And the title might be Wanting to be Needed.
Not boring now
I found myself annoyed by my new ugly black asphalt “driveway apron”: a useless expensive City requirement for all homes built in the city since 200X? It cost us $1090 to put in an asphalt “apron” between an old chip seal surfaced street and a very firm & functional rock/gravel/grass “driveway”. It is ugly, and creates problematic hard to “soft” surface erosion edges.
OK, enough ranting. I did what any artist would do: viewed it as a blank “canvas”.
And this is what I did with a can of road marking spray paint today: not fine art but it has cheered me up:
!
This is my work.
When I make my funky yard art it will seem as if I am playing, wasting time, or pursuing an odd obsession.
All of this may be true, but beyond that this is my work.
Nice ambiguity in the English grammar here, of course. Both meanings are good. My new screening panel is not a work of art or even a creation that I am especially proud of. It will soon be a fine privacy screen built from (mostly free) stuff, and I will enjoy the eccentric nature of this “fence” panel, and the visual balance I am creating here.
But my real intention with the above statement is to say that doing this is not mere play, or a way to waste time. I am doing the work I need to do in order to make art. This outdoor shaping, building and assembling serves to energize me, enhance my creativity, and train me to see and make on a larger scale and in three dimensions.
My seemingly casual assemblies of found objects and scrap often do serve useful purposes; they keep out deer, screen & anchor my trash cans, etc. But the work is as much about building my aesthetic, stimulating my creativity, and keeping me happily engrossed in making art!
Adding color to prints
With some color, then …
It changes to become this!
And here I added color to an overlay of two prints, but it isnot done yet…
Adding color to prints by hand, using paint or drawing materials, is an old tradition. Hand tinted prints, colored by the original artist (usually the printmaker was not the artist, but the skilled craftsperson!), may be more valuable than editions of prints untouched by the original artist. Of course the value of the print depends most heavily upon the following: the artist must be 1) dead, and 2) famous.
Northwind Arts Center painting demonstration
I enjoyed watching & listening to the last half of two painting demonstrations at Northwind Arts Center yesterday, when I arrived to sit the gallery desk. The two artists featured in the current exhibit, Kristi Galindo Dyson and Jackie VanNoy, were working and talking about how they work, in conjunction with their current exhibit, Creative Play. Nice!
Afterwards the gallery got quiet, so I did some drawing. Inspired by the demo, I used grid lines to get started and an idea from Maureen P.: the notion of compass points and quadrants to represent different phases of my life.This is my doodle, using my water soluble graphite pencils.
Is it about Art or the Perfection of the Print?
Or Why I will never be a Printmaker
Yesterday was another fun day at the print shop (Corvidae Press), but my results are not quite as pleasing as on my previous poly litho printmaking attempts.
I made two new plates, one directly from an original pencil drawing transferred to the polyester plate using a laser copier. The other plate is based on two original pencil drawings that I combined digitally in Corel’s PaintshopPro software, after scanning them. However I then drew further onto an inkjet print of this new piece before making a laser copy directly onto the polyester plate material.
So I printed from both of these two new laser toner plates, but I never quite got the darks I wanted on these. Laser toner definitely requires more charging than ballpoint pen on the poly plate, and I may not have used quite enough ink either. I printed only a few prints, none quite satisfactory as is. Almost true to the original drawings, though. My Gamblin Portland Black ink looks alot like graphite pencil in these prints.
But it will be quite easy to touch these up with colored pencil to get a bit more contrast, and color can be added in several different ways. Eventually I am sure that I will use all of these prints. And I expect that even the faintest, least satisfactory prints will become very satisfying artworks.
For me it is not about perfecting the craft of printmaking, even though I certainly enjoy and appreciate excellent printmaking! I am primarily interested in a desirable end result, and in enjoying the process of getting there. So that means I won’t struggle endlessly for perfect registration or creating the perfect plate. After all, once you have perfect printmaking technique you simply have a means of duplicating your fine work, and I don’t need that.
Soft World, two pass print
So I am an artist who used printmaking, but I will never really be a printmaker! The print showing a circle inside a circle, with lots of detail (Through a Lens 🙂 has grey colored pencil and water soluble graphite added to increase the contrast. The double “brain” image has had the background digitally “cleaned” of fingerprints & smudges!
Aquarelle pencil sketch
New poly litho prints from Monday, plus …
Water soluble graphite is delicious!
Poly litho plate “disasters” still good for art
I am working on the messy “disaster” prints from my first (now abandoned) circle sharpie on poly litho plate. I could not get a clean print from this plate, but I will re-use all the “failed” prints in some way. I tinted these with prismacolor pencils and rather love them. Printmaking reliable repeatable editions is not all that much fun: it is the messy surprises that can turn into magic…
