Serious Sharks

2011-04-05T10:12:00.001-07:00

HillyHundred2010Best (3)
Originally uploaded by Sylva.Johnson

Just how much is a bushel and a peck?

2010-03-02T14:06:00.000-08:00

My parents have told my sister and me from the time we quite young just how much they love us. If you're wondering the details of that amount, I'll tell you. They loved us one bushel, one peck, and one hug, specifically located around the neck.

I later learned we were not the only children to be loved in such quantities,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNjv1WDGxt8
but like other things I didn't understand (What kind of metal is aleeeoooooh-minum, or was it al-YOU-min-ee-um? Which grade is A-levels? You were a prefect?!? At Hogwarts?!?) I didn't fully grasp just how much love my parents held for me. Even if I generally knew how much a peck amounts to, "What boy or girl is there who, when sent to buy a peck of apples, has not felt as though peck measures were getting smaller all the time?"

Luckily, I found a website which teaches how to make one's own peck measure and never be ripped off on love or apples again*!

http://chestofbooks.com/home-improvement/woodworking/Things-To-Make/How-To-Make-A-Peck-Measure.html

*In the course of this study, I realized that my parents had grossly underestimated their love, but I'm hoping this works like a bank error in my favor, and that the amount received shant be reduced upon comparing measurements.

Street (and everywhere else!) Sounds

2010-02-17T18:40:00.001-08:00

This week I'm nutty about The Small's new interactive map which invites users to upload sounds to a map which is searchable by location/tag/user.

Their idea is that the sounds can be used as stock for film-makers, but I think that's just one option.

http://www.thesmalls.com/StreetSounds/

Search for slingers, an upload by my friend Becca. You might also enjoy some Hobo Music I posted.

Some are straightforward, some are cryptic clips of conversations which might inspire you.

It's just kicking off, with a fun film-making competition to boot, and they're hoping to get 5,000 sounds by the end of March.

So at least check it out, and maybe capture some sound and upload it. If you're a mac kid, shoot some video on your phone or camera, pull it into garage band and delete the video track (>Tracks>Delete Track) then export as mp3.

Go to it!

2009-11-15T14:23:00.001-08:00

Because I'm tired of starting and never continuing with blogs when the content doesn't make sense together, I'm going to admit that my life doesn't make sense together and post whatever wherever.

Today I walked around downtown inviting people over for cereal and bananas with a girl who found out yesterday that she's 6 weeks pregnant. She showed me the picture, which I could make neither heads nor tail of. It didn't even really look like a peanut. She found out, she told me, because yesterday she was raped, so she went to the hospital. Conversationally, she told me this. Adding, "you, you know, it was one of those date rape things." I didn't know how to say, "No, I don't know."

I wouldn't have been there, but last night when Allen cooked me some amazing chili, WorkerBee knew I had arrived by car and asked if I'd run to the grocery to buy him some bowls and spoons to feed people breakfast. I foolishly said yes, although I had neither been the driver nor had the time to do said task. So to not go back on my word, I offered to bring the things tomorrow, now today, which meant getting up at 6 am to run to the grocery store where I bought 100 bowls, 100 spoons, and 20 bananas. Then I drove downtown.

When you pick up trash in a park, it's likely that someone will approach you and ask you what you're doing. They might squint their eyes and ask caustically if you're with some church group. When you explain that you're not with any group, that you're just there, picking up trash, they might smile and say "God bless you."

Ivory says to me "Hey, College Girl, you can slow down, you ain't walkin' to class or nothing." And I slow down.

Mole Hunting.

2009-06-15T20:27:00.000-07:00

I'm finally fighting the not-so-good fight. Can't we all just live and let live? Ummmmm. No. Not when he's nibbling the roots of my oh-so-freshly planted nasturtiums, nurtured from seeds and then transplanted to the fresh tilled soil of dark earthy from-a-bag goodness, exported from Lowesdom. I don't want to kill the mole, but he's just wrecking everything. I stomp the soil back down, go take a shower, and come back to find the entire garden re-churned. I simply can't abide it. Thus, I leave a poem as warning.

Woodchucks

Gassing the woodchucks didn't turn out right.
The knockout bomb from the Feed and Grain Exchange
was featured as merciful, quick at the bone
and the case we had against them was airtight,
both exits shoehorned shut with puddingstone,
but they had a sub-sub-basement out of range.

Next morning they turned up again, no worse
for the cyanide than we for our cigarettes
and state-store Scotch, all of us up to scratch.
They brought down the marigolds as a matter of course
and then took over the vegetable patch
nipping the broccoli shoots, beheading the carrots.

The food from our mouths, I said, righteously thrilling
to the feel of the .22, the bullets' neat noses.
I, a lapsed pacifist fallen from grace
puffed with Darwinian pieties for killing,
now drew a bead on the little woodchuck's face.
He died down in the everbearing roses.

Ten minutes later I dropped the mother.She
flipflopped in the air and fell, her needle teeth
still hooked in a leaf of early Swiss chard.
Another baby next.O one-two-three
the murderer inside me rose up hard,
the hawkeye killer came on stage forthwith.

There's one chuck left. Old wily fellow, he keeps
me cocked and ready day after day after day.
All night I hunt his humped-up form.I dream
I sight along the barrel in my sleep.
If only they'd all consented to die unseen
gassed underground the quiet Nazi way.

Maxine Kumin

Moldy roses.

2009-04-13T11:57:00.000-07:00

Superstitions after all? I never thought I was superstitious, but I may have to reevaluate this standpoint after a few things I've found shocking. Number one, that there was a small chick fallen and splattered on the sidewalk on Easter morning. That just shouldn't happen. Number two, that my easter rose grew mold. I didn't even think of roses as something that might grow mold, although I know it makes sense. And everything grows mold in Italy. Number three, I'll think of when it happens. It's probably something like being depressed while in the most beautiful country with a loving Italian family and making art. It just shouldn't happen.

Sleep Chronicles, Part 1.

2009-04-10T23:39:00.000-07:00

Last night was one of the worst nights of sleep I can remember. Maria gave me something for sleeping, as she has once before, and both times it just seems to make me over alert. All night, I was obsessively rearranging the pillows and sheets and my body within the bed. Getting up and closing the shutters. Getting up and changing clothes. Getting up and tugging at the curtains. Back in bed, turning this way and that, trying to find some perfect position where I might fall asleep. With my eyes closed, I saw the room before me but various photoshop effects were in constant motion over the landscape as I tried to get it just right. Some burning, then dodging, and then the stamp tool would move my pillow from one place to another. Very strange. Finally a short dream about college, running into Y as we were both moving back in, talking about housing and driving to school and at some point there were two boys who hit the descriptions of Austrian host brothers although they were American and I don't know how they came into the picture. Maybe we were at a museum. Anyway, no. We were at a random old junk warehouse, with especially a lot of toys. And there were lots of these mirror books in different themes. They had usually only 2 pages that folding out on either side and looked in general like those things people hold to their face when lying out in lawn chairs, all silver and shiny. Only the front cover would have something else, like Mickey mouse and at the time I didn't even think about the tanning objects. These had some other use, I don't know what. Anyway, I was there and was searching through all the flea market sort of stuff with them and park ranger looking cop comes and up and says something like "Did you think I wouldn't catch you?" And details how everyday she watches them pull out on the highway and take it to about 90, that she's always there and tracking them and that she's given them enough tickets they they should know better than to drive the way they do. I thought I was awake for this. Finally I fall asleep just a little, where I know I'm kind of sleeping, and I'm feeling calm. And I dream that it's a sort of critique and someone else and I have very similar patterns in our work, and the teacher comments on the design and we both shrug and say "Bedsheets." Soon after that, the alarm. I wonder if any of the troubles of tossing and turning were due to my sorely bruised bottom from riding for an hour along cobblestones and bumpy river paths with my rickety second-hand bike?

