New and Old

Moving to London has brought new challenges, which is in part why the move appealed to me.

But moving someplace new doesn’t mean you don’t seek out the familiar.

Last October I visited the London Print Studio on the recommendation of a friend. Perhaps it was the scent of burnt linseed oil, but I immediately felt at home.

The studio offers classes and studio work sessions for printmakers. It also has a gallery space and small shop.

I signed up for a screenprint workshop. It was good. I asked if they could use any volunteer workers (I figured I might as well make myself useful while I’m here). They said Yes.

I met with the LPS founder and director John Phillips and the operations manager Nadia Yahiaoui. They asked me to put together a print media display for their upcoming 40^th anniversary exhibit, “Printopia – How and Why Artists Reproduce.”

In addition to showcasing all of the techniques the studio provides equipment and materials for – letterpress printing, etching, screenprinting (or silkscreen) and stone lithography – John also asked me if I would like to produce a print to demonstrate each technique in the display.

Well sure. I am still fairly new to silkscreen, I haven’t made an etching since the early 80s, and I’ve never done stone litho. But hey, why not?

Fortunately, I had help from many, but especially from the LPS Print Studio Coordinator, Darren van der Merwe, who was kind and patient enough to give me an very quick intro to stone litho.

To start with, I had an excerpt from Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris that John  planned to use for the letterpress demo. The piece is from the chapter, “This will destroy That. The Book will destroy the Edifice.”

I decided to interpret (illustrate) this quote in the three remaining media, adapting the image to suit each technique.

I started with etching.This is the first state (proof stage) of the image done freehand on hard ground.

I then moved on to the stone lithography piece. This involves drawing on a slab of finely grained limestone mined from Jurassic Era deposits. A fresh stone has a surface Darren describes as “like velvet.” It instantly absorbs any grease you apply, including that from your skin. Wherever the grease is absorbed will show up on the final print. If you mess up, the stone has to be ground down. Grinding down a stone takes hours. I didn’t want to mess up. It was a bit intimidating.

After drawing on my stone for a while it occurred to me that I am not really a line-work person. I am much more comfortable working with form, which is probably why I mostly work in relief printing where I can cut out shapes and leave the line-work to my preliminary drawings. My litho image was looking very timid.

I went looking for Darren, who suggested I could move some of the line around with tusche and even remove some of what I had done with mineral spirits.

That’s when things got really messy but much more productive. I began rubbing out lines, cutting out stencils (shapes) and splattering tusche. I got so carried away I dissolved some of the gum arabic that Darren had laid down to mask out the border areas. It doesn’t resemble what I started out with, but I am relieved and pleased with the end result. It looks like I meant to do whatever it was I did.

I then proceeded to add aquatint to my etching plate. However, I misread the handy timing guide posted in the acid room. The sign showed progressive darknesses of aquatint with a guideline that read; 5″,  10″,  15″, etc.  I thought  ”  meant minutes, but it wasn’t till I had dunked my plate in the acid four times, for a total of sixteen minutes, did I realize that  ”  meant seconds. #@$%&

So I ended up with a very dark plate, but at least the print doesn’t look timid!

That left the silkscreen image, which I had no choice but to create digitally and send to Darren to transfer to the screen and print.

Darren printed everything for me as I had to leave town for two weeks in the middle of the exhibit preparations. I came back with barely enough time to build the displays before the opening.

John had purchased thin metal sheeting imagining it could be sandwiched between the printed images and a blank sheet of paper to create the effect of the prints “magically” lifting off the plates. I was skeptical. I tested it out. It worked beautifully.

I assembled the displays, and now I can add display-building to my list of new skills.

I had fun. I problem-solved. I got to work with a great group of art people. I created my first (and perhaps only) stone litho image. I made something useful. The LPS gained an extra pair of hands for a few weeks and I felt welcomed. I’m looking forward to the next challenge.

Brevity: Short and Sweet

A poetry group I belong to thought it might be a good idea to write one poem a day for April 2015 – National Poetry Month – so we gave it a try.  I managed to do it without missing a day, but doing so caused a few muscle cramps along the way. The unexpected result – at least for me – was that we produced some interesting poems on demand, and we all enjoyed it enough to do it again during the current month. Again, a few muscle cramps, but the process is feeling less strenuous now – any exercise feels better if you do it daily instead of sporadically. Of course, I’m not writing the same kind of poetry I usually write, the kind with what I’ll call, for lack of a better word, complications. Instead, I’m going for short, accepting the fact that a lot of what I produce will be chaff instead of wheat, and I’m learning a few things about the sweet joys of brevity.  The essence of a poem’s inspiration – similar to photography’s decisive moment – comes through with more clarity.  Brevity can feel clean and uncluttered.

For example, the other day I saw a good friend who went through my MFA program with me, and for the first time I met his daughter, who is now four. She was shy at first, but when she got more comfortable, she began to tell stories and giggle and chat and do what four-year old girls normally do – steal the limelight. The more my friend wanted to catch up with me, the more his daughter wanted to bring the light back to her own observations. She’s a natural sharer, and so is my grandson – both of them delightful and both of them with a lot to say.  At a certain point, she began to pat her dad’s cheeks and say, “Look, Daddy. Look, Daddy. Daddy, look!”  and I thought about my own kids, grown now and no longer in need of my attention that way – no one patting my cheeks, no one thrilled by my attention. And I thought of my husband, and how I used to watch him be a father, which I get to see only once in awhile now, since it’s just the two of us at home.

