Shunga?

This is the tentative start of a small project. This, the first print, is based on yet another scribble from my sketchbook and my recurring interest in how our mind and eye turn random or unconnected shapes into recognizable forms.

The original scrawl of two wavy lines drawn as positive and negative reciprocal shapes-somehow became became male and female--and the reworked lines and resulting shapes then became figures. I drew these over and over--some more literal, others even more nuanced and I've played with how abstract I can go and still have this read (almost) as a depiction of an erotic act.

The two plates that printed together make the print at the top.

 There are others coming, but they're not subtle and I hope to be able to make a small series of prints-
playing with the Eastern/Western techniques of moku hanga and etching while referencing the history of erotic images from the Ukiyo-e tradition.
My plan is to combine the techniques of soft-ground etching for the drawn lines and fill in color areas using wood blocks and bokashi gradations although I may try doing the same image (or a variant) using the different techniques. I'll start with a couple and see if I can make something interesting,
but the eventual goal is to put together a group of 10-12 images for a small portfolio or artist book.

More naked (caution--drawings of naked women by REAL artists)

I cut a third block and printed a few copies for a color version of my nude woodblock print.
This is on a thin, home-sized kozo washi 40g/m2 and now mounted onto thicker paper so it lies flat.
I'll probably print a few more to have a small edition (e.v.) on good washi in this color version.

It's no longer abstract so harder to read as or mistake for a flower or tree.
I like to think I'm channeling Schiele more than Courbet but either way I'm 100-150 years too late and both did a better job with the subject.

Schiele's female nude with red stockings (1914)

Courbet's "origin of the universe" 1866

Naked

"mons Veneris", A/P. 2016;  watercolor wood block print (moku hanga).
Printed from 2 blocks on Magnani etching paper for the Baren Forum's 68th print exchange.

I scribbled this in the margin of a notebook with a felt-tip pen. But it could just as easily been sand or clay, or on a tile wall or the peeling paint of an old building.
Totem or magic? Symbol of desire or of power? Sex or the power of birth? But decidedly
NOT a metaphor of Art or Beauty nor an idealized form of the perfect body.
One squiggly and jagged line that becomes legs and pubis and vulva.
Nude as in naked, the person unclothed, without the personalities that wait in our closets to be put on mornings and we take off at night.

Elbows and pubic hair, callouses and wrinkles and surgical scars are all as worthy of my time as a vase of flowers, the view from my window,  or a bowl of fruit in the afternoon light.

Boxwood sandwich

I'm participating in the Baren Forum's next print exchange,  due May 1st.  The theme is "the nude" and the paper size is restricted to an 8"x8" square.
I've had a good idea all along what I was going to do, but haven't been able to get any chunks of work time in to make any progress.

I'll be doing a figurative piece, with mostly line work, and I'll need to be able to carve some thin lines.
For that I like cherry or maple...but the pieces I have of those woods were too big and I didn't want to cut them down to a smaller size.  So,  I pulled out the rest of the boxwood plank I've been saving.

But since it's pretty thin--7mm and will warp badly during water-based printing, I decided to laminate it to a piece of plywood to make a warp-resistent block that will allow for more detailed cutting.  In this case I used a piece of 3-ply Shina---you can only carve one side since it's so thin and I glued the side with the seam to the box so I'll be able to use the good side as a second plate.
The boxwood will be for the fine lines of my drawing and the Shina side will be used for a color beta ban impression (the water-based woodblock version of chine colle) that will flatten the paper to allow for cleaner printing while adding a base tone to the paper.

The box got scraped smooth with my metal scraper, and then finished with 1200 grit sandpaper.
Today I glued down my sketch and this weekend I'm hoping for a carving marathon....

Marble Dust

Ceres, carrara marble, unfinished sculpture, 2000

While it's not definite, I've been asked to help out at a local sculpture school for a few weeks to keep an eye on the students during their independent study time.   I'll be there to make sure they keep on their goggles, and don't work in a way that might risk injury and are holding and using the tools properly, and for that I'm still abundantly qualified. I don't know that I've written about it on my blog, but before I started cutting woodblocks,  I was carving stone.
I'm married to a geologist, and her field work takes us frequently to Liguria and the area in and around Massa and Carrara, where the marble has been quarried for thousands of years and where the stones came for the facade of the Duomo and the statues of Donatello and Michelangelo.

