Lacrime di Rospo

Size Experiments: some results

2012-01-21T01:48:00.000-08:00

Sized Paper: Lite size Left/Heavy size Right

I'll lead in with the results and discuss the nuances after.

I can detect very little difference in the prints printed on my heavily sized vs. lightly sized paper. The bigger surprise was that there was little difference on the paper that had NO size.

My experiments are with a paper called Hosokawa and is imported in Europe by Japico ( a wholesale paper importer). The booklet at the store where I bought it lists it as: 90%Kozo 10% pulp and weight 39g/M2.
(However--different sources list the same paper as having 20%-40% pulp and I expect the proportion has changed in the last years.) There are other papers listed in their catalog with heavier weights and higher kozo percentages that weren't available at my local store but would be worth trying to find or convince them to add/order. (I'd rather try sizing a 70g/m2 100% kozo paper...).

The store-side sizing test...( a small amount of saliva placed on a corner of the paper) shows that it is rapidly absorbed into a big wet spot---showing that the paper isn't sized. (Do this discreetly--the owners aren't keen on you touching the paper much less spitting on it...).

My first sizing attempt of this paper: 40g glue and 20alum to 1L water was unsuccessful. The paper stuck to itself and dried wavy, puckered and uneven.
There were however some decent pieces within the whole sheet and these I cut out and have used for this trial.
This is called HS (heavy size). There is a slight sparkle/glisten to the paper which means there is a little too much alum or it wasn't fully dissolved.(New Hosho paper--available from Woodlike Matsumura in Japan has similar sparkle).

My second sizing attempt used 14g Glue and 5g alum per Liter water.
Because in the second try I didn't size all the way to the end I have some strips that are partly sized on one half and unsized on the other.

HS is heavy size; LS is light size; NS is NO size.

Sized Paper LS Left/HS Right: light betaban block and bright yellow (2 impressions)

Sized Paper: NS (no size) Left/Light size (LS) Right (see arrows)

Multiple impressions(10?) Each sheet is 1/2 LS and 1/2 NS (see initials/arrows) Since these were registration mishaps--I printed them a little more aggressively after--darker colors/more layers to see what would happen.

Results Comments:
While printing, the unsized portion did tend to pill/pull up a little bit but as I continued printing this was less of an issue and by the end at 10-11 impressions it was still printing ok. The unsized portion is perhaps a little less brilliant/vibrant. In the half LS/half NS you can see a line of demarcation so there is a difference but it would be hard to tell which was which if they were unlabelled.
In the top photo; the dark cherry red background has at least 5 layers of printed pigment--that is a fair amount of printing for a light-weight paper but it tolerated it well. (light yellow beta ban;carmine twice;cad red/carmine mix once; pale green wash once;keyblock).
The heavy sized paper seemed to allow the pigment to rest a bit more on the surface but that was more noticeable in the first few impressions (see the yellow arrows) but there was little difference at the end. It didn't resist the pigment at all and I had no trouble printing on it (there was no resist).
This is a lighter paper than I usually use. At 39g/M2 it is fairly transparent and soft and in the first impressions it was probably a bit too damp. I'm not sure if I could handle a bigger sheet when damp. The small size of this sample and the small paper size (4" x 8") and the fact that I was intermittently switching from different sized papers may have altered the results; a bigger sheet might have revealed differences not visible on small printed surfaces. The unsized paper printed surprisingly well and I expect it would be serviceable if I keep the board/printing fairly "dry".

P.S. I did the saliva test again once the paper was dried...my little gob of spit didn't absorb at all in the LS and HS portions of my printed paper--but got soaked up instantly in the NS portion.
P.S.S. I also sized a piece of Japanese Hosho (probably 100%pulp) from a different store--it tried to fall apart as I was sizing it but once sized (LS) it printed ok too. See photo below:

LS Japanese "Hosho" content unknown but looks like 100% pulp/sulfite

Glue and Alum, sizing paper at home; round two

2012-01-15T06:01:00.000-08:00

Emboldened by encouraging words (and detailed instructions) from accomplished printmaker Paul Furneaux (who sizes his own paper) I decided to give it another go.

I'm using his Winter recipe; 14grams of animal-skin glue (rabbit) and 5 g of powdered alum to 1L of water. I soaked the glue in 1/2 the water overnight, then added another 1/2 liter of boiling water in the morning, stirred it all up (it dissolved nicely) then turned up the heat and added the small amount of alum, that I had already dissolved in a small cup of very hot water. I kept all this on a warm stove/flame in a make-shift double boiler to keep the glue mixture from getting too hot.

The interesting advice I got from Paul was to use an old blanket under my work station to act as a size catcher--and to move the brush slowly across the width saturating the paper with warm size (it will soak thru to the blanket). He doesn't stack it but then picks it up carefully and hangs it up to dry sheet by sheet. He urged to leave the last few centimeters unsized so as to have a dry, strong edge to lift it up.

I'm trying to size a fairly thin paper but that was available down the street at the local art-supply store and was practically the heaviest they had, the rest of their stock is used by bookbinders and for restoration work.
It is a handmade Japanese washi, 45g/M2 weight and 90%Kozo(mulberry) and 10% wood pulp.

Here's the table. Blanket is down, sheet of paper on top, smooth side of the paper (the printing side) is UP and will receive the size brushed out.

What I noticed:
This paper is strong enough that I didn't need to leave the unprimed edge. The one sheet I sized right to the edge was just as easy to handle and didn't tear.
This paper is pretty thin and I got some buckling where my thumb was used to hold it down to allow the brush to go over the paper.
Extreme care has to be taken to try to get the edges of the strokes almost touching as if they overlap and xtra layer of size goes down.
A bigger brush would be good. I thought of buying 2-3 of these and making a jig to hold them all together so they'd function as one big brush....but I decided to wait and see how these trials go.
Hung up they looked smooth and pretty good. There were some areas of skipped or double size but not too bad but in my Winter climate the rooms are all very dry and trying to place them in the one unheated room with the windows open (Damper outside than inside) still caused the paper to dry too quickly--they were dry to the touch in 30-40 minutes.
And I think the slight puckering/unevenness is due to the drying.
But this is much better than my first try and I think all the paper is useable.

Results?
The professionally sized paper I've been able to buy online still looks better and more uniform than these sheets that I've managed to produce at home. But this is much better than my last try so there's hope?

I need to let it rest/cure for a few days before I print on it.
The paper is still hanging in the room to rest/age/cure/loosen up.
It feels stiffer and has more body than it did unsized.
I sized BOTH sides of one sheet and will pull a few proofs of a small print from each of these trials later this week and I'll post pics of those once they're done.

Maple Proofs

2012-01-12T06:15:00.000-08:00

Well my first creative act of 2012 was to scrape the year 2011 off the keyblock for my slow-to-move-forward Maple branch print. I have been working on it but it just seems to be taking longer than it should. I did go ahead and carve a new 2012 on another block.

My first attempt at proofing was a disaster as my keyblock shifted on all 3 copies making it impossible to see if the registration of subsequent blocks was on.
So last night I had another go.
2 pieces of shin torinoko, one fabriano artistico, one Magnani watercolor paper.

Registration is decent but not perfect. The leaves are too orange/red and not variegated enough--I'll need to play with them during the actual printing.
And I'll need to trim down a bit some of the blocks and adjust at least one kento.
Here are the two variants that look ok.

The biggest problem is with my Shina plywood blocks. My Italian "white glue" didn't completely wash off the block and there is a thin layer acting as a partial resist. This is pretty evident here where the brush strokes are fairly visible (and wouldn't be exactly reproducible) but worse, as I continued to print the seams began to print quite visibly. Not sure yet what to do about this. Ignore it or try and work around it. The same board on the other unglued side also was starting to show the seam when printed too so it is not just the glue.

The atmosphery speckling of the darker copy is due to the watercolor paper. It can be printed more evenly by pressing harder with the baren but I was mostly checking registration and trying to get an idea of color fields. I like how it looks but it really is a defect of printing.

Happy New Year

2011-12-31T11:35:00.000-08:00

Wishing all a happy and healthy, productive and creative New Year.

Hope any who need direction will find it and those who already are where they want to be will share coherent directions.

Auguri and Best Wishes,

Andrew

Imagining Baluchistan

2011-12-30T15:19:00.002-08:00

Here are two versions of a small print I've been working on.
They are about 4" x 8" in size.
The first is printed on a small fragment of my home-sized Japanese paper;

the second is on Magnani a handmade,190g/m2 watercolor paper that I've been trialing to see if it would work as a locally available paper.

The shape is based on a rug motif from a small Baluch pile woven bag that I pulled out of storage recently. This is a close up of a small pillow bag or balisht, woven by the Baluch--a nomadic tribe that inhabit parts of what are now Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan. Balisht were/are small bags, woven in pairs that were part of a young woman's dowry and would have been used for head pillows or storage. Old ones are still found in pristine condition suggesting that they are not used but stored away as valued items. This one has a repeating motif of double headed arrows on a camel wool ground.

I had this motif in mind when I carved the 6-7 blocks for this little print.
It was designed to be able to play with overlapping colors--blue over yellow/red over yellow, etc and there are positive and negative blocks so I can alternate the order of printing and the effect.As with my other attempts to recall textile/rug pieces in moku hanga the results are only mediocre. It's a simple image but the prints are still too flat and the colors not nearly saturated or rich enough.

I do like however the surface I did manage to get--especially on my Japanese paper.
I also allowed the uncarved areas to print at the edges, and overprinted in tinted washes to try to get some layering and depth.

Filler

2011-12-12T04:52:00.000-08:00

As my big Maple branch/seed/print is taking a long time, I need to take frequent breaks or I'll lose interest.

These are two watercolor doodles done on my badly-sized Japanese paper (and indeed they were unevenly sized and both resisted and sucked up the watercolor rather haphazardly). (I have a big stack of reject paper...from my sizing experiments.)

Nervous Energy-- 5"x7" watercolor on Japanese paper

Counting the Days--5"x7" watercolor and mica on Japanese paper

No real theme just shapes, colors, lines and a bit of leftover mica powder mixed into the paint.

Oops--Woodblock slips, lost wood and repairs.

2011-12-09T09:47:00.000-08:00

I'm pushing the limit of this particular piece of Shina Plywood. I can carve thinner lines but the glue holding the veneer firm is not always uniform and pieces will pop off. Sometimes due to a slip of the chisel and sometimes not. (A careful look at the photos will show that I gave myself some extra space while carving--I'm a good 1-2mm away from my hanshita lines but I still had a good 8-9 slips/losses/gaps.)

It's a offshoot of Murphy's law that a small loss of line is always in a critical area and not some irrelevant spot. It's always the eye or nose or a letter etc.
In this case it is the Maple seed that will be the focus of the image.

Here are a few photos of the slips (but already with repairs in progress).

I've already taken a little shina --taken off the surface with a flat chisel and cut into wedge shapes or narrow rectangles and these have been glued into the space left by a lost piece.
I've opened up the spaces a bit to give me more room and tried to flatten the bottom of both the receiving board and the wood plug.

They are allowed to dry and then the next day carefully trimmed to match the original lines. A wood glue for exteriors is best (won't come off when wet like Elmer's white glue will).
I didn't have any so used a local Italian glue that looked and smelled like airplane glue and wasn't ideal.

Here are the repairs after they've been trimmed:

And here is one view of the test proof I took today to check the keyblock.

Not invisible, but not bad.
I do take care to shave the top flat so the repair is flush with my keyblock.
With a little more care to cut the plugs to fit better and the right glue the repairs can be undetectable once printing gets underway and the small gaps fill in.

Truccioli--wood shavings

2011-12-05T04:19:00.000-08:00

I've retreated to work some more on my Maple Branch keyblock as I'm still licking my wounds after the sizing debacle. (Although, looking over the sheets there were actually TWO usable half sheets.)
I had forgotten the obvious that while increasing the size of my drawing with the copier by 100% meant I'd have an easier time carving the details but the block surface area has quadrupled and it just takes longer to carve a large block. Especially one with lots of curvy, spiky lines.

This is a 16" x 20" block of which I'm really using just a 14 inch square ( and will cut off and use the long strip left over).

I'm working zone by zone. Outlining a leaf and stem; clearing a trench around the area with my larger U-gouge then going back in with the toh to outline all the lines before clearing the area. I'm trying to be good about clearing and cleaning up as I go so I won't have tons of cleaning to do when I'm done.

I have lost some bits and pieces of the thinner lines and I'll have to glue back in some wood to recarve a few key areas.

Sizing Disaster

2011-12-03T11:05:00.004-08:00

One good corner....
I'll lead in with the one good corner of the one good (well, usable) half sheet from my first attempt at sizing my own paper. I used--I thought--a relatively weak recipe:
45g rabbit-skin glue to 23 g alum to one liter of water.

Sizing pot/double boiler

Work Station

But before anyone thinks they want to follow my example here are the rest of the sheets:

I think my size was too strong--too much gelatin anyway-- and I tried stacking the sheets to "even out the moisture" but even after the 4-5 minutes I needed to brush out 5-6 half sheets, I couldn't then get them apart, and attempting to pull them apart they stretched and pulled fibers off. The paper was a bit soft and thin and once dampened with size it just got too soft and rippled with the moisture. Those ripples became creases and areas that would catch the size and while I didn't get any dripping there was definitely too much size at the R and top side of the paper where the brush, moving R to L would touch down.
The one decent sheet I got was one I brushed out alone, immediately hanging it to dry.

They didn't look too bad hanging but they dried curled, uneven, puckered and mottled.
Despite the damp outside, our indoor heating (radiant floor and bright dry day inside) I think contributed to the paper drying too fast.

At any rate--it is almost completely to trash--I did cut down the better halves of each sheet and I'll try printing on them; I hope when they are dampened and printed on they might even or flatten out a bit but I fear that the wavy bits will dry that way even once they're printed.

I have a few ideas for next time and despite this result, I do want to have another try:

--more hands. A helper would have been very helpful--hanging the sheets was more of a hassle/problem than I imagined (clothespins didn't hold, pieces fell off...)
--smaller 1/2 liter batch to try 3-4 sheets only--I didn't use all the size I made and wanted just enough to be able to fill the brush and try it out.
--half the gelatin--I think it was just too thick/gluey.
--hang each sheet as soon as it is brushed rather than trying to stack them.
--turn off the heat in the room where they'll dry. I need to slow the drying time down so they don't curl so much.

On the good side the small pieces of paper that don't look too bad have a nice feel.
The 40g/m2 paper that was a bit thin and soft definitely has more body and feels like it would be good to print on if it wasn't just so badly sized.

Carving again

2011-11-30T03:21:00.001-08:00

Enough baking.
Time to do some more work.

I've put off any more of my road sign pieces until I can get some plain white/fine mica. I wanted a shift in color anyway.
I had planned on moving into a bigger piece for one of my sign works but a small outdoor sketch of the one Japanese Maple we have in the fields came out looking very
Secession-like and I prepped it for a small print but when I went to xerox it to make my hanshita the copier was set at 100% and it doubled the image.

Hmmm. That would be MUCH easier to carve I thought (as I was wondering if my eyes/hands/skill and cherry would tolerate the thin lines) but scaled up it would probably fit a piece of Shina plywood I've been saving.

So, work has begun.
I'm carving the keyblock for what should be a 14" x 14" print.
I'm happy to be carving again and can't wait to try printing something this size again too.

English Muffins

2011-11-23T12:25:00.000-08:00

Home-made, Sourdough English Muffins

Certain things are just hard to find over here.
While I hesitate to actually complain, the food and variety here is still quite amazing, but certain comfort foods just aren't on the local shelves.

English muffins for example.
Used to be I had to bring in 2-3 packages in my suitcase; I hear they show up from time to time in the supermarket/specialty stores but I shy away from the supermarket these days. While the home oven isn't great ( I miss the wood oven I built in Santa Cruz) I still make bread and cookies and have been keeping a sourdough starter alive since we moved back to Florence.
So time to pull out the sourdough starter from the fridge and cruise the internet for food blogs.

Sure enough; "Wild Yeast" (wildyeastblog.com)had some great photos and a recipe for sourdough English muffins.
While the taste wasn't quite "Thomason's" it was close enough to satisfy the homesick-for-trash-food-void while being infinitely more tasty and nutritious.
And since they're made with local eggs; organic flour (a mix of semolina, soft wheat, and kamut) and my sourdough starter I know that they're real food.

Fork split and toasted with fresh butter and fig jam for me.
The boys instead went for my version of the fast-food breakfast muffin.

While we haven't stepped foot in a McDonalds or BurgerKing for years, I did enjoy making my own version of the Egg McMuffin:

Free range egg, romaine lettuce, home-made English Muffin and Lonzo di Maiale (truffle-infused pork loin from our foray to San Miniato last weekend that B smuggled into the house).

Four muffins went to the American Aunt who lives down the lane, and the remaining 8 vanished quickly.

One Way (Left) Ahead

2011-11-22T02:21:00.000-08:00

"One Way" 4" x 8.5" Moku Hanga color woodblock print.

