The Order of Things

The Christmas evidence is all taken down and gifts put away. Our company of family and friends leave tomorrow for home. But while here they encouraged me to start on something new, something that could be a series and be exciting. They even contributed opinions and parts for the new work.

I am still continuing with the “collection” watercolor paintings on old gessoed boards and am planning on using all the ones I prepared for egg temperas for this series. I will post a picture of one of the first ones done here.

To continue with the boards, I am now taking parts of the things I collect and stash in the studio and adding them together. Much like I did for The Expedition to Elsewhere: the Evidence. See some below.

But now they are assembled only to be used as the model for the painting on gessoed boards. I really like returning to my fabricated beings. And I am going to especially like documenting these specimens with carefully rendered watercolors on panels.

The goal is to have an exhibition of them. Some framed on a wall just over a large open drawer of the various sized boards placed inside like the specimens themselves. The viewer would have the sensation of having just slid the drawer open to inspect the things inside.

So the last few days I have rummaged, selected, cut and glued parts to make some things quite magical. Here are a few.

Beetle:

Dragonfly:

Bogon Moth:

Butterfly:

Snail:

And a small bug in progress:

Now I will carefully and very lightly draw each on on its board and then slowly bring it to life with light layers of watercolors. This is going to be fun!

More pictures as I progress…..

 

 

I finished five houses and will stop there until I figure out what to do with them next. And it is the holiday season.  So my mind is on incoming company, Christmas dinner, presents, wrapping, getting last cards out. This year I resurrected an old undergraduate etched plate to use for our card. We have, or rather I have, always made our Christmas cards. And they have always said, “Happy Holidays” inside.

This year there seems to be an extreme sensitivity to using that phrase over “Merry Christmas”. The other day I heard two people congratulating themselves for saying, “Merry Christmas” to each other and indicated they were protesting some left wing conspiracy by doing so. This latest election has brought out the worst in us and an amazing amount of pride in ignorance. I would just like to hide out until education becomes an important goal again. But with the things the way they are right now, especially in states like North Carolina, I might be under wraps for quite some time.

But onto other things about the holidays. My not so traditional tree is up again this year with an oil can theme. It does lack the smell of pine and all the age old ornaments full of memories, but I like doing this….featuring a collection each year on the tree.

Also sharing part of the living is my answer to the lack of a fireplace in our house. A very old basket that my father and I picked peaches in while living in Michigan. I filled it with some local apples from a neighbor, my collection of African monkey balls, twigs from our corkscrew willows, some Eucalyptus branches, a large wooden bird, some mementos from Australia and twinkling lights to make me feel like I am sitting near some small glowing embers.

Here are some detail of the Australian Aboriginal carved goannas and in keeping with the pyrography of the bird and those animals are Toni Rogers’ sticks of driftwood. Whenever I am in Australia and I see Toni, I buy her sticks when I can. They are magical and fit in my non burning fireplace just perfectly. Here are some details of the fireplace basket.

On the front door this year I have another nod to Australia…

In 2011 I put this on the front door. A coil of barbed wire with an old rusted calf muzzle attached. I thought filling it with holly and a bit of honeysuckle vine sort of made it a bit festive. A neighbor questioned my holiday spirit. Now it hangs minus dead and dying plants up high in the foyer. I still like it.

I think one of the best things about blogs are the pictures. And I just don’t have any more for this one. It is a dark and dreary day here with ongoing showers. I think I will go back to the studio and find something to do.

If I am not back here before please have a Wonderful and Happy Holiday Season. I will be keeping the company of family and friends where we all can say “Happy Holiday” and discuss the new and less than happy outcome our election has brought into each of our homes and hearts. We will do this over some single malt, excellent bourbon and lovely Australian wines.

Be back in 2017.

 

 

I don’t know what it is about when you ink a plate that makes you think, “Ahh, this could be good.” Such incredibly false hopes for such a limited knowledge of what I am doing. It’s amazing how easily I think it will be so much better than it really is. Collographs just might not be my thing.

Well that was pitiful I had carved out around the wave and the hill with the road. Thought that the ink would catch in there and give me some definition.  The ink has too much extender in it I think. And the print lacks definition where it is needed, around the camel, boat, sharks, anchor, you name it. So I decide to gesso all the good parts to elevate them and create more of a separation between them and the background.

 

 

I increase the amount of ink in the mix and print again.

Believe it or not, I even attempt another collograph with the camel being dragged up the hill to a house. Just the bow of the boat is in the foreground. It is a vertical image. It was embarrassingly bad. So I wonder if the story is so important, go back to etching. There is just too much texture in these collographs. Which is fine if you want what you did in undergraduate school. When you were trying to avoid “wedding cake” plates. Here are some I still have framed and stashed here in the office and and storage room behind me.