I knew what I was feeling would be a good opportunity for a poem – not an expansive poem but a zen moment kind of a poem – a small observation meant to capture a large and bittersweet longing, kind of like the image of the small goldfish in the large bowl which I put at the top of this post – something small floating in an expansive space. My poem for the day was this:

She Was Thinking All Night

…about the things she missed most, like
the way a little girl says daddy look
look daddy and then the way a daddy
turns and looks

Twenty-five words. It captures what I was thinking about for the rest of the night, after my friend and I said goodbye. For all I know, it will be too long before I see him again. If so, his daughter will be more independent and need his attention less. We’ll probably catch up more, but I won’t get that moment when she pats his cheeks and says “Look, Daddy.” Moments, poems, observations, feelings – there’s a lot out there that comes and goes quickly. For those of us who, in their writing, tend to go on a bit, and then a bit more, I recommend brevity on occasion.

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Kimberly Moran is the host for this week’s Poetry Friday. Head over there to see what other people have posted.

WONDER AND WONDERING

We’re suffering here in Seattle – a record 15 days of temperatures over 80 degrees. I know this might be laughable to people in other, hotter, parts of the country, including our California cousins who don’t even break a sweat until it’s over 100.

In Sonora CA where I grew up, most summers had a week or even two over 110. We did not have air conditioning, so on those hot summer nights we’d pull rollaway beds out on the deck and sleep under the huge humming wheel of the Milky Way.

We’d count falling stars as we fell to sleep. Mom promised that if we could say “Money, money, money,” before a star burned out, we’d be millionaires. But this effort was quickly eclipsed by the sheer wonder of the night skies. Those skies taught me Wonder, one of my favorite emotions.

As Sara Teasdale put it: “…And children’s faces looking up,/ Holding wonder like a cup.” (from Barter)

To escape the Seattle heat yesterday, we slipped into an air conditioned theatre to see INSIDE OUT, Pixar’s brilliant new film. It combines a hero’s journey with an animated construct of how the brain functions. The outer story: eleven-year old Riley has to leave her beloved Minnesota life, including her hockey team, to move to San Francisco with her mom and dad. The ingenious inner story: through animation we to see inside Riley’s mind where the console is run by five emotions: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust. We watch as these emotions govern her stream of consciousness and impact behavior. It is fascinating.

Why did the writers choose these five emotions from the vast possibilities? I expect they settled on Joy, Sadness, Fear, and Anger because these are the core emotions of many more subtle feelings. Disgust I think they chose for comic relief. She’s a green Mean Girl, voiced by Mindy Kaling, who peppers the dialogue with a cynical uppity point of view.

Perhaps you are familiar with the Wheel of Emotions from the Writers’ Circle? The writers of INSIDE OUT employed five of the six core emotions from this wheel, leaving out Surprise. It is interesting to see so many of the human emotions organized on this wheel — but they leave out wonder.

Perhaps I’ll have to start a campaign. “WONDER — the emotion that sings, even on a hot sweaty day in Seattle.” I know. I know. I’ll need to come up with something snappier.

But this could be my first campaign vid: NASA’s images of the Andromeda galaxy taken by the Hubbell telescope last January. Watch it for an instant Wonder hit.

Or check out this photo of the new moon over San Francisco on the night of our grandson’s birth. To me it is just as wondrous — and speaks of wonders to come.

p.s. Wondering if the science behind INSIDE OUT is accurate? Click here. The short answer is yes.

The Pursuit of Happiness

HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!

In 2000 I made this card and sold it to benefit the American Friends Service Committee. It was inspired by my desire for peace, and by the Peaceable Kingdom paintings of Edward Hicks. I also made a series of cards celebrating the bill of rights which I sold to benefit the ACLU. When I painted them I read the constitution and the bill of rights and I was surprised at how unfamiliar the words were to me.  So today I offer you those images and words in honor of flag and country.

The Pursuit of Happiness

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness – that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The First Amendment

The First Amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The Fourth Amendment

The Fourth Amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probably cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the person or things to be seized.

The Sixth Amendment

The Sixth Amendment: In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by the law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witness against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

These images came to the attention of Patti VanTuyl at the National Endowment for the Humanities and over the next few years I painted some posters for an NEH program called the We the People Bookshelf.

In 2008 the NEH bookshelf celebrated the idea that all men are created equal. I took that to mean men and women, black and white, apples and oranges.

In 2009 the theme was A More Perfect Union. The NEH sought to promote reflection on the idea of the United States as a union. In what ways is America a One as well as a Many? I used cake as a metaphor. All of the states as of 1861 are part of the cake.

The United Cake of America

I hope you have a good Fourth of July celebration. I hope you take some time to ponder what America is and what about it you want to celebrate, or to work to change. And I hope you have delicious food tomorrow. Here’s to the Red, White and Blueberries!