Another go at a finished version.
Hand carved stamp for the little seal.
Still too silver but acceptable.
Still a test print.
Hope to do something bigger so I can really play with the wood texture/imperfections and play with the bigger brushes and looser printing.

I suppose I could play with the metaphorical/political implications and print bunches of these pointing either Left or Right but I'm not feeling very political these days despite the feeling of impending doom.
The Italian government is falling; the Eurozone looks doomed/imperiled;there's a health crisis looming and I'm still making woodblock prints of beetles and road signs?

Arrow(s)

2011-11-19T07:35:00.000-08:00

I printed a few more proofs/test prints of my little, One-Way arrow sign.
I printed several copies on Shin Torinoko--a machine-made Japanese pulp and linen paper and about 7-8 on Nishinouchi. The latter is a tan, strong mulberry paper but it tends to vary in thickness across the sheet as well as in sizing--it turns out--and I had trouble again in getting it to print evenly and to not have some paper fibers pull up; if I pressed firmly enough to get a good even impression it seemed to want to pull up the paper fibers more often.

I printed the white arrow first using Zinc white and some rice paste and I did 2-3 impressions to get the white to look opaque and dense enough.
Then I printed the blue block. Again it seemed to require many reprints to get it even halfway dark. I started with Ultramarine pigment dispersion and a bit of paste and gum arabic and eventually after 2-4 impressions added a touch of pthalo blue to get it dark/covering enough. The wood grain is still pretty visible (which is fine) but I still think the blue should have been deeper; and the paper would have been happier with a few fewer impressions.

Next I printed the white block again, but this time with a mixture of zinc white and gum arabic and pressed very lightly with the baren to transfer this to the arrow shape. Then I lightly dusted brushed on some "mother-of-pearl" mica powder using a very soft, squirrel-hair mop brush. Then I brushed off the excess with another brush.
This mica turned out much too silver in color so I had to go back and print a light coating of white thinned with paste again to beat it back a bit so I lost much of the sheen I was after but I didn't want it to look like a silver arrow.

I think it looks pretty good if the lighting is right.
As a test print it has definitely been worthwhile.
I'm going to try a few copies on good, well-sized paper and see if I can have another go at printing--hope I can find some plain or white/uncolored mica.

One Way

2011-11-15T06:32:00.000-08:00

A little temporary diversion.
I've been threatening for years to do a series of prints based on my favorite Italian road signs inspired by my forced attendance at Italian driving school. (There's an oxymoron for you). ((Forced due to residency requirements not any traffic infringements)).

Two small blocks of Beech (Faggio). These are leftover cuts of one of my beetle blocks and are about 4"x 9" in size.
A little too short to faithfully represent the actual road sign this is inspired by.
While not actually one of my favorite signs it will do as a test print.
I wanted to see if my locally-sourced, Japanese paper (unsized) would work--it didn't.
And whether I could get a decent opaque white printed on tan paper....fair but not convincing. I'll need to do multiple impressions to get the deep blue and the opaque sparkly white I want. Third, it will give me a chance to print with mica powder now that I found a local source of mica today (the ever-helpful folks at Zecchi Fine Arts) so I can now forge ahead once I finish cleaning up the blocks.

Not worth showing the results this round as the blocks are still more interesting than the prints.
Need to clean out the hollow areas--they seemed deeper before washing off my hanshita/drawing paper.

Grub

2011-11-09T14:30:00.000-08:00

Prionus Californicus (Cherry Root Borer Beetle) Larva; EV 200.
Moku hanga, 2.5" x 3.5" ACEO print.

I wasn't sure when or if to post the grub version of my beetle print.
This is the pair to the beetle print of several posts ago and is 1/2 of my contribution to the Baren printmaking forum's 50th anniversary exchange. My print(s) are a portrait of a common, New-World parasite of cherry and other hardwoods.
In the larval form, the grub eats the roots of cherry trees and burrows into the trunk making circular burrows and holes, often killing the trees and rendering the wood useless. I had wanted to do the much more attractive Asian Tiger beetle (currently destroying thousands of acres of hardwood trees since arriving in the USA from China in packing material) but despite that beetles taste for ornamental hardwoods it doesn't seem to eat Cherry. And I really wanted a beetle that turns perfectly good cherry lumber into useless frass, woodshavings, and damaged timber.
(I had just been rejected from yet another printmaking association.....)

As the beetle and grub were printed off the same blocks using the same colors I did something not just a tad repulsive but also a bit unorthodox.
I decided to number the prints sequentially. So the first print became grub (E.V. 1/200) and the beetle E.V. 2/200. All the grubs bear odd numbers and in theory pair up with the even numbered Beetle prints.
I sent in 51 of each and the 100 participants will receive a print titled:
Prionus Californicus, but will get Either a beetle or a grub.

Calling this an edition varie E.V. is technically not correct--an Edition Varie (EV) can have variants in printing or paper or color--but the carving of separate--but related images makes them two distinct prints. But I'm totally fine with breaking the numbering/editioning rules.

Since I'm giving these away, the idea that they have to be numbered and editioned rationally so that "collectors" and dealers "know what they are getting" is rather moot. (except for a few 11 year-old bug collectors there has been surprisingly little demand). Besides, if anyone is miffed or feels slighted I can always say that I sent out all grubs but that, during shipping and customs clearance, there must have been some that metamorphosized.

Olive Oil

2011-11-07T10:00:00.000-08:00

I haven't been printing or carving recently as I've spent most of the last two weeks climbing trees. We've been picking olives on my wife's family's fields. While it has been gloriously beautiful--blue skies, warm days, no rain and really nice olives this year it has been pretty exhausting.
It is completely uneconomic.....if you factor in tilling the fields/pruning the trees twice a year/mowing the grass/Removing the suckers/new growth from the trees twice a year; spraying to keep the fungal diseases at bay (at least 2-3 times/year with copper sulfate--still allowed even in organic production due to it's "natural origins" and historic use-not to mention the lack of a decent alternative). Then there is the whole project of picking by hand, tree by tree and pretty much, olive by olive and getting the olives to the press and then processed into oil.

But as you can imagine from the photos above, that the non-economic benefits are priceless. There is something magical about being able to grow and produce your own oil. We're lucky to live in the country and have the amazing great fortune of being able to be outdoors and doing something that would be an unimaginable dream for so many.

We can BUY decent Italian olive oil for as little as 4 Euro a bottle for inferior (but still pretty good) oil from Sicily or Puglia in the South, and "local" Tuscan oil for more like 10-11 Euro/liter. But the "cost" of producing it--the picking, pruning, socializing and participating in a task/process that has been going on for thousands of years is also one of the major non-economic benefits. I'd have to PAY someone 10-15 euro/hour to pick olives but I can do it for nothing except my time.
And I'd rather spend the day up a tree in the countryside than a lot of other jobs I've done in my life.

Today was spent at the press. After dropping the kids at school, We drove the rented van three times to the nearest small press as 1000kg was about the safest it could carry. We joined our olives with those of our neighbors (also relatives) to cut on transport and press charges.
We picked 6.4 Quintale (640kg) of olives from which we obtained about 90 Kg of oil.
(a little more than 90 Liters). We left about 1/3 of the trees unpicked--it did finally rain and we'll have to consider going back into the fields and back to the press next week.

The frantoio was an amazing place--with the misty air of aerosolized olive oil.
A forklift dumps the picked olives into the waiting bins.
A conveyer belt will take them up a steep ramp from which they will fall into a washing tank, but not before dropping in front of a large fan that will blow/suck off most of the leaves. The olives are then washed, then gravity fed to the next machine where they will be crushed/minced/macerated into a paste. This will then again be washed then centrifuged to spin off the lighter oil from the water and pit debris. The oil emerges one building away from the spout of the centrifuge. It is unfiltered as we choose to keep it freshly pressed and alive. The machines stay cool and this remains cold-pressed, "extra-virgin" olive oil.

The oil emerges a green that seems to be too unreal to be a color that could exist in nature and everywhere there are olives and containers and tractors and men smoking and shuffling about.
The color will last a few weeks to months if the oil is kept dark, but a bottle left on the counter will change color in just a few hours.
The spicy, slightly bitter and biting flavor of new oil will also last just a few days to weeks and will then mellow. The oil will keep for several years without spoiling but we will try to consume it within 1-2 years--we try to keep enough for two as we don't get decent oil every year and like to have some on hand if next year is a bust.
We will distribute oil to all who helped pick as well as friends and relatives who don't have trees or the possibility of picking.

Tonight it's pane, olio, ed aglio;
Toasted bread, rubbed with raw garlic and then generously doused with the piquant new oil and salt.

Wallpaper

2011-10-23T05:49:00.000-07:00

Here are some quick shots of the prints drying and a close up of one of the two variants I printed. While these are small prints the beetle and grub are quite large and these are just over life-size.

Debugging

2011-10-22T12:36:00.000-07:00

Looking for defects.

Finished printing my Beetle print this afternoon. It took much longer than I imagined.
In this photo I'm looking over the nearly finished prints to look for any that need reprinting of the keyblock in the few prints where it didn't print dark enough and in the dozen or so in which I decided to print it last.
Each block took about 4-5 hrs to print so I spent the better part of a week printing-- one color by hand each morning. 5 blocks printed about 8 times for 80 copies=over 600 impressions.

No photos of the finished print tonight.
My camera batteries died and the scanner I have is so old it is no longer supported by my current computer.

But tomorrow I hope to upload some JPEGs of the finished prints.

Now it is just to let the paper dry; then sign, number, separate and trim the finished prints. But tonight I'll wash out the brushes and let the blocks air dry too.

Beetle and Proof

2011-10-12T03:26:00.001-07:00

This showed up in the driveway today.

I think it showed up to check on my work as I was proofing yesterday.

I think it is still a Prionus beetle but I am not sure.
It lacks the little spikes on the thorax that are quite prominent on P. Californicus.
But doesn't resemble the more common, local P. Coriarius beetle either.

This is a quick proof of my beetle print (tube watercolors/rice paste and sumi).

The beetle made little hissing noises and excreted a rather unpleasant-smelling fluid...so I may have to adjust the colors.

bug blocks

2011-10-09T15:15:00.001-07:00

I finished carving my small-print, bug blocks.
There are five blocks total but I could have managed just four if I had planned better. There is a fair amount of redundancy of the information carried on each individual block.

Maybe I'll get to print tomorrow but I still have to moisten some proof and trial paper to check registration and color printing--I suspect I'll have to trim back one or two of the blocks but I am looking forward to printing this one. Hope it's not too blotchy.

Three of the blocks were picked up at a yard sale. They're meant to be used to plank-grill fish on the barbecue. At 1/2 " thick they're likely to warp during printing but they were cherry and really cheap (50cents each).
AND I'll still be able to use them on the grill once I'm done printing.

Printing Again

2011-10-03T15:16:00.001-07:00

Prionus Californicus keyblock proof

I still don't have a dedicated work space.....I'm working out of a spare bedroom...but I got my keyblock carved and I was I was itching to print again. I found a small jar into which I had thrown a broken up sumi stick in December? so I poured off the surface water and it seemed good to go after a good stirring.

Turns out Arborio rice will work for rice paste and the kitchen table, once the kids are in school, will too.

I dashed off 6 copies of my keyblock for my small bug print. This is the hanshita, it is printed off the keyblock including the kento marks and will be pasted face down, one for each color.
So far it has two 2.5" X 3.5" prints on it printing side by side...
it will have color blocks too and I'm trying now to figure out how to combine the colors to get both printed simultaneously.

Due date for 100 prints is Nov 1.
I'll need to go back in and open up the "O" of "prionus" and the second set of legs are too long but I think I'll leave that alone.

Still Life with Pigments and Quince

2011-09-26T12:56:00.000-07:00

Although I've been back from the Japan meeting since June--I haven't been able to get any new work started until now. I returned energized and really ready to take off and start some new work but the clinic, job, trying to clean up/close up my studio and house; pack a years worth of art supplies, etc. were too time consuming to do any art and once abroad, getting the rooms and suitcases unpacked and orderly is still a unending task. What's worse is that due to airline luggage restrictions and weight limits, I had to jettison (but at home at least) all my pigments and Akua colors for fear they might leak or be confiscated. So today I made a trip to the Art Supply Shop RIGACCI in the center of town to pick up some dry pigments.
This will be a first for me.
Prussian Blue, Ultramarine blue; Cadmium Yellow Light (they had only yellow ochre, an opaque looking Naples yellow and the Cadmiums); Carmine and Cadmium Red Light, Pthalo Green; Ivory black.
They are already VERY finely ground and were only 3-5 Euro ($5.00) for each 100g jar.
They also had some beautiful antique pigments--real Lapis lazuli, turquoise, cinnabar, etc but they were all 30-40$/jar and were too pricey for my budget.

I'm working on a small print 2.5" X 3.5" for the 50th Baren-forum exchange.
It's small work, even for me and I'm still trying to figure out how much detail I want to consider.
I have had a couple of competing ideas and as soon as I was able I went to the Museo La Specola, the oldest Natural History museum in the world to look at some bugs. The one I wanted wasn't there but they have an amazing collection of wax anatomy models and cadavers and there was lots of other stuff to look at.

So tomorrow I'll mix up some pigent dispersions. I have a particulate maske to protect me from the Cadmium in the red and yellow; The grappa isn't for drinking; a small amount of alcohol will help dissolve some of the colors in water. I hope to make a dense paste/liquid suspension and use these for my color mixes.

The Quince isn't yet ripe; the grapes were a welcome surprise as they were ripe, sweet, and the birds hadn't found them.

Trash

2011-08-26T00:28:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to get through a backlog of printing, but I've been putting a little time into my trash bag print/project.

Here is a reworked sketch; with eventual registration marks on the drawing so subsequent copies or tracings will all match up.

And at the top is a simple xerox of the above, with some colored pencils filling in the shapes to get an idea of what colors and values might look like.

Still working on how many blocks and colors I'll need to achieve the look I want.

Pizza Oven--Insulating with cob/adobe

2011-08-21T18:26:00.000-07:00

Pizza Oven/Insulation added

Since far and away the most interest my art blog generates is for my home-made, adobe bread and pizza oven I thought I should reward all those random readers with an oven update.
As I said previously in my last Pizza Post, it is functional as it is now but would stay hot longer if it was better insulated. For a cob/adobe oven; insulation means: dirt/sand/clay mix but made into a slip by adding more water and then folding in hay or grass or sawdust. I had a big bag of woodshavings and sawdust from a neighbor's woodshop so that's what I used but I added some dried cut stemmy grass to give it a little more structural stablity.

Here is the process;
First I made some moist clay/soil mix and patched the few cracks that exist in the insulation layer I had built previously.

Then, I mixed up a wheelbarrow's worth of woodshavings/sawdust with clay/mud slip.
I mixed it with a shovel and then threw in a bucket of dried grass/stemmy clippings.
(Straw would have been better but I had a pile of cut grass).

Then I added about a two-inch layer, fistful at a time going around the base and then up the sides to meet a layer I had already added to the top. By slapping it on it didn't slump and the grassy bits helped meld the fistfuls together. I gently smoothed the surface and then added some scratches in the surface to help the next layer adhere/stick.
Now, I'll let it dry for a day or two and decide if I want to try to add a finish or smoother layer. It will take several days to dry out and I'll post again about how it works then.
But here is a photo of my last pizza: Potato and leek with garlic oil. It was tasty.

Hefty

2011-08-19T22:18:00.000-07:00

trash bag doodle No 1.

I have quite a few ideas gurgling away in the back of my mind/psyche. Some are pretty ambitious and involved and not something I want to tackle as I get ready to relocate to Italy (I leave in 2 weeks). But although I have a few simpler ideas I could probably get done before I leave, I haven't yet really jumped into anything with enthusiasm. In the meanwhile, I'm cleaning out the house and filling the recycling bins with papers and trash.

Needing to get out of the house, I grabbed my sketchbook and headed downtown. Not surprisingly, I've been drawing trash bags. Mostly in threes. Sometimes just one. Never two.

I like the one on the left as a possible woodblock print and started to think about printing logistics. The doodles on the bottom are thoughts about color separations and blocks. I would try this with six or seven blocks--with or without a keyblock.
However, this particular image could probably be tackled as a REDUCTION print, using just one block, gradually printing and then carving away from the image. I could go light to dark and progressively overlap colors to get the darks needed for the black and dark plastic.

I've never done a reduction print--and while it would solve all sorts of registration issues and would probably be faster; it would mean destroying the block as I go along, with no chance to go back and reprint areas later if they are too light or the wrong shade.

