Dragons-A Good Start to 2024 (Maybe it's the battery?....)

Year of the Dragon, mokuhanga, 4.5"x6.5"

My car battery dies often enough that I keep a pair of jumper cables behind the driver's seat. So, I've been eyeing those cables and thinking how suitable they were for an etegami for some time but hadn't really figured out a suitable text to go with the drawings I contemplated painting.

But 2024 is the year of the Dragon according to the Chinese Zodiac and while I wasn't planning on making a Lunar New Year's card this year, I knew I was going to try and make it to the big Hokusai exhibit in Seattle in January, and when I started thinking about Hokusai, I couldn't help thinking of his big Sumi self-portraits as a dragon......

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And so,  I started drawing jumper cables, but thinking about dragons.

A) This was more calligraphic and suggesting a dragon flying.

 

 

B) This one has a distinctly R.Crumb vibe that I wasn't sure about....

 

 

But when I showed various family members and acquaintences (and a few strangers) my pages of sketches, "B" was the unanimous choice.  While I don't often yield to family taste (pressure) and I'm still not sure I made the right decision but......

 

 

Go Figure: Bad Kitty

Oooooooh! I LOVE this.....Is it for sale?

"BAD" Kitty

 

 

 

I was curious about the traditional way of printing white-line prints, using a wooden spoon rather than a baren and printing on dry paper, tacked along one edge to the board. 

So during a short wait between other commitments, I hastily cut a cat doodle I had done earlier onto a small 4 x 7" block of a poor-quality, scrap plywood. 

It's a funny process: flip up the paper, paint a small area of the block (the lines have been excised away) and fold the paper down and burnish it with a wooden spoon. Each area USUALLY needs to be printed at least twice and the ultimate effect is a little like a coloring book, with the drawing in white.

Being hastily done, everything went as you'd expect. The cheap plywood's grain would suck the paint across the borders, the paper was thick and hard to print on, and my ink drawing bled a bit into the paper during printing. 

BUT,  since I didn't really care how it came out,  I worked fast and loosely with the colors, ignoring the smudges and pale areas. 

The First visitor to my studio while I was working made a beeline to my workstation.
"Oooooh! I love this, Is it for Sale?" and I replied, "Um, well No, it's not finished yet, and its really just an exersize to see if I like this method......", I replied replied rather clumsily..

The Second visitor to my studio (and I rarely get visitors). ALSO immediately asked if the little ugly print was for sale? or could they buy the block!!!

 My son stopped by with some friends from the UK....."I LOVE this, can I have it!?!"

???? Is it a cat person thing?!?!

 Here's the more carefully printed version. This one is a little too dark in the brown areas (which i do like better in the first version). 

"Good" Kitty

 

 I THINK I'll try to redraw and recut this and start again.   I'm fond of Siamese cats, I've always wanted to do a print of one, and I guess there's a niche to fill.

Not on Speaking Terms-Amaryllis

 

Not on Speaking Terms, White-line Woodblock print, 8 1/4" x 11 3/4"

I buy an Amaryllis bulb/plant almost every year. I love how dramatic they are, the rising bud is just interesting enough without being threatening or too obscene and I like the fact that the budding and bloom last quite a long time.

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This particular plant was one of the few that survived from last year to bloom again. I didn't give it the attention it deserved, so it wasn't as vigorous or as energetic as the first year, and it made only 2 buds, instead of the usual 3-4.

And with just two blooms--Siamese-twins joined at the shoulders--they must have had quarrelled, as they grew with their flowers facing in opposite directions. And they kept this haughty posture, neither really accepting nor acknowledging the other's face or presence.
Despite being nearer and more alike than perhaps they'd have liked to admit, and despite sharing the single stem and bulb, they budded, bloomed, and then withered away next to each other, but alone. 

 

Who knows what they were mad about, maybe even they don't remember.

This fall, I'll pot them again with some new soil and a bigger pot and the hope that next year they will not simply flower, but wake with enough vigor to shed their grudges and ready to grow.

 

 

 

The only tool I have is a hammer and ALL of my problems look like nails....

If your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. 

 

This was an etegami that never was. I had the idea to do a postcard of an old hammer and the text was already there, the 60's-era quote from the psychologist Abraham Maslow that "If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". But I never did the sumi postcard, since I had rapidly sketched an imaginary hammer, and liked how it came out, so modified it to use as a sample print for a workshop demo. The simple line drawing was easy to turn into 4 separate plates and to show how to transfer the image and to demonstrate carving.