An open post-it note.

2009-03-29T08:53:00.001-07:00

Art history as a major, every day you look better. Love, Sylva.

Poems

2009-03-25T13:51:00.000-07:00

I Hear Voices

They say, "Fix the lawnmower."
"Clean the garage." Then I realize

I've left the door open and it's birds.
Please, I need voices that lie, not

issue orders. Voices that tell me
how lucky I am to be alone.

-John Lehman
Acting Lessons

Sleeping in My Boyhood Bedroom Again

I wake to the songs of mourning doves,
having returned from far-off places
to sleep beneath the scaffolding of old dreams.

I know this room the way
a river knows its bed:
every crack of plaster
through three skins of paint,
every fissure veining the ceiling
where the old house has buckled
bearing the weight of five lives of sleep.

On the doorframe of the closet
our father measured our growth,
penciling a line above our heads,
recording the year and the weather
as if recording water levels.

I am the furthest flood
of the river of my life,
the high-water mark.

I stand in that closet again
and feel infinite children
nested within me.

I have gone miles
and miles.
Now, when I wake, I must lie still
to allow the light to recognize
this shape I have taken.

-Austin Smith
In the Silence of the Migrated Birds

Kamikaze

After he died we turned
the power off and the noise
got better for awhile

but then summer came
and even though we kept
all the windows closed
some small hole crept open

and we began to fill with moths
and fireflies and creatures
too small to name

until a million thrumming wings
beat a symphony in every pore
and we pulsed inside out
fluorescent from forfeit.

Giving in was giving up but
it was right before the end
that light that brilliant light.

-Cathryn Cofell
Kamikaze Commotion

La critica d'arte.

2009-03-05T09:54:00.000-08:00

I woke up this morning (for the second time, I assume) with my alarm in my hand. I think I had woken "fife" minutes before my alarm and wanted to shut it off quickly, but I might have taken longer as I tried to figure out where it was. Like when I was hanging my work and kept losing the masking tape because I would slip it on my wrist and have no idea where it was. Yeah, sleep deprivation.

Anyway, crit went well. I talked about how I'd gone to the point I was at, starting with dreams and making the newspaper beds, then finding the TV and dissecting it, as part of play, then realizing it could become a symbol for dreams if I put it on my head. I started wearing it and taking photos, then wound up doing my project with double negatives of the TV with images inside of my in various scenes with the TV Head on. I talked about how I saw them as Dream Reliquaries, and stills from a film. I spoke a bit about each image, my voice getting a little nervous with all the excitement/emotion as I talked about the relationships I saw between dreams and the media, the contrast between this sort of show inside one's head with (for me) the same kinds of cinematography and plot twists as televison or movies, but as something exclusively personal that no one but me sees, and also that no one is producing. No one is making conscious decisions about what will appear on the screen of my eyelids, and I don't have any insight into why my subconscious calls forth certain things, although I can guess. So in a way, I was talking about this very mysterious and intimate thing, and offering it up for other people as a shared experience instead of a private happening. It's like, why do we go to the movies to sit in the dark and not talk to each other if it's not for the importance of this shared experience, of seeing the same things at the same time? So I was searching perhaps to translate my experiences with dreams to something other people could engage with, as wordless and fragile in the face of language as dreams are. At the same time, I was dealing with my very specific dream experience, which I realized don't necessarily translate to the way others dream, as I spoke with Siena. It's almost like there is a general societal schema for dream, and a very specific way in which individuals may actually experience and remember dreaming. I find it interesting that some people don't believe they dream at all.

Jana liked my phrase about the cinematography of dreams, and overall said that my comments probably gave clues to where my work could go during the semester. She said the mirror piece, and the idea of fixing one's head mechanically [tools as a metaphor] has potential. We talked about my face, essentially my acting skills. . . the way some seemed very acted out or recreated while others really caught me just doing something (esp. the bus one). Regan mentioned that it was as if I had forgotten that she was photographing me, which was cool because I was very intentional about that one to act as if I weren't wearing the head, to lean against the pole as I always would, to just engage in the act of riding a bus, like I for an hour or so a day. We talked about the redundancy of the TV frame with the TV headed self inside and there was some devil's advocacy for keeping it, but ultimately John had the best suggestion for how to keep the metaphor and understanding of the TV head being dreams (not just some weird TV show) and that was to have the TV sitting on my shoulders instead of a table. I really like this idea, and I want to pursue it, although perhaps in photoshop instead of the dark room for the interest of time. Unfortunately, I don't have my good camera here. I emailed my parents just barely too late about bringing it to me. (They're on their way!) If I redid parts of it, It would also be interesting to pursue a more dreamlike image, that indistinct quality; the way you can never really see faces. I didn't want to pursue this with my film prints for fear that it would end up looking technically unsound, and I had a desire to produce crisp images that would show I had mastered double exposure. Or at least apprenticed it. With the devil/curtain piece, we talked about the idea of just a curtain, or just a stage light. . .something with mystery, allowing the viewer to come in at a point where they know something has just happened or is about to happen but they don't know what. What else? I've been thinking about text, and Susanna had talked about even text which scrolled out of the hole where the channel changer goes, but dreams never really translate to language, they just sound weird when said aloud. Other things to consider, like the channel changing thing, where when I wore the TV Head in public people would pull out their cell phones, pointing it at the TV and pressing buttons to try to change the channel, and how Susanna pointed out that this sort of TV didn't have a remote, you'd have to actually come up and press a button by my neck to change the channel. Giovanni was talking to me after about the nostalgia of an old television set, which is something that's come up a lot. It's sort of an elephant for me, this issue that I know is there; this visual vocabulary which I want to pretend I don't have to adopt or address, but even the square screen ration and rounded corners are this old-fashioned thing, maybe related to memory. John made a really good point about how when people wanted to indicate that someone was having a dream engaging with some kind of memory or fantasy that would represented on the screen, they had to devise a way of separating this fantasy from the other fantasy, the fiction of the base story in whatever show it was on TV. And that's where we got all those now-ultra-cheesy screen wobbles and soft edges on TV shows growing up. I guess they still use it now sometimes, but it seems very funny, this contrived thing. But it's a vocabulary, a device to allow the viewers to follow what's going on, to recognize which images are from what the character is dreaming/thinking about/etc. We the viewers need a clue. Our fantastic visiting artist Marisa Favretto said she was interested in the devil image, that she didn't like it and it made her uncomfortable and she kept coming back to it, kept being interested in it, curious about it. But she was the one to say maybe all I need is the curtain. . .overall I want to do more unexpected things, maybe work more directly from my dreams but keep it elusive, putting attention on something other than direct action, as in the tree couch piece.

