Altered Direction

"Altered Direction"

Monotype on Lama Li paper 

I'm to going to soon start graduate school in printmaking. This marks a big change in my career direction as well as my life. I'm going in as a non-traditional student due to my advanced years compared to my fellow grad students. It should be an interesting experience since the last time I was in college was in the mid-80s.

Even though I have a very full schedule, I will try to continue to post to this blog and offer insights as well as offer new-to-me techniques that I anticipate I'll be learning along the way.

I know that my posting schedule hasn't always been like clockwork and I guess that will continue with the new direction I'm going in my life. But I am dedicated to this blog and will try to post as often as I can. I think it may be interesting to offer it as a diary of a printmaking student for the next 2 years where my life will be going in a decidedly altered direction.

Happy creating!

My trip to the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone

Quick sketch from my visit to the Grand Tetons last week.

I visited Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Tetons last week and it was really beautiful. The sky was cloudless during most of my stay there and the temperature rarely went above 73 degrees according to my rental car's thermometer. During the day the sky was bright blue and windy for a couple of days leaving me mercifully bug-free during the windiest of times on the trail.

I tried to visit as many places as I could during my week there and I took the opportunity to explore as many different hiking trails as I could discover. The terrain changes vastly from the Tetons up to Yellowstone where thermal areas seem everywhere. Hence the proliferation of geysers that draw the crowds (like Old Faithful). Below is a pic I took of the "Grand Geyser" which goes off every 8-9 hours or so. I was lucky to catch it when I did.

Grand Geyser, Yellowstone National park

I also saw alot of buffalo along the roadside as well as deer, antelope and even a wolf. It was good to see animals in their natural element and not harassed or imprisoned by self-serving humans.

On one of my hikes I saw a moose with her two calves and on another hike, an antelope being pursued by a coyote. The antelope came bounding out of the woods, up the hill from me and ran down the hill, crossed my path not 5 feet from me and then disappeared down the hill. By the time the coyote arrived at the top of the hill, the antelope was long gone and the coyote turned around after seeing that it was only me left on the hillside. It all happened quite fast and I had no time to take pix.

Buffalo along the road in Yellowstone

I loved taking long hikes away from the crowds and was able to do a 9 mile hike up into Cascade Canyon and back. The trailhead for the canyon was most easily reached by taking a ferry across Jenny Lake. It was a long and beautiful hike. Lots of waterfalls and this was where I saw the moose and her calves.

Waterfall along the Cascade Canyon trail

Cascade Canyon Trail

Another from the Primate Series

"Pain"

Monotype on Rives BFK

Here's another monotype from my primates-held-captive monotype series. 

New Woodcut

"Sundown"

Woodcut

Plate size: 13 1/4" x 12"

I am attempting to expand my printmaking focus and create more woodcut prints. One reason is that I love the way the wood grain comes through on the print. I also find the act of carving the wood very therapeutic, almost meditative. The wood also guides me, helping me with the direction that I take the work and I love aspect of the creative partnership with the medium.

I try to find discarded scrap wood, if possible, so that I can try to minimize my impact on the trees used for plywood, etc. It's not always easy or practical to do this but I think it's worth the effort to find scrap when and where I can.

I find that my approach to carving the wood is similar to my approach to creating aquatint etchings where I tend to use multiple strokes to add depth to the image. With etchings, I use a brush with stopout (both asphaltum-based and acrylic-based) to create the varied layers of tints. And with woodcuts, it seems natural to me to make the same type of marks with my carving tools. I'm not sure if this is the best approach to use for wood since it lends itself to yielding more bold and graphic prints than does etching. Yet, it seems that my style leans more towards the subtle and a focus on detail (unless I'm working on monotypes), so this comes through on my woodcut work as well as with my etchings.

From Long Ago

Digging through some boxes, I came across this note that I haven't seen in years but kept because it's part of a story that I always wanted to remember. When folded the front reads, "To the woman with the long brown hair on the parlor floor..." and the inside reads, "There's a duck in your backyard, this isn't a joke. Please take care of him." It's a story that partially inspired this etching entitled "Free."

"Free"

Plate size: 9" x 6"

Aquatint Etching

Here's the story:
A very, very long time ago, I lived in Brooklyn, specifically Cobble Hill, in a strange 1-block neighborhood that was wedged between the BQE (Brooklyn Queens Expressway) and the Hudson River. The block had been cut off from the rest of Cobble Hill in the 1950s when the BQE was built and it was part of a strange area on the waterfront that ran from Cobble Hill to Redhook where there was a mix of apartment buildings, brownstones, varied businesses and warehouses. I had regularly heard talk in the neighborhood about a poultry slaughterhouse that was among the warehouses near the river.