IMC 2: Shapes and blotches

2011-08-17T14:17:00.001-07:00

Here are a few more things I wanted to share from early June's International Moku Hanga Conference in Kyoto/Awaji Island. I'm an amateur printmaker and my interests were particularly focused on the practical aspects of carving and printing rather that the historical or cultural impact of Ukiyo-e prints. (although I greedily looked at as much as I could for ideas to incorporate, expand upon, borrow or appropriate.)
In the first day's demonstrations of Kyoto-style printing and traditional carving, I went over to watch traditional Ukiyo-e carver, Mr. Hiroshi Fujisawa carving a cherry block. I didn't take photos of the first part as I was watching too closely--he carved the outline of these shapes using a hangi-toh chisel--a pointed chisel to incise precisely against the edge of the shape using two to three cuts. These would serve as stop-cuts to be cleanly edged away using an Aisuke or bull-nosed chisel to cleanly pare away the wood up to the incised edge.
But before that he had to clear away all the waste wood, that which would not print.

Here in these four photos he is using a mallet and curved chisel to rapidly clear almost up against he already incised shapes.
I was quite taken by how quick he was and how close to the carved shapes he was clearing--I haven't the control to work that close so it takes me a lot longer.
Finally using a much wider, shallower chisel he finished clearing the areas around the printing surface.

He cleared the blocks much the way I would use an eraser to clean off a blackboard.
Tap, Tap, Tap large chips of wood were flying.
He has carved peg holes in his low work bench and there is a bench dog(that square peg) the board is butted against to keep it from sliding away.

he did in about an hour what would take me at least a day.

Later that week on Awaji Island, Mr. Shoichi Kitamura(carving) and Mr. Makoto Nakayama (printing) led a panel discussion and presentation of "Mokuhanga in Japan Today--Collaborations between Craftsmen and Artists" detailing and providing examples of their work done in collaboration with Artists from the UK and Australia.

Here was one very striking and stunning example of what's possible:

This photo shows four watercolor paintings/drawings by the UK artist Rebecca Salter;
On the left are her original paintings that were used by the studio to prepare blocks and print from.
On the Right are the woodblock prints.
The drawings by themselves werea already very special but it was the reworking of them as woodblock prints using ukiyo-e traditional methods and the amazing richness and depth of color and surface that was quite remarkable for me as a "striving-to-improve" neophyte woodblock artist.
There were obviously subtle differences-they were not identical but they were gorgeous and it was quite eye-opening for me to see the reproduction of splotchy ink drops and bleeding/seeping ink marks reproduced using multiple blocks and over printings. They talked about the range of techniques that could be used; printing on the back to have the color bleed through, careful multiple bokashi-printings, etc.etc. One not-so-obvious revelation was the careful division of the block to be printed into sections and small areas of bokashi might be printed section by section rather than trying to accomplish it all at once.
Here below is one process photo during the carving of one of the blocks and the carver holding a piece of dried equisitum (Horsetail plant) which has a raspy/sandpaper like surface used to sand down the edges of the shapes to allow for softer printing.(that's NOT a cigarette in his mouth but a small piece of dried horsetail being moistened).

They spoke a bit about how challenging this project had been for them but how they enjoyed the challenge and welcomed future work and collaboration with fine artists to realize works using traditional moku hanga techniques.

All I know is I can't wait to try printing an ink blotch--on purpose. ( I get quite a few by accident...).

IMC 2011: Colors

2011-08-02T16:56:00.000-07:00

Color Grid; moku hanga overlaps: Red/Yellow/Blue/Green

I was fortunate to be able to attend the 1st International Conference of Moku Hanga (IMC 2011); a conference of international artists, artisans, scholars and historians of Japanese woodblocks that was held in Japan in the cities of Kyoto and Awaji Island in early June. I took some photos, but was often too absorbed in what was happening to take decent pictures. In the second half of the conference on Awaji Island; A demonstration of contemporary woodblock prints and printmaking by a group of Japanese publishers and professional printers included these prints of a simple demonstration of the effects of overlapping colors.

This color exercise was one I had long hoped to do myself and was happy to see so clearly illustrated. Special thanks to Lawrence Pinto, another conference participant who was in this session who had the good sense to take these photographs, and the courtesy to send me JPEG copies to share.

Four blocks were carved in a grid pattern with three primary colors and one secondary color. They were carved in such a way as to show the effects of overlapping color. Each of the original block colors falls on one of the corner squares in the composite image above.

Since traditional moku hanga, japanese woodblocks are printed with transparent, water-based colors, the paper shows through the printed color giving them a luminosity they wouldn't have if they were opaque and simply reflecting the ambient light.
Transparent blue over yellow will give green, red over yellow, orange; et cetera.
What isn't easily imagined is what happens when you change the sequence of color; yellow over blue will yield a different effect than blue over yellow and in this particular exercise the forth block was green; the effects and browns/greys obtained would be different if it had been orange or purple.
Similarly a cool red vs a warm red, yellow or blue will shift everything again towards a different green/brown/grey.
The last two illustrations are the code for the grid so you can change the colors and try it for yourself.

P.S. The code illustrated in the last two pictures will give you a similar print but different from the one actually illustrated: the four pure colors run across the top of the graph in the map, but on the opposite corners in the actual print.

Doodles

2011-07-21T23:20:00.000-07:00

Here are a few of the scribblings I did in the waiting room Monday.

All of the half-circle shapes are for a large, collaborative puzzle print and my small piece of wood is this shape.
I still haven't really decided on a direction.

The lampreys are one of the recurring opportunistic/parasitic organisms that inhabit my sketchbooks and psyche....

The lungs.....I don't know; holding my breath?inside/outside? Life/living?
Again it's an image that I've drawn over and over; sometimes quite literally, other times more oddly hidden or masked.

I've been looking over these and my sketchbooks these few days.
I'm off during Alex's recovery so I've had some time at home.
I'm getting itchy to start a NEW print....I've even been looking at my blank blocks and plank lumber, just looking at boards as sometimes the wood itself will tell me what to do.
I'm waiting for the dust to settle and A. to return to normal before I really go forward. But he's healing fast and I've had hours to myself when he hasn't really needed supervision.

I even managed to pull a stack of damp, partially-printed rabbit prints out of the freezer and finish them yesterday!
They're in a stack drying by the vent and should be ready to go out in the next 1-2 days!

Waiting Room

2011-07-20T03:05:00.000-07:00

Cholesteotoma

It's always a bad sign when the doctor says the procedure should only take an hour or so and three hours pass and you're still in the waiting room, beneath the large clock, a magazine rack full of old magazines and the drip coffee pot with acid coffee and artificial whitener.

I brought a clipboard with all the necessary papers and a stack of sheets of bond paper, thinking I would probably be here longer than we had hoped for.

Doodles of projects that I've not yet started emerge. Two print exchanges I've signed up for but not really thought about and some recurring images that have been coming back again and again.

But the longer I waited the more medical became the drawings until finally I just drew what we were really worried about. This is a highly rough schematic of the middle and inner ear as imagined if seen in a frontal slice through the skull. I've drawn/imagined a clean middle ear with the three little bones, the incus, malleus and stapes all in place against the snail-like, spiral cochlea and mastoid. I've studied anatomy but this is fancifully imagined and would make my old anatomy teachers cringe with dismay. But I'm engaging in guided imagery, positively thinking about good outcomes with the naive hope of a parent, whose child is again under general anesthesia, trusting us to have made the right decision and that everything will be all right.

A. is having his fourth operation on his middle ear to see if the benign tumor he was born with has come back, or if his recurring hearing issues and infections are just scarring and fluid. The Surgeon and Operating Room had scheduled him for just an hour, which means the doctor actually expects it to be quick and easy, probably just fluid and a reconstruction of his ear bones...but the delay suggests otherwise. Cholesteotoma is an benign, but erosive and very slow growing tumor of the middle ear and is noted for being recurrent. A. has had several infections in the last 2 years, and a recent polyp was a telltale warning that things were again amiss.

When the surgeon finally emerges to bring us news, it is not the end of the world, but not what we had hoped.

The growth had come back, they had to take out what was left of his middle ear bones to clean out what had wrapped around them and couldn't be dissected away. They'll have to go back in again in 6-9 months; at that time they should be able to see if they truly have gotten it all out and replace the missing bones with a titanium implant so he can hear again out of that ear. We were led into the recovery room where A. was already awake, a large dressing on one ear, looking like a dog who had just had one of his ears cropped.
But awake, not crying, asking again and again (the sedatives had temporarily knocked out his short-term memory) what they had found. In the lull between his frequent awakenings and resting, and before we took him home, I added to the drawing the small black growth around the little bones that aren't there anymore.

June Century

2011-06-28T00:28:00.000-07:00

Louis Rhead, Literary Poster for the Century Magazine,
June 1896, stone color lithograph.

I love this print and it's one of the few pieces of original art that I own. It's a splendid example of "American" Art Nouveau printed during the heydey of color stone lithography. (Rhead is actually English and part of the distinguished family of artists and potters living on both sides of the Atlantic) He moved to the US at the end of the 19th Century and was among a handful of very influential and successful artists working in this style during it's rather brief popularity in this country.
The curving, thorny rose brambles contrast with the flowing lines of the hair and clothes and it is printed in just a few colors--orange,teal, purple,red, yellow and black but achieves a richness and complexity well beyond that number.
A better image can be seen here:
http://www.lessing-photo.com/dispimg.asp?i=03080857+&cr=2&cl=1

This marks my 100th post.

I don't know that that actually means very much as I don't think I picked up any readers until #75 or so but still it seems like a little milestone.

It does serve as a moment to pause and see what I've done so far and to begin to think about what I want to do next.
Lacrime di Rospo started out hoping to be a farming blog stemming from my small organic farming venture--that never really took off--before we left Italy to move to Santa Cruz.

We were "Toad Organics" or Rospobio and I was trying to lay the groundwork for a small CSA (community supported agriculture project) in Florence.

But we moved to the USA and the farm sort of got abandoned. I went back to work as a physician to pay the bills and drowned my sorrow not with whiskey and beer but with rice paste and water-based colors.

I took a 5 day course in Moku Hanga at the local community college and started making prints again for the first time in many years.

So here I am. It's about 5 years later.
I have about 23 woodblock prints that I've completed.
I still consider myself a novice, if not a beginner. My carving skills are improving but the printing is still woefully lacking in control, skill, and just simple experience. Even if I learn something from every print, I still feel very much like a
"hobby" printer.
I'd like to take another step forward. Each print has been a kind of home-study course, with some kind of goal or skill I hoped to explore or improve on.
"Lydia" was about lyrical, calligraphic lines, My little series of Blu vases was about overlapping pale transparent colors; "Domino" about trying to get a dense black by overlapping primary colors; etc.
My recent trip to Japan to attend a conference on International artists working in Moku Hanga was a great opportunity to look at work by some wonderful artists from all over the world and to get both ideas and energy to push forward to try to improve the quality of my work.

SO here's a list of some things I hope to do this year:

A white line print--probably a floral still life or fairly explicit nude.
A landscape--I have almost no prints with a strong horizontal format.
A still life or interior scene.
A larger print than I'm used to.
Something Dark and rich and splotchy.
And I'd like to work again on achieving nice rich dark colors as well as wispy, washes and delicate colors.
And I'd like to work on "quality control"--cleaner edges and less smudges where they do matter while still allowing some spontaneity with looser printing when that's important.

I'll have some time.

We're moving back to Italy in the Fall. B needs to go back to work full-time in Italy and we'd like the kids to have another year in Italian public schools. So it looks like we'll be back in Florence for the school year. Since I can't work over there as an MD, I'll be able to spend a fair amount carving and printing.

Hope to get something started soon though.
I won't leave before September, and that's plenty of time before that to try something new.

Bloom

2011-06-13T23:45:00.001-07:00

Kyoto Cherries, June 2011

I sent out my kimono print today. It went out as it appeared in my last post with no additions other than a title and edition number and signature. It will be part of the 60+ prints that will be included in the Baren "Inspired by Japan" benefit portfolio. (individual prints and the entire set should be available for purchase in the coming weeks).

I had been planning on calling it, "The Year of No Cherries..." but this seemed a little too sad and, worse, would have been incorrect. I looked up the traditional dates of full bloom of the cherry blossoms in Japan and found this note:

"This year's cherry blossom season will be overshadowed by the tremendous loss caused by the recent earthquake. However, we believe that the blossoms will serve as symbols of hope and resilience and a source of motivation along Japan's road to recovery."

and it included photos taken by the Sendai representative who went and explored and gave a full report of this year's bloom.
Full Bloom in Sendai was 21-4-2011. ( http://www.japan-guide.com/blog/sakura11/110421_sendai.html )

So I thought about it and changed the title to "RIPPLES"
The little waves caused by the falling blossoms onto the blue silk waters of the many ponds and rivers and lakes that enrobe Japan;the outward spreading waves and interconnections of events. Blooms that signal Spring, and rebirth, and hope.
Cherry blossoms that are also atoms--the breeze caused by these petals can be felt across the world and will continue for one-hundred thousand years.

And in this year's new growth and tender shoots, next years buds have already formed.

(note: I attended the 1st International Conference of Moku Hanga in Kyoto, Japan and got back from Japan last night. I took this photograph while walking through the city. The cherry trees were no longer in bloom but were covered with these small fruits, black when ripe that littered the ground with their falling fruit and staining the sidewalks black. I tasted some. They are not sweet and the birds seemed to leave them mostly alone.

Kimono--Done but not finished

2011-05-31T00:32:00.001-07:00

I set a June 1 deadline for getting my contribution to the "Inspired by Japan" benefit portfolio printed and ready for mailing. I have some other big June commitments and know if it doesn't get done by then it won't be finished in time.

Consequently, I've been printing rather frantically. I got a lot done yesterday, and this morning, awoke to find it grey and foggy outside--perfect printing weather--so I got up early and started in again. By Noon I had the printing done except for some quick little touches: the wooden bar holding out the arms was pink--needed to be overprinted to brown and the little seal at the bottom was blotchy and had a light glaze of quinacridine coral added.

So, I think it's "done".
4 blocks, about 6 colors and 9-10 impressions.
Printed on Echizen Kozo natural washi.

The only nagging problem is it still looks and feels
"unfinished". I had liked my other color proof; the darker orange/grey background did make the kimono shape float and while a bit more drab was more striking due to the contrast. I chose the green instead as more jewel-like and I liked the connotation of the glowing green background. I had planned and ditched a block that would have had the subtle shadows and creases of the silk kimono as being unnecessary and too busy.

I'll pull out the 31 I need for the exchange and from the remaining 10 or so I may pull out the few that are too pale or too green and have a go at glazing a darker background again to see how they look.
I still have one more day after all.

Trial Kimonos

2011-05-21T18:55:00.000-07:00

Lots done today.

I managed to print a few proofs of the kimono print.

While not quite what I envisioned, it is striking enough that I had to pause to decide what will stay and what will go.

The blossoms are WAY too Pink/Mauve and will need to be much paler and more glowing.
But it's the stripes in the background that I'm not sure of....I was afraid the pale simple background would be too still so I didn't totally clear the block. Since they are on the same block as the body of the kimono (blue) I'm a bit tethered as to how light and subtle I can make them and still make the kimono silk the right blue.
I printed up four variants. I can see some adjustments that need to be made to the keyblock and I'll still need to carve one more block I think.

I have a busy week of work so I'll mull this over before making any changes.

Baren

2011-05-21T00:35:00.000-07:00

This is my primary printing press.
A Murasaki, Medium Baren made in Japan of braided hard nylon cord.
It is covered with a bamboo skin/leaf which, over time and with use will crack and wear out.
I need to do some serious printing this week and the small concentric circular holes that were forming in the cover meant it was time to be replaced.
The top photo shows the old cover removed from the baren itself.

The bottom 2 photos show my fairly mediocre attempt to replace it.
This is my second try ever. The first has lasted about 6 months, was serviceable if unevenly tied but seemed to work just fine.
I did manage to get it on and tied tight enough; but there is a tiny rip in the top,
that will require me to replace it again fairly soon--the usual friction of regular printing will open/enlarge it. I may get through this print run as is, but if seems to be enlarging, it's more likely I'll have to do it all over.

Still, I have four sheets of paper in a damp pack and tomorrow I hope to proof the
Kimono print. I have four blocks carved and want to see how it looks before I carve another. This baren cover should hold out at least that long.

Shina Kimono

2011-05-16T21:10:00.000-07:00

Well, I meant to include this photo in the last post but didn't have my camera and the sketch was too big for my scanner. This is about a 11" X 16" board of Shina Plywood (a kind of Japanese Linden or Basswood). I have three of these for a total of six plates.

This is the almost finished keyblock for my effort for the Japan Relief print--if I can get it done in time.
There's still to fix a few slips/lost lines and I have to carve the 4-5 color blocks that should go with this but this should be the bulk of the carving work.

I'll be quiet for a while as I do need to work and I still have some details not quite worked out.

I doubt this will offend anybody who isn't already aghast at what I was thinking before.
The real fear now is that it won't be interesting.

More rejects

2011-05-13T23:34:00.000-07:00

I've been drawing thumbnail and finished sketches and throwing them out as fast as I produce them. Most of the ideas haven't been too bad; it's just that they've been either too direct and blunt or just not nuanced enough to be interesting.
I received a fair number of emails and private remarks about my last post and ultimately decided to listen to what seemed like good advice from others closer than I am to Japan.