We looked at my other pieces, the ones I spent billions of hours on and freaked out about quite briefly. Partly a time thing, but partly very right and good, they were the bane of my existence at times. There were moments of play and enjoyment but at other times my fingers were just in so much pain and I was just going through the motions, and that harshness comes through in the figures, they lose the play element. My strongest pieces (as I knew) were actually the happy accidents from the spray paint. She was talking about the blue smudges being the real drawings, that the moment came when things aren't spelled out or overly clear; the unclarity is more interesting. Of the "finished" pieces, they ones like Venus on Venus, where the two images play on each other and really start to blur the edge of it being two distinct images were best. She chided me that when she told me to make a lot, she didn't mean to make them in the same way, which was actually something I really struggle with. I remember asking Noah and others whether I could back some in white, some in gold, etc. but in the end I didn't listen and I fell prey to the idea that I had to have some kind of master concept and a cohesive piece, a consistency, which wasn't really true. I mean, I pretty much had that with the photo project. Here was where I should have had dozens and dozens of trials, and some errors, but some grand successes as I worked in a sort of messy inbetween instead of trying to get all 2D Design about it. This feels contrary to everything I've been taught, and it's going to be a struggle to unlearn some things, but I think that's where we're headed as a class and I think with John and Regan's guidance, I'll be able to move to a new level of art making. I read over that and it sounds cheesy and contrived, but I'm not editing it. I'm taking it to the next level.

Only first, I'm going to mess around on the computer for a year and sleep a lot!

Today I officially became obsessed with Wooster Collective. It's going to be a serious problem, I can tell.

This is pretty fantastic: http://evan-roth.com/

Crap, I just got chocolate on my keyboard.

Siena's Italian Relatives

2009-02-23T14:17:00.000-08:00

I feel a little as if I'm still floating, project wise. Other people are standing on their property with blueprints, and only the building left to do, and I'm still at sea. But it's a lovely view and at least I know what ocean I'm in. I'm still working in Theme Sequence with this dream world, using a TV head as symbol for my dream self, and also exploring the way that modern media influences my dreamscapes, sort of the cinematography of dreams. Last night I dreamed I was travelling to Spain again (this is the third dream about it) but most of the onscreen (on eyelid?) images were just me shaving my legs. Dreams are like that. But how does one capture that "knowing", the way that a face might look like your neighbor, but it's actually your English teacher, and you simply know? I'm mostly working with the blending, the crazy way that you're talking to your best friend and it turns out it's your mom, or perhaps becomes your mom, but you're not sure when. I'm working a bit in videography, but I think my more finished work will be in photgraphy, overlaying negatives and using multiple enlargers to make composite prints. I just have to go through all the playing of video and the action to have that motion for my images and keep them from becoming stagnant or real. I want them to retain the inclarity and morphability of dreams. I'd like to work in the same way with masterprints, but I'm also still drawn to the idea of recreating in some form an altarpiece, particularly one with St. Francis. I've been working in collage with the basic gesture of a St. Francis altarpiece by Stefano di Giovanni, known as Sassetta, recreating the silhoutte of a figure in a habit with outstretched arms, but with modern lighting. I've actually been working with images from a lighting company's catalogue. I have some images from skyscrapers that begin to look like stained glass which I like a lot. I'm going to work on some sketches of the collages and see where that takes me, but I may be doing more drawing in relation to setting up the photos as I mix them up. I'm doing the initial tast of taking the photographs now, composing them on the negative, but plan to start doing more work in the darkroom this week.

It's been interesting seeing the way people react to TV Head. A lot of people are really wild about it, they'll grin and grab their friends and point and ask me in Italian if they can change the channel. I'm going to have to develop some shtick where I do famous bits of Italian cinema then jerk my head and switch to something else as they point their invisible remotes at me, clicking furiously. (They really do this. All the time!) Right before we got on the train, we were walking through a festival in San Benedetto near a parade and I was wearing the TV and even though everyone else was costumed, I still stood out a great deal. Rather than freaking out about the monks and nuns, or the men in lace bodices and fishnets, the attention went to me. We also went to festivals in Ascoli Piceno and another small town.

Thursday was some 5 hours in transit, longer because of the anticipation at meeting Siena's Italian relatives, Rita, Davide, and Gionata. It was a lovely trainride through mountains and on bridges over great valleys, ending with a stretch along the coast, water all but lapping at the rails on our way to San Benedetto. Friday morning began with cappucino and a cornetto bursting with nutella and continued with a trip to the beach, grocery shopping, and an oddly short visit with some other relatives. We met Gionata, who was just arriving from Spain (he's studying for a PhD) and he drove us back with his mother shouting "Piano!" from the rear the whole time. Almost as soon as we got to the house they suddenly received news that Rita's mother had fallen and possibly broken her arm, but while Rita and Gionata rushed off to the hospital, we had lunch and then went to see the festivities for Carnivale. It was very strange to be on the edge of this tragedy, wanting to help in some way or at least offer condolences, but not having quite enough grace with the language to say something with the desired comforting effect. I'm not quite sure how I felt as we were whisked away by another relative, Leone, climbing hairpin curves to another mountainous town called Ortezzano, where we had the most lavish dinner, with delicious appetizers and champagne, two courses of pasta, several plates of meat, red wine, and more. When the waiter asked if we would like a dessert, they said "Si, tutto!" and we tried every single dessert on the menu, as well as some Carnivale sweets which weren't even listed. The meal was finished with both dessert wine and some fiery liquor distilled from honey. It was as if we were royalty. I was asked to taste the wine when they brought it out, and did my best to give it a slow swirl and a thorough smell before pronouncing it "Buono." I will say, I was terrified of the return, because the roads had been a rollercoaster of turns at both high altitude and high velocity, and by the end of dinner there was no room on the table for all the empty glasses; luckily we took a different route with a subdued speed and I found myself belting out opera with almost as much gusto as Leone. He was thrilled that I knew the tune, if not the words. We arrived back late, but gathered around the table to hear the news of la nonna and talk with Gionata. He told me I spoke good Italian. This was, of course, an enormous lie, but I think it was one of the most useful things anyone's said to me, because the idea of someone thinking I was good at Italian was so desirable that I have a renewed vigor for learning the language. There can be great wisdom in calling things that are not as though they are. (Rom. 14:7, yeah?) Saturday morning Gionata took us on a hike around the ruins of un castello near Grottammare. That evening we went again with Leone and his wife Vincencina made us a grand dinner. Sunday we had lunch in Patrignone, possibly the most beautiful paesino in Italy. And apertivo to boot! Here we met even more of her family, like Mauro and Valentino. We drove home again and Rita's family brought out a homemade cake with a candle for Siena to blow out, then packed pieces into foil for us to take on the train and we were headed home after the quick weave through festive streets. We had a compartment in the train and when the snack-cart rolled by, I was hoping they might have Wizard Cards. On the Regionale from Faenza to Firenze, a woman from Russia who had taken two wrong trains in an attempt to go to Rome asked us for help and we tried to sort her out, and communicated with some station employees in Italian (she spoke some English but no Italian) but it didn't seem like there would be a train going to Rome that night.

Work!

2009-02-05T14:38:00.000-08:00

So far we've been exploring "ways of working" in theme sequence, and we've covered collecting, following personal themes, and research. I guess it's really all about developing a practice from your obsession. . . so now I just have to figure out what I have an unhealthy preoccupation with.

Right now I'm drawn towards Dreamscapes, both the literal place where I exist as my dreams unfolding, and the fantastic landscapes of the dreams themselves, the strange sequencing and illogic that guides the imagery in my head at night. This might be in part because I'm having trouble sleeping and going through a strange metamorphosis or perhaps some graphable function of changes in my sleeping patterns, from easy sleep to hyperactive dreaming which trumps sleep for restless adventures to calm dreamless nights where I still lie awake, to last night's deep but hollow drug-induced slumber.
I think I'm going to try to start dream-journaling again, esp. if I can get dreams on track to where I both get rest and have some memorable fun. I think one comes at the price of another, though, and I can't predict what I'll sleep like.