One day, I came home from work to find the note pictured above taped to the front door of the brownstone where I lived. I guessed that my reputation as an animal rescuer (I regularly rescued strays from the street) had reached beyond my circle of friends and subsequently resulted in this note being left on my door. Though I really didn't know anything about ducks.

I went into the backyard and sure enough there was a bird in my backyard, though not a duck, but a beautiful white goose that I assumed was an escapee from the local poultry slaughterhouse. I tried to approach her and she just kept moving away in fear, so I let her be.  I really knew nothing about geese either.

I went to the kitchen and looked for whatever vegetables I could find in the fridge and left them out for the goose hoping that something might catch her fancy. I realized that I was going to have to figure out how to take care of this goose properly so I searched for a place where I could buy goose food and other goose necessities. Not surprisingly, I could not find a store in New York City that supplied such things.

Though I was really guessing (there was no internet then to google "goose care"), I figured that I needed some hay and some goose food to start. I found an Agway in Connecticut and went on a road trip to get the needed staples and hopefully some sound advice about how to care for a goose.

Once I had the goose supplied with goose pellets and hay for a bed, I enlisted my friend to build a wooden "house" which as I far as I can tell was never used by the goose. I also had a kiddie pool which was a leftover prop from a photo shoot and I filled it with water which the goose immediately took to.

The goose never let me get near her but I liked to think she was happy splashing around in the kiddie pool, having her fill of goose pellets and settling happily in her mound of hay. But one day, after a couple of months had gone by, I came home from work and she was gone. My unemployed neighbor downstairs, who was home all day and who gave me daily goose reports, told me, "I watched as your goose just flew away."

I never saw the goose again but I wanted to believe that she flew to a nicer place away from the city where she was able to live out her natural life unmolested by anyone who would use her and/or do her harm. But I am not naive and I know that a domestic bird would probably not fare well out there in the raw city or even beyond if she got that far. Still, I wanted to imagine her flying and living Free.

Another in a series

"Lab Animal"

Plate size: 15" x 11 3/8"

 Monotype on Rives BFK

This is another monotype that is part of a series that I'm doing on primates used for vivisection in the labs. My work on these monoprints has been difficult in two ways. Firstly, and more poignantly, I have to work through the anger and disgust that I feel at the scientists who torture primates, sentient and sensitive cousins to our species. And secondly, I have work through my learning curve in creating monotypes. 

I can see that I am getting better at this as I work, but it does get frustrating when they don't all come out as well as I'd like. Hence, the previous post on what to do when faced with that particular challenge. You may also want to read the comment that Aime Roman made on my last post. She offers some good advice about other media to use besides pastels on monotypes. 

And by the way, kudos to Aime for making the list of 50 Incredibly Inspiring Printmaking Blogs!

When It Doesn't Work

"Not Alarmed Yet"

Pastel on monotype, Rives BFK

There are times when monotypes don't come out the way you planned and that can be a good thing resulting in a "happy accident" where you end up with something both wonderful and unexpected. However, this is not always the case with some monotypes, sometimes they just don't come out well at all. So what to do?

I had been taking all my failed prints (monotypes, etchings, woodcuts, etc) and storing them in a drawer with the hope that I would figure out what to turn them into at some later time. Perhaps tear then up and make them part of collages or paint over them and see if there was any more I could get out of them. But the pile in my drawer just kept getting bigger until I decided it was time to dig in and see what I could do with my failed prints.

I started experimenting with mediums that work on top of Rives BFK (the paper I use most for printmaking) and which will work on top of the oil-based inks that I use for my prints. I pulled out my pastels and started playing with layering color lines on top of one of my monotype ghost prints (a second print from a monotype plate that has already gone through the press once). I have been working towards loosening up my drawings and I thought I'd practice a bit with the pastel lines on this monotype. The result is what you see above. A loose pastel drawing that has a monotype "underpainting." I still need to work on this and I suspect I'll improve with practice, but I kind of like the effect that's achieved by using this technique. It also gives me hope that I will finally be able to do something with those "failed" prints stacking up in my drawer. I might have some future successes just waiting to be discovered in that stack.