The Seedless Watermelon

I'm finally finished! I'll have to get a photo of it framed because I am in LOVE with the framing I did. I'll have to buy another frame for myself. I got a black mat and a very baroque black frame and with the black ink fines and swirls it looks great!
The piece will be hung in the Meals on Wheels Benefit Show at the McGuffey Art Center. It's quite funny. The stipulation for having work in the show is to have the work focus on food. Quite a few of the pieces have a dark bent to them. Mine deals with the loss of heritage due to apathy. Another piece focuses on the gluttony of meat. LOL! Well, I guess it's appropriate that we have it during Halloween!

Big Ole' Update O' Everything!

Of course, I love the design phase of printing! Drawing is at the root of my artistic abilities since I was 5 years old. That being said, I probably have a truck load of sketch books full of drawings that will never make it to an actual print. That's okay but I fear stagnation like none other! Having a looming deadline sure can horse whip you into getting a move on and not dally long on things. I know this project will take years but I want at least a few prints to show for it in July! When faced with things like this I'm a nervous wreck until I feel like I'm making significant progress. It's sort of like not being able to sleep the night before a big day. I am breathing a sigh of relief as I've finished constructing the key block for the Precipitation page. I feel at least now I'm on the road to success with block ready to carve!
I don't know if you would consider it upcycled but the wood is at least "reclaimed". I had a show in Fredricksburg VA a few years ago and I had constructed a long plank of poplar designed to be hung on the wall. The plan was to ink it up in black and then "white line" draw an image into the wood with my carving tools. The drawing itself would be sparse and in the end it was shelved in leu of better projects. I had already constructed the plank and it was a really nice piece of poplar. I knew humidity would be high and that the wood would most likely bend out of shape so I shore it up from behind with bars of poplar similar to stretchers on a canvas. It sat for a few years between sheets of protective styrofoam and then came to rest behind my sofa! Last weekend I pulled it out and we visited Mr. Miter saw and had a grand old time. My plan was to rip out the stretchers and reform them around the new planks. I did NOT remember that I had wood glued them on. I just went with it and bought two new end pieces to fit on the ends. Now, because I am employing a kento this block is far from "perfect." Mr. Miter saw didn't get everything straight but after some sanding, glue, and the end pieces things shouldn't move but so much.

In other news, I'm carving the color blocks for my Seedless Watermelon broadside. I proofed up the "sand" block in some ink I mixed up from Graphic Chemical. I was shocked at how close the color came out to what I wanted!

On the glass it almost had a greenish tinge to it. (When learning how to etch in zinc, we could curse the yellow as it would tinge to a muddy green when touching the zinc due to a chemical reaction between the metal and the ink.) As I mixed, I thought Oh well, I'll work on better ink later. This is only a proof. When it came off the press, the color was a pleasant surprise. I think my initial perceptions were an illusion from the glass and the cream paper gave it some warmth. The red of the melon is a different story.

Alizeran is the only red I have in oil based block ink (fixing that soon). It was so tacky it wouldn't pick up on the rollers. I added a hair too much easy wipe (easy to do when working with tiny quantities of ink) and the proof printed out a little splattery. At least the registration is in the ball park. Here they are lined up without the green.

I would say it was a productive studio day!

Book of Life Update

Unfortunately, this image has all the charm of UFO or yeti shots. That's what you get when you try to photograph a 4H pencil drawing because it won't fit in the scanner. Anyway, I'm that much closer to beginning the carving on the first Book of Life page. Simply put, instead of the "Water Cycle" I think I'll call it precipitation. I am in love with the natural imagery itself and this picture definitely doesn't convey it but the band around it is supposed to represent H2O molecules reaction's to temperature. This reaction for the most part fuels precipitation. Close up (as long as the wood grain will allow me) I hope to be able to carve out enough detail so one will be able to count that the inner circle has 8 valence spots and that the smaller outer circles are covering 2 of those valence spots. We'll see. Here's the trouble. Having learned about the 4 major forces in the universe, it becomes a mute point to include those symbols because all four will ultimately be used in some way (weak force may be a challenge) and it becomes repedative. Convection is the ultimate drive. The two "ribbons" on either side of the sun indicate this. I'm not sure wether or not this is a successful tool though. To me, they seem to get in the way. I would welcome other opinions on this! Regardless, I must plug on. The 4 forces of the universe will definitely be addressed in their own print. There is rich inspiration there!

Labradorite

I am finishing the rough workings of the Solar Cycle page in the Book of Life. This page will be particularly complicated and I am also working on a painting in gouache to help me visualize what sort of blocks I will have to carve to make it work. The Precipitation page is fairly straight forward in that there is one key block that can have colors added to it later but for rendering space I want to use a series of nearly black purples and blues instead of just black. I have a feeling I'll need to carve a key block and just deconstruct from there. I was contemplating a straight black ink version of the Book of Life anyway to mimic the old medieval alchemists texts. I snapped a shot of the center stone that the entire book has been designed around and how it will lay in relation to the book. I plan to make (most likely have made :P ) a wooden book stand with the stone resting half sunk into the middle so that the pages will appear to orbit the stone as the turn. I purchased this labradorite orb from China. Labradorite is my favorite stone. The stone itself is unremarkable and most of the time a muddy hue and flecked with dark black flecks. An impatient person would regard it as an eye sore at first glance and continue on but those who lag behind to satisfy their curiosity are in for a treat. As the object is turned and rolled in the light, a flash of blue streaked with green erupts as if the essence of the universe itself is encapsulated within this sullied shell. Contemplating the orb by night helps one to imagine what dark matter must be like. Having this mineral as the center of my book will hopefully convey the fact that wondrous beauty can lie within those often overlooked.