My favorite of the rejects was this:

I have always loved Japanese folding screens and really liked the idea of the layers that would involve doing a woodblock print depicting one.
I was interested in the the stillness of the usually hand-painted nature scenes but this would have had this big, rolling wave instead of the usual seasonal landscape. I got as far as this finished watercolor sketch (lots of other drawings with more or less insistent waves on them) but ditched it as just too insensitive to do at this time with so many people dead and missing.

My other ideas involved carving and printing this seismogram reading taken off the coast of Sendai and recording the enormous earthquake near its epicenter. I had hoped to work it in as part of a print but found it didn't add much beside a macabre sense of tragedy and didn't like the drawings I had done that included it.

Ultimately, I just started carving.
The sketch I chose does involve a kimono, cherry blossoms,
water, a gentle reminder of the the passage of time and the fragility of life and a probably too-subtle nod to unstable atoms and electrons.
But it's not obvious and risks being if anything too banal.
Hope to finish carving the keyblock tomorrow as good or bad, it will be a crunch to get it done on time.

Inspired by Japan--Sketches

2011-05-05T09:52:00.000-07:00

The Baren, an internet-based, international group of woodblock artists is sponsoring a benefit exchange of prints to benefit the Aid efforts following Japan's recent devastating earthquake, Tsunami and radiation disaster.
It is a themed exchange, titled "inspired by Japan" and the artists who have volunteered will print 31 copies to be exhibited and then, sold with all proceeds to benefit relief efforts.

My first idea was to depict a "Mofuku", the all black, mourning kimono of Japanese funeral rites. I had hoped to print a dark blue ground-to represent the water and the shadow cast of the kimono would be in the shape of the initial seismograph reading recorded off Sendai on that terrible morning.
It was to be dedicated to all those who lost their entire families and have no one left to mourn them.

But I've been a little uneasy.
I've been scouring the web and internet sites devoted to Japanese culture, Kimono styles and traditions, and specifically sites selling used and vintage kimonos to the west.
All have emphasized that the Mofuku, an all-black kimono with 5 undyed family crests is only to be worn by close relatives of the deceased and several sites
stated that they could not even show samples of Mofuku due to the sensitive nature of their use.
Since, my print would make the display of such a seemingly sensitive object not only visible but the subject and focus I have been hesitant to begin carving.

I showed some images of my sketches to my cousin's Japanese wife and she very graciously but pointedly confirmed my suspicions that while this would pose No issues to a Western audience, such a direct approach would make many Japanese uneasy. (As it did her).

So now I don't know what to do. I have several other sketches--some more or less complicated that I need to revisit and decide soon if I can make them work.
I would not normally be worried about appropriating ideas and images for my own work and purposes but in this context, a Benefit donation, it feels like I can not simply ignore such sentiment.

Kimono: Furisode/Tomesode? Sketch B
Fortunately, the traditions of kimono are fairly strict.
If the kimono doesn't have the 5 mon (crests) or has any other decoration, it is NOT considered Mofuku. But it then loses the connotations I was after about the terrible loss of life and consequent national mourning and international sadness.

Below was yesterday's sketch; done as Sami had Karate practice and I sat in the local coffeehouse with my sketchbook. Sort of a Japanese screen with an implacable wave. Perhaps a bit overdone/overwritten but it could be at least much more subtle and beautiful if printed well.

The Implacable Wave (sketch C)

Roses

2011-05-04T15:06:00.000-07:00

The Pruner; Rose Garden, Exposition Park, L.A. 2011
My son made it into the State Science Fair and we drove to Los Angeles for two days of judging and exhibits. While he was explaining his project to the judges I went outside to explore the adjacent Rose Garden.
Exposition park has a very large formal garden planted to separate beds; one variety to each bed. So there are rectangles of white, red, yellow, mauve, purple and orange flowers. It was too hot to catch the scent unless you pushed your nose deep into the blossoms.
As I waited outside on a shaded bench surrounded by hundreds of roses and a fountain
and the Beaux-Arts Style architecture; I pulled out my always-handy but rarely-used field sketchbook and colors.
It was early morning and there were workers out pruning and watering.
This man was heavily built and had a baseball cap, slate blue outfit and rust colored apron and white work gloves as he went about the beds deadheading and pruning out the still in FULL bloom May blossoming.

This is somewhat compressed and made up. I did sketch the general layout but as I filled in the color I sort of abandoned the careful layout if favor of flowing greens and spots of color.

It seemed to be favorite walking spot of elderly Korean women with colored umbrellas (for shade--it was 90F degrees yesterday) and big sneakers and white cotton gloves.
They all stopped to look over my shoulder but were too polite to say anything.
I like the riot of colors even if I had wanted the man to be lost in a sea of flowers but he ended up being the focus and subject.

Not the Easter Bunny

2011-04-23T23:41:00.000-07:00

Proofing continues.

I managed to print 3-4 color variants of my still-unfinished, Year of the Rabbit card.
I have the yellow block pretty much squared in and registration was satisfactory, if not perfect. I need to work on the ring over the Right eye and there was some unwanted embossing of the paper where I hadn't cleared the block well enough.

There is still to trim back or shim the red block--the red jewel is a bit out of registration...and there is a little general clean up to do as well on the rabbit block and the keyblock.

But I still think I have to play with the colors a bit and I'd like the gold rings to be a bit more visible...I may try some metallic ink. I touched in some gold gouache with a small paintbrush and I liked the effect but would prefer to print it.
HOPE to try printing later this week.....

Short Cuts and Long Cuts

2011-04-10T22:37:00.000-07:00

Sometimes trying to cut corners just makes the path a whole lot longer.

I ordered paper for my last print directly from Japan and when I saw that they also offered blocks of small, postcard paper in 4" X 6", 50-sheet blocks I thought it was a great idea.
I'm working on a postcard sized print for the Year of the Rabbit.
So I ordered 2 packs or 100 postcards. "Wow, these are already cut to size",
"think of all the time I'll save.....".

Then, I needed blocks. I ordered blocks too at 4" x 6" size. Since the paper is already pretty small, I'll print right to the edges so I don't waste any paper.
"think of the money I'll save on smaller blocks and I won't waste any wood or paper scraps....."
Usually I carve my registration system into each block using the traditional kento system of corner and edge stops that are part of each woodblock.

This is a traditional kento system of registration:Here is the corner stop or "kagi kento"

The corner kento is carved in a lower corner of the block and the corner of the damp paper would normally seat into this to line up each time it was printed. Another straight edge is carved to catch the lower edge of the paper; this is instead the line stop or lower edge stop called the hikitsuke kento.

Together, the pair of these carved niches allow very precise registration of multiple colors and multiple impressions. You can place the paper down EXACTLY where you want it using this system.

But I had decided not to use this system....but to use a jig, a floating L-shaped accessory that would carry the corner kento and registration marks and would be the same for each block. This way I wouldn't have to carve the kentos for each block but could use just ONE for all of them.....

SO, I had to make a little jig, that would hold the blocks still and allow me to lay the paper down evenly. But the kind of jig that allows me to place a piece of damp paper directly down on a block of the same size just isn't accurate enough for the print I'm planning so, I had to abandon the first jig, build another, I go out and cut paper 5" X 7" so I'll have enough border to work with.

But, as my blocks came from two different sources and are different heights, the slight difference in height meant the thinner block was harder to control in the jig and ended up printing off-register from the rest which I figured out with the first full-color proofs when my yellow color printed way off. I've spent the last two days trying to fix it.

Today I finally broke down and made a SECOND jig for the yellow color, wrong-sized, off-register block.

I printed a black copy from my key block using Jig 1 on dry paper.
Then, using a small blade, I cut out the small parts that will print off my yellow block. Then using the new jig, I placed the yellow block in it, and placing the printed copy on top and peeking through the holes, I could line up the cut out with the corresponding raised portions of the carved block and the edges of the paper will now demarcate where to place my new registration marks for the yellow block.
I used blue painter's tape instead of cutting into the foam board I used so I can move them if necessary after proofing.

Tomorrow I hope to reprint a color proof to see if they now all line up.
But already I know I'd have saved a ton of labor and been done already if I'd just taken the "long way",
planning on using paper a bit bigger, carving blocks on boards a bit bigger too, and trimming down to size afterwards just accepting that there will be some "waste" paper and wood but a huge savings in labor, time, energy and precision.

Rabbits

2011-03-29T23:06:00.000-07:00

Year of the Rabbit, 2011; Preliminary Sketch

It's been AGES since I did any carving and despite having Taxes and loads of other more important things to attend to I decided to get to work on my already late "Year of the Rabbit" cards.

My image was drawn from a nice photo of a jackrabbit on the web stylized a bit to allow for some easier carving and loosely drawn in a format that will suit a small postcard-sized image.

Sami, looking at this and the half-dozen earlier sketches had asked,
"Why don't you add an earring?" and the idea was planted and it was a good one.
This is the year of the METAL rabbit and multiple piercings are all the rage here in Santa Cruz, (Northern California) and elsewhere so this will be just perfect.

This image became the hanshita and I've just finished carving and proofing the keyblock. Next the proofs will get glued down to new boards to allow for the color blocks; I'm thinking probably four color blocks in addition to the keyblock.

Toadprints at Coffeetopia!

2011-03-01T22:49:00.000-08:00

Well, it's official:

Shapes and Postures, recent prints 2008-2011
by Andrew Stone
went up today and will be on display until April 15th.

We hung 19 prints this afternoon at Coffeetopia, 1723 Mission St; Santa Cruz: a local, popular coffeehouse. No photos yet, I left my camera at home and was whizzing about trying to get them all up after the shop closed. Dave the owner graciously helped hang the prints and adjusted the lighting.
All that's left to do is sneak in in the morning and put up all the identification tags of the framed prints.

There will be a mid-show opening March 25th 6-8p and I hope anyone in the Santa Cruz, South Bay or San Francisco area can come!

Frames: old friends in new clothes

2011-02-17T19:35:00.000-08:00

I will be having a small show of my work opening March 1st in a local, popular coffee shop; this will be the first time I show my work in a public space and I'm pretty excited about it. It is a popular spot and I go there frequently; there is a good mix of construction workers, students and university faculty and locals and it will be a chance to see how a rather normal "public" reacts to my prints. There is a long wall, well-lit along one side and there should be room for 12-15 prints. I've spent the last few weeks searching local, second-hand shops for vintage or used frames; and the local stores for small frames that look suitable.

Most of my work has never been framed but instead, frantically printed, put away soon after as I moved quickly on to another idea.
It's been a novel experience to haul out the big Logan mat cutter I got at a yard sale and all the mat board I've been accumulating over the years. Since all the frames are different it's been a bit of a puzzle to figure out what goes well where.
Some is just size.
I'm surprised at how many of my works are really long vertical formats (that don't want to fit in a pre-made, standard frame.
And some of the work is trying to judge wood color: cherry? maple/natural? Brown, black or gilt.

But it is slowly coming together. I have about half of them framed and a few days off next week to finish the rest.
I'll try and take some pictures too when they're up on the walls.

Blood Dreams

2011-02-14T19:31:00.000-08:00

Blood Dreams, Monoprint; 13" X 18"

Place your fingers to your lover's wrist or against your own neck and feel the pulse against your skin and know that in this moment, at least, you are alive.

This is another old work--one of my first forays into monoprints from 1997 in Santa Fe at an intensive 5-day monoprint workshop. I was really happy with this print but the really nice one--a beautiful blood-dark maroon ground--(this was the reworked ghost print) vanished out of the drying racks on the last day--so my first "collector" remains unknown.

I hope to revisit this with woodblock soon. I'd like to change the size and composition a bit and am curious to see how it would turn out in Moku Hanga.

D is for Done with Dominos

2011-02-07T21:40:00.000-08:00

I've been quiet lately because I've been PRINTING. and printing and printing.
Six blocks.
I stopped counting at 17 impressions and 10-ish colors.

As I mentioned in the last post the first color was going to set the mood and would be very important. Unfortunately it ended up looking like a warm yellow in the tube but printed thinly it proved a very cool yellow; the second pass helped a bit but three layers was too strong a yellow and so I was left with this cool yellow that I had to battle all the rest of the print.

The next layer was a thin, phthalo blue--hoping to give me a decent green so I could then overprint with a quinacradine red. But it wasn't as easy as all that; the first blue over the too-cool/too-strong yellow came out way too green and I spent a whole day fighting back that turquoise/green shade--actually it was quite lovely--just wrong--with repeated overprintings of complementary colors to neutralize and warm it down.But Adjusting the various doses of pigment I was able to get either a greenish brown, a mauveish brown, or a blue-green. Next went a blue-black--a bit of indathrone blue and carbon black pigment dispersions and I got a nice dark domino.

Once I got the Domino done I turned to the Shadow. I started with a Rose Madder Genuine/Quinacridine rose--this over the yellow ground gave me a very orange-y pink.
Over this went a Bokashi (graded wash of dark purple of phthalo blue and alazarin c.) Then another Bokashi of strong phthalo blue to heighten the edge.
I did about 10 in this color scheme then had a late night fit of panic and clouded judgement and cleaned off the board and switched to a clear blue--to get a nice vibrant green shadow; and then that was graded down with a phthalo blue bokashi edge too.

So, its a true Edition Varie--each domino is a bit different--some are green, blue, purple, brown or mauve; a few have hot purple shadows, most a green; and there are few outliers--pinks and reds and bright yellow golds.

I am reminded however, that my assignment was to try to achieve a rich, dark BLACK.
I had a Robert-Motherwell-kind-of-black in mind that I definitely did not achieve.
I sort of skirted that goal in favor of a rich, multicolored dark but it was a long,
bumpy session and very haphazard and disorganized and while some of the dominos are really gorgeous, I couldn't repeat the process if my life depended on it.
But if you look at the BACK of the paper you can get a pretty good idea of what I was up to.

Black and Blue, Again

2011-01-28T22:20:00.000-08:00

Well, this was my last attempt at proofing my Domino print before printing in earnest.

I managed to get a deep dark "black" even if this is really a deep purple; it was achieved by printing carbon black, over a rich, very dark purple, over a vermilion red, over a peach/tan.
By burnishing REALLY hard I managed to get out all the little white specks of unprinted paper. (and let it dry unpressed so there are some wrinkles).

My shadow, while a great color in itself, is too high key and warm and generally wrong for a shadow so it will have to get darker and cooler.

As for the domino body, it's dark and blue-black but maybe not as interesting as the earlier, multicolor trials.

Tomorrow, I'll start printing. I hope to print 50 copies and will probably decide as I'm sitting in front of the blocks, with all my proofs tacked to the wall in front of me, which direction I'll go in. The mood, and final print is greatly controlled by my first color--the background block and that will likely be the most important choice. (I've tried hansa yellow, yellow ochre, pthalo blue green, cobalt blue and this peach (mix of cadmium orange and buff titanium).

But first, and once again, the damp paper, despite my having cleared the blank parts of the blocks carefully is still picking up lots of stray ink and two or three of the blocks will have to be cleared again to prevent spoiling of the final prints.

What's the plural of DOMINO?

2011-01-25T21:47:00.000-08:00

Well, I've been printing, pulling proofs; like Noah, two by two.

I've been trialing different color combinations and sequences of printing and several different papers. I'm having some issues with the results and while a little late in the game--the blocks are all carved after all--I pull out a REAL domino. I check out the shadows of the little divots/holes again as they don't look quite right in the print. (It's not a real comparison as this domino has divots and the one I drew has hemispherical dots.)

Then back to the studio to print a bit more....

A little more blue, a little more red, A little pthalo green---OOPS--maybe not--overprint some Cadmium Orange to tone that one down--...
The big issue for the moment is my first block is one solid tone except for the white of the dots. Printed yellow, it puts yellow everywhere and that limits the later colors that print over it. The dark shadow of the tile, in my sketch has a vibrant fuchsia in the shadow that--with transparent colors--will be impossible to reproduce if there is a strong yellow underneath. I either have to change colors or carve out the yellow block's shadow area to allow more freedom with the later shadow.

This one's pretty close to what I had in mind--even if it still isn't quite dark enough.
Hmm. Guess I'll have to trim some of those shadows a bit.....

Black and Blue and Gray

2011-01-19T22:26:00.000-08:00

Well, a dark, rich black is the still elusive goal.
I'm working with transparent, water-based pigments and printing by hand with a baren on handmade, textured paper so it's harder than you'd imagine.
I finished carving the six blocks for the domino print and started try to figure out in what order to print the blocks and how.

Here is a reference trial.
One of my blocks printed with fairly dense, straight out of the bottle SUMI black ink.
It's a warm, inky black and covers very well if you paint it with a brush. But brushed onto the block and printed once it looks like this:

If I brush another layer of sumi and print it again it will get quite a bit darker but the gray tone is the white of the paper showing through--some of it is the texture of the paper and some the grain of the wood. Pressing harder will help.
I could use this as a griseille--a grey value underprinting and then attempt to print colored glazes over the top to achieve the colors I'm after.

The other way to get black is to overprint different colors. The process colors cyan, magenta, yellow and black should give you a dense rich black.