I've also found myself photographing mannequins and cutting from magazines pictures of the same. Often it's a clothed person posing with a nude mannequin or even a nude statue. I have one photo that's sort of I'm-trying-to-make-this-artistic black and white of a business man casually leaning against the stone torso of a well-endowed armless sculpture. Sort of like "it wouldn't be appropriate for me to appear in this magazine naked, but if I stand next to this model, you can see what's under my clothes." A very strange sort of substitution/symbolism. I'm toying with the idea of nude people next to clothed statues, just to switch things up. How would people respond? It's the same anatomy on display. A performance piece, taking off one's own clothes to dress a statue?

Other compulsive fascinations. . . thinking of creativity as a basic human desire, an evolutionary impulse. With art so cordoned off into "art world" what channels do we have to express our instinctive need to "make special." I was particularly drawn to cooking as a channel for creating, and I see my own spectrum from the more-than-mud-pies I made with berries and other mixtures carefully and aesthetically wrapped into little leaf packets and served on bark platters beside the stream that marked the boundary between yard and forest as child to the boboti I must soon learn to make so I can pass this enormous ceremony of a South African meal on to my own children.

Children, too, might be an area. I watched for a long time as several siblings scattered confetti around. Now I see the little bits of paper everywhere and I always like to imagine the little girl in the pink coat skipping around with her big bag. But even for all the fun and innocence of this activity, it's interesting that we teach children early to litter and leave messes behind without being concerned with who will have to clean up later. As we get older, we graduate to beer cans and oil spills, but we're still scattering markers of our passing.

The city also makes me think more of man vs. nature themes, and found objects. Or, transversely, lost objects, objects which retain some identity of their previous owner even when they are found by someone else, like the many gloves I stumble across.

So those are stubs to build on.

We made short videos in the city today. Early, we had created newspaper sculptures, and I made a pillow and blanket out of newspaper and slept with the pigeons in Piazza San Lorenzo. It was quite fun. Maybe once I get it off Monica's camera and edit it, I'll put it on youtube and post the link.

I'm thinking of really going back and making a cushier and more elaborate bed and doing a longer and more stable take of sleeping on newspaper in a public place. It sounds like too much fun not to. I thought about other materials, but newspaper just seems right.

I think you'll want to see it. But for now I will give you a video discovered today:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgk360PZJ7w

Back to Day 1

2009-01-26T00:34:00.001-08:00

I arrived in Florence gasping, and grasping the arm of the man sitting beside me, a man I did not know. I had been asleep, and woke up to the jarring sensation that the plane was going down. It was, in fact, going down (we were landing) but the plane was hesitant to stay on the ground, and after first contact it jumped up again, and sent all the passengers bouncing and jostling as it waggled to a stop. The poor Brit beside me had been astonished to be seized by the woman who had been drooling placidly only moments before, and at the time I mistook his startled look for further evidence that we were crash-landing. My heart was still pounding as I gathered my bags, but the warm, clear air that greeted me when I descended the stairs from the plane cast off some of the stress I’d been carrying from the day’s traveling. Siena and I had met Felicia in London and so we caught a cab from the airport together. Three people and 4 months of luggage for the fixed-rate price of 25 euros? Score! We were the last three in line, and lots of cabs were waiting, hoping for customers, and when they saw us all get into one cab, the other cab drivers exclaimed “Hai tutti le ragazze!” and “Tutti tre!” and ours replied “C’è la buona fortuna!”
I sat up front and gave directions, Via San Gallo 53 rosso. We arrived and checked in and met our housemate, Anna, and hailed a cab to head to the apartment where we met our hostmother Maria. . . . Sweetest. Woman. Alive. No, really. She’s amazing. The apartment is incredible; spacious and well furnished, nothing like the american schema for apartment. Maria took us around the neighborhood (zona stadio), helped us buy bus tickets, showed us our stop and which numbers to take, and even took Anna to get toiletries, and Siena and me to get stamps. Daniella, one of her daughters came home and was so enthusiastically welcoming, I then knew it would not be Harry Potter with the Dursleys. Unfortunately, the family is entirely too skilled with English, so we won’t drown in immersion, but they are wonderful about using Italian, even when it is somewhat challenging, to help us learn, and also English when we’re clearly too tired, or just really need to understand something well. We met the father and the older sister and had dinner, which was (Not just pasta!) an amazingly flavorful rice dish with meat and salad and more of the home made bread we’d had with tea earlier. It turns out she makes fresh home made bread every day. They engaged us in conversation, but also had a humorous word-play conversation which I caught some of, and they explained the rest after the laughter died down. “un lira di Dio.”

There you have my actual first, first impression of Florence.

Since then, I have continued to be amazed by the hospitality of our hosts; Maria woke us up the next morning when we would have otherwise been late, and she drove us yesterday to the train station to make sure we got the best and right travel tickets, and showed us the Esselungha grocery on the way. We went back to the grocery to get fixings for dinner at Grace and Laura’s. It was almost as packed as the nightbus home, aisles as narrow as the streets. I bought wine and bread, Anna and Leah got gnocchi and all the makings of a parmesan mushroom cream sauce. Siena covered a dessert of shortbread cakelets with poached pears and kiwi, and our hosts made salad and served lemon gelato with dessert. Not just eating, but cooking Italian!

And I think that’s the big idea! That we’re not here to run around and snap a few shots of the Duomo, that we actually have un indirezzo, we live in the city, and we will experience it as something more than tourists. In this city of history, we will be telling our story. In a place with so many layers, we will bother observe and become part of the changes. Even watching out the bus window the first day, and seeing ‘Israel è stato terrorista” and a few mornings later seeing a layer of fresh gray paint, which then ran in the rain and became transparent by the afternoon ride, and was repainted the next day. . .I could write of so many more fantastic experiences, but I’ll spare you for now.

I want to see more of Florence.

Una settimana e mezzo.

2009-01-21T10:18:00.000-08:00

A week and a half in, I thought I should update! Our family is amazing! Absolutely fantastic. The mother, Maria cooks not only in enormous quantities, but multiple dishes which are all mouth watering. I'm drooling a little just thinking of her lasagna (which had no tomatoes, oddly) and how I almost grew another stomach just to have a third plate. Their daughters, 26 and 28, are beautiful and as well-fed as we are. Alessandra is engaged, and Daniella is bubbly and delightful to talk with. Unfortunately, they speak very good English, but we are practicing a lot of Italian and today Anna and I read an article about Obama's inauguration on the way home and understood just about everything. (Yeah, change!)

In other news, we had photo class for the first time today, and that should be pretty cool. I like art history. So much that today I considered dropping art and doing an art history major. Eh, probably not, though.

Day 1

2009-01-08T18:48:00.000-08:00

In my first misadventure of the trip, we stopped for lunch in Merrilville on the way to Chicago at the Great American Bagel Company, and in all my excitement of eating a not-so-great Mexican bagel, I must have left my purse in the both while mom was showing me pictures in her find it guide. Unfortunately, we didn't realize this until we got to a gas station just down the way, and it seemed more prudent to fill up before returning for the purse. Unfortunately, on our return both the Bagel Co. and the next door Starbucks we stopped into were devoid of purses. So all those hopes of photo updates or phone calls can be relinquished, because I lost not only my American phone, but my international phone and my camera, camera case, winter gloves, baby aspirin, 2 pairs of headphones, poetry books, and other assorted items.

