When my print arts salon, Painters Under Pressure, suggested we do the Seattle Sampling December studio tour it was. . . . July. No sweat, plenty of time! Now we are all in that wonderful pre-show manic state of trying to make art round the clock while life in its inconvenient way interferes. Laundry? Bookkeeping? The Gym? Huh. I have never made so much work in such a compressed period of time. I think the happiest state, the state of mind I treasure most, may be just pure focus, and I’m there, even if I am wearing last week’s socks. [Read more…]
Object Lessons: The Moon, the Feather, the Leaf, the Rose
The moon is here in all its singularity, full and bright, and daring me to look at it all night and not go blind. November is not yet here but in the wings, and threatening. The mood shifts, worry and fear attendant.
When I think of the year and its divisions, the prismed light across the page, time’s markers are uneven, an anarchic rout. The losses collide into the dark months, and if a few spill into March the chill of winter accompanies. There is good reason to sit in the dark and stare at the moon, realizing more clearly, “Some things in life cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.”
This, I think, is why I walk in Autumn and forage until my pockets fill with stones and twigs, why I take huge comfort in contemplation of a single thing. To look at it until it returns my gaze. Until there is no forward or back, or there is both at the same time, a cancellation that returns me to my self. I carry home my gleanings and arrange and rearrange until there is an order, each thing remembered in its place in time.
Surface Queries and Technical Notes on Wax and Vanished Colors
There are certain colors that just made life so much easier. Not to mention more luminous and radiant with saturated contentment and possibility, as if one were looking through a glass of lillet from a cafe in Firenze, just before dinner. Or surveying the vineyard from the ramparts, in a good year. And this color was not a cheap trick, although it could be used that way.
I am speaking, of course, about the dearly departed Quinacridone Gold, taken from us by unknown and sudden circumstance when I wasn’t looking. [Read more…]
Capturing Incandescence with Digital Printmaking: An Homage to Dürer
Although I am a avid gardener, the kind of gardener who intentionally plants things with an eye to color and texture and contrast and who pulls out weeds, I have to confess that my very favorite flower in the world is the dandelion. I have been trying to capture dandelions since I was about three, when I was first photographed eating them, which I will say was much less satisfying than blowing them and watching the seeds fly up into the air.
In July I took some photographs of a particularly expressive weed against the crumbling wall of a parking lot, and the image has been murmuring to me ever since. It was an exquisite morning spent in the company of my mother and old books. Somehow the grainy pages of her 1930’s Latin primer and a distant memory of a print by Albrecht Dürer came together in this image.
My scale with the current Almanac series of botanical work is intimate. This print is 8″ square. My intention is to make a second image in which the photographic elements are directly transferred into the plaster which forms the background. It has been a very challenging piece, composed of at least a dozen “plates” ie. Photoshop layers, on which I have drawn and erased and shaded with my digital tools. It is slightly crazy to try to convey incandescence with low contrast, but everything about the original moment when I saw this beloved weed was about innocence and light and the uncapturable haze of memory—which is a quiet place. Perhaps I should let Robert Creeley explain, from his poem “The Immoral Proposition”:
If quietly and like another time there
is the passage of an unexpected thing.
To look at it is more
than it was.
New Directions with Italian Plaster
After my inspirational time with Jennifer Carrasco I am diving into the new/old technique of Italian plaster and reveling in what happens when you let surface speak. In the past I’ve tended to get nervous when I spend a lot of time making a surface to paint or draw on. The calligrapher in me wants to have a stack of a hundred sheets of paper and nothing to lose by drowning in ink, again and again, and throwing whatever happens on the floor for later reflection. The word “precious” comes up when I think of sanding and painting and sanding again and then glazing and . . . then trying to put something down on such a huge investment of time.
If you are a recovering calligrapher or watercolorist you know this tyranny of the perfect sheet of rag paper. With a pristine sheet of BFK or $20 rice paper there is really nowhere to go but [Read more…]
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