I've roughly tried that here with a yellow background layer, then a warm red, then a cobalt blue (not really cyan but transparent) and then Carbon black in 1) and Phthalo blue in 2. They are still "gray"--there's still too much white paper showing for my taste, but the mood/texture of the dark is to my eye more interesting if still
not black.

Tomorrow I'll switch the order, play with a real cyan/magenta combo and see what happens if I drop the yellow background. Today's printing has shown me that there is still some general trimming and cleaning of the blocks to tighten up the registration and get rid of some stray marks before printing the edition.

Dominos

2011-01-15T22:06:00.000-08:00

Well, enough of all that etching silliness. TIME to get back to woodblocks!
I like to use my woodblocks as a sort of home study course.
I've had trouble getting really dark and rich blacks and the subject of the next print is really just a pretext for this task.

Here's one of the original doodles. The domino originated as a white ivory tile with black pips (ebony wood) but for my purposes I went with the black version--usually black painted wood with white dots. I wanted something black, that I could print in a varied way and still have it be interesting.

My original sketch was of a domino with a six and a one but then, at the food store I saw this....and was crushed.

I thought about changing paths/ideas--especially as this one is a bit thin, content-wise. But after waffling and postponing, I finally just charged ahead.
Drinking some of the bottle helped. It's not bad. So I went back to the sketchbook and tried again:

This is the preparatory drawing for the blocks, colored in with colored pencils.

The liveliness comes from the handling of the color; in this case I've colored in using black, over red, over ochre, over yellow, each time laying color on the paper and the rough oak table underneath imparts an irregular surface to the color.
Achieving this kind of color/liveliness/richness with water based, transparent pigments in a block print is the challenge. I'll need several blocks and have to print each multiple times to achieve anything near this interesting....we'll see...

I glued my hanshita's down and started carving. I finished the keyblock last week; blocks 2 and 3 tonight.
Should be able to get the next three carved tomorrow?

Dust Bunny

2011-01-11T17:06:00.000-08:00

8" x 10" Soft ground and sugar lift etching with color aquatint

The owner of the braid of the last two posts leaves these things each time she brushes her waist-length hair. She leaves them as little gifts on a desk, in a wineglass or tucked into an envelope like some precious little secret note.

And they are charming, in a kind of old-relic, church-remnant sort of way. We now both sort of collect them; I hope eventually to fill a large bell jar with the cast off tumbleweeds around a small suspended marble figure floating in the middle like a fetus in a hairy amniotic sac.

This print was so much fun to make.

Plate 1: 6" X 8" polished copper. Sugar lift/aquatint--even the name is cool.

A single fat brush stroke towards the bottom of the plate was drawn using a karo sugar syrup/india ink solution and allowed to dry.
Then a turpentine/asphaltum mixture was painted over that. It coated the rest of the copper plate to protect it from the acid. Once dry, the whole plate was placed in warm water and the sugar/karo brush stroke was dissolved out leaving the bare metal. This was placed in the acquatint box--depositing a thin layer of powdered rosin over the brush stroke. Heated gently in an oven, it sort of melted in a pebbly,uneven fashion so when the plate was placed in the acid (30seconds) the result is a gently etched perfect brush stroke that will print at the bottom of the print.

Plate 2: The hairball. Soft ground etching. I rolled a warm, waxy, soft resist across the whole second plate and then placed a thin piece of paper on top. Using a dull pencil, I scribbled all the lines on the paper. They pressed into the soft wax-like resist which stuck to the paper where the lines were drawn.
Lifted off they left the impression of my drawn squiggles which when placed in the acid (30 minutes) ate where the lines had exposed the metal. These etched lines would then hold the ink when the plate was inked and printed.

These were printed in sequence; First a nice lavender shadow/brush stroke for plate 1
Followed by a brown/black for plate 2.

Simple/complex--maybe not quite hairy enough....

Hairball, etching and aquatint, chine colle'
8" X 10"

copper braid

2011-01-10T23:35:00.000-08:00

I'm not far from San Francisco and when a colleague mentioned that Crown Point Press was having a weekend etching workshop I jumped at the chance. One of the premier fine art printing/publishing studios of mostly conceptual/visual artists' work in prints, it meant having access to their amazing studio and help from two master printers.

Since I've been having lots of trouble with my blue press--I need some help with the hands-on part--how to ink and wipe a plate, registration, multiple plate registration, etc. SO I drove up and spent two days and it was exhausting but loads of fun. It's an impressive set up; with separate rooms for acquatint, and acid etching, great lighting, OSHA regulation ventilation and safety features and all the tools and techniques available to help you produce whatever you'd like.

Soft ground, hard ground, spit bite, aquatint, flat bite, chine colle', drypoint, engraving, sugar lift, etc. etc.
Too much for just two days.

I decided to work loosely from my previous figure drawing hoping to be able to play with technique rather than fret about image and detail. I loosely traced my image outlines hoping to work on the braid in line and color as the main subject.

The initial line drawing was reproduced with soft-ground etching giving me nice, hand-drawn quality lines to the contours and basic braid and hair shapes.

Then I blocked out the figure and did a simple aquatint of the background shapes to set them back by making them flat and darker.

Next, I went back in a reblocked the figure and step-etched using aquatint the hair several times to get different tones, once blocking out with a sharpie before going back in the acid bath.

The second one was printed using a burnt umber/black mix; both on white Somerset paper using Charbonel inks.

I'm mostly happy with how it came out. I was hoping for something a bit looser and I wanted the subject really to be the braid. The drawing is a bit off/not quite naive or accurate enough but I like the way the hair came out. I'll probably still go back in with my drypoint needle and add some more wispy hairs but it's mostly done.

La Sposa

2011-01-03T19:26:00.000-08:00

There was a time when you wouldn't undress before me.
But that was years ago.
Maybe you're finally comfortable with my presence.

Maybe after all this time you no longer see me before you
Or can't hear my breath or footstep
Or just can't be bothered any longer with modesty and shyness.

Maybe you know that I will always find you beautiful,
And find my gaze so natural and normal as to be like the beating of your heart
Something of which we are almost unawares
Unless it goes faster
Or skips or stops.

Rimproveri (Reproaches)

2011-01-02T15:47:00.000-08:00

I am a frustrated farmer and left Italy some years ago very reluctantly. When, in 2000, we moved back to my wife's family home, I tried to revive an abandoned farm on the surrounding acreage. But hampered by my inexperience and tethered by family responsibilities I didn't do such a good job of it. But it was something I took very seriously and still feel was one of the few times of my life I was doing something really important. The fields had been cultivated heavily for centuries and the last 50 years had been hard. The loss of the farm animals and subsequent heavy instrument/tractor farming by itinerant farmers had really depleted the land and weakened the soil.

I tilled the soil, double dug vegetable beds, imported tons of manure and compost and started trying to fix things. I pruned the olives and old fruit trees back into production. I started tending the small vineyard and made oil and juice and wine with the fruit. Planted many heirloom old fruit tree varieties, french strawberries, American pumpkins and sweet corn. We ate well but never made any money and we traveled too much to ever really make it work. New farms like most new businesses do not tolerate absentee owners and much of what I planted died. We moved back to the USA in 2008 and I left fruit hanging on the vine--no wine to be made that year.

It's always hard to go back. I remember much of what I planted, where things went and what they should look like now after another year away--but it's always a shock to see how much things have changed; I walk the fields and see so many errors of judgement and promises broken.
Empty fields--planted to clover and vetch, borage and rye now sprouting instead with dock and thistles--plants that will slowly take over and later be hard to be rid of.

But it was the grapes this year that were the saddest.

Someone, wisely, had covered them with netting to keep the birds out--it's a small vineyard and they'll slowly eat them all as they ripen left to their own.
But the grapes never got picked and the netting never got taken down.
These are the mummies.
Moldy clusters of once yellow and gold; black and purple fruits.
They never got to the table or the press and only their names remain things of beauty.
These are Malvasia and Trebbiano, San Giovese and Canaiolo.

Or they were. It would have been better to have left them to the sparrows and blackbirds.
If I had the energy, I'd take down the nets; cut off and burn the moldy fruits, prune back the vines in anticipation of next year.....
But I'm already gone.

Calicantus

2010-12-27T16:01:00.000-08:00

Calicantus, watercolor and pencil 8" X 10"

Chimonanthus praecox_-- Calicanto in Italian--fitting since the only bush I've ever seen sits in my mother-in-law's Italian garden.

I like it for its rather wintry, austere angular form; unprepossessing in its drabness. It's a bony plant, somber and sad in Winter when the leaves are off but it carries a scent that invites meditation and introspection.

I've been trying to do a still life/watercolor of this plant for years. The snows abrubtly ended the day after we arrived and 5 full days of steady rain made for some indoor painting.

It blooms in late December or early January and is one of the few truly fragrant winter flowers. As a garden plant it is a bit drab and coarse; it makes an oval shrub 2-3meters in height and 2 in width. The leaves are lanceolate and a nice yellow green in Spring and Summer but it Winter, if they don't just fall off, turn a vague parchment/paper yellow brown.

The flowers are small, dime-sized and waxy, pale to bright yellow and have 8 outer petals and four reddish/orange inner petals. The white central pistel opens well after the flower.

It has a strong floral tuberose-like fragrance and merits planting near a window or where it's scent can waft into the house or at least near enough to be handy to cut branches to bring it inside.

It looks much like the American Witch Hazel plant but the petals are less showy and it appears to belong to a different genus--although the habit, fruit, winter blooming and scent have me wondering if not the same plant if they are at least related?

Man of War

2010-12-17T18:41:00.000-08:00

I pulled several copies of the aluminum drypoint plate I made yesterday. I used a pthalo blue etching ink (Akua) and have been trying different wiping techniques/materials.

The prints are getting better but they are still printed pretty badly--too much ink here and there and too little in other places. My best luck was with a stiff tarlatan--that's what they're used for after all-- but I'll try to find someone who can show me how to wipe and if my ink is too stiff/loose. I'm still hoping to make a go with these water-soluble inks as clean up is really easy and there are no solvents to deal with.
I wiped ink on with a piece of matboard/scraped it off and then lightly buffed the plate with a big ball of tarlatan cloth slowly wiping off the ink. Then I went in with a bit of rolled/pointed newsprint to pull out some highlights and lastly wiped lightly with the side of my hand.

The last three I printed over an initial printing of a solid color using a piece of plexiglass plate.
I rolled color onto the plexiglass plate corresponding to where the aluminum plate would go later--lifted out the jellyfish body and some of the tenticles/stingers with a Q-tip and printed that first--one dark, the second ghost was lighter. Then, inking the plate each time, I printed the etching plate on top of the already tinted paper.

The last one is a true monoprint--I painted in my usual badly chosen colors on the plexiplate; blue for sky/blue for water, purple jelly, multicolor tenticles. It's loose and kind of interesting and would have worked if I had chosen colors more carefully; the green in particular was rather ill-advised.

I'll tip in watercolor in one of the poorly printed drypoints and see what that looks like.

P.S. If you get stung by one of these--hot water works best at neutralizing the stinging cells once you peel off the sticky stinging strings as best you can. They really hurt and can scar.

Drypoint Man of War

2010-12-16T23:26:00.000-08:00

Itching to do something and I've been working with variations of this sketch for weeks.

The idea is quite simple; a Portugese Man of War--a floating, stinging jellyfish common to the Atlantic in Winter as an exercise in composition and color.
I've been envisioning this in color woodblock but haven't committed yet to how many blocks or colors and figured this would be a quick way to scratch in an idea and play with some color after.

I want a strong flowing diagonal for the drifting tentacles and the float should be a transparent/iridescent pale purple set off by varying shadings of the sky and deep waters.

That's the idea anyway.
This has been scratched into the leftover scrap of aluminum sheeting that I have
6 X 13" in size and I'll try printing in the AM.

Sunburn

2010-12-14T21:15:00.000-08:00

Tub Burn, silkscreen, 7.5" x 9", 1984

I've been going through some old portfolios and I found this print--one of my only silkscreens, done in college in 1984. It was my first ever edition--all the prints had to be exactly the same and I printed six.

I gave away most to classmates. It was small and silly enough an image that it was a hit. At least, I always thought it was cute.

This one ended up in a small wooden frame in the bathroom of the loft apartment we would rent out in Florence when we were away. I never got any complaints, but then no one asked where they could get a copy either. We took it out of the house when we moved back to the States.

We'll head back to Italy for the holidays and I'll be pulling out some more old student-era portofolios.

I wonder what else I'll find?

Grapes and Light

2010-12-01T01:05:00.001-08:00

Hanukkah 2010 Starts tonight at sundown.

Fall colors.
Grapes and vines.
Light, Blessings and Miracles.

I've had this quirky idea for a while to draw a cordon-trained grapevine as a Menorah (the candelabra that holds the candles for the Festival of Hanukkah)--the Fall colors illuminating the leaves. I never really got around to doing it seriously but sat down yesterday just to try one out as a collagraph print.

All REAL artists will eventually do some nudes, a still life, some abstract thing and,
if they're JEWISH, eventually a stab at something Judaica.

Below is the print just off the press, printed in Black and White on Rives BFK paper. You can see the embossing but the vine isn't visible enough as is so again, I painted in with watercolors and brush.

I had hoped to print up a bunch for cards but it's a lot of work and the cardstock/matboard plate won't print too many before getting squished.
Maybe it will at least last 8 impressions?!?
I'd like to try tomorrow a real monoprint, loosely painting on some colors on the plate before running it through the press.
Will show the results tomorrow.

Happy Hanukkah!

Music and Noise

2010-12-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

Music and Noise
collagraph monoprint with watercolor. 7.5" X 10"

I'm still playing around. Procrastinating really. I'm trying to get going on another woodblock print. I have a nice long plank of Red Birch, lovely grain, 6' x 8" that I've cut down into a few 15" lengths and have started sanding and planing them down. Thinking about what to do next.

There are some things I've wanted to try: a reduction print, a bold black and white image, a white-line print and a few nude/figurative pieces I have preliminary sketches for but haven't committed to.

So when I'm this waffly (is that a word? an adjective?) I usually doodle and from the noise and the clutter sometimes comes just more mess and chaos but sometimes, if not order, at least some good ideas.

This started as a kid's exercise on a rainy day. We all cut out some card stock and made collagraph plates using old 5" x 7" mat boards and glue and scissors.
This was my version from the first test printing. Each one of these shapes was cut out of an old file folder using a pair of scissors and glued down onto the matboard and then coated with wood glue to seal it before printing.
It was overwiped, too pale but well-embossed from being run through the press so this one has watercolor pigment painted on.

I think it's a cochlea. The snail like thing in our heads that is involved with hearing and balance. THIS one seems to be spewing out and rejecting all sounds.
Or is it all going in? I can't tell.

parasites

2010-11-20T18:19:00.000-08:00

Tapeworm 8" X 9" drypoint etching on Rives Heavyweight paper. Trial proof.

Been in a bit of a bad temper lately. This one's been brewing for a while and is rooted in some mid-life issues about success, failure, hopes and disappointments and some big and seemingly unresolvable conflicts. These moods are cyclical and will usually pass if I just wait long enough but nothing beats back a bad mood like creating something repulsive and pointless. Sort of a spread-the-wealth kind of thing.

I was in the hardware store buying some things for the house and saw they had some sheets of rolled aluminum. 6" X 18" and fairly thin. I took one home, cut it down to about a 6"X 8" size and scratched in this tapeworm using a metal point. I printed a few test copies so I could mess with the press and see how aluminum prints.

This is sort of a made-up tapeworm; somewhat in-between what a taenia solium (pork tapeworm) and dog tapeworm or flatfish tapeworm would look like. They all have fairly complex life cycles passing through multiple requisite hosts. Sometimes pausing forever if stuck in the body of the wrong host. The small end has little hooks and suckers to attach to the lining of the intestine and it slowly grows new segments, elongating segment by segment and can reach 20-30 ft (13m) in length. They don't actually suck blood from the wall of the intestine or stomach but absorb nutrients from the lumen of the intestine through the walls of the segments. Each segment has it's own digestive and reproductive tract and by the time the little segments fragment off and pass through the gut out of the body, they are little time-bomb sacs of eggs waiting to be ingested by the next host to start a new cycle.
Human carriers are usually asymptomatic unless infected by multiple worms that can then cause malnutrition by absorbing so many calories (rare) or severe anemia from B12 deficiency--the worm absorbs all the B12 from the gut(more common). In the cyst stage the pork tapeworm can cause all sorts of medical illness; the cysts can form in the muscle, internal organs and brain and are a common cause of adult-onset seizures in nations where incompletely cooked pork are consumed.

But, as I said, this is more of a metaphorical tapeworm.

What kind of nastiness are you carrying inside?

Feathered Visitors

2010-11-18T00:19:00.000-08:00

Another odd visit yesterday from a group of four California Quail; two adult males and two juveniles (one didn't feel like hopping up onto the trunk). They were in the back yard looking for bugs and tolerated my presence for a good half-hour.
Surprisingly they were chased away by a squirrel. Walnut in mouth, the squirrel really chased them up and down the tree, off the lawn and didn't quit until they flew away.
We have lots of Quail in the brush of the wilder areas but as we have a fenced yard they've never ventured in before nor have I seen them in the neighborhood.