But I had some good plum tea and some tasty chai, as well as pad thai and got to watch some speed skating. I'm blown away by the amount of solid art pieces in Siena's house, and we might watch Art School Confidential later. Yay!

Homestay!

2008-12-30T15:58:00.000-08:00

View Larger Map

I'm google-stalking my Florence family in anticipation of calling them tomorrow morning. I believe this is the apartment we'll be living in!

Boxtastic Returns!

2008-12-08T09:36:00.000-08:00

Some images from the collaborative project that I never posted. . .

This was the ghost, I believe, of a reductive flat we printed from plexi. It was sort of meant to be a landscape in which we'd place our various prints from other small matrices, but we all agreed that it was quite interesting by itself.

I did a woodcut of a mole for the first part, based on a song lyric.

Then I made a knight to ride him.

They got along quite well.

Aaron carved a host of little men.

I was dazzled, as usual, by his ability to fashion a figure which a few deft movements of the u-gouge. They were printed in his signature sage green.

Speaking of colors, a reminder of the rainbow roll which I somehow thought would not look cheesy. . .

Also I carved Chloe's dragon and printed it in pepto bismol.
I thought it was pretty funny with the Georges.

Not so sweet November.

2008-11-16T12:22:00.000-08:00

Apologies go out to most everyone this month, as the mono I was incubating in October really struck in full force on election day and knocked me out of the ring. The morning found me sewing quite feebly on our fantastically large prints, making trips to the bathroom inbetween to gargle salt water and stopping to glide apple sauce down my tender throat, each swallow grimace-worthy. While I made it to the polls after my second visit of the week to student health (strep test: negative), the next day found me in bed through my first class, and making my third and fourth trips to Habif in the afternoon. (mono test: positive). My spectacular mother drove the four and a half hours out to St. Louis to medicate and care for me, but my excitement at having her come for the first time to see Rutledge and the DUC made me much more tourguide than invalid, and our shopping trip to stock up on tea, rice, applesauce, etc. did me in. Thursday I tried very hard to go to classes, even got up at 7:15, but I was basically worthless to the world. After I managed to squirm through fifty minutes of Italian, I met mom and realized there was no way I was going to be able to do the next three hours of class, so came back to the suite. My offered to make tea, but for she could even ask "Roibos or HuKwa?" I was fast asleep on the couch. I didn't really emerge until Monday, and even now I'm wading through exhaustion, still.

Wednesday in my communications class I was working happily on an illustrator file when my computer froze and I restarted it to be greeted by the Gray Screen of Death, and ultimately found out my hard drive had failed and I've lost everything I ever did since college, photos, essays, poems, photographs (including my biking trip in France this summer. . .) and current assignments I hadn't yet turned in.

It's just things, just information, though. My sister got into an accident and broke her arm, both the ulna and radius shattering, some parts in chips, other shards breaking through the skin and damaging her soft tissue, just tearing up the muscles of her arm. This time it was my dad making an emergency trip to Boston, in time to be there when she got out of emergency surgery. Thank God she's okay.

I'm not going to make the mistake of can't get worse than this, and truly I'm very blessed and these issues are small in relation to the world, but somehow in all of this, coursework has evolved into an unscalable cliff, waves crashing below me. I'm bouldering and trying to find a route up, but right now it all feels a little scary.

Joel Demo!

2008-11-11T07:15:00.000-08:00

Today we learned basic folded-paper books, registration, and guidelines for editioning.

Registration is pretty basic. Measure the exact center and draw a line from top to bottom on a piece of newsprint which is the same size of your paper. Put similar marks denoting the midpoint on the top and bottom edge of the actual paper you'll be printing on, marking the top one with a crossbar to from a + (t) for top. On your newsprint, then, measure and mark out with sharpie where you want your plate or woodblock or whatever to be positioned. Stick yer newsprint down under some mylar on the press bed and tape it down, and then position the matrix according to it's outline and the paper matched up according to the midpoints (top to top, the newsprint should also have the T) and, in theory, they should all match up. We did a little bit of "what not to do" in the demo, so hopefully we won't have to make some of the mistakes ourselves in order to learn the right way.

I'm rabidly excited about the possibility of books for the print exchange. We're doing editions on 8.5x11 paper, but the books can be smaller, being folded out of an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet, or for the overachievers among us, they could be 8.5 by 11 when folded, so conceivably, they can fit somewhere in the middle of there, too. I'd like to use 18 by 12 or something.

I'm wrestling with myself about the 12 editions, whether I want to try to be ultra-consistent and have the same thing to give to everyone, or whether I'll do some of the mono-printing, which really catches my fancy and have a very congruous theme and color scheme, the basic imagery staying the same, as the actual placements and variances shift.

I'd rather like to employ ultra ridiculous editioning methods, just because I think the system is a bit silly, and plays into the commodification of art.

Limited Edition:
A limited edition print is one in which a limit is placed on the number of impressions pulled in order to create a scarcity of the print. Limited editions are usually numbered and are often signed. Limited editions are a relatively recent development, dating from the late nineteenth century. Earlier prints were limited in the number of their impressions solely by market demand or by the maximum number that could be printed by the medium used. The inherent physical limitations of the print media and the relatively small size of the pre-twentieth century print market meant that non-limited edition prints from before the late nineteenth century were in fact quite limited in number even though not intentionally so. German printmaker Adam von Bartsch, in his 1821 Anleitung zur Kupferstichkunde, estimated the maximum number of quality impressions it was possible to pull using different print media.

* Engraving: 500 (and about the same number of weaker images)
* Stipple: 500 (and about the same number of weaker images)
* Mezzotint: 300 to 400, though the quality suffers after the first 150
* Aquatint: Less than 200
* Wood block: Up to 10,000

It was only with the development of lithography and of steel-facing of metal plates in the nineteenth century that tens of thousands of impressions could be pulled without a loss of quality. These technological developments led to the idea of making limited edition prints, by which printmakers created an appearance of rarity and individuality for multiple-impression art.

Proof:
A proof is an impression of a print pulled prior to the regular, published edition of the print. A trial or working proof is one taken before the design on the matrix is finished. These proofs are pulled so that the artist can see what work still needs to be done to the matrix. Once a printed image meets the artist's expectations, this becomes a bon à tirer ("good to pull") proof. This proof is often signed by the artist to indicate his approval and is used for comparison purposes by the printer. An artist's proof is an impression issued extra to the regular numbered edition and reserved for the artist's own use. Artist's proofs are usually signed and are sometimes marked "A.P.", "E.A." or "H.C." (Cf. glossary of abbreviations) Commercial publishers found that there was a financial advantage to offering so-called "proofs" for sale and so developed other types of proofs to offer to collectors, generally at higher prices.

* Proof before letters (Avant les lettres): An impression pulled before the title is added below the image.
* Scratched letter proof: An impression in which the title is lightly etched below the image.
* Remarque proof: An impression pulled before the remarque is removed.

Sidenote - Favorite Song this week: In My Lady's House by Iron & Wine

Demo Recap.

2008-10-26T20:59:00.000-07:00

The last demo was a lot of taking previous concepts farther and exploring what can be done with the methods we'd already covered, but it was still quite enlightening, esp. the monotype bits. The highlights were probably
•plexi as matrix
-it's see-through!
•trace monotype
- rolling relief ink on newsprint and rubbing talc in, then using it like graphite paper. instant image!

•angela's printmaking magic

-(Yes, stars actually flowed from her fingertips.)
•reductive methods!
- the joy of inking a plexi and then wiping away parts to create design

•the big press
-it's so big!

-left = up, right = down. crank to hand tight, then up a quarter turn. top button sends bed away from you.

