Hefty

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.

Doodles

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

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.

Where do balloons come from?

It's funny that since I started doing woodblock prints, many of the images I've done were mined from old sketchbooks. Lots of drawings, still lives, doodles and life drawings that I kept or always liked have been reemerging as subjects for my prints.

When I was in Italy, I opened an old moving box that was full of art supplies and had three or four old sketchbooks. In one of them as I sat leafing through the pages I found a page cut out from an older sketchbook that I must have pulled out when I packed.

While they say the olfactory sense is our most primitive link to memory I find these scribbles and sketches to be amazing memory triggers that can pull me back from over 30 years in this instance to a dusty studio in Gainesville, Florida and a life drawing class that I frequented in what seems must have been a previous life.

I still remember the model. She showed up late to the class and was dressed in a leopard skin leotard that was several sizes too small. She had boots and a feather boa/scarf and a big leather belt. This is the drawing I did of her. I remember as she walked around during a break that she hated it. I had added probably 20 lbs. to her frame and she didn't appreciate it and wanted to know why I had made her look so fat. I don't remember what I said but I do remember thinking that as badly dressed as she was when she came in I thought she was beautiful naked. I know I didn't say that though; I was as shy then as I was circumspect.

But that image of her walking in persists and in the cut out drawing I preserved there's a funny shape to the upper right. But when I started pulling it out and making copies and putting a border around the drawing it became a balloon. In case there was any doubt I also wrote in cursive, "Balloon".

In my next post I'll show how "balloon" becomes a print.