Jajim: Blues 1 and 2

2010-11-06T14:53:00.000-07:00

Monoprints again. I went back into the studio to try and finish these two prints I had started several months back. I had started with an acetate/plexiglass drypoint--the lines scratched into the plexiglass sheet with a metal point. Printed in black on RIVES BFK paper.
Then I started in with blue ink, painted onto the plate with a brush to start giving it some color.

With this session I went back in again painting in the vertical blue stripes with different tonalities of blue ink; mostly Pthalo Blue and some cobalt/ultramarine.
I tried to vary the color a bit with each stripe. and built up the color with two to three layers, each time running them through the press.

The background had been loosely brushed onto the plate and run through the press but I added a rose/quinacradone pink/rose halo around the tapestry part and blurred the edges to make it glow a bit.

Lastly, as my ends had smudged quite a bit, I painted in with a brush and some sumi black ink and white opaque watercolor the black and white trim.

I like the one with the big blue smudge the best--the blues are smokier and richer and the pink/rose really glows due to it being printed on too-wet paper and resisting a bit the paper so it has a mottled/irregular effect that was as accidental as it was serendipitous. I still can't really say I have a grip on the Akua colors--I was using monotype colors--or the press. I'll try to work a little smaller to facilitate some more experiments. Dry paper/wet paper/wetter or dryer ink. Mostly I'm having trouble with lots of smudging at the edges--it may be the nature of the method. The paper and inked plate qet squished together and unless the ink layer is very thin, it has to go somewhere. In my case it seems to be going out the sides.

Skeletons

2010-10-31T21:58:00.000-07:00

These are my first two proofs of a drypoint print I started a few weeks ago. I hoped to have a finished work in time for Halloween but I had to content myself with two quick proofs pulled off my first ever copper drypoint.

The plate was a thin 6" X 9" copper sheet on which I first roughly sketched and then scratched into the surface with a sharp metal tip scratching and cutting lines in the smooth surface. The plate was then wiped with AKUA color intaglio black ink and wiped off leaving ink in the scratches and some on the surface. Printed using BIG BLUE, my etching press, onto Arches white printmaking paper.

This is my first go at drypoint and the first time using these inks. I had a hard time wiping the ink--I couldn't find where I had put my tarlatans and ended up using an old cotton rag--(old kids underpants) that were too soft and absorbent.

The First pull was much too pale due to overwiping and so became a candidate for some watercolor tip in to rescue what was just a pale ghost.

I'll go back in to try to give some more emphasis on the hand/fingers and try to deepen the shadows over the whole pelvis area then try another round of printing/wiping.

Toggle Bolt

2010-10-27T22:27:00.000-07:00

Toggle Bolt, the first Figure in the imaginary and now out-of-print classic handbook of European and American Fasteners. A guide for those who often choose the wrong tool for the wrong job.

moku-hanga, Japanese-style, polychrome woodblock print
6" X 8"

When we were looking for a house in Santa Cruz, this one was exactly what B was looking for. The previous owner is a photographer and the walls had beautiful black and white photographs perfectly placed on all the walls in a house that was neat and ordered and lovely.

Imagine my surprise when we moved in to discover that the owner, not wanting, I suppose, to force his own aesthetic choices on the new tenants had pulled out every nail, stuccoed and painted over every hole and left the house spotless and new.

I am not particularly handy. And living in a lathe-and-stucco house means to put anything on the wall you have to hunt for the studs that the walls are hanging on. The walls themselves are just 1-2cm of brittle plaster and any brad or nail you just hammer in will just wiggle out, leaving a small pile of plaster dust and holes in the walls.
B, long since having given up on me ever hanging anything on the walls has hammered nails and brads, where-ever-you-please and has hung up all sorts of second hand/goodwill frames and art and posters and mirrors and shelves.

A Toggle Bolt is a fastener designed to be used to hang light to medium weight objects on hollow walls when a stud isn't available; on sheetrock, lathe and plaster, etc. The metal parts are spring loaded--A fairly large hole is drilled in the wall, the two flexible, spring loaded flaps are pulled against the screw and the whole thing is passed into the hole. Once past the wall, the flaps open up and by turning the screw are pulled up against the inside face of the wall holding the other, outside part fast. IF you make a mistake and have to unscrew it, the folding part just falls off behind the wall and you have to use a new one.

That's the idea anyway. I've bought a few but never actually gotten around to putting one in the wall.

There are holes all over my walls.

Swarm

2010-10-26T21:47:00.000-07:00

Inching towards completion.
Printing is done.
I briefly shuffled all of them out on the table to get out some of the major dampness--the rains have stopped and the humidity is less so they quickly feel less soft and cool--that means they're drying.
Then I cart them off to press between an old hardwood cheeseboard with several sheets of paper interleaved and another used hardwood board on top. Over this sandwich goes the old lithography stone I found in a Miami second hand shop thirty years ago. This whole stack then enjoys the living room bookcase next to the forced air heating vent. I'll undo the pile a few times to shuffle through the prints to even out the pressure and drying and with the last shuffle they felt dry and crisp.
Tomorrow they'll be trimmed, gone over for rejects and then signed. I said I wanted to be done by the end of October and I think I did it!

All that printmaking makes me hungry!

2010-10-25T21:26:00.000-07:00

Two leftover pears in the fridge, a mostly eaten bag of semisweet chocolate chips and a lack of anything sweet and baked to munch on....what to do.

Alexander and I whipped out a mostly invented recipe for upside-down pear cake but added chocolate chips and left out the maple syrup. Bar Petrarca in Florence makes a killer pear and chocolate butter cake but we're just too far away.
Hope this will fill the void.

Still steaming from the oven. Hope it cools soon enough to eat some.

Toggle emerging

2010-10-23T18:41:00.001-07:00

Raining today and for the first time I'm having trouble keeping my paper dry enough.

Two more impressions on my Toggle print.

The first a pale gray solid shape to give mass tone to the bolt, then a roughly carved shadow block--I've learned that this doesn't have to be carved as neatly or detailed as the detail will be carried by my keyblock that will print over it.

I tried to post shots of each stage but my scanner isn't picking up the pale blue-grey of the thin wash-like colors at all so this one image shows those two impressions over the light blue-green background.

Tomorrow I hope to print the keyblock over the previous three impressions...It may be so damp in my studio I'll have to move into the kitchen.

Printing again

2010-10-20T20:49:00.000-07:00

Starting on my Toggle print.
I managed to get one block printed today. A simple, single-color even wash.
It's a mixture of pthalo blue green and pthalo blue mixed with lots of rice paste to make a very transparent wash.
I usually would have started with the keyblock--the black and white block that outlines most of the color areas and in this case carries all the details, but I tried printing that first but my good printing paper is slightly uneven textured and was picking up some of the ink from the carved out areas from the shallowly carved letters.

SO I switched the order and am printing this block first--the pressure of printing the paper against the hardwood block will smooth out the paper and make getting a clean impression easier down the line. The line of very small print will end up printing over the bottom of the blue square later.

Here's the block I printed from and here's a very bad photo of the print pulled from it.

Sorry about the quality of the second photo--I'll replace it with a better one once I get my scanner back up.

A brief pause from our sponsors...

2010-10-17T18:07:00.001-07:00

In the wee hours I decided to put the cat in the garage--she has started waking us all up at 4-5am when she decides it's a good time to be fed and that's getting old really fast.
But I had opened the garage door earlier in the evening and forgotten to close it.
There's water, a litter box and usually some food in a dish for her nights there.

So, walking in with the reluctant cat in my arms when I stepped on the threshold there was a lot of noise/crashing/bustle and first one large dark shape rushed past my legs and as I jumped back, cat scratching, two more furry dark shapes rushed past, climbed the fig tree and jumped onto the shed.

SO here they are.
They're called "orso lavatore" in Italian, (washing bears).

They've been turning over my garbage pail, eating/stealing all the figs, raiding the cat dish and more or less being quite a late night nuisance.

I hope they are at least fans of my work.

Patience, Grasshopper.

2010-10-15T12:24:00.000-07:00

Well, one of the perks of the medical environment are single use, disposable scalpels. I borrowed one to see if it would work; this one came loaded with an #11 blade--a long pointed blade slightly beveled on both edges. The point is very tiny and very flexible and with a pair of 3X drugstore reading glasses and a LOT of patience to flip or clear the little bits around the letters I managed to finish all the letters last night. Fruit of a late night espresso.

Proofed today. All the letters are legible. Now to whip out the color blocks.

Hard at Work

2010-10-06T20:59:00.000-07:00

There was not much to look at in the last post. Today, with the kids in school, Bene back at work in Italy for the next few months and my mom, visiting this month, off at a duplicate bridge game, I could actually disappear into the studio for a block of several hours.

I managed to get the keyblock almost completely carved even if this photo shows it only about 1/3rd done. It will be a fairly simple print with a fairly detailed keyblock but just a few color blocks.

The big hurdle will be some very small type at the bottom. I'm not sure the kiln-dried cherry or my big fat fingers are up to the task and I'm thinking about alternatives if I lose too many letters. Rubber stamp? Acetate drypoint? Handwriting?( I don't have access or any experience with letterpress...).

New Wood

2010-10-05T20:49:00.000-07:00

I haven't been carving in a while and while I have a few works that still need a day or two of work to be completed, those unfinished prints are still almost a year old in concept and I feel the urge to do something new again.

I hope to have this little print done by the end of October.
While the subject is still cloaked in secrecy, I will say that I pulled out, then sawed off an end piece of my big cherry plank.

Here is that piece cut again lengthwise into two 7" X 10" pieces.
And again with the hanshita, my preparatory sketches/xeroxes glued on face down.

More to come.....

Jajim-trials: Adding Blues

2010-09-22T21:59:00.000-07:00

Well, remind me next time I experiment to do it on a smaller scale. These are 1/2 sheets of Rives BFK printmaking paper so they're 20" X 15" and I need to fill the sink in the kitchen to soak them and just moving them about is a bit of a project and I'd have got lots more trials done if I was just working on a 5 X 7" plate instead.
I'd like to test in a little more controlled manner the differences of wet paint vs. dry paint; damper paper vs less; more or less pressure, etc.

I am using Akua color brand water soluble colors again. This time the monotype colors which are quite syrupy--I think there is both honey and soy oil in the mix?

I decided not to roll out the color but just brush it on to the surface of my original plexiglass plate--I added some retarder to keep it from drying too fast and I deliberately brushed out each vertical stripe separately, remixing the colors each time for each stripe. I think my color was still a bit too thick and beaded a bit to the edges and I had a slight slip when I dropped the plexiglass on the damp paper--I tried to adjust it and you can see the results here where there is a big blue smear at the edge.

But I got that kind of rich, deep, multicolor blu I was hoping for.
I ran the leftover color on the second sheet of paper but it didn't really print so I repainted the plate again--this time adding a little cerulean blue to the border area before I ran it all through the press. I think the cerulean border is a bit too deep and I again had some edge issues--I can't keep the edges from bleeding a bit but I'll make them work with this print. Mostly there is an area of the third blue strip that didn't print at the bottom that is bothering my eye and I'll have to get some blue in there and deepen a bit the saturation of all the dark blue stripes.

I work tomorrow but maybe Friday I'll have another go. I'd like to add a hazy rose halo around the blue border of the carpet of the second trial and I need to deal with the blue smear on the first by trying to print around the edges with a different value and color to see if I can save it. The end edges were meant to be black and white but with all the smearing I'll probably go back in at the end with a brush and some opaque gouache.

Fooling around: plexiglass and a drypoint tool

2010-09-21T17:23:00.000-07:00

I've been going through my sketchbook again getting ready for my next woodblock print but I've got nothing really ready to go and I've been thinking and looking; doodling and making thumbnails. So, as I had really nothing ready yet to get put on a board I started looking around for something to do today.

I took a piece of leftover plexiglass--it's about 18 X 24" and a drypoint needle I have and sketched out a rough enlargement of one of my previous textile/rug sketches.
The drypoint tool has a really sharp point, and while it would be traditionally be used to scratch a line in copper or zinc plates to be run through a press, I'm using it on the plexiglass to score a line in the soft plastic.

This afternoon I got to try how it would print. I'm still using Akua color--this time I have a tin of lamp black intaglio ink--and straight out of the tub with a piece of matboard scraping a thin layer of ink all across the plate. Then I lightly rubbed it off with an old rag and ran it through the Press onto damp Rives BFK. The ink is supposed to remain in the scratches and areas left by the burr of the point and should mostly wipe clean off the smooth plastic surface.

It's pretty tacky ink and I've never done this before so my wiping was pretty lame.
One came out a bit overwiped in spots and underwiped in others and my second attempt seemed "moodier" but ended up covered with dark fingerprints-spots and underwiped areas too. Still, the incised scribbles came out pretty good and it's pretty close to my sketch in concept and mood. I suspect if I can get the colors to be rich enough all the splotchiness now will add depth and complexity to the stripes/weaving I'm trying to emulate.

Tomorrow I'll try to go in again painting on the plate in color to bring up the vertical stripes in blue and the background in a sepia/tan--the only trick now will be I'll have to redampen the paper so the plate and paper will match up again.

Monoprint workshop Day 2

2010-09-11T16:31:00.000-07:00

The last day of Beth Fein's Akua color monoprint/monotype workshop at the Kala Institute in Berkeley was a few weeks ago but I dove back into the September work schedule so couldn't update the blog.

I forgot my camera so I'll keep it brief. She demonstrated some viscosity resists/monotypes--changing the viscosity using various color modifiers to have the thinner colors resist the heavier for some spontaneous, mostly uncontrollable effects.

Rather interesting but a bit too uncontrolled for me. I'm big on control.
But we also worked on some Chine Colle'; using stencils to block out portions of color and by using decent thin washi or japanese papers using these now colored papers to go back in to add to the print in multiple layers.

Here's what I managed to get out during the day's session. The dark "froot loop cascade" is a fairly straight forward monotype with rolled color underneath, then painted color in the next layer. The circles were stencilled out and then using the cleaned plate painted in again using bright colors and a brush. All in all there are probably 4-5 layers/passes through the press.
The ghost had the various layers run through after the darker version. But in this case I used the cut out stencil circles accumulated during the days printings glued back in the ghost base using wheat paste and the press. I like the chine colle' pale version better but the brush strokes on the dark one are lively and appealing--if a bit childish.

The last two were sort of "I'm getting tired and making lots of mistakes" but the mushroom cloud stencil thingy is sort of interesting and looks like if I push it a little bit might make a finished piece... I just don't know what yet. And the expanding cross/talisman will go through the press another 4-5 times before I decide if I should keep it or just throw it out.

I had fun. Have a nice base now from which to start experimenting at home and will see what I can come up with on Big Blue.
Mostly I wanted an alternative to the slow, carefully planned woodblock prints that are my main focus and these monotypes allow me to get into the studio and play with some ideas and colors in a way that's more direct and spontaneous and will allow me to flesh out some ideas before I decide if they're interesting enough to try in a multiblock woodblock print.

Mono workshop day 1.

2010-08-22T23:11:00.000-07:00

I have been hoping to get back into the classroom for a while and trying to mesh my erratic work schedule ( I work different shifts every week) with a class schedule has been hard. But I found out about a monotype workshop held at the KALA art istitute in Berkeley,CA in time to ask for the two Saturday's off that the class was held.
So I managed to work into the wee hours Friday night, wake up really early Saturday morning, drive the 1 1/2 hrs to Berkeley and found the place easily enough. It's a grand old three story brick factory and the whole upper floor has been converted to a printmaking atelier with facilities for screenprinting, letterpress, etching, monoprints etc. This is a short class focusing on monoprinting with Akua color nontoxic pigments and I'm hoping it will help me avoid the errors I made on my first attempts with the blue press. I had a great time, even if I managed to ink the wrong side of my transparent plexiglass plate a few times!! but otherwise had everything under control. It's a fun technique, allowing much spontaneity and for some fun (and not so fun surprises).
We worked on learning how to get even coats of color from this honey-based, water based color and how to do chine colle' and a little bit about viscosity printing and resists.
Here's a print of the work table with everybody's efforts at the end of the first day and a quick shot of my first efforts. I like my ghost prints the best. Whispers of color and nuanced effects that are much more delicate and evocative than my more heavy handed full-color efforts.

Stain 3

2010-08-17T14:39:00.000-07:00

Well, work continues....

I printed 25 onto Nishinouchi, an off-white mulberry paper and the blue didn't print quite grey enough and I think my earlier proof on white paper came out better. I'll take a little pause. Let these dry and decide whether to add another color or pass on the tie to deepen the color or just print a second batch in a different color scheme on white paper. I pulled this out of the batch as I plan on gluing one down face up on a hardwood block, carving the tie again and polishing the other copies to make the tie shiny and silky looking.