Crit 2

2008-10-25T18:45:00.000-07:00

The second critique came at the end of whirlwind week of printmaking. It was a hectic and hard week, but a good one too, and it was nice to know that if studio was open, we would all be there working together.

Felicia's Bed.

Lindsay's House.

Birds & Fish.

Aaron's piece.

Cameron's Elephant Dreams.

Nicolett's Prints:

Sylva's Ear and Co.

As far as my piece went, they said they liked the overall shape, and the transition worked well, especially with the consistent red plate tone from the intaglio tying it all together as it gradually made changes, but there was a lot of confusion as to what was actually going on. The algae shapes were mistaken for abstract representations of the shapes of sounds, this was largely because of the context of the ear. The ear, too, was static and out of touch up in the corner, it didn't really come into the space or function in a 3D way, as originally planned.

My practice as an artist suffered from my inability to funnel my ideas and brainstorming and dreaming into a working plan from early on. I needed to boil it down to one strong concept and go with it, rather than keeping my head in the clouds, trying to do keep everything in consideration, then ending in disappointment.

When I revisit the piece, I want to push it more towards 3D, bring parts of the piece off the wall, onto the floor, onto other objects, print on fabric, create a real space, etc.

Boxtastic Printstravaganza

2008-10-20T12:28:00.000-07:00

c) our box keeps us together!

d) st. george and the dragon, bleached shell, punch drunk love, and layers

st. george and the dragon
i like the idea of playing with what a dragon is, what we think of when we hear the word. it's become filtered to a much more specific creature in the modern day, i feel. when i hear dragon, i think of the basic wingéd, talon'd, fire-breathing being covered in scales, the typical tattoo dragon.
(as modeled by Chase Russell.)

But a quick scan of paintings of St. George and the dragon, or other images depicting the mythical animal before the onset of mass-mass-mass media, and you'll see that artists took a lot more liberty with their interpretation.

St. George and the Dragon. Edward Burne-Jones.

St. George and the Dragon,
scene from the predella panel of the 'Madonna della Rondine' altarpiece
Carlo Crivelli
National Gallery, London, UK

Saint George and the Dragon
Paolo Uccello

Monster Brains compiled a really nice collection of St. G and the D over on his blog, definitely check it out. The variances are pretty weird. So is the actual story, which I'm sure also has variances, but here's one version:

The legend takes place in a town called Silene, in Libya. The legend states that this town had a large pond where a plague-bearing dragon dwelt. To appease the dragon, the villagers would feed it sheep and maidens. The maidens of the village would draw lots to see who would be sacrificed to the dragon.

One day, the lot fell upon the princess of Silene. The king, distraught with grief, told the people they could have all his gold and silver and half of his kingdom if his daughter were spared. The people, fearing the wrath of the dragon, refused. So, the princess was sent out to the lake, dressed as a bride, to be fed to the dragon.

Saint George, hearing of this predicament, rode on horseback to the lake. The princess, trembling, sought to send him away, but George vowed to remain and fortified himself with the Sign of the Cross.

The dragon reared out of the lake as George and the princess were talking. Saint George charged at it on horseback and pierced it with his lance. Then he called to the princess to throw him her girdle, and put it around the dragon's neck. When she did so, the dragon followed the girl like a dog on a leash. They led the dragon back into town, where it terrified the people at its approach. But St. George called out to them, saying that if they converted to Christianity and were baptized, he would slay the dragon before them.

The king and the villagers agreed, 15,000 men plus women and children, and were converted and baptized. George then drew his sword and slew the dragon. On the site where the dragon died, the king built a church, which bore a spring whose waters cured all diseases.

!!! What wonderful things can be done with this story. . .

bleached shell

punch drunk love
could refer to a couple songs, one by dr. feelgood, or incubus or this one by
steven romain

why is it that i can't read you?
you're so unattainable,
so unable to see,
i want to be with you,
but i can't tell if,
you want to be with me.

come on, talk to me,
i want to know.
i just can't let you go.
away from me.
you've got the most beautiful karma.
you've got the most beautiful soul.

you push me away,
or do you yet?
is it paranoia in my head?
do you really care for me?
or is this just.. punch drunk love.
punch drunk love.

you brighten my day, when you're around,
but you don't know what i have found.
i searched inside my soul,
i dug as deep as a mole.

i want to be with you,
more than you will know,
i want to be with you..
but you're far away, just so
far away.

you push me away,
or do you yet?
is it paranoia in my head?
do you really care for me?
or is this just. punch drunk love.
punch drunk love.

or the first song i thought of,
punch drunk lovesick singalong
by radiohead

I wrapped you inside my coat/When they came to firebomb the house/I didn't feel pain, because no one can touch me/Now that I'm held in your spell//A beautiful girl/A beautiful girl can turn your world into dust//Sell me a car that goes/Sell me a house that stands/I never cared before, I never cared before/I never cared before, before, before, before//A beautiful girl/A beautiful girl can turn your world into dust//I stood in front of her face/When the first bullet was shot

layers

layer \ˈlā-ər, ˈler\

Function: noun Date: 13th century
1: one that lays (as a worker who lays brick or a hen that lays eggs)2 a: one thickness, course, or fold laid or lying over or under another b: stratum c: horizon 23 a: a branch or shoot of a plant that roots while still attached to the parent plant b: a plant developed by layering
— lay·ered Listen to the pronunciation of layered \ˈlā-ərd, ˈlerd\ adjective

Function: verb Date: 1832
transitive verb
1: to propagate (a plant) by means of layers2 a: to place as a layer b: to place a layer on top of c: to form or arrange in layersintransitive verb1 a: to separate into layers b: to form out of superimposed layers2of a plant : to form roots where a stem comes in contact with the ground

Weekend.

2008-10-13T13:31:00.000-07:00

My suitemates have mono and it's entirely possible that I do as well, although I'm still crossing my fingers for the contrary. When I woke up from an accidental nap (more a collapse of exhaustion) Friday, I headed straight for the print shop, having already missed the first two hours of precious time. I arrive a bit after seven to find my class but no monitor, and thus a lucked supply closet and no access to tools or sanders or any of the other things we count on having monitor hours for. Having thought through the process wrong the first time, as far as double printing (I traced a print from the woodcut onto my hardground'd steel plate with iron oxide so I'd know where the other parts of the image were, then realized after I'd started carving into the plate with the etching needle that I hadn't reversed it.) I needed to sand those and other scratches out (turns out that intaglio plates really don't work well transported in a backpack. . .) but I couldn't do any of that. I tried used the scraper tool, but I can't seem to get the hang of it, and it mars my plates more instead of removing the offending etching. Even cleaning the plates and removing the old hardground proved to be a task with no Copper Glow. Friday night was definitely a night of frustration overall. The shop monitor did turn up. . . at five after ten to kick us out. He's a generally nice guy, and helpful. I really like him, but I'm still upset because I feel like if you sign up to be a shop monitor, you should be committed to being there when you say you will be. It shouldn't just be a "Sweet, I get paid to be in the print shop doing the work I need to do anyway, and really, if something like an exhibit opening with free wine comes up, I'll just leave for three hours and go to that instead. . ."

Saturday was a better day, the heat of trial-by-fire definitely worked as activation energy and Eniola was there with some lovely mp3 selections and I was stunningly productive. My algae woodcuts have an almost coloring book quality to them, they're simply broad shapes, almost more like a series of shaped flats than a detailed line-work carving. So for the ear carving I focused on letting the image really arise from the method of work, allowing the mark-making of the tools to be evident and trying to do something that looked "woodcut-esque" if that makes any sense. I was really pleased with the proof I pulled.

