parasites

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?

Jajim-trials: Adding Blues

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.

The Blue Press

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.