But that was in NOVEMBER, and with just 4 blocks, and rather straightforward colors, this print should have been done in just a few days. But times are strange, and between Covid lockdowns, waves of infection that kept me out of the studio, the need to take care of garden/outdoor projects or to assist with family matters meant that the prints got started, then stashed in the freezer multiple times. A small loss of line in a key block I wasn't sure I was going to use needed a repair, and further work was delayed by the Winter and New Year Holidays. But I finished one set of proofs, shown above. You can see very pronounced goma-zuri (speckling) that I think was due to me using either too strong a size (too much alum) or mistakenly sizing the same sheet twice....the background block should have printed the shina grain. But I like how this came out.

The top photo is a proof I finished today. It was printed on Awagami heavyweight kozo, a machine-made paper to which I've added additional sizing--there is another set, on natural-color kozo that I hope to finish early next week and on which I want to try the original idea--a version without a keyblock, using just the overlapping color plates to create defining borders to separate the shapes and forms. Either way, and despite starting this in November, this is my First Print of 2022.....

Inclined Plane: (What will it take to move me?).

 

The Inclined plane is one of the 6 simple machines, used since ancient times to aid in construction or move masses of stone, or materials up or down.  By increasing the distance traveled, the amount of force needed is decreased when compared to hauling the same weight straight up or down. Blocks of stone were hauled up long ramps to build the pyramids and the blocks of Italian marble were slid from the quarries, miles to the sea using sloped ramps and rolling logs and teams of oxen to ship by boat to Rome and the rest of the world. The forces acting are gravity, pulling downwards, inertia, a body's resistence to movement based on it's mass, and friction, the resistence to sliding based on the nature of the materials and their surfaces. Increasing the slope, decreasing the coefficient of friction (by oiling or wetting the surface), or applying an outward force (pushing or pulling) will all aid in moving any object up or down the ramp. 

But this was intended as a metaphor and not a physics problem.  I've been stuck for a while, not with creative block, I have a book of ideas of prints and images I want to explore, but with something else.  I can't seem to get anything done.  I've a desk and studio full of unfinished work and many more never started.  And the BIG things, changes I need to make in my life and for my career, sit in a stack, getting taller as it also gets buried, by all the things that I let pile up and take precedence over the important, or distract me, long enough, so it's too late most every day to even think about tackling my problems.

So, it's been a long time since I really worked on a new woodblock print. The combination of the COVID-19 pandemic, quarantines and lockdowns and the political upheaval in the USA and Italy have had me fairly paralyzed, glued to the computer trying to figure out what's happening next or wondering about the future.  So when the Barenforum called for participants in their next print exchange,  in a simple format and without a theme,  I decided to take the hint, and sign up, hoping that the deadline would help push me to start working again. 

This was meant to be a simple image of a dark block, sitting on a steep slope at the borderline of what would visually feel like it might want to move, or slip, on it's own, or with a little help. One has to imagine the forces preventing any movement--inertia, maybe laziness, fear of failure or habits of self-sabatoge, the frictions of daily life: my duties as parent or husband, taxes, a mortgage, family conflicts very near and far away, ageing parents and troubled children, the quiet and odd newness of an ageing body and the subtle return of hints of illnesses known but never really conquered or new, disquieting symptoms that whisper menace with all the things that any little thing might portend. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                What to do?

 I can increase the slope. Sooner or later, I'll start to slip and then accelerate downhill.  I can try to smooth the rough parts on the path, make the rough and irregular road, smooth and slippery. Or I can wait for some inevitable, eventual, external force--maybe positive: such as an invition to participate in a print exchange or residency, or a commission, or an exciting idea that just begs to be worked on, or negative one--a major life event or disruption--that forces me finally to change or startles me into flight.  But either way, like it or not, I have the sense that once it comes, and I start to slip and accelerate downhill,  it may not be possible to control how fast or far I go, or stop if I want to.

"Inclined Plane" "What does it take to move me?"  8" x 10" Mokuhanga watercolor woodblock with handwritten text. Edition Varié, 30 copies on off white or beige Japanese kozo paper.  9 color impressions from six plywood blocks with Sumi ink, watercolor pigments and rice paste. 

 

An early sketch

 

 

Year of the RAT

NOTE: I started working on this little print in November 2019 and finished mailing them out in late February....just as the COVID-19 was just beginning to migrate out of China and into Italy.  I certainly didn't expect that the epidemic that started in Wuhan would spread so far and so fast, and my folded-paper, mouse/rat was supposed to be an innocent and gentle reminder of the fragility and transient nature of all things....

 The Rat is the first of the 12 animals that make up the 12-year cycle of the Chinese Zodiac and as this year also marks the beginning a new decade, it was supposed to be a year of good and auspicious beginnings.  I began working on this print in November--as I used it as a class project for my beginners' woodblock class in Florence's art and culture center,  L'Appartamento.  Using the traditional method of working in which the carvers and printers would have worked from a simple sketch--I provided the students with my drawing of an origami rat (mouse) and the students became first the carvers and then the printers of the blocks that were needed to print the color print version. Along the way I got to show them the hanshita method of image transfer that allows a reliable way to ensure that the multiple color blocks will register to the black and white keyblock, much as they would have done in the Ukiyo-e workshops of Japan 150 years ago.