The one above my instructor let me use all the packing materials off the latest delivery box of inks for the studio. I liked it rolled with two different inks. I thought it was “mysterious”. Actually it is rather weak by any standard in printmaking.

Here is another one that this one inspired. I was heavily into textures at the time with weaving and basketry.

On this one I was pushing the limits and patience of my professor because I was not only draping cords and fabrics all over the plate, but was printing on a textures surface as well!!! And using two different colors of ink really does not take it out of the realm of what a twelve year old can do.

And one last observation on my early work in this technique. I found a very large framed collograph in the storage room that not only had all these threads, etc draped all over but was printed in the chine colle technique of adding textured and colored papers and even cloth before printing. And if that was not enough texture for me, I actually stitched around the image with varying embroidery threads and stitches. This has not been an affirming visit into the storage room. I need to get rid of that stuff!

I really don’t know why I felt the need to revisit this technique. All it has done is point out its limitations and my own. So in the few days I have spent time, ink, paper and false hopes, I have decided that it is the story of the camel that matters. Me and my camel. I think maybe illustrations (etched of course) of my encouraging the camel to help me get him up the hill. So I am heading back in there with my etching tools and small plates to tell a story.  More about the results later but here is an image of a recent etching and our Christmas card this year which was actually a tiny etching done as part of a series in the same class I was playing around with collographs.

A few weeks ago I thought it would be fun to revisit making collographs. I made several in an undergraduate printmaking class. I like how easy it was to get texture. But to that end you have to sacrifice details….drawing detail. Taking a piece of book board (davey board) and covering it with cut outs of card stock for the tree trunks and then bits of rosemary for the leaves I tried to get the essence of what I saw out my studio doorway. There also is a stone pillar made with  card stock stones and daubs of garnet gesso for a “stoney” look. More bits of whatever made up the ground under the crepe myrtle trees.  I did not think it was too piled on. My teacher back then said, “Don’t be making it like a wedding cake. Keep it printable.”

So I put it together and shellacked both sides after coating it with gesso for additional textures.

I decided to just print it and see what would happen. Well the “wedding cake” aspect is certainly apparent because the abundance of white means there was little contact with the paper. I did not like how the stone pillar came out at all and thought before I try this again, I will just chop off that part. I also hammered down some of the high parts and really increased the pressure.

All said and done with this experiment, I like the plate better than the prints. AND I learned that whatever I learned in undergraduate school had been well and truly forgotten. So the next best thing is to go onto YouTube and watch some tutorials. My books from back then were very out dated compared with the internet innovations in printing collographs.

I don’t know why I wanted to use the dark umber ink instead of the black. It might be that the mistakes are less glaring in a color print.

So taking another board and only card stock paper from an old folder, I created a block image of a bird nest. Super simple. Finding the flaws in ones work is always easier if things are kept simple at first.

A collograph plate is only good for so many prints and then the build-up flattens and it is hard to get an image after about ten or so runs through the press. It took three to get the pressure and viscosity of the ink just right. The ink should be thinner than when covering an etching plate so it can seep into the cracks and of course in the long run, waste less ink. Here are the brown ones and then the black ones. The black ones definitely give me more information on what needs to be done or not done when printing. But by now I have used up almost all of my ten passes.

I will say that once they are matted and signed they do take on a more professional look. But it also seems that by the time you get the hang of it a lot of ink is wasted, not to mention time and paper. The end product could just as easily have been done by a ten year old. A ten year old with an etching press. I may go back to the dry point etching. At least there it is more about my ability to make marks, draw so to say.

But just to share I am going to show one more plate that I am working on. The subject matter is how it is for me sometimes…..feeling like hauling a expletive deleted camel up a hill. Here is the camel in an ill-fated vessel sailing over dangerous waters only to get to that blessed hill with a camel who is intent on carrying the same dilemma on his back as a reminder that even at the top of the hill, nothing is going to end…..be prepared to start again.

I will post a picture of this when I print it just so you can see. The pencil lines need to be carved out to allow me a fine line (like etching). The boat is using a textured paper. The house that is for me, the hidden passenger, needs to have a window cut out so I can see where I am going. And of course there is the huge rock for an anchor that might just leave me stranded out there among those awful sharks if the wave doesn’t put us all overboard.

I hate that camel. But the good thing is I think it’s some fairly rich territory for more to come. Plus I am learning loads about the techniques and knowledge required to make a decent collograph.