Carrier Pigeon Show in Chelsea (NYC)

My work is in a group show at the EMOA Space in Chelsea on 530 w. 25th street, NYC. Please stop by if you are in the NY area. It's a great show featuring the talented artists who have contributed to Carrier Pigeon Magazine. The show runs until December 14, 2013.

Etching Show at the National Arts Club in NYC

I am honored to have been asked to participate in the New York Society of Etchers Directors show which is being exhibited this week at the National Arts Club at 15 Gramercy Park South in NYC. The opening reception for the show is on Wednesday, November 6 from 6:30-8:30 pm. This is a really strong show and runs from November 3 until November 8—this week only.

The show will later travel to Chicago as work from the Chicago Printmakers Collaborative is also represented in the exhibition this week.

New Linocut for a Cause

Limited Edition T-Shirt Available for purchase at portchesterdogpark.com.

My sister is raising funds to bring a much-needed dog park to her town of Port Chester. I had originally created a logo for her group (shown below) which was silkscreened onto t-shirts and made available for sale at all Port Chester Dog Park (PCDP) fundraising events, but we needed something a little more. There was a special event at Garcia's at the Capitol Theater and she needed some special edition shirts to offer for sale at the event. So I thought, why not try to print a linocut plate onto the shirts and make them into wearable art? The above image is the result of that experimental effort.

Though I had never done it before, I figured that since oil-based printing ink is very tenacious and never wants to come off your clothes, I could use it to print tees. This notion was born from the many printing "smocks" I have as a result of the ink-clings-to-everything principle. So, my sister got the shirts and I carved the linoleum and we were set to go when life's ups and downs took a big nosedive in the week leading up to the benefit at Garcia's. It was a very rough week but at least the printing went pretty smoothly as I inked the plate and ran the shirts through my etching press. Drying time took longer than expected due to a combination of the weather being pretty cold and damp and the shirt fabric not letting the ink soak in as much as on the test shirts (old, worn tees) which dried faster. But, thanks to a tip from a printmaking artist friend, Ilse, I was able to iron the print using newsprint and a very hot iron which made drying time a lot faster. Note: this technique does lift some of the ink away.

If you have any interest in getting one of these shirts and helping to fund the Port Chester Dog Park, please go to their website: http://portchesterdogpark.com/ or their fundraising page.

The logo shirts are for sale too:

Prints and Drawings at Mehu

My work will be in a group show, at the Mehu Gallery in NYC. The opening is on Thursday, October 24 from 6 until 9 pm. The show was curated by Bruce Waldman and Patricia Wynne.

Animalia Print Exchange

Car Number 29
Reductive Linocut
©2012, Elana Goren

The above print was submitted for a print exchange organized by Printmaking Sisters in Australia. The Animalia International Print Exchange will be exhibited in Australia in August, then Italy and the U.S. in 2014.

I decided to do a linocut because I hadn't done one in a while and I wanted to create the print as quickly as possible with the deadline approaching and the need for extra time to ship the prints to Australia from New York.

I have been working for a while with the subject of cattle trucks that I see on the highway. They contain animals who are not fed or given water for the duration of the trip which might last days. I am pretty obsessed with the subject since I saw a calf one hot summer day in one of these death mobiles.

I was behind such a truck on an extremely hot day while driving on Interstate 84 that runs through New York. I saw a calf try to stick it's nose through one of the container's holes and stick his tongue out, desperately trying to get relief from thirst by "licking" the air rushing by the truck. It made me sick to think of those poor desperate animals, cruelly neglected as they were sped off to their deaths.

Working on a New Website

I know that it's been a long while since I posted but things have been very busy in "Spider Ink Land." I am looking at blogging options for my new website and since I can't seem to find a way to embed Blogger into the new website, I have to look elsewhere (unless any of you have a trick that I don't know about). I may need to use WordPress or some other (easier) blogging software to do what I need to.

I will post here to let you know when I have the new website up and the new blog up and running. Until then, I hope to add one or two more printmaking-relevant posts until the major switchover.

Hope the hot summer days have been treating you well. Stay cool and happy creating.

Inspiration: Käthe Kollwitz

Käthe Kollwitz, Lithograph, Tod (Death), 1897

Käthe Kollwitz, Etching, After the Battle (Schlachtfeld), 1907

I recently took a stone lithography class with Devraj Dakoji at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (RBPMW) and he has been (patiently) helping me print my stone from that class. I am very much a novice lithographer but I have been so inspired by the work of Käthe Kollwitz that I knew her work would act as a guide as I put litho crayon to stone.

Kollwitz's masterful use of shadow and light to evoke emotional responses to the plight of the people she depicts is as visually powerful today as it was over a hundred years ago. Her artistic subjects were derived from her world, what was going on around her: war, famine, disease and the gut-wrenching sorrow seen in the human condition during very difficult times.

I admire everything about Kollwitz's work: her ability to expertly render her subjects with empathy combined with a skillful hand, her expertise as a printmaker using the medium to maximize the dramatic and visceral reaction intended for the viewer, and her devotion to relaying the wrongs that she felt compelled to reveal through her art.

The two works above are a couple of my favorite pieces of Kollwitz's, especially the poignant etching, After the Battle, which by showing very little through use of a bit of light, speaks volumes about the poor woman on the battlefield searching for her loved one. I get chills and endless inspiration from this piece. Kollowitz's lithograph, Death, was my launching point for what I was trying to achieve with my own lithograph, The Road, shown below. I debated even showing my novice attempt at lithography but I thought it might be more relevant to a post about inspiration if I showed what the inspiration lead to.
So here is my humble and first lithographic homage to Käthe Kollwitz:

© 2013 Elana Goren
Lithograph, The Road