Strunk and White in Blue

In High School, The Elements of Style by Strunk and White was a required text every year to assist us in learning to write in a concise and clear manner. I still use it, often subconciously, to edit letters, my children's homework essays and works I translate.
The chief concept of eliminating all the unnecessary wordage that doesn't contribute to the content is still sound.
Not everything written is poetry and often everyday communication is full of extra detail that contributes little other than bulk. I don't have any training in graphic art but I admire the work of others who have the gift to convey a complete and powerful thought or concept with a minimum of detail or line. If road signs and logos would be on the one end of the spectrum then the beautiful, concise draftmanship in the simple sketches of Rodin or Schiele or Matisse might be on the other end. (I'm partial to nudes).
This came to mind as I was printing, over and over again the copies of my Ox print.
Working light to dark, I printed the yellow plate first, the numbers in 2009 clearly legible the rest an odd assortment of circles and shapes.
Next, the red plate in a nice transparant, clear pigment. This overlapped the yellow a bit making a nice orange and filling in what would become the red yoke.
But before I printed the proofs of the blue block, I pulled a few copies on clean paper to see if the ink was printing clearly and I had to pause.

This block, printed all by itself, was already complete.

Without the keyblock and without the two other colors everything I wanted to include was already here: the bull, the strong contrast of horns against sky, the year. While I did lose the idea of the Italian Chianina breed and the "details" of the chain of the nose ring or the shadows of the neck, and the nice contrast the black nose and horns made against the white body, this was all "extra detail" that added bulk but not much content to what I had hoped to produce.
Hmmmm.
The nagging voice in my head reminds me that I could not have produced this blue block in isolation. I don't have that economic, bold skill in composition and draftmanship that I admire so much in the work of others. I can get there, often laboriously (rather than effortlessly) by producing in bulk, and then through the editing process, working to eliminate what is nonessential. In times like these, I need the help of a good, disinterested editor who with a red pen can slash through the irrelevant or needlessly showy, or just plain badly done. Or I need just the clarity to do it alone.
But, I went ahead and printed the blue block over the others. And then on top went the keyblock in sumi ink mixed with a sepia tube watercolor. It was only partly because I didn't want to waste all that paper already cut and printed to start over. The other reason was I wasn't really able (willing?) to discard the original idea and all the work I did to get there.
So the finished, four-block, four-color image I spent a month working is the one that will go out in the mail next week.

I kept a few of the blue ones. One to file in the small folder I keep of the works I consider successful and the other to post on the corkboard over my workbench in my studio as a visual reminder and reprimand of what I want to accomplish and what I'll have to do to get there.

La Chianina

One of the most ancient breeds of cattle still alive is the Chianina. It had been depicted on Roman sarcophagi and ancient painted scrolls from antiquity. It is an enormous beast, easily surpassing 2200lbs live weight and was the beast of burden of choice for the ancient Romans as well as for the prudent contadini (peasants) for its rustic and thrifty nature. It is a beautiful pure white color with black mucous membranes and horns that are black when young and lighten on ageing.
When the tractor began to replace animal traction in the 1950's it survived due to it's popularity as a source of meat and the Florentine beefsteak still eaten in trattoria all over Italy usually comes from this breed raised in the region of Maremma in southern Tuscany.
It has been imported all over the world and in the USA, in the Northeast where small pockets of stubborn small farmers keep working the land via animal power the Chianina can also be found harnessed to the plow and cart.


2009 is the Year of the Ox according to the Chinese Zodiac and out of respect for the thousands of years that this beast has worked the fields of Italy and abroad he/she is the subject of my annual, late-to-go-out greeting cards.

Anyone interested in Animal traction in the modern age should check out Ruralheritage.com or The Small Farmers Journal for information on the economics and ethics of small farming with draft animals.


Year of the Ox
Japanese woodblock print in four colors.

object desire

Inspired loosely by Swiss object posters of the 50's and 60's and more specifically by an Industrial (tractor?) compression coil I saw in a Florence antique shop sitting in a storefront window. It was dramatically illuminated by a theatrical spotlight. Like many objects designed with a purpose it had an inherent beauty in it's form that was increased by the patina its yellow paint had taken on over 50 years or so.
The shop was closed and when I went back again a few days later to enquire about the price ( I didn't really have the money so I went slowly), it was gone. As I am an avid collector of beautiful, but essentially useless things, I was crushed.
So 6 months later, I doodled a spiral, which became a coil, and then a print.
The original was so much more beautiful........

This woodblock print was carved on 6 blocks: 5 poplar and 1 redwood and printed on various Japanese Hosho papers (This Artist Proof was on 100% Gampi) using waterbased ink and hand printed using a Murasaki baren. The dimensions are 10"X15".

more worms

Here are some more proofs from my early morning session before Thanksgiving.

The first is on torinoko cream and has a brown impression over green for the backround.
The second is on gampi and has a darker brown over green.
The third is one of the early proofs before the brown on bond paper that I kept as a reference.
The last was black and white, again on torinoko cream.

All the colors are a bit on the drab side. I think the farmer/scientist in me wants them to be somewhat naturalistic. I did one in a high key pink but it was nasty and I printed over it pretty quickly to destroy any traces.

They used to put oysters in the stuffing.......

