Book Arts Illustration Printmaking & Online Studio Workshops
My illustration is through printmaking and collage with mixed media . Design research, drawing sketches, planning, registration, paper preparation and trial proofs, choice of ink and modifications -all this creates a print which can be a multiple or unique image.
Lithography on stone
If you wish to incorporate drawing into your daily life routine, the kitchen is a good place to start. We all know the lures of virtual cooking through food magazines: the pictures have all the flavor minus the work (almost!) Well, drawing will enhance any meal, and give new meaning once you have encountered the complexities of light on the surface of a tomato or eggplant. The design was inspired by Archimboldo’s paintings.
As for my work, I have merged self portrait with lithography and vegetables. My print was drawn with lithography crayon and tuche ink. I collaborated with fellow printer Maria Romero for printing the edition.
My current work uses several methods of printmaking; monoprinting, lithography, digital and silkscreen. The idea is the power and dynamics of mark making and its relationship to languages. Through my work as a language therapist I have come to learn more about the development of the English alphabet. It began with the exchange between ancient cultures of the Mediterranean Sea. Marks that were the river delta, the sun, an ox's head became alphabetic symbols for communication . A system is the organization of symbols into a language. We have visual and textual systems. My prints play with both kinds of marks.
My photos show a digital European map from 1504. The orange color is a monoprint of sandpaper. This adds texture and connects to primitive drawing in sand, mud and on stone walls. The next layers are photo-lithographs inspired by Southwestern petroglyphs, and early alphabet writing. I plan additional handmade paper printed with marks from ancient Sumerian writings and medieval manuscripts. Those prints will be drawn on lithographic stones.
Why printmaking and layers? Because it reflects the layers of thinking, culture, time and the single energy of connecting the human hand to expression. This is important today, as we become more and more technology based. Are we human if we forget the first power and feeling of using our hands, eyes and physical tools, such as the charcoal stick, to make and expressive mark? Technology gets unplugged, outdated, bugged. But there is an integrity that can last thousands of years and we can still understand in cave painting, hieroglyphs and rock walls.
If you are new to printmaking and would like to learn more I recommend several books. One is Simple Printmaking by Gwen Diehn and the Complete Printmaker: Techniques, Traditions, and Innovation by John Ross. Printmaking can begin with very simple tools and materials. It's a great way to discover your environment and enjoy the beauty of marks and textures.
It is a common belief that every artist is always portraying some aspect of self in their work. Have you ever heard that Mona Lisa is a self portrait of Da Vinci?
I have asked myself what is it I like so much about foxes. Their color, yes. Their grace and movement, yes. The particular shape of the face, eye markings and ears, yes. And what about their personality that has been developed as cunning, clever, overconfident, trickster, and curious?
I may say that an artist needs at least some of these qualities. The pursuit of art might be like that of a fox after prey. It can be illusive, it needs tracking and clever perseverance, curiosity is a major plus, and there is trickery afoot. Art making can place one in the forest and it takes some figuring to find the way out.
I wouldn't mind being either of the foxes in my print. There are two of them, and they represent different characters. One is always asking questions, ready to be reasonable, and wants to please. The other thinks it can solve anything, maybe is too concerned about success and his status, and can push a problem too far. In the end of the fable the two foxes come to a resolution of agreement and peace with identities that are different and unique.
I feel that I am both foxes, and yes, the print is a self portrait. Choosing a story is one way of asking what matters, and what I want to commit my time and energy to make. As the drawings and prints progress I come to know more about those characters, and my self. Every art work is a dialogue between the artist and self, and then the viewer. What do you see in the fox?
What could walking in the park on the super moon night have to do with art making? Lots. I have completed printing two runs, meaning layers of printmaking information, for "The Two Foxes." I've posted the beginning drawing on stone, and the second printing was the negative or background area. The foxes are walking at night in a dense wooded area, and I created an environment for them by pressing leaves into a lithographic ink, etching it, and printing it in a dark green/blue. What is now dark will become light when I print the next layer on it. How? Through contrast of darks and light.
To understand what this means, I went out for the night walk. Think Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are." Most of that story takes place at night, and inexplicably the moon changes from a crescent to full. That's the magic of illustration. Have you ever figured out what color the sky is under a very full moon? Or looked at the different types of leaves in the moonlight? I just observed very carefully the light on giant fur trees, pines, maples, beech and plum trees. Some rules never changes about the turning of light on planes. But what I saw the most was how the dark around the highlighted forms gave the sense of light to each leaf or needle.
