Mexican Prints

I just discovered a cool ephemera blog that has many vintage photos, drawings and prints. Check out the latest post of vintage Mexican prints at http://assemblyman-eph.blogspot.com/.

New Etching Series

I've been working on an etching series featuring animals being stalked by human shadows alluding to the deadly fate that they face daily in the human world.

By experimenting with textures and different acid resists I was able to achieve the eerie atmosphere in the prints that define the series.

This series was created with a mixture of effort to tap into my most gut-wrenching feelings about the plight of non-human animals in a human world as well as hints of satisfaction that I am finally dealing with political issues in my artwork that deeply matter to me.

It's not always easy to deal with deeply emotional and/or political issues when my muse is calling but again it's not very satisfying for me to skip lightly on the surface with little to say about what's down deep. I wonder how many other artists deal with this struggle.

UPDATE: The Huffington Post has been running a series of articles on a new book by Jonathan Safran Foer

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-gross/jonathan-safran-foers-con_b_333698.html

called Eating Animals. As Huff Po contributor, Dr. Andrew Weil, puts it, "Foer makes it clear that factory farming is the exceptional human activity that debases and destroys everything it touches: land, people, communities, and most of all, the innocents at the nexus, animals."

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-weil-md/the-moral-ferocity-of-eme_b_335811.html

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-weil-md/the-moral-ferocity-of-eme_b_335811.html

Solo show coming up

I realize it's been a while since I posted but I've been getting ready for a show coming up which has kept me pretty busy. I'll be showcasing a new print series of etchings along with some of my drawings and paintings. The show starts next Sunday, September 27 and runs through to November 14. If you're in the Peekskill, NY area, please come to the opening on Saturday, October 3 from 3-6pm at the BRC Gallery at the Bean Runner Cafe, 201 S. Division St, Peekskill.

Eyes Void of Hope

I've been experimenting with textures in my aquatints and the results can be surprising and interesting. I used a burlap texture for this subject, a cow who spends her days with her head locked in bars that do not allow her to turn around, move very much at all. Her eyes are truly void of any hope, or light, or anything beyond her misery.

UPDATE: For a good article on the plight of farm animals in the U.S. look at this in The Atlantic.

Ribbon-Cutting Ceremony with the Mayor

We had a great day at Brown Street Studios. The Mayor of Peekskill, Mary Foster, officiated the ribbon-cutting ceremony for our new building sign. The pic above is of John Ford (the building owner) and me cutting the ribbon. Mayor Foster is on the left and the people surrounding us are mostly the rest of the artists at Brown Street Studios.

After the ceremony, we invited everyone up for a tour of our studios and had the studios open to the public for the rest of the day. We had a steady flow of people come through and the day was very successful.

I spent most of Friday cleaning up my studio and so my husband, Rocky, decide to document "the clean" by taking pictures. This is about as clean as my studio has been in a long time:

Silk Aquatint

I just took a silk aquatint workshop with Kathy Caraccio and it was a great experience. The technique uses only water-based mediums to create the plate and was printed with Faust AquaLine water-soluable inks. It was great fun and a more eco-friendly and inexpensive alternate to traditional aquatint techniques. I should say though, the results of working on this kind of plate differ greatly from the effects you get with traditional aquatints. It will be interesting for me to experiment with this technique and see what I can do with it when I find the time to do so.

The image above is a 15" x 20" plate that I made in the workshop. Kathy says that up to 250 impressions can be made with this type of plate. I plan to experiment with ink colors and transparencies to get the most out of the grey tones from the plate.

Etching with Z*Acryl

I did a test plate using the water-soluble hard-ground, Z*Acryl. I just freehand sketched this goat kid onto the plate feeling out the differences between the way the etching needle cuts into the Z*Acryl hard ground versus the traditional asphaltum-based hard ground. I found that in the areas where my hand was light, the point "skipped" yielding a dotted line. Yet, overall the line was even and thicker than my lines are when using traditional grounds.

In the spirit of fully testing the Z*Acryl products on one plate, I did the aquatint version using the Z*Acryl stop-out. The brush-strokes didn't "spread" the way they can when using traditional hard ground as a stop out. Even when hard ground is mixed with asphaltum to thicken it up, it still is tough to control brushstrokes sometimes. So, there was an advantage to using the Z*Acryl stop out in this regard. However, the Z*Acryl stop-out is a green color that wasn't easy to see on a zinc plate.

I plan to do more experiments with these environmentally-friendly, water-soluble mediums but unfortunately I can't say that I'm ready to give up traditional hard ground yet. There's still nothing like it that I've come across.