Apostrophetic

 This is my second attempt at a white-line or Provincetown print.  You can just make out the thin white halo around the color areas that are the hallmark of the American variant of tradional moku hanga.

A simple drawing of commas and apostrophes, black shapes on white paper, caught my eye and I played with it, changing the composition.
I liked it enough to draw it a few more times.
Then enough to trace one of those drawings onto a piece of shina, and cut out, with a V-gouge, the outline of my fat apostrophes, heavy and irregularly drawn.

Today I went to the studio and made a couple of color proofs.
Pink, Blue, Violet, Black, Mica, Sumi.

I'm not sure which I like best. The original idea was to make the forms black, on a white chalk ground on tan paper but I didn't print any like that.  But I also thought about the colors of traditional printed text: blue, black, red, blue-black and ended up working with that palette.

You may not notice but the apostrophes get a little bigger as they move to the bottom row and you definitely can't see the effect of the mica powder on the background, which makes the lighter center section slightly opaque and iridescent.


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Seedling

There are some plants, pumpkins and squashes, for example, that grow faster at night,  in the hours just before dawn.
And there are some seeds, that without a period of darkness and an absence of light, won't germinate at all.

It is winter and the Solstice has just passed. The shortest day is now history but the nights are still long and cold and I awake to darkness and frost and brittle grass. The winter wheat the neighbors planted went in in November and will put roots down into the cold earth--as they're more hardy in the cold than the other seeds--and will gain a head start that will mean a good crop and grain for bread and pasta in a June and July that are still a distant dream.
Fava beans and peas are also already in the ground and have sprouted but just sit there,  with leaves limp and sad in the cold and damp as they will patiently wait for lengthening days and warmer temperatures to jump up and climb and unfurl leaves and tendrils.

I'm a gardener and therefore an optimist by nature.  But I'm frightened by the wind and chatter now.
Things are changing that the wise farmers didn't see coming.
There are seeds that have been planted for hundreds of years that are now gone, "disappeared" by companies that bought seed houses and catalogs and made them vanish or had them re-patented so they can no longer be saved and sown by the frugal or good farmer.
And they don't tell us but the water is dirtier than it's supposed to be and the air has particles in it that are too small to be measured easily and so are declared "well-below measurable limits".  So even my "organic" garden isn't. No more than anything alive is now free of radioactive isotopes from the atomic tests, bombs and nuclear disasters.
 And now the chemical and oil and pharmaceutical and pesticide and seed and food companies all become one and soon it will be illegal (maybe I'm paranoid) to save seed, or plant "unapproved" varieties, or grow vegetables on unreported plots--and all in the name of "food security" or to fight "bioterrorism".
I watch the news and I read the papers but for the first time that I can remember,  the people in charge want MORE oil exploration and pipelines,  more mining and more ocean drilling but fewer environmental protections for the air and water or labor regulations that guarantee worker and public safety.  They want no regulations to hamper business models that can be profitable only if they can shift the cost of clean up and waste removal to a distant public till and that are instead now encouraged to plunder and multiply while laws are passed that protect them, rather than us,  from liability for environmental damage or pollution.

I have never been a political activist but now I have no choice. I have to join the fight to keep them from poisoning the wells, darkening the skies and making a lifeless, plastic gel of what was once the water of life or stealing the birthright of future generations, the germplasm of all the crops that have ever been sown in soil worked by honest men and women. So I am attending meetings and writing letters and supporting those that are still working to conserve and protect but I will also go back to my little plot of soil.

So I will plant a garden this spring and record in a diary the day the first anemonies flower or the grape buds swell, the day of the first asparagus on the table and the first and last of the English peas.  I will plant some of the old varieties and grow food that the peasants knew and flowers that have different names in different lands. Some we eat, some I draw. As farmers have done for longer than memories can recall, we eat the stunted and challenged plants. For the best plants, strong and defiant, are allowed to set seed are not eaten but saved. They are saved for next year's seed.  We select out the best, the ones that thrived in my soil and today's climate to plant next year and for the year after that, and the one after that, and so on, or so we can hope.
It is dark outside but not yet night.
I wonder what will come up in the garden this year and what will be there to harvest.

Notes; "Seedling" is a moku hanga, watercolor woodblock print. 8.25" x 11.7" and was printed from 4 blocks with 8 separate color impressions on handmade Japanese paper (Shin Hosho). e.v. 10 copies.




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Arrow(s)

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.