Since we'd often be up near the quarries during the weekends or after hours, I'd putter around while my wife was scouting for geologic clues to the formation of the Appenines, I'd try to find a piece of cast off marble that was big enough to sculpt, but small enough to lift. (They quarry out blocks the size of a small VW van, to be cut down in the city stone sawmills). The pieces that chip off or are lying around are scrap and while for safety reasons (there are no fences protecting the sheer drops of the quarry), no one is supposed to tresspass, no one will bother you for picking up scrap marble.

So in 1998 or so I started first with a rasp, shaping the occasional piece of stone, and then, later I actually rented a room in Querceta, near Pietra Santa and Massa Carrara and started actually learning how to carve marble with a hammer and a chisel.  I worked mostly with hand tools, but after a while I also acquired a pneumatic hammer and grinder as some of the basic roughing out can be done much faster with power tools, although they are very noisy and even more dusty.

We were commuting often those years so I'd spend a few months in Italy carving stone, then go back and work as a physician back in the US.  I did shift work in the ER and they were always short-staffed, so I never had to worry about having a job coming back after time away.

Commuting however is hard with stone. An unfinished sculpture is still really heavy and the tools are all steel and iron.  I never wanted to deal with shipping a container of stone to the US from here, nor did I have contacts in the US to buy Vermont or Colorado marble or stone to carve when I was home.
Eventually it was the hassle of trying to carve stone on two continents that led me to woodblock prints.   A class in Santa Cruz, CA. in 2005 allowed me to start carving wood, instead of stone and I've been printing ever since.
But I miss the stone carving. It is probably one of the most fun things I've ever done. The tap, tap, tap of the hammer, the slow emerging from an ancient block of stone something that didn't exist before, the dust and the marble chips that would fall from my brow, hair or out of my nose the next day would always make me smile. (Marble is also pretty inert, and was not going to cause lung disease--which granite or other silica based rocks can do).

Even an ugly statue looks good in the garden.

So, I'm really glad that I came to mind when they were looking for someone with some carving experience with stone and stone tools to help out in the next few weeks.  I also think, since there are just a few students, that I'll also get a chance to work a bit on a new piece of stone after a few years of pause, and that has me dusting off my tools and looking for my safety glasses.  I can't wait.

Braiding wood, paper and hair.

Early Proof state--the image is about 7.5 x 10".

I'm working to try to get a new print done for this year's AIMPE Awagami's International Mini Print Competition 2015 for works on Japanese washi (paper) and the deadline is nearing (July 30th).  I also committed to the Baren forum's quarterly print exchange and that too is due July 30th. The paper sizes are different,  with the former a standard A4 (8.25 x 11.5") while the latter is a bigger 10 x 15"....but after playing with half a dozen designs I settled on one I've been working on off and on for a few years that I knew would work well with both formats.

It's based on a drawing I did a few year's ago when my wife still had waist length hair that she would wear in a tangled braid.  I did an etching similar to this also a few years back but was never happy with that.

The basic concept is simple and fairly formal...a woman's head and back with the picture plane divided by the dark braid....but the variations are endless....and I've doodled simple, idealized, literal, and exaggerated backs and braids in many of the sketchbooks I've filled.
In this case these sketches were drawn from memory done to scale to fit an A4 sheet knowing that I could adjust the block to fit both paper sizes.

I settled on the bottom sketch which ,while not perfect,  gave me a little more room to play with the braid and blouse. I especially like the wispy hairs of the nape of the neck and the cloud of stray hairs that surround the head and braid.   It will be challenge to carve the hair and while I know how to cut the wispy ones, I haven't really figured out yet how to cut the head and braid themselves..nor how many blocks to dedicate to them.
I ordered a block of Cherry plywood for the keyblock from McClains...it has a good 1/8th inch layer of good cherry veneer and a 9 x 12 inch block should allow me to print both paper sizes.

I glued down the laser copy I made of the drawing and once the paste was dry I peeled back the outer layer of paper to reveal the image. With a thin coating of olive oil,  the remaining paper became translucent and I could follow the drawing to guide the cutting.
I'm using a 4.5 Hangi toh to outline all the hairs.

This particular piece of cherry was pretty dense. Carving was pretty straightforward--if slow-- but clearing the cut bits was harder than usual often requiring 4-5 passes with the toh and back cuts to get the pieces to finally separate from the block. The final carving of the mass of hair of the head and braids was cut with a V-gouge instead of the toh.

I proofed this block yesterday onto thin paper and glued 4 copies down to Shin blocks to start the color plates.  I lost a lot of the detail above and the braid is now a tangled mess. I like it but will need to tease out the definition of the braid better than it printed in the top photo.
But now I think I'll need an additional cherry block to resolve the hair.