 I was able to combine my student-cut color plates and with my key block (with the addition of another color block to allow some bokashi gradation printing) using the combination of plates to print this year's "YEAR of the RAT" greeting card.

Shina plywood key block (before removing the corner marks).

An early proof in B&W and gray

I also printed them on a mix of papers, although the majority were printed on Western papers--Magnani incisioni, Fabriano Artistico and Arches 180lb cotton etching papers instead of Japanese washi.   That let me have cards that had a thick, postcard-like heft but also gave them the slightly grainy, textured look that mokuhanga prints get when they're printed on Western papers.

Of the 125 copies I printed, about 40 went to the Baren Zodiac exchange, another 40 to colleagues and collectors, and about another 40 to family and friends.

As I wrote above, my little zodiac print was supposed to represent a good-luck, origami mouse--but this was not the kind of luck or 2020 I was expecting.  I hope the current international health and social disaster ends soon and that the toll on human life and suffering of all things in the natural world are not greater than we can bear and that we remember to help each other through the difficult times ahead--the more fortunate assisting those in need. 

Tokyo Diary: Flowering plums

I have just returned from a one-month artist residency in Tokyo, Japan. Along with fellow mokuhanga artists Mara Cozzolino, Laura Boswell and Paul Furneaux, we were group participants in ArtsChiyoda3331's joint residency, sharing an apartment and a large studio space in the antique books section of Tokyo--- Jimbocho. It was a paradise for mokuhanga artists; there were antique Ukiyo-e prints in the book shops, Ukiyo-e prints in the museums, and we had contacts and lists of artists, material suppliers and shops, and craftsmen making tools, paper, blocks, sharpening stones and more.  I wasn't sure what I was going to work on-but I wanted it to have a subject that would tie in with my presence in Japan, but still reflect my artistic interests of etegami and woodblock prints.

While all Tokyo and much of Japan was eagerly awaiting the Sakura blossoms--the cherry blooms. I was carrying a drawing I did this time LAST year, of an old, stunted plum tree, in bud and starting to flower.

That drawing was an etegami--a loose sumi ink brush drawing to which watercolors were added and then text.
And since along with the Japanese Quince, the plums are among the first of the blooms to open, they were blooming when I left Florence, and I found them blooming--in lots of places in Japan too.

On my first morning in Tokyo, I found them on the way to Ueno park in a streetside garden,  I found them again, on a scroll in a shop selling calligraphy supplies, and I found them again inside the museum, depicted over and over again.


So I was happy to throw myself into this long and noble tradition.   This is the original drawing/etegami from which I created the resulting print.

I added the background and there is some variation in color and gradation intensity across the 30 print edition. 
"What if I'm not ready?"

Japanese woodblock print: Edition Varie of 30. Printed from 8 Shina blocks,
12 layers of color with watercolor, sumi ink and rice paste on mixed Japanese papers.

I may never finish my novel....

The blue-gray of the ferrule isn't showing up in the scan.

  This print began as an etegami--another of the small Japanese mail-art cards I make.  It was done during my first Etegami workshop, where I used a small pencil stub to make 3 different simple sumi ink and watercolor drawings, with added text.  I knew right away one would become a print.
I also have a novel and probably a few short stories in me--although I doubt any will ever get written.

This is a simple image, but getting it carved and printed has posed a few hurdles.
I enlarged the size of the work from postcard-size (3"x5") to an easier to carve 8" x 10" to make it less likely that I'd have too much trouble cutting the text but I still had the top half of one of the "e"s pop off;  I had to re-glue and re-cut a repair 3 times due to glue failure the first time, wrong glue (too elastic) the second time, and (fingers crossed) the last repair seems to be holding.  Mostly I've had a hard time getting into the studio with enough protected time to just get it done.

The above copy/proof is on Fabriano Artistico--a thick, Italian watercolor paper but there are still a few things to work out:
   The original drawing was done on a postcard--so it had a natural boundary (the paper edges) and the drawing "happened" with that scale in mind, but printed on a bigger sheet, it now has a much larger outer border of white paper--and I can either leave it like that  or print a very faint rectangle of very pale color (it's called a Beta-ban block)--that would recreate the original horizontal, small format on the bigger sheet.  This variant still needs to be finished as well as a few more that have a different block order to see if it changes the final look.

Here's the original etegami watercolor and sumi ink postcard.

This print, is pretty close to recreating the original--I did tweak the pencil in a few places, lessening the slightly phallic droop of the point. I also pushed the text over a little bit, and reversed the chop (white letter on red field).









Tomorrow, I'll finish printing the rest of the proofs. That will allow me to see what they look like with the background block before I cut down the rest of the paper and print the final version or full edition.