They are a bit less yellow than this appears on my monitor.

Almost there

2010-08-09T21:11:00.000-07:00

Well, while I didn't get into the studio as much as I'd have liked--I managed to get these proofs done today and I'm pretty happy. I carved all day Sunday. Trimmed paper and printed these color proofs today. There is still some tidying up to do. The thin tie stripes need to be cut back a bit at the bottom to match the color tie block but we are almost there.
There will still be some surprise. It would be too boring for me to know exactly where this will end up--I'll be printing on Nishinouchi, an warm, off-white, slightly newsprinty paper that will change the colors somewhat. And I won't really decide until I'm sitting down with the bowls and colors in front of me which one I'll do. But I've only cut 25 pieces of paper so there will probably be another run and that will allow another color.
The biggest challenge still is the blood spot. It has three colors/impressions and it's still not right.

Stains and colors

2010-08-01T23:52:00.000-07:00

I printed some sample proofs from my fresh keyblock.
The original idea was a simple black and white line drawing with the red blood stain on the white shirt. (I thought of carving different color stains --coffee, blood, etc but that seemed pushing it a bit too far).
But with some proofs on hand I decided to color some in with watercolor.
The one on the bottom R is my favorite;it would be sort of a halftone, bluegray--all the colors would be shades of grey except for the stain; the others are as can be seen above--I like the yellow tie more than the blue one.
The risk is that the subject--the blood spot--might be lost if too much energy and interest is directed at the necktie and colors.

The red stain will be cut off the key block and recarved so it will be much more noticeable. I'm also planning on adding a bit of alcohol to the color to make it seep a bit.

Any favorites/comments before I carve the next block?

Carving Blood

2010-07-28T23:35:00.001-07:00

Well, I decided to step away from my big Jajim print for a little pause. I haven't done any carving since early this year and I wanted to make some chips fly.

SO I went back into my unfinished projects file and pulled out a little print that never got farther than a preparatory sketch. While brainstorming ideas for one of the Baren Forum exchanges I posted this as one of the ideas that got nixed. Several followers--well, most of them actually since I have so few--said that it was too bad as they liked the idea.
So did I. So I went back to my preparatory sketch--it was on old mat board and I looked it over--I added some type for the title and drove over to Kinko's and made a xerox to serve as my Hanshita. Glued it down that night and spent most of yesterday carving the keyblock. This morning I recut a few spot repairs I made on some slips. It looks mostly ok but it's carved pretty shallowly so printing will tell if it's deep enough.

Now I'm back into a stretch of shifts for work until next week but hope to get in to test print and see how much cleaning up I need to do on this block. And how many other blocks I'll need.

Wrinkled corners/Jajim continued

2010-07-26T16:10:00.000-07:00

I've made decent progress on my Jajim/Kelim pieces. I printed 13 strips; 6 on Echizen Kozo and 7 on Nishinouchi. I took the better ones--those printed on the whiter and heavier E.K. and started playing with how they would look. Then I spent a day printing the background sheets. These are printed by hand off a sheet of uncarved exterior plywood and were printed in multiple layers and colors.
As I worried, I had a bit of trouble laying down and registering the background damp sheets of paper. My paper was slightly larger than my printing plate/board so the unprinted edge formed a frame all around the work. Unfortunately, as the printed portion became thinner from rubbing firmly with the baren, this portion became damper and thinner. The corners sort of dried a bit/ the printed parts got wetter and the corners buckled pretty badly. I let them dry and then re-wet the paper and let it sit overnight. Then I ironed them again as I printed an additional color or two over the background. They flattened out nicely but once they dried (under plywood sheets/some pressure) they wrinkled up again.
I'll have to figure out how to correct/avoid this before I try to print on a larger sheet.
I suspect I'll have to dampen them again, Flatten them with my baren to iron out the wrinkles and try a longer and heavier weighting to flatten them until they are fully dry.
But of the 3 big backgound sheets I prepped I got 2 acceptable versions.

Poppy 2

2010-07-22T16:59:00.000-07:00

Well, salvage time. Mom's birthday and I didn't send flowers. (I didn't forget, she was in Norway! Cruising her way around the fjords).
This was the first pull off of Big Blue; it printed very spotty, the red was all wrong and the green dried on the plate and didn't print onto the dry paper.
So, watercolor to the rescue.
Daniel Smith artist color and some pure pigment brushed into the petals to get that vibrant red I wanted. Lots of greens mixed both on the paper and palette.
It's a little overworked and the drawing's a bit off. But it's way better than it was before. Hope I can get it dry and in the mail before the ship returns to port.

Poppies

2010-07-19T23:25:00.000-07:00

POPPY, detail, monotype print 10" X 12" (ghost)

I finally decided it was time to stop putting it off and break in Big Blue--my 30 year-old, homemade etching press. I have over the last few weeks picked up a couple of plexiglass sheets from the hardware store; some sample bottles of Akua Color monoprint/water-based inks/one inexpensive brayer and dug around my cupboards for some stray printmaking papers.

I have lots of flowers blooming in the garden beds so a quick sketch on a sheet of paper and I covered the drawing with the sheet of plexiglass and using mostly brushes, painted the colors on the plate. It happened in stages: first the red petals; then the black flag of the center and some of the green buds/seedpods/then back in again with more color here or there, finishing with tracing my drawing in black ink with a brush on the plate.

I ran the plate each time face up on the bed of the press, laying down the paper on top; covering it with blankets and running it through the rollers. I had three sheets. Rives BFK Dry; Rives LW dry; rives LW damp. The last two sheets are ghost prints--printed after most of the ink was taken up by the first sheet.

Akua color is supposed to work better on dry paper but I got uneven coverage and very splotchy color instead. My best print is the third run on damp paper. The colors are too soft and faded--this should be a vermillion poppy that should stand out from 100yds instead of being so soft/muted. I will probably have to play with papers and pressure/blankets to get the right pressure.

I wanted a painterly approach. But I'd have ended up with something more lively and with more vibrant color if I had just stuck to watercolor and painted it. It will take me a while to get a hang of these new colors--they're honey-like in consistency--and didn't like to be brushed onto plexi.

Top to bottom: 1st Impression (dry paper); ghost print on damp paper;ghost print on dry paper.

So while I'm not really happy with how these turned out (I'll probably overpaint them in watercolor to see if I can salvage anything) but I'm really happy to have used the press, broken the ice and gotten some studio time in.

Jajim--a woodblock/collage work in progress

2010-07-09T20:39:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm back at work on another "textile" project prompted by a lovely, large Persian weaving I saw in a gallery last year. As I alluded to in my previous post, I am working off a long thin board to print a 4" X 24" image. This is an experiment as the idea is to use these long narrow strips to constitute a larger print by attaching them side by side to make a larger piece. The idea for this comes from a common practice among tribal weavers throughout much of Persia and the East where the frequent migrations required small, narrow, easily portable looms. Working on the ground, horizontally, the width of the piece generated was often only the width of warp strands that could be picked up by the weaver with one hand as she moved the shuttle across and was often measured in finger breadths. The length of the warps was not limited however so long strips would be woven, then cut into lengths and sewn together to make covers, room dividers, carpets, horse blankets etc.
The different tribes and regions led to very different looks; some are monochrome, some have multicolored stripes decorated by alternating the color of the warps to add talismanic symbols and decorations.

I chose a deliberately sober palate of alternating black and white stripes accented by thin red banding--this is very similar to a stunning antique piece I found here: http://www.warpandweft.com/antique-rugs/flatweaves/265/?page=1

What I like so much about these is as they were woven in long strips, during the course of weaving the subtle differences in how tightly packed were the wefts--the horizontal strands--that the actual width varies slightly and rather randomly. When sewn side-by-side this irregularity leads to a wonderful, chaotic rhythm of the alternating bands that I find both beautiful and evocative.

I am not the only one. Here's a painting, "Cite'", by Elsworth Kelly from 1951 and painted on multiple blocks of wood--probably not influenced by Kurdish flatweaves but still the focus and interest and jazzy rhythm of the results are similar.

Like most of my experiments the results have been mixed. These were quickly printed on machine-made paper to try out the idea--I've subsequently printed more onto good paper but I've noticed from the trials that the nature of printing off one block--a template-- means that wonderful variability gets lost as each of my images/portions is the same. I've alleviated it a bit by inverting the central image but I can see the difference.

I still need to try and get some more texture and richness to the white/pale yellow stripes and when I print my background colors I'll try too to get some more depth and shadow to add visual interest and complexity/depth. I'm also planning on trying to go to 5 or seven strips to see how it works as they get bigger.

Teen Ninja

2010-06-19T10:53:00.001-07:00

Teen Ninja
Sumi on Shin Torinoko
Moku Hanga woodblock

My Pre-teen son, Alex; realizing that there might be money to be made!?! Asked if he could make a print (with hopes of eventual sales of prints next to the lemonade stand?).

This is what he produced. He followed my advice to keep his design simple and easy to carve and he did a pretty good job with the U and V gouges. We printed up a few on some Shin torinoko to see how they'd come out and here it is. I really like it.

I suggested a midnight blue background and red eyes but I think he's moved on....he's looking up rockets and stink bombs on the internet...
I better go hide the matches.

New Directions

2010-05-19T21:31:00.000-07:00

I couldn't resist trying a little test. After my last Tiger print, I wanted to try something a little bigger--but there are limitations both in wood size (unless I get plywood) and paper size (the Japanese paper size I use is pricey and since I'm printing damp, difficult to physically maneuver as it gets bigger). SO I wanted to try a LITTLE, big print. I'm working off another textile idea and it will gradually make sense as I carve and print more.

Here's the first block that I finished carving this am. It's a 24" x 6" plank of Beech. It has a lovely, very pronounced vertical grain pattern and despite what the lumber dealer said, it's not so great for woodblock. It carves decently enough across the grain but I have a hard time carving with the grain and keeping my cuts straight.
This will be a print made up primarily of rectangles so it shouldn't matter other than it is going to take more time to carve/clear than I wanted to spend on an experiment.

Here's a close up just after carving the kento (corner registration) and here's the block upright, in what will be the eventual orientation of the print. Although I'm calling this a keyblock, about half of the lines carved will come off once I've used this as a template for the color blocks yet to come. I'm working the next four days so I'm not sure when I will be able to get back into the studio.

The Infinite Possibilities

2010-05-10T20:56:00.000-07:00

Clockwise from bottom L; Cherry, birch, mahogany, Beech, maple (center).

There is something mysterious and provocative about a blank, smooth block of wood.
I've had long dry spells, standing in a studio blankly staring at a blank canvas. But unlike a white canvas or sheet of watercolor paper, whose stark white surfaces seem only to emphasize all the works I'll never produce, a WOOD surface invites ideas and seems to prompt whatever muses are out there to shuffle on over for a visit to whisper ideas or remind me of old sketches and untried directions that might be just perfect with this new block. I'll pull out my old sketchbooks and manila folders of doodles and jotted half thoughts and look at the blocks and usually something will emerge. There is something deep and provocative about a new block of wood that prods me forward when I'm stuck and can't figure out what to do next.

Today I paid a visit to the local lumberyard--a huge warehouse of mostly fiberboard and plywoods but there is a whole section devoted to local and exotic woods. The staple woods of the local cabinetmakers, luthiers, boat and house builders are all there and I can usually find the odd plank that speaks to me. I went looking to see if I could find a nice piece of close-grained cherry but the stuff they had was too knotty. But the local dealer suggested I try out a piece of beech--"the furniture guys usually buy me out, it should carve nice" he said. And sure enough there was a handsome board 10ft long and 8" wide. This will do. I had him cut two two-foot lengths off so I could get it all in the car and drove home.

I spent the next few hours sanding smooth one of the 2' lengths. I have a small orbital sander but I did this one by hand, with a sanding block and gradually finer and finer sheets of sandpaper. The board got smoother and smoother, and finally fairly glassy when I got to the 600grit sandpaper. By now I'm covered in fine sawdust, small clouds of yellow flour fall from me every time I move. My hands go over and over the smooth surface. I'm thinking and looking and ideas start coming to me.

It must have something to do with the warmth of the wood. Maybe it has something to do with the absolute uniqueness of each and every piece. The grain, the color, the knots and veins, the length and width are always different; the odd scar or burl that meant stress to the tree and means harder wood to the blade that will cut it. I suppose it might be different if I had an assistant or dealer prepare/procure standard size blocks or if I always used plywood sheets. But I won't go that route; not only am I not successful enough to warrant/merit/afford such a service but I'm still enjoying the dialog with the wood. I'm still learning with every print, every block and the process is as important to me as the finished works.

Scooter Kiss Again

2010-05-08T16:16:00.000-07:00

I'm finally back in the studio trying to catch up on some unfinished printing. This week a revisit to a print I did in early 2009 in black and white; tipped in watercolor for a wedding gift; decided to carve color blocks and printed a few proofs and then got paper all cut and ready but never got around to printing. The multicolor background is printed in two to three passes mixing rice paste and water to one end of the block, color to the other end and blending where they overlap before printing. In the rainbow example yellow was brushed out first bottom to top 1/3. Next blue from the top down and lastly a red orange strip at the bottom.
The printing was a bit sloppy. I was just printing 25 or so and registration was always a tad off and as I would get things adjusted I'd run out of prints. But I got a good batch done; about half are decent and half give-aways (a bit off-register or a splotch of color in the wrong spot). Mostly I'm trying to finish some unfinished projects before I start on anything new. I'm still mulling over the next work. One of the problems of having to work a real job is now that my artistic production has fallen way off I have new ideas and challenges coming in faster than I can realize the old ones that I never started and I can't decide whether to tackle the "good idea" projects I never initiated or one of my fresher, new ideas that are starting to go in a new direction.
So, I solved that dilemma by just pulling out some old blocks and printing away. Basically just procrastinating but thinking all the while about what's going to be next.

Scooter Kiss
Polychrome woodblock print (moku hanga)
5" X 8" paper size/3.5"X 5.5" image size

The Blue Press

2010-05-01T21:48:00.000-07:00

Well, not sure yet really what I'm going to do with this thing but this afternoon I finally got it all put together.

I did some etching and monoprints in college and again later in a few workshops and although I could spend the rest of my life working in and learning moku hanga (hand printed, water-based, woodblock prints) I miss every now and again the plate tone and scratchiness that is so inherent in those other processes and the speed with which an idea can be worked out in monotype. I need a fast and quickly rewarding alternative to the very slow process of carving and printing woodblocks. I've been looking on craigslist and Ebay for about 2 years for a used table press...I wanted something bigger than I usually work in moku hanga but not so big as to cost a fortune. I was hoping for something that would handle a full 22" X 30" sheet of paper . Several came and went. One as I was driving to Monterey to look was sold in the 1hr it took me to get there. One was in San Francisco but the owner decided in the end she really didn't want to sell it to a man. So one morning this showed up on craigslist; one 30 year-old, home-made, 33" X 44" etching press-- and it was in Pacifica, CA (about an hour away on the coast) and still $300 under the amount I had inwardly agreed to budget (squander) under the category, "Tools I really don't deserve/need/or have enough money to buy". I wrote to ask if it was still available and seconds later the owner answered amusedly as he had just posted it 30 minutes earlier! Turns out he was a woodblock printer who was now in his late 60's and had just finished re-printing a suite of prints for his kids before putting away the blocks and selling the press for good. I drove up left a deposit and agreed to come back later that week with a van, a helper, a socket wrench and the rest of the money.

This was in NOVEMBER, just a few days shy of Thanksgiving. I did go up the following week with my friend and always energetic colleague K. We dismantled it; wrestled it all including the 200-300lb+ press bed in the back of his van. We got it home, threw it all in the garage and I've been looking at the dismembered parts almost daily until now thinking,
"Now what?"

So NOW it's May 1. I have a few days off and I finally just decided to stop staring at it and just mount it up in our remodeled garage. For a home made press it was pretty well thought out. It all comes apart. It all goes back together again easily with the same size bolts. It's 30 years old and a little bit off-kilter but I greased it all up and it seems to be serviceable. The steel bed had been in storage for about 10yrs and doesn't appear warped. The previous user made another bed out of a solid-core door that is 33" X 72" that he used most of the time. That's still tucked away in the shed. It came with blankets and a plastic/acrylic pusher for woodcuts.

Hmmm. Now what. I have some ideas bouncing about in my head that I'm anxious to try out and will be looking for some free days to start experimenting but I better get cracking. I'm going to have to produce something to justify this.

Humidity surfing

2010-03-18T21:58:00.000-07:00

Well, as I expected, my registration problems were due to my keyblock spending too much time in my damp studio and getting too big. I brought the keyblock inside and let it dry out and when I started printing it was TOO SMALL...but this time I was ready so I slowly dampened the block and pulled throwaway proofs until the block gradually reached the right size and then I started printing away. A few are still a hair off register some on the short side (early prints) but once the block settled in it stayed stable long enough for me to print a good 50 prints. Not much to show yet. They're all still in a stack drying out and the finished print looks much like the earlier proof but once they're signed and editioned I'll post one. I've got enough to send out the 50 I need for the Baren Asian Zodiac exchange. I'll still have to print another batch of about 40 for all the friends and relatives to whom I usually send cards. Hopefully by April???

