Everyday it is a different beach

After seeing the crocheted star fish, I arrived at the beach in South Carolina and there were real star fish everywhere.  Or as one little boy kept correcting his big brother "sea stars".  On that first day they were in all of the tidal pools.

But of course, the beach is always unpredictable.  Since that day, I have only seen a few mangled dead ones in the surf line.  Where do they go, under the sand, out to sea?

On another day I found many sand dollars.  Of course there were many broken ones, but I was walking along the waters edge and found at least eight whole one's within half an hour.

They are very fragile, and I'll be lucky to get any home.

The conch shell is always the elusive prize.  While running on the beach I found a pretty decent one, but it is old and blue.  Today as I ran I found three perfect ones, but they were all still occupied by their rightful owners.  So I apologized and shoved them back in the sand.  How can I find so many when I am busy, and none when I come back later totally focused on uncovering more?
 

Everyday it is a new beach. One day it started out sunny and warm and then fog rolled in so that we couldn't see down the coast at all.  Beautiful.

Starfish

Today I met a friend and went downtown to see the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef at the Museum of Natural History.  They call it the "intersection of mathematics, marine biology, handcraft and community art practice."  It's way cool.  Begun by two women in their apartment, it has grown into a world wide art/environmental installation.  Although their website crochetcoralreef.org does a much better job explaining it than I do, I can try.  Mathematicians were aware of a third kind of geometry beyond planes and spheres they named it hyperbolic, but didn't know how to make models that showed the intersection of lines.  A woman mathematician discovered she could create a model with crochet.  It has to do with algorithms, fractals, repeated sets and increasing stitches.  Well I can't really explain it.  But it made me want to crochet.
There is a large central reef full of different colors and textures. There are also several different satellite reefs that are more thematic.  One is made of plastic cut into strips and crocheted with garbage accents, surprisingly sparkly.  Another is all white.  One case is full of beaded pieces.  Some really exquisite corals were made of really fine and delicate wire.

A crocheted starfish

A live starfish in Maine last summer

 
The only thing I didn't like about the exhibit was that you couldn't touch it.  It is just so tactile, you just want to squeeze handfuls of it.  Maybe I'll just have to order their book and start to make my own anemone and jellyfish.  

Drawing more

I had dinner with some art school friends a few weeks ago.  We were talking about how important it is to keep working on art and of course, how easy it is not to work at all.  My friend Maria said she had taken an illustration course and her teacher had stressed the importance of drawing every day. Maria had been trying to do that and showed us some of her work, which of course was beautiful.  We all resolved to try to draw every day.
A week later I was fretting that I hadn't pulled out my sketchbook once and wished I had time to draw.  As I dug around for a pencil, I started thinking about what to draw and thought of doing some more perspective examples.  And then it occurred to me, I draw all of the time, and during the week, pretty much every day.  So what was I worried about?  I draw examples for the kids, I draw with the kids, I make signs and diagrams for them all the time with drawings all over them.  Wasn't that why I wanted to be an art teacher in the first place, so I could keep my hand in?
Another thing I have started doing is keeping a notebook for when I visit my Dad.  I try to ask him about something from his life and write it down.  When he is not cooperating, or when he starts repeating himself, I do line drawings of him or the other residents.  They don't move around much, so they are pretty easy to draw, and all of those lines and wrinkles make interesting drawings.
So I am drawing everyday and sometimes a little bit more, tonight I'm drawing into the ground on my etching plate which is a pretty cool surface to work on.
I rarely photograph my sketchbook, but I have some of my beach drawings.  This one is from Sandbridge, VA a couple years ago.

Japanese wood block prints

I have a fondness for Japanese woodblock prints.  I have always been fascinated by how lacking in wood grain they end up being.  They could be linoleum block prints, but that seems so un-Japanese.
Years ago, I took a yoga class in someone's home.  She had this print hanging in her stairwell.  One day it was gone and another print was in it's place.  When I asked what had happened to it, because I loved looking at it, she said she had decided to take it down. And then she gave it to me.  Even though it has lots of foxing and a big fold line down the center, I had it re-framed and have had it in my living room ever since.  I even painted the wall to match the blue.


It turns out that it is a Hiroshige print, though how old,
I have not determined.

  My parents had always had several Japanese wood block prints in their house that I have always coveted.  Now, after all these years, they are in my possession.  They all need serious re-framing but I want to get them looked at by someone that knows something about them first.  This one is definitely a Hiroshige also.



And I'm pretty sure this one is also, but I have no idea what generation these prints are, whether old and original or 19th century re-prints.