I'm definitely still behind because I couldn't even do work outside of studio later Friday night or Saturday morning, since I was unable to do the basic preparation of my intaglio plates, but hopefully tonight will be as productive as Saturday.

Rainboots in the soft ground.

2008-10-07T19:52:00.000-07:00

Today was depressing. And not just because of the rain. Also because we crushed a poor helpless butterfly's body, running it through the press, then peeling the carcass back from the still-pliable resist, leaving behind a fossil image on the steel plate.

Okay, honestly it was actually exciting in a sick why-am-I-so-fascinated sort of way. The image was pretty stunning, I'd say. AND I can show you pictures, because although I hit my monthly upload limits with the pictures from Special Collections, because I went pro with the flickr account, just for you, my loyal blogreaders.

So: soft ground demo. I'm really excited about the possibilities of this medium. I don't know how much I'll explore with them this project, because I have a pretty specific plan, but then again, it might be perfect for algae texture. . .

I love the oxidized look when the butterfly was pulled off the plate, and even the print the butterfly made, itself a matrix, on the wax paper is pretty nice. What a wild project that would be, just bugs as matrices. Oh, the possibilities.

Oryx and Crake

2008-10-07T14:17:00.000-07:00

My up and coming project is in response to a tag from Oryx and Crake which talks about the idea of wallpaper which can sense the emotions of nearby people and respond in hue with sensitive algae embedded in the wall covering. Actually, you're going to want to read it. I'll type it out.

On one day they toured some of the wonders of Watson-Crick. Crake was interest in everything-all the projects that were going on. He kept saying "Wave of the future," which got irritating after the third time.
First they went to Décor Botanicals, where a team of five seniors was developing Smart Wallpaper that would change the color on the walls of your room to complement your mood. The wallpaper=they told Jimmy-had a modified form of Kilian energy sensing algae embedded in it, along with a sub layer of algae nutrients, but there were still some glitches to be fixed. The wallpaper was short lived in humid weather because it ate up all the nutrients and went gray; also, it could not tell the difference between drooling lust and murderous rage, and was likely to turn your wallpaper an erotic pink when what you really wanted needed was a murky, capillary-bursting greenish red.
That team was also working on a line of bathroom towels that would behave in much the same way, but they hadn't yet solved the marine-life fundamentals: when algae got wet it swelled up and vegan to grow and the test subjects so far had not liked the sight of their towels from the night before puffing up like rectangular marshmallows and inching across the bathroom floor.
"Wave of the future," said Crake.

Intriguing, to be sure. My ideas were all over the place at first, I wanted to design modules for wallpaper and have the colors change across the wall, huge amounts of prints filling the room. And then stuffed sense organs printed on paper and sewn into their respective shapes, coming off the wall like creatures. Stuffed animals, only stuffed body parts. And a wave of the future and near the water the wallpaper would go gray. Maybe the wave would be coming out of a futuresque faucet, like this was a hyper-modern bathroom, with the sensory walls and towels. Yes, and printing on towels, which could also be stuffed and become puffy and dimensional, maybe on casters so that if you bumped one it would move.

Did I mention this is due Tuesday? Less than a week?

Anyway, it was too wild and busy anyway. I'm going to focus in on the idea of modular with shifting colors and on the idea behind it, algae. So I'm doing a set of algae types which will combine woodcut and intaglio and I'm planning to print an abundance of these so that I can layer the wall with them and play with color gradients. Then I'm going to do sense organs printed on wood, much like the style of the woodpeckers from my previous post, also a combination of woodcut and intaglio. My first thought was straight black, but maybe i could go more fleshy and subtle. Or wild colors. Or natural algae colors. Definitely a few details to work out.

Trial by fire, here we go.

Algae so far.

Alternate Dimensions.

2008-10-06T23:54:00.001-07:00

Joel lovingly compiled some images of 3 dimensional prints and installations, and I chose six which struck my fancy to show here. They're somewhat arranged in order of effectiveness, as judged by me.

The three dimensionality of this is pretty basic; a print on the wall and delicately and complexly cut paper hovering above. The actual printing doesn't take this piece very far, the main component being the dripping below the roots. The cut paper is very appealing, though.

This guy takes the cut paper a step further, going beyond the basic overlay and letting the curves bend and create the illusion of depth and mass. The same color palette and basic process, but with more layers and a deeper complexity.

I find this one pleasing, but in terms of 3-dimensional, or ideas for my project, it doesn't do much for me. Basic box shape with branch-like elements added. I think maybe palette is what attracted my to this one, the monochromatic blue-gray next to the earth browns and greens.

This one is fun, because it really is a sculpture. I got some very thick birch faced plywood, and I definitely think I could do something like this, carving shapes. I had been considering doing a three-d element with stuffed fabric, but projecting wood may actually work better, and I could save the fabric for the floor piece in my composition.

I feel like this one take the last piece, which exists as a pillar, a central thing in a room, and says "no, i'm taking over the whole room." One gets the sense that this is the bird's room, that we are in their space, whether it's a "cage" or not is debatable, but there is no questioning that the birds have dominion in this gallery, and are not subjugated to single frame or wall.

And this one is very intriguing, from the world play, to the display, to the material. I really have a think for this piece. I might have thought to print on felt, I think Annie did some prints on felt this week, but to display a felt cut-out of a military plane on a clothes hanger takes it a step further and makes the viewer reevaluate their relation to the object - really dynamic stuff.

Prints moving beyond the wall: (Brainstorm ahead)
•prints bound in books like Nicolette's
–closed books/books to be read
–sculptural books, books that stay open
•printing on objects
–trashcans (like in the slideshow)
–toys
–dishes
–towels
–boxes
–bicycles
–cars
–mailboxes
–microwaves
•print on fabric, then making things out of it
–clothing
–stuffed objects
–fabric so thick it's an object
–hangings
•printing on threads, not actual fabric, just rows of string then installed in a dynamic way
•filling the entire room with prints
– prints on the ceiling
– prints on the floor
•prints on living things (how does the print change as it moves/grows?)
– printed plants (a print on every leaf of a tree?)
– printed animals (i met a poodle with hot pink hair once.)
– printed people (secretly, we all want to do this.)
•embossing into the wall (don't worry bixby, i won't hurt you.)
•prints you have to interact with in order to view
–through a peephole in a box?
–must lift something to see something else?
–interactive layers of prints?
•oragami type paper folding (like the pyramid in the slideshow)
•printing on puzzle pieces
•matrices out of the souls of shoes, so that you print whenever you walk
•combination of prints and lights
– christmas lights poked through a 3D paper print?
– 3D paper structures of prints which glow (rice paper would be good for this)
–printing on the lightsource
–shadow effects
•wrapping things in printed material
•hanging printed materials
–mobiles
–spanning ceiling
–canopy•quilted prints - disparate elements sewn together.

Kemper.

2008-10-02T23:04:00.000-07:00

Today's lack of studio space brought us to the Kemper Art Museum, conveniently located right across from Bixby. But seriously, the Kemper really is ridiculously convenient; it has some amazing amazing stuff, and exists for the sake of the university. There's no excuse for a WashU student not to spend some time there.

Paul Crenshaw was kind enough to pull some prints for us and set them up in the viewing room, even giving us some background information and leading and informal discussion of their significance within the context of art history.