Wazzermelonz!

Here is a proof of my finished key block for "The Seedless Watermelon" broadside. I was without my camera when I finished in the studio so alas, I lack the pristine finished block shot. I just couldn't wait to see how it looked and proofed it up anyway. There is something so satisfying in that moment between just finishing a block and inking it up for the first run. I don't think Hinduism would be such a jump for a printmaker. (At least in my process) The printmaker labors over a drawing until achieving what he/she considers perfection and then stands back and says "Ah, what a beautiful work of form and art! A lovely drawing! But you are destined for another incarnation!" And so, the printer transcribes the beloved drawing to a block and labors over the object with his/her tools until achieving what is considered perfection and stands back. "Ah, what a beautiful sculpture! A lovely relief! But you are destined for another incarnation!" And so, the printer inks up the block and proceeds to print lovely images one after another. The printer says "Ah, what beautiful children! Go and be plentiful and share yourselves among the people!" That's my romantic spin on printmaking. Catch me next week ripping my hair out over registration or crappy ink. :)
Anyways, here is a rough coloring in photoshop that I did:

I plan on printing them up on Rives BFK Cream. I have a block ink that I purchased from Graphic Chemical called Antiquarian Black. I'm hoping it will print up really richly against the cream. The above is a grayscale image but it was pulled on Masa paper in Antiquarian Black and I think the icy white dampened any warmth that was in it.

Book of Life Update

I've been working lately on how to represent certain concepts with symbols and it's been hard but a fun puzzle to knock around. My previous update goes into more detail but I'm basically trying to reinvent the wheel. To complete the first page in the book which deals with water as a vehicle in as far as the precipitation cycle, there are two concepts I must illustrate. The first is universal rule of convection. This icon will be featured numerous times throughout the volume so I feel I must nail it the first time. The main player of the precipitation cycle here on earth however, is water. I needed to convey H2O without writing it in a language but at the same time use a symbol that could be recognized by any person. They typical "one large bubble connecting two small bubbles" in an "upside down mickey mouse" image feels contrived and I was hard pressed to find a different arrangement. I was also fascinated by valence shells housing electrons. Matrix numerology is beyond the average joe's comprehension (mine included at the moment) but I feel that some patterning can be intuitive. I decided to try a ring arrangement based on the atomic numbers in an element.

Valence shells have a desire to be full. Notice that the two smaller (hydrogen) atoms add an electron each to complete the 8 electron spaces necessary to have a stable valence shell (oxygen only has 6 to go around in it's L valence). Still, the arrangement irked me and I wanted to try another arrangement feeling that I could put the electron holes wherever I chose.

At this point, I wore myself out and I would like to have more time to play around with this idea but as it stands time is of the essence (due in July 2009). I decided to try out different color arrangements just for play:

The Seedless Watermelon

The McGuffey Art Center has agreed to have a show in October for the benefit of Meals On Wheels. Meals On Wheels is an organization that drives meals around town to shut-ins who would otherwise not be able to cook for themselves at home. A percentage (I can't remember how much!) of sales for that show will go to Meals On Wheels. I'd imagine that those people could use that scratch right about now seeing as their drivers are voluntary and they DON'T get reimbursed for the cost of gas. We've all agreed to make pieces of art with the theme of food. I could do a still life of fruit or what have you but I like to stir things up. I have really been thinking lately about how we are running the planet into the ground and how the presumed answer to hunger around the world and in countries with low-arable land is GM crops. Well, there is a lack of arable land because we have not taken care of our soils and that needs attention first. The only thing you'll get out of GM crops on low-arable land is the need in a few years for new GM crops to thrive in non-arable land. Also, I have been reading books on seed saving and the recommendations are to grow plants that are open pollinated or heirloom. To my amazement when I went through my regular seed catalogs, 90% of the seeds sold were hybrids. This means if one were to save seed from the hybrid (if it were viable), the next generation would not be "true" to the first. It would revert to a lesser crop or not produce at all. Then I stumbled onto "Seedless Watermelons" seed. Everyone loves seedless watermelon. I love seedless watermelon but as a future seed saver, the fruit would be useless to me. It struck me that if something horrible happened tomorrow to our infrastructure, the majority of the populous would be too ignorant to feed itself for very long. They would die or kill each other for the remaining food. Our ancestors traversed the deserts in Egypt with watermelons to quench their thirst. The thick empty rinds were even sometimes filled with water. Were the fruits cursed for the tedious habit of having seeds? Doubtful. I feel more and more isolated from my generation as I see more and more people fall under the slumber of convenience and ignorance. So, far be it from me to treat anyone to a simple unbiased still life of fruit. I am working on a broadside of seedless watermelons resting in the sand. I've already set the passage in 12pt. Tudor Black. I don't have a very extensive set and pretty much only have 3 e's left after setting it all up. The photoshopped version features a different font.
On a lighter note, my mystery veggie is finally having babies! A few of these vines popped up uninvited when I planted flowers and dill. I recognized the leaves and let them hang out. For the longest time the little yellow buds blossomed, got fertilized, and then dropped off before fruition but now they appear to have taken hold. I wonder what my little fuzzles will be?