it with the maroon color so you can see a litte of the blue peaking out. I actually like the way that looks color-wise though it compromises the way the grain of the wood looks and ultimately would be too labor intensive.

And here is the final version. I did struggle with the notion of signing the print on the back. I opted for signing at the bottom using a silver pencil. If I were exhibiting a series of prints like this I would have signed on the back but in the context of the edition I preferred to incorporate the standard convention of signing on the front.

Ten of these portfolios will be for sale at TRPS. The portfolio in its entirety will be exhibited at TRPS during the month of December, opening December 2. Individual artist proofs will also be for sale.

Summer Prints

Here are some more prints I made this summer. All of these prints combine intaglio etching plates with woodblock relief. All of them also have spray-paint stencil. Most of these prints except for Blue Window and Floodplain include chine collé. The plate size is 12″x15″.

Singular (with variations)

I made these three prints using one intaglio plate. It is the dark oblique rectangle with lines raditing from the corners. In each of the prints I used the chine collé process with a piece of a print I had made at Northern Print last summer. It was a large scale woodblock/screen-print combo. I much prefer the combination of the smeary expressive marks of the fluorescent screen-print ink and curvilinear woodblock shapes in their new incarnation. For a while now I’ve been using neon colors as an accent or addition during the last step in the process of making a print. When I made these prints I became interested in reversing the order and printing on top of the fluorescent paint. This does something different with the color, it doesn’t sit on top but is integrated into the image. I worked this way with many of the other prints I made this summer.

Another Shape

This is the latest shaped painting I made. It’s called Slab Cloud and is 35″x39″–plywood with latex paint and spray-paint.

Shaped Paintings

I have often felt like it is a pitfall for printmakers to become too enamored of their plates. The plates (especially copper etching plates) can look so cool–sometimes much cooler than the print. That being said, last spring and summer when I was making large shaped woodblocks I really fell for the wood objects themselves, especially after they had been rolled up with color. Now that I have my new studio space and don’t have to creep down to my cold damp basement for all wood cutting projects I have embarked on a series of shaped wood panels.

Each of these paintings was created from a single piece of plywood. They are painted with latex paint and spray paint. At this point the titles are place holders and may change. Of course now when I look at these paintings on their irregular shaped surfaces I am tempted to flip them over, roll on some color and print them on paper.

Relief/Redux

When I was in England last summer (I love being able to say that!) I cut a number of woodblock relief plates out of plywood.  I printed them on top of screen prints. Here’s a reminder:

At Northern Print they used powdered pigments so it was a new experience for me to mix up colors with the oils and the pigments. I had a huge glass slab at my disposal for mixing colors. A corner of a glass slab is visible in this image. It was actually one of the smaller palettes.

At the end of the last week I inked up a bunch of the wood blocks and printed them randomly on Japanese paper figuring I could use them for chine collé in future prints. The future is now. Here is one of those prints it’s called Sever. I think you can actually see some of the ultramarine from the palette image above in this print.

 I also used one of those random woodblock prints in a piece for a holiday show at TRPS. I had saved some of the mylar stencils I had made in England which was the basis for the pink spraypaint stencil on this image. The holiday show piece didn’t quite work for me so I cut it down and used it as a chine collé for this print called Cloud Chaser:

Both of these prints were sold recently in the TRPS auction. They are 12”x12”, intaglio prints with chine collé, woodblock relief and spraypaint stencil.

Resolved/Refreshed

I resolve to update this blog more regularly! Before the holidays I moved into a beautiful studio space overlooking the White River. Between the move, building a table and shelves, and the holidays, I haven’t done much printing. But I did manage to make a series of small prints for the TRPS Holiday Show. They are all about six inch square bleed prints.

 

Squares

When I got back from Newcastle I decided to work on some smaller format prints. I made a series of 12″x12″ bleed prints. I love this size and the freedom I get from not having to worry too much about borders. I made two new intaglio plates for this series using aquatint and aquatint and drypoint on the other. Then I combined and flipped the plates and used some older plates from the AVA Gallery series. On two of the prints, Sloop and Delve I used parts of woodblock prints I had done in Newcastle for chine collé. This series is currently hanging at TRPS.