So this is what I will do next. Draw thinking of the negative space so that the leaves will come into being as light around my foxes. I've included a pictures of the roller I used for the color ink and the aluminum plate ready of the press. The next layer of printing will be from a photo plate that has been exposed to my drawing on a frosted mylar. It's all just light and dark.
Collage is a method that encourages discovery. I use multiple sources for materials: book pages, specialty papers, prints that were proofs, and paste papers. In the example I've posted, the birds are paste papers. This method of surface decoration began about four hundred years ago in Europe as a poor man's method of protecting books. If one could not afford leather, there was paper. It needed to be stronger and sealed to protect the content of the pages. Today we think of books as disposable- paperbacks- but books originally were a treasure. The rising merchant class wanted this object for status and enhancing the education of their entire family. So paste paper was invented using wheat flour starch, pigments, and paper that was probably flax or hemp. By cooking a paste and applying it to the paper surface, a durable and beautiful cover was made that suited the new book owners of the middle ages.
There are two traditions in paste papers; the Moravian (including German, French and Italian) and the English. When I took a class at the San Francisco Center for the Book with British master bookmaker, Dominic Riley, we learned to make paste papers that had subtle patterns with methyl cellulose. At RISD I learned the Moravian style with Jan Baker. That has strong patterns scraped into the wet paste with combs and plastic cards with cut edges.
I always teach paste papers in my book arts classes. We can use the papers for altered books, journal covers or end papers that line the inside of the covers, or for box linings. Making paste paper is very relaxing and puts everyone into right brain good moods. Here's an example of a beautiful book made by my student, Madeleine Prado. Another example from my classroom at Santa Fe Community College is a collection of paste paper journals by Squidge Lain.
What I enjoy is using paste paper to cut new shapes for collage. The paste paper patterns lend themselves to become feather, fins, and features of anything one can imagine. Starting with this method is a freeing activity that can lead to lots of art making.
What a great pleasure to meet the papermakers and presenters this weekend at the Dard Hunter Conference in Santa Fe. The New Mexico History Museum was a beautiful setting for demonstrations, tables of beautiful papers from Helen Hiebert, Madeleine Durham, Andrea Peterson, and Cave Papers as well as book arts of Donna and Peter Thomas, and the craftsmanship of Jim Croft. I was especially happy to meet Lisa Miles who began book arts and papermaking at Santa Fe Community College and now is at the University of Iowa finishing up her graduate degree in Book Arts. She was a presenter about her studies of amatyl papers from Mexico and I saw her very beautiful books that used amatyl, letterpress, and pressure printing of corn husks. It is exciting to see the connections and art that grow from the talent in our classroom at SFCC.
I also visited the show of Marilyn Chambers and Patricia Pearce at the Rotunda with my book arts students last week. What a wonderful presentation of materials in a range of highly personal formats that are uniquely merged with found structures. Just great to see and be inspired to keep one's eyes open to all the beauty around us in objects as they age.
At the conference I also met Lauren Pearlman from the Paperconnection. Her warehouse of beautiful Asian papers is located in Providence, R.I. and we talked about the wonderful teachers in the Graphic Arts Department at Rhode Island School of Design. I graduated from RISD in 2004 and did an accordian book, "Walk, Run." I'm posting it here. The images were from old photos of me as a child, enlarged images of handwriting and printed images from documents and index cards, and used shoes as iconic markers of time sequence. I did this book in Jan Baker's class and I have taught many of the methods of suminigashi, paste paper, pop-ups and sewn books that I learned with her. One of my former students, Madeleine Durham, now has a wonderful paste paper business and her papers are so beautiful they become art in themselves. Check out her website https://madeleinedurham.com/for inspiration. She's been invited to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to give a talk about her work. Isn't it great thinking how a bit of wheat paste and teaching has traveled!
This book is a timeline of my growth as an artist. It uses shoes as icons of time. Printmaking methods are transfer print, monoprint and plate lithography. Handwriting is from an old index card enlarged 800%.
This is my third and final stage for drawing the central characters of the two foxes on the lithography stone. Lithography literally means drawing on stone. The beauty of stone is that the artist can use a variety of materials that are pencil or ink-like, or can transfer photos, xerox transfers images, or toner onto the surface for other affects or unusual combinations of sources.