Registration woes

2010-03-09T15:35:00.000-08:00

Well, I managed to get into the studio last week and get four impressions done. Two of the orange ground color: one lighter, the other a bit deeper and with some accentuation of pigment around the borders. The last two impressions to get the red border deep and even. I did decide to get rid of the outer blue line around the red border and adjusted that yesterday.

But it's been raining off and on, and I've been moving between my heated house (dry) and my poorly insulated shed/studio (very damp).

Since I did some proofing I left my "tiger stripes" birch block in the shed and this morning, with the day off I got all set to finish printing.

Pulled the paper out of the freezer (it's damp too and will go moldy if it sits out); mixed my color; got up early and made some rice paste. Had a cup of coffee and went out to start. But once I pulled a bunch of throwaway pulls on crap paper I used my first proof on white paper.

Hmmm. Seems to be off register. Must be just a bad drop. So I pulled another.
NOPE. Something's way off. Could be the paper moisture's off; it gets bigger and smaller as it's dampness changes. So I pulled quickly two pulls off two different blocks; (if its the paper, they'll line up now; if it doesn't line up it means the block has expanded.) They don't line up.
That means it's the block. There's a quarter inch of difference between the keyblock and color block/orange carpet. They line up perfectly at the bottom but are off by 1/4 inch at the top. The small amount of misregistration from the sides is more fixable; I just need to adjust my paper placement and that will line up just fine but the end to end problem is going to be a problem.

The birch block has absorbed moisture and is now expanded from when I printed the hanshitas--the color templates the other blocks were carved from-- so it is now "bigger" than it needs to be. And since I'm printing it last onto paper that has already been printed with the two other blocks I can't really start over without throwing away 65 prints and quite a bit of work.

Now what? I'll try bringing in the keyblock into the dry house to dry out and see if it shrinks down to size/fit. It's a different wood than the other three blocks so they are expanding at different rates. If I find the right window I should be able to pull it off but if the block needs to be somewhere between totally dry (house humidity) and totally damp (outside fog) Finding the right level will be almost impossible.
Another reason why I need a dedicated work space although, if I didn't have to actually work, I'd have printed them all in one batch and they'd have lined up just fine.

Year of the Tiger

2010-02-21T12:23:00.000-08:00

Well, although they're not ready to go out yet...I still need to cut paper, print about 100 or so, number and sign, stuff, collate, address and send them out...But the BIG hurdle, getting a design figured out and boards cut and test printed, is done.
I've pulled some proofs to adjust the woodblocks and registration and test some colors and papers so I'm basically ready to go. Now I just need a few days of damp weather and off from work.

I celebrate the Asian New Year largely because, falling in February, it gives a chronic procrastinator like me another month or so to get yearly greeting cards out before I feel hopelessly and guiltily late. This year, I've had an idea of what I wanted to do for some time. In my days when I was gainfully employed, over paid and had few living expenses, I developed an interest in tribal carpets. I have a few small examples...nothing really valuable or museum quality--in part because they're just too expensive and in part because with two small children, two cats, and the occasional wool-eathing moth I never felt trustworthy as the custodian of anything really unique or valuable. But I've spent a lot of time visiting galleries of authentic tribal and village carpets and textiles and looking at examples online or in magazines and texts.

The amazing color and sparkle of hand-dyed wool with natural colors when done well is just remarkable. There are incredibly rich reds, and blues, yellows and violets that when applied with the right mordants by skillful dyers made for incredible colors and vibrancy...much of it lost when synthetic colors were introduced in the late 1800s. That combined with the immediacy and graphic power of some of good examples have always really appealed to me. And since I can't really own any of these true jewel-like carpets, the idea of reproducing one in woodcut has been bouncing around my brain for a while.

My thinking was that the natural pigments I use when printed on good paper have a similar sparkle and beauty that might be able to recall that of dyed wool and the quirky drawing and power of tribal carpets and textiles might be evoked with the sometimes crude marks inherent in (my) woodcuts.

So when YEAR of THE TIGER rolled around I recalled the wonderful Tiger Pelt Carpets produced in Tibet in the 1800's. Presumably originating from the priviliged use by important persons of real tiger pelts, the practice of reproducing them in wool carpets eventually developed. Some reproduce the entire tiger on a light color ground. Others recall instead the pattered stripes in realistic or very abstract ways.

Thomas Cole, who is a dealer of and writer about central asian carpets and textiles has written several articles for HALI magazine on Tibetan carpets and when I wrote him of my project and interest in finding an abstract example of such a carpet, he very generously sent me a wonderful image from one of his works. Here is a photo of the original carpet from his Hali article, "Tibetan Rugs--A Tribal Tradition" of issue 49, 1990 (republished on his website).
I thoroughly encourage you to visit his website (www.tcoletribalrugs.com) and read his articles.

As with most of my printed endeavors I have both succeeded and failed.
My version of this carpet came out reasonably well although it is so much less beautiful than the photo of the somewhat damaged original. My cherry plank that I used for the keyblock proved a little too brittle and many of the tiger stripe points broke off during clearing of the block. So some of the delicate curviness of the original stripes--many have one or two knots as an end flourish that didn't come out in my carved block--were lost in the translation to wood. Mostly, however, I didn't yet capture either the sparkly, irregular nature of the hand-dyed wool--for once I'm guilty of printing TOO evenly! And the wonderful abrash of the carpet (the horizontal lines that come from weaving with irregularly dyed wool whose color changes batch to batch and skein to skein) didn't come out. I'm still hoping in my next round of printing to evoke that better through more careless brushing out of the pigment and letting the brushstrokes show. My version is still a little too flat and "graphic novel-looking". I've printed on Gampi, E.Kozo, and white Masa and the best color so far has been on the E. Kozo.

YEAR of TIGER: Tiger Carpet, Tibet c. 1850's
Moku Hanga 4 3/4" X 11".
Cherry Keyblock: two alder blocks; one maple block; 4 colors.
AP of what should be an eventual edition of 100.

Infinite and Completely Irrational

2010-02-01T12:42:00.001-08:00

Something infinite and completely irrational. Pi.

The small Greek letter Pi is used to represent the mathematical constant, ever changing, derived from geometry of the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter. This ratio for any circle will always equal: 3.141592653589....and goes on forever without repeating. No pattern, just randomness as you divide it out. Supercomputers are still churning it out and have it figured out to millions of digits.
My kids have memorized it out as far as they can and go around chanting the number sing-song throughout the day. Beats gum-chewing.

This is my contribution to the Baren Forum exchange # 43. I was pulled in from the waiting list. While not strictly on topic--the theme was "typography"--it does include large hand-drawn/carved numbers and the Greek letter Pi prominently displayed and hand printed.

Then there's also the formula for calculating the area of a circle...in case you forgot.

I had wanted the numbers to be visible through the ink of the "Pi" and should have printed the numbers block a bit darker or last so it would have at least embossed the damp paper. Lots of overprinting to the "Pi" as it either was too pale and lacked oomph or subject power but as it gained it by going darker I lost the effect of the numbers marching through it. At least 4 impressions and it still isn't uniform or rich enough. But the biggest defect in my mind is that I wish I'd partially drawn in the next number in the sequence so that the illusion of it continuing off page was emphasized. I'd already printed some when I figured it out and it was too late to go back.

Pi = 3.1415.....∞
Woodblock print-moku hanga (water-based) 7.25" X 11"
Baren Exchange 43: Edition of 32; 10 various-colored Artist proofs (too many but I couldn't decide).
4 blocks; 5 colors; 8 impressions.

Math lesson

2010-01-18T21:45:00.000-08:00

Not sure why it grabbed their attention, but both my boys have become enamored with the number Pi where Pi = 3.141592653589793238......They're each working on memorizing it out as far as they can. I think Alex is up to thirty digits; Sami is at about 12 or so. They go about the house singing or chanting in turn sottovoce 3.14159265.....
For those who have forgotten, the small Greek letter π Pi is used to represent the irrational number mentioned above that is the ratio, derived from geometry, of a circle's circumference divided by its diameter. For any perfect circle, therefore, the ratio of the circumference divided by the diameter will always equal Pi. What is fascinating about this is that it is a number that goes on infinitely without repeating. (unlike 1/3 which remains .33333....forever, Pi has a nearly random sequence where all the digits are equally represented.) The solving of Pi into the millions of digits had to await the arrival of supercomputers but the problem of pi, of squaring a circle and many other mathematical proofs occupied thinkers and mathematicians from the time of the ancient civilizations until only very recently.
Not sure either why this particular diversion of theirs has also piqued my interest.
I can't memorize a new phone number anymore so pi beyond 3.14 is all I can manage but I can carve still a bit better than that so we'll count it out to at least 19 digits.
Here's the cherry block. The remains of my hanshita (paper guide) are still glued on waiting to be washed off but this will be the first of probably three blocks of my next print. I'm working a bit more loosely, this time in that I think I'll work with just 2-3 blocks and see what I can derive from them.
For those attentive readers who recall my "red shed" post, the rains have driven me from my poorly insulated and very damp workshed/studio to the kitchen table. Hope things dry out a bit so I can do some test printing.

First Day Home

2009-12-13T21:39:00.000-08:00

My neighbors and friends had a baby this week and he came home two days ago.
I was reminded of the day Sami came home--my wife had had a C-section so it took a few days before they could both leave the hospital together. But when the time came the car was driven close to the door, I helped my wife into the house and pulled the still sleeping newborn infant in his combi car seat/car carrier into the house and set him on the brick floor.
We had two cats in those days; Grillo, a lovely, black, yellow-eyed moron of a feline and Garbanzo, a shelter-rescue, tortoise-shell; cautious, watchful and a great huntress of snakes, hares, and gophers.
I set the baby on the floor and sort of kept bringing stuff into the house and on my next trip in this was the view I had of the three of them. (although in reality, the baby was well hidden in the bundle and not visible above the rim). The two cats, who had never been interested in ANYTHING I had ever brought into the house approached the carrier like it would explode. They crept up, tails twitching, ever so slowly up to the edge to peek/sniff inside. And when something moved, they bolted. Never again to show so much interest as that first moment. ( Though they would later happily keep the baby company whenever they could).
So, in honor of the neighbor's new baby boy, I dug out this little doodle I did in the days after that encounter. Another Steinlein I'm not, so if these don't look like real cats I'm sorry; but the gesture and spirit of the moment is there.
Something new and marvelous and very different has arrived and things won't ever be the same.
Congratulations to Lisa and Karl on the birth of their new son. And thank you Sami and Alexander (and a nod to the cats who are gone) for always providing me with inspiration, content, and great joy.

First Day Home, 6" X 8" Woodblock print. One maple keyblock; Sumi on Rives lightweight paper.

Moka Genie

2009-11-04T13:56:00.000-08:00

My minor obsession with coffee has a lot to do with having spent the last 10 years living in Italy. Being but a thinly-veiled socialist society they long ago realized that certain staples; gas, bread, chianti, and espresso prices need to be artificially controlled to maintain social order. So, in almost all the bars in Tuscany an espresso will cost .90 cents (euro) as long as you drink it standing up at the bar. (Much more if you sit down at a table where a different "tourist" price list kicks in.)
So while I was living there, I'd drop the kids off at school and head to the bar on the corner, Bar Petrarca, just outside Porta Romana in Florence and have my morning cappuccino and a brioche. Then again, picking them up at 4pm stop in at the Bar Il Poggio for an espresso. I could have made coffee at home, but the ritual of standing at the bar, chatting with the barista and quickly reading the newspaper coupled with a 15 minute break from the house chores and farmwork was important.
So, Imagine my horror to find on my yearly return to the US that a cappuccino costs $3.00-$3.50 here and an espresso--often badly made and served in a paper cup the size of a medium popcorn at the theater often $2. So, while I loved taking coffee socially in Italy, I retreated to the kitchen and the stovetop moka or french press to make coffee that I could afford and brood about the vagaries of fate.
Fortunately, Santa Cruz has some really good coffee bars and while they are still expensive at least the quality is good. And on one foggy morning as I stopped in to the local coffee place and stared at my little espresso cup with the little spoon and sugar cube wondering about my life and life's choices out of the crema and steam rose this little genie who asked me about the ebbs and tides of my life and then (this being California and a surf capital) about the current surf conditions. Then after a bit of hemming and hawing, chatting about the weather and local politics he finally got to the point and asked what I wanted out of life and said he would grant me a wish. When I asked how come all the other genies I'd ever heard about usually offered at least three wishes he shrugged his shoulders, twisted the hairs of his yellow eyebrows and said, "Hey, I'm the espresso genie" "With me there's just one strong, dense, chocolatey, concentrated wish". Then, with a sly grin he said, "If you wanted three wishes you should have gone with the double-shot, extra-tall soy, non-fat pumpkin latte."
And then, after a pause, "So", he went on, "what's it going to be?....."

"The espresso genie grants just ONE wish..."
3.5"x"9.5" Japanese polychrome wood block print
9 blocks, 13 colors, printed on Kizuki Hanga 135g/m2 Japanese Hosho paper.
open edition/40 printed to date.

Continental Drift and coffee bars.

2009-11-02T19:02:00.000-08:00

Wow. It's been five months since my last post. I meant to write, really I did but the the tectonic plate of economic upheaval collided with the quiet but unstable plate of marital politics to force me first off the unproductive and certainly nonprofitable farm/garden and then push me out of the studio and back into the world of American health care. When the tremors stopped and all was quiet I realized what was painfully obvious. I had to go back to work.
And since as I said in my job interview, It was just 8 years since I was working in the emergency room but almost 30 since I last waited tables it was probably better that I go back to sewing up lacerations and saving lives instead of bartending or serving food again. So I'm no longer an "ex-ER physician" but a part-time physician in a local, busy urgent care. It's been stressful going back and I've spent much of the last five months reviewing books, journals, current antibiotic usage and resistance patterns, ECG reviews, etc., etc. so that I'm current and up to speed at work. So, I'm back from Italy; the kids are in school again in Santa Cruz, I'm working again 2-3 shifts a week; reading and studying in my free time and just now beginning to drift back to the studio and to some printmaking. But as I started planning my next print, a narrow long format of 3 X 9 inches, my ambivalence about going back to work was pretty clear.
Here's the first idea:
I've been spattered with all sorts of body fluids during my past life as an ER physician and putting on the shirt and tie again after so many years brought that back. I figured the long format would be perfect for the necktie and that the colorful tie would be fun to print over the white shirt. The working title was "stain". But Alexander, looking over my shoulder was very clear, "Dad, that's the most boring thing you've ever done....why don't you do something interesting! No one would ever buy that!" So, I kept on sketching. (although I still think it was a good idea).
And lots of these kept popping up...

There were all sorts of bound and wrapped bundles in different shapes and sizes. Just looking at them all made me depressed.

So I went back to the sketchbook and while at Coffeetopia, a local coffee/espresso bar I doodled this:

And then this....and this:

Keep an eye out for the little gremlin in the bottom as he's about to become the main attraction.
I liked where this was going and tomorrow I'll post the final preliminary sketch and the keyblock.

Blue Balloon-final version

2009-05-31T17:19:00.000-07:00

It seems like it must have been a sad birthday party.

After lots of fits and starts, or in this case wetting, then drying, then re-wetting my cut paper, I finally got into the studio to finish the final version of the nude print, "Balloon". It ended up as an edition varie as I never really settled on a background color and most have a cobalt violet ground, reprinted with a light glaze of quinacradone pink/indanthanthrone blue with a dark blue keyblock.

I'm happy to be done with it as it was meant to be a quick print based on a loose drawing and it has just dragged on and on. I'm envious of all you organized types that manage to work efficiently and get work done on schedule. I can't figure out where the time goes.

Balloon, Japanese Moku Hanga print, edition varie of 30 with several A/Ps with slightly different background tonalities.

Wood fired Pizza

2009-05-17T13:16:00.000-07:00

I promised all who were following my slow, intermittent mud/cob/adobe oven posts that I would post a photo once the oven was done and we made the first pizza.

Well, the oven isn't technically done; we did add a 2 1/2 inch layer of mud/woodshaving/sawdust insulation but it would really benefit from another layer of insulation and a finish plastering of mud/sand to help make it more weather resistant.

BUT, the working part; the clay shell and 1st layer of insulation is all you need to bake and like the impatient child that I am (and my kids were asking, when are you going to make pizza, Dad?") we lit up the fire.

I built a small starter fire and kept it going for 2 hours adding sticks of hardwood 3-4 times during that span. I made a sourdough dough the day before and used the leftover dough to make 3 10" pizzas. The oven worked great. The pizzas cooked in about 2-3 minutes and the bread cooked in 25 minutes (instead of the hour I usually need in my conventional oven at 450degrees F.) and the only problem was that my dough was too "sourdough" for a real Pizza margherita. Next time I'll mix up a bona fide pizza dough and make them a little thinner.