This set on Japanese paper is almost done. They lack just the two yellow layers of the pencil wood and the sumi ink "keyblock" and text.  I'll post a finished version of these too as soon as they're done.

You can't see the beautiful gray-blue of the metal ferrule--it won't pick up with the scanner but it really goes well with the orange-y pencil and pink eraser.

A White-Line, Pink Lily

I wanted to have another go at a white line or Provincetown print. (I've done a couple already--my "Tree Farm at Night" from 2016, last year's Baren exchange print, "Apostrophetic",  and my afternoon experiment from last summer, "Sweet Tea".  I was very happy with how "Apostrophetic turned out, but wanted to try a simpler print to see if I can work on a version of this method that works for me.

It's an odd technique--using just one block and allows for lots of freedom for color application but as one print is produced at a time, it's more suitable for unique prints or very short runs.
Here is the one block after I transferred the image but before it was cut. 

This was a simple image, close-cropped to both allow the shapes to be bigger and easier to brush in with pigment and to allow for a little drama.

While a traditional white line is made by tacking the paper to the block, folding it back, and applying the color with a brush to a small area, flipping back the paper and printing that section and repeating this for each area and multiple times to build up stronger and more uniform color.

I've approached it more as a variant of traditional mokuhanga using dampened Japanese paper and a kento system of registration to set the paper down each time in the right spot.



 
 
Here's the first 4 prints I made from this block.
Number 1/8 on Okawara handmade-- a paper that I got originally from Hiromi paper in LA--but I've added additional dosa (sizing) to make it work for water based prints.  This is a Thai kozo-blend paper that is a little off white in color.  Encouraged I tried 3 more copies on different kinds of paper. These 3 all look different but this is due more to the different papers than changes in colors as these were each printed using the same pigments and similar color applications. The differing weights and fibers made for very different prints.

These three copies were all built up or printed semi-simultaneously. A few color layers on one, then I'd switch to a new sheet and built up the colors by adding pigment multiple times to each area.  There are at least 15 color applications to each of these prints.

#2/8 is on a very heavy, uneven-surface Fabriano watercolor paper. It was fairly heavily sized and was very difficult to print with a baren and only a little easier with a small doorknob. The "moth eaten" appearance is due to the uneven surface and lack of adequate pressure.

 No. 3/8 is on Gampi Torinoko, a beautiful handmade gampi paper no longer made but once available from McClains. This paper also has added size/dosa.

Detail of the copy on Gampi Torinoko, #3/8.

 It's a natural color paper and really lovely. It accentuated the embossing of the white lines and has a softer feel to the colors.

4/8, above, is on Hosho Professional, another paper from Awagami--(100% cellulose but with added sizing).
This one was done more loosely and with wetter pigment to better approximate a watercolor painting.
Unfortunately, the paper slipped during one color application (See the dark background parts for double printing) and there was a section that got muddied up by too many color layers so this is probably a reject.

I'll have another try before I retire this block. I want to try printing on DRY paper--using the traditional method--and also on unsized paper. Arches cover is supposed to be good, but I'll use one of my unsized or weakly sized Japanese papers to see how they print with this method.

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Chinese Zodiac: 2007-2018-Mokuhanga

With my portrait of Bosco as my "Year of the Dog" print for 2018, I have finished one 12-year cycle  for the Baren Forum's Chinese New Year exchange. Each year I printed enough copies to share with the other printmakers in the exchange, with extras for relatives and colleagues and  a few to give away to collectors or important contacts and usually a few more to sell at occasional print fairs or inquiring visitors to my website. Some years I finished them so late I was too embarrassed to send them out (Tiger) so I have lots. Others are now gone except for a few bad or odd copies.
I should note that the "Year of the Boar" pretty much marks my introduction to woodblock printing as that print and making wine labels were my impetus for starting down this odd path. Here, in chronological order are the prints from this series.
For Baren members thinking, "Hey! I never got one of those!", both Boar and Rat were made with the intention of joining the official exchange, but each time, I procrastinated too much and I missed out on the entry date deadline, and I was a new member and didn't think to ask to still be included so they were not part of the Baren exchange, even though I cut and printed about 60 copies of each....
Note that with the exception of "RAT" which I produced exactly as drawn by my then 8-year-old son Sami, and "Tiger" which is based on a Tibetan Tiger carpet, are of the prints are original designs drawn, carved and printed by me. All are mokuhanga prints except for "Goat/Sheep", which is a wood engraving.
I'd also like to mention, I am not much into astrology, and was happy to illustrate the Chinese zodiac because 1) it gave me artist's license to draw and print some charming creatures in a small, postcard format and as I've mentioned before, 2) a chance to procrastinate until February (and beyond) as the Chinese New Year is a month later than ours and gave me extra time without seeming too late.