For this image I am working only in lithographic pencil for the figures. I've used photo sources for understanding how fur turns direction, or to see the shape of a fox's eye and head. Then I freely interpret. While drawing I am thinking of the characters in the original folk tale. In Margaret Read MacDonald's book, Peace Tales, the fox story is agreement and problem solving. I also feel it's about being content with one's unique self.
Margaret Read MacDonald's website is http://www.margaretreadmacdonald.com/index.cfm. You can learn more about her other books, storytelling performances, and workshops. The friendship of the foxes is describes as "made of fire and water, the two great riches of the world, and so nothing could break that friendship." I've put a lantern and bucket of water to illustrate these elements. Doesn't that contrast and balance between fire and water make you pause to consider those elements in our lives and communities?
I will next be etching and proofing the litho stone by using gum arabic, nitric acid, water and inks. The etch makes the stone attract ink to the drawing areas and absorb water, resisting inks, to the stone surface that has been changed by etching. Water is absolutely key to lithography. It's part of the "friendship" a printmaker needs with the stone for the image to print successfully. The areas around the foxes will be made with tuche inks, leaves, and a reticulation like watercolor of the watery ink from objects places in the wet surface.
Water is a rich source for art making, stories, and life! A Chinese wisdom saying is:
When you drink the water, remember the spring.
Lantern and bucket are fire and water
Native North Carolina gray fox's different colors!
This week in lithography I am drawing on a large litho stone that is 24 x 33 inches. After seeing a Robert Rauschenberg lithograph that use a composite photo and drawn image, I was inspired to go big. I wanted the freedom of making broad, expressive marks with the drawing materials used on stone: litho pencil, crayon, and tuche. The last is a grease-based ink for lithography that can create a painterly mark or be used to put objects in for an impression.
The drawing I'm doing comes from a drypoint image that I made nine years ago. It was 4x6 inches. In 2011 I revisted that same image and did it in a copper plate intaglio. That meant using tools to scratch into a metal plate, develop different tonal darks and flat area, and create a new image that extended my first drawing. When I was drawing on stone today at a much larger image size, I realized it was so magnified that the drawing of the character and surface was completely different. I used photo sources to understand the whorls for fur on a fox's face, to find out the differences between a gray fox and red fox, and to study the shape and light of eyes. But, I also made choices for when I simply wanted to adapt and make the fox in its anthropomorphic character of carrying a lantern. As an artist we can choose what to emphasize or change completely. To quote Dr. Seuss: “I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living.”
When I draw foxes as people, I am free of the constraints of human form and its limitations. We can all see ourselves in animal characters, much like fables. It's not nonsense, but a freedom of waking up to the pleasure of seeing anew.
blog 1, September 5, 2016, Making art.....
Hello!
This writing is about making art.
I'd like to say that it's easy as breathing, but it does take more than that. What's important is getting it out of the head stage and into the materials. Materials speak back. Materials guide, excite, inform and lead. They are your best friends, and part of your job as an artist is to find the materials you want to work with. Materials are not just pen, pencil or crayons. They can be fiber, clay, thread, metal, recycled stuff, and most of all, whatever wonderful sensory material creates a dialogue for you. In Roderi's book, Collage, he describes the process as
" Thrust into the very centre of the work, we participate in its creation. We reconstruct it with our own hands, as it were. By identifying closely with its plastic requirements we can hope to discover its secret.” (1998, Rissoli Publications, NY)
We are whole creatures, and the materials will connect you to your ideas, working strategies, and motivate your sense of exploration. As an artist, you are an explorer, a Robinson Crusoe in the Lillipution world of ideas and materials. The learning process will take you many places, imaginary and real. I know, because my art pursuits have taken me across the U.S.A many times, and I've settled in the land of Book Arts, Printmaking, and Papermaking. This all came about because of Illustration. I am a visual storyteller that loves words and images.
I also have been teaching art to people of all ages for over twenty years. Art makes lots of things happen, and you may feel shipwrecked through the process. But, you can write about that, too. Monet never was finished with his process of discovery, even as blindness inhibited his work. He felt his drawings and paintings. I recommend reading Elliot Eisner's thoughts about art:
Ten Lessons the Arts Teach (show) that “learning in the arts requires the ABILITY and a WILLINGNESS to surrender to the unanticipated possibilities of the work as it unfolds.” (The arts and the creation of mind, New Haven, CT: Yale University, 2002.)
Folio Page from "Same Language" collage, watercolor, crayon, colored pencil, bound book.