As for this print, I still haven't figured out who  the artist is.  But I keep looking.  I thought it might be Hashiguchi but I do not know for sure.






  Here is a photograph I took that reminds me of the first print.
It's from a weekend on the Chesapeake Bay.

In the clearing

This is a painting I made a couple of years ago.  It is pretty small, about 12" x 12".  It happily resided in the glass fronted bookcase until I had a show.  I sold it to someone who lives in Key West.  This is nice, but I miss it.  I decided to make a print kind of similar to it.  I started with the same image and made a dry point etching.  Dry point is much harder than you would think.  You spend a lot of time scratching into the surface and then you print it, and it looks pathetic.  So you have to go back and scratch some more.  And then some more again.  I got it to where it looked okay, but then I saw a show of Edvard Munch's prints.  He combined different kinds of prints together, like he might print a linoleum block on top of an etching.

So I started to think that I could carry the dry point further by using a different technique on top of it.  I put a layer of soft ground on top of the plate and pressed in feathers and pine needles, which were etched into the surface.  I have to admit I was quite pleased with the final print.  The image is reversed from the original painting, another side effect of printmaking.  This crows head is less bumpy too, I think he looks a little bit like a mockingbird.  We used to have a mockingbird that sat in the tree outside our bedroom window and sang all night.  Maybe this is really a portrait of him.

Painting to print

I painted this about two years ago.  It's not a flat painting, the roof and the shelf stick out the furthest, about 3".  The house shape has sides that are about 2" wide, so that floats in front of the background.  The wing is ceramic painted with acrylic paint.  The rest of the piece is constructed from foam core and wrapped in paper.  It's a way I like to work because it's lightweight and easy to alter.  I call this piece "heavy wing".  I don't really like to assign meaning to my paintings as I make them, but someone remarked that it was the saddest painting they had every seen.  At first I was taken aback, but then I realized it is kind of sad.  That wing is really heavy.  In retrospect, I think it expresses the burden I was feeling at the time my mother was dying and my father was becoming more lost to Alzheimer's.

A year or two later I was trying a linoleum reduction print.  That is where you carve away at the plate, print it in one color, carve some more, print over the first with another color and keep carving and printing until you are done; or until there is no linoleum left.  I decided to use pretty much the same image since I had recently had a show and it was fresh in my mind.

This is one early version.  I did play around with the background colors a bit.  This one has an emerald forest quality.

I like this one a lot, but it is a reduction print and there is no going back.

This one has been carved more than the previous one, and has different background color.  It also has lousy registration.  I decided the small birds on the house (in the painting and my original sketch) would be too hard to make look good with lino cutters so I changed them from my original plan.


The last one is the same print in black and white.  It's kind of cool like this and I'm stuck trying to decide if I should continue to work on it as a black and white print or carve away major sections of it and continue to reduce the plate.

I only have a few more colored prints to experiment with, but I could paint backgrounds and print on top of them.  This would mean I have a painting that became a print and a print that is becoming a painting.

Of course the big difference besides the lack of three dimensional elements is that there is no heavy wing.  The emotional feeling of the painting has changed, but I'm not exactly sure where it is going yet.

Collograph Prints

Okay, so I haven't posted since the winter break.  I've been busy with being back at school, but mostly preoccupied with the death of a close friend.  Some days it's hard to even look at e-mail, much less write something.  I was also hung up on photoing some art work.  But, I did that this weekend, so I can put up some recent work.  I've been taking a printmaking class, which I love.  Besides carving the occasional linoleum block, I don't get much done on my own.  If only I had a printing press of my own...

A hand colored collograph.  This one titled "I wrote my name on the back of a leaf and I watched it drift away."  A lyric from a song.  It's not the best, but the color helps.

  I have done a lot of work with gloves, but mostly in clay.  I was fascinated with an image from the 19th century of a woman's kid glove printed with a tourist map of London.  How ingenious, you could walk around looking at your glove, discretely getting directions.  What else could you put on a glove?  Answers to a test?  Secrets?  Maps for the memory impaired (don't misplace those gloves!)  Anyway this is another collograph printed in burnt umber, love that color.

This is two versions of the same plate.  One in burnt umber, one in two colors.  You can see the plate is starting to collapse in the blue version.  You can clearly see the lower layers through the shape of the barn.  Now I know better when constructing a plate, unless of course I want that look.

This is my favorite, it is a double ghost.  A ghost is when you run a printed plate back through the press to pick up the leftover ink.  I used the house and the glove together.  Looks like poetry.