Racing to finish printing at least the color proofs before we go to visit family for Thanksgiving and got this done this morning. I'm pretty happy with the colors although I printed a few in black and white and a few with a more brown background. I did a bunch of versions on all sorts of leftover Japanese papers and a few pieces of watercolor paper. Most printed well without too much trouble and no more blotchyness!

They used to put oysters in the stuffing. Maybe........



Happy Thanksgiving!
Hopefully we all have what to be grateful for.
--Andrew S.

Not just another segmented worm

An acquaintance of mine suggested I'd sell more work if I stopped drawing all these naked people and did some baby animals or something. Since, so far I've never sold anything, I couldn't really test this hypothesis, so rather than argue I went ahead and sketched, carved and just finished printing the keyblock proof on a little piece that shamelessly is pandering to that market. I haven't decided yet if I'll carve the color blocks or just leave it black and white. Nor can I decide whether to print it in a special limited edition to artificially inflate it's value or leave it open, to better anticipate possible future demand. My eight-year-old son, said, "Dad, I think that's the best drawing you've ever done." But, he likes worms.

This is the real hero of the organic farm and garden. Given the right environment the various species of earthworms will aerate the soil, improve soil texture, fertilize and help remineralize the soil, improve both drainage and water-holding capacity providing drought resistance and preventing runoff. Pictured above would be be Lumbricus terrestris or the nightcrawler. He/She (a true hermaphrodite, the earthworm contains both male and female sex organs) emerges at night or during rains and pulls surface debris (leaf litter, compost, straw, etc.) into their vertical tunnels that can penetrate the soils to 8 ft. Makes decent bait if you're into fishing and is sure to gross out half of any audience by it's size, color and movement. They lay 70-80 small, translucent lemon shaped egg cocoons each year each which will hatch into minuscule baby worms.
Your compost pile however would be home to Eisenia foetida or the redworm. She's red to red-brown and thinner and shorter. These worms tend to live above ground in leaf litter, compost piles or manure heaps breaking down the debris to worm castings, a mixture of soil, carbohydrate slime, and digested nutrients. Very prolific, a cubic yard (3' X3'X3') can hold up to 100.000 worms. These are the cuties used by worm farms for fishing bait or to provide live worms to those who want to start vermiculture or worm-composting bins in their yard or under the kitchen sink. They arrive in those little cardboard boxes that chinese food comes in. I always found that amusing.
The enemies to the earthworm aren't limited to the foraging robin, crow, toad or hedgehog. Damage on the organic farm comes from tillage. The plowing, ripping or rototilling of the surface soils to prepare the fields for planting are very harmful as the steel blades chop up the worms and can drastically reduce their numbers. On conventional farms the real damage however is from both deep tillage-often to depths of a meter and the use of harsh chemical pesticides and herbicides that kill them or deprive them of food or cover.
Earthworm numbers are considered a good barometer for soil health in the organic farming community. In our organic farm in Italy, the organic fields are full of worms; each shovelfull will reveal 2-3 of the big ones and lots of little ones. A layer of leaves or compost mulch will disappear over two to three weeks as the worms pull the debris down into their burrows. In contrast, our bottom fields, farmed conventionally by another farmer (with erbicides and pesticides until very recently and deep plowed every summer) had none when I went looking several years ago. Shovel in hand I walked over the fields and turned up just heavy clay with the occasional antpile or cricket uncovered.

This woodblock print was printed from a small board of hard maple. It measures 4 1/2" X 9" and is the keyblock for what will hopefully become a color print if I can manage to carve the color blocks and figure out how to mix just the right shade of "Nightcrawler Pink" from my limited palette of watercolor colors.

Blu Vase Variations

I went to a Morandi exhibit years ago in Italy and was quite enthralled by the beauty and simplicity of his paintings. I went home and found a suitable vase from my Mother-in-law's cupboard and did this watercolor sketch. The composition is quite staid and rather uninteresting.....another Morandi I am not...but there was a liveliness to the watercolor handling that was reasonably successful and gave this little piece some life.

Like so many other things it sat on my desk and when we moved to Santa Cruz, I thought it would make a good printmaking exercise in woodcut and Moku Hanga. I hoped it would let me work on waterbased printing, especially Bokashi, the graded color for which good Japanese prints are so rightly associated. The blocks were carved in early July but my first attempt at printing was a disappointment and I put it aside. Last week, I carved another block (the one with the diamond print on the tablecloth) and had another go at printing.

This work is small; the image size is roughly 3.5" X 5" and was printed from 6 basswood plywood blocks but was printed and overprinted so has probably closer to 9-10 impressions in several different color tonalities. Hansa Yellow first as a overall plate color, then a pale Prussian blue for the vase, printed four times with different blocks to get the shading and then a Quinacradine Rose/Dalamar Yellow for the backround. A few were printed over a cobalt violet backround printed first.
I'm still not too happy with the outcome although the prints are better this time around. The combination of a stiff composition and too crude printing lost the delicacy that was in the sketch. I think the vase is still a bit too pale and I think I was printing a bit too wet as there is some tortoise-shell mottling in the blue that I didn't intend. And the colors aren't quite right. So I'll go back to the printing bench again and try to give a bit more volume and presence to the vase with some different blues and print a bit drier.