We looked at Charles Quest, who was actually a professor at WashU from the 50s into the 70s. He had some really interesting woodcuts, some cubist, others more AbEx.
I liked these because they have a lot going on, with tonal qualities and textures, even as they move into the abstract.

We looked at John Martin's Moses and the Burning Bush, (1833. Mezzotint with etching. 11 5/8 x 16 1/2".) which is a mezzotint. Mezzotint sounds pretty tedious to do by hand, slowly rock thousands of tiny pock marks into the metal to hold ink, burnishing them back out for the whites. But when it first came onto the scene, it was a pretty big deal because it gave a (relatively) quick way to reproduce paintings with a full range of tonality. Of course, this ease of reproduction started the bad rap for printmakers as mere copiers, and so on and so forth.

We looked at Goya and his hella sweet acquatint.
Disparate Femino = Feminine Folly.

We checked out some Max Beckman, which looked just like someone had been drawing on paper, doodling, and then sold all the doodles together as a Portfolio.

Also some Stanley William Hayter, who instead of just hatin' actually made a really big difference in the art world by letting his Paris and New York workshops become a haven for exiles, a place where the greats met and transferred ideas; picasso and matisse and pollock. . . He was also devilishly goodlooking.
And on top of that, he made some trippy prints. (I couldn't find a print from the matrix at the Kemper, but he has a solid style, so I reckon it's okay.)

We saw things from Hung Liu, who was a visiting artist with Island Press, and some mind-boggling prints by William Tillyer. His stuff is so wild, the computer can't handle it.
If you make an appointment to see these prints, bring aspirin.

Special Collections

2008-09-30T22:50:00.000-07:00

Because of the print shop being closed, we headed to the Special Collections at Olin Library today (with forty-five minutes of extra sleep, to boot.) Erin Davis really pulled out a fantastic collection of prints for us, from Gutenburg style books like the Morris productions I looked at for Reading American Culture last semester to the edgy sculpture books and interactive boxes of toys with everything inbetween. Aaron and I were amazed at the graphic novel quality of two books from the very beginning of the 20th century. I loved these prints because they were so dynamic and immediate. They told a lot without telling much at all, really drawing on a lot of the ideas I'm studying in Pictures for Communication, about closure and allowing the viewer to draw in the gory details.

The detail in the fantastically old woodcuts is also fairly impressive.
I felt pretty sure my gouges would have slipped and cut through the fine lines.

I was really interested in the portrayal of mutations in one of the books. It was in German, so I don't know what it said, but the pictuers say enough.

I also liked the book on Florida, which I believe is Intaglio. It's completely unPC and full of Ruebenesque women trying to pose for fit Native Americans, posing in the river in contraposto instead of doing anything really active. I don't even want to know what's happening in the next one.

Visiting Artist

2008-09-29T21:00:00.000-07:00

The print shop is closed for elective students this week as it functions as the Island Press during visiting artist week. Visit the Kemper website and check out the history of the press, which was started in the 70's, and see some works from artists in the past and even images of the prints being made.

Juan Sanchez
American, Born 1954
Sol y Flores Para Liora 1997
Master printer - Maryanne Ellison Simmons
Duotone Lithograph from photo plates with Collagraph from two sintra plates, acrylic paint, silk roses
Handmade Paper
64"h x 44"w
Ed. 16

Chris Duncan is the man of the hour for a week this year. I went to his lecture tonight, both because we were required to and because I was interested to see what all this guest printmaker business was about. I was a little surprised. I went last year to hear visiting artist Willie Cole speak as part of a series of lectures pertaining to the On The Margins show at the Kemper, and he really seemed to have something to say about his work and his life, what is was like to be marginalized as a black artist, only getting reviews in February for Black History month.

To contrast, Duncan started his lecture with a serious of photos (some of out focus) of albums from his record collection lying on a faux-wood vinyl'd table. He was trying to drive home the point that his "art education began in record stores and skate shops," but he came off as a high schooler who hasn't learned the art of public speaking yet. I was surprised to learn that he was in his 30's, was married, had a daughter, was a well-respected artist. Maybe they just don't teach rhetoric in suburban New Jersey.

I think I wish I had met his art before I had met him, because my impression of his work was certainly colored by the lack of professionalism in his presentation. It reminds me of Flannery O'Conner, and how her works are adored, but no one wants anything to do with what she says her works "mean" or what she intended an audience to get out of her literature. It also reminds me of watching Marie Antoinette and then watching the special features and being really unimpressed with Sofia Coppola, but then realizing that it doesn't matter what she comes off like or her interview style, because she brought together this insane film project and really made it into something edible, something that works. Maybe be true for Duncan too. . . Or really, any great artist. Apparently they're mostly no good to meet in real life.

Chris does a lot with string, which reminds me of the work someone did out in the Sam Fox Courtyard last spring (fall?) with all the strings attached from railing to railing across the lower green. It also reminded me of some projects from my 3-D design class, and it made me wonder how his work would go over in a critique in studio at WashU. . . would we say he needs to take it further, like "Okay, you're really interested in string, but what else can you do with it?"

Another common theme in his work was this proliferation of dots, multicolored and chaotic. He said he made them with a fork. I thought they got old fast, like "Okay, what else can you do?" but I guess Rothko and Newman just did their thing (over and over and over) and no one faulted them for coming up with something and sticking to it until it was recognizable and they were famous.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see what he's like in the actual studio space, and some of his stuff I really like, like This Ain't No Picnic and Absence Presents.

This Ain't No Picnic
2007
wood putty, spray paint, acrylic and gouache on paper
15" x 20"

Absence Presents
2008
spray paint on mirror
42" x 42"

Call for Mail Art.

2008-09-21T13:05:00.001-07:00

This is just a callout I'm passing along, the sort of thing I like to do.

Maryville University in St. Louis, MO, USA is accepting 5 x 7 postcards of your nightmares. We ask that all postcards be original art. Entries will be accepted ongoing and exhibited when we have acquired enough to fill the gallery. All submissions will become part of the Maryville University permanent art collection. There is no entry fee. Multiple submissions per artist will be accepted. If you supply us with an email address you will be notified of the exhibition when it is scheduled. We ask that all Nightmare Postcards be hand signed, addressed by the artist and mailed to the gallery with a first class stamp. Spread the word....

Please send submissions to:
Maryville University
Morton J. May Foundation Gallery
650 Maryville University Drive
St. Louis, MO 63141

Finally, some criticism.

2008-09-18T19:09:00.000-07:00

First critique = hard, but good.

I felt pretty good going into the crit, having even postponed writing a paper and some other things to get a good night sleep so I would really be awake. Then I remembered that in my decision to just call it a night that I had never actually typed out the artist's statement I'd been rolling around in my head all week. Space Cadet Sylva strikes again. What was worse, though, was that I think it came off as more of an "I don't feel like writing one" thing, which wasn't the case at all. I definitely understand the disrespect, though, of not being completely prepared and in the real world, there's no "I forgot"s for galleries, etc.

For a first critique I think it went pretty well. I'm sure we'll develop a better rhythm and comfort with each other as the semester progresses, but I am above all glad that we don't just have a saccharine don't-step-on-any-toes approach. My studios last semester erred on the "Well, I mean, I guess that's okay, too" side, with no one wanting to hurt feelings or have people dislike them for saying something negative. Mob mentality was also pretty pervasive in one of my cores, with mad stampedes to join the bandwagon. I definitely felt more freedom for dissent in our critique.

Some issues that were brought up in response to my work were its tendency towards kitsch, sort of an alliance with some kind of arts and craft movement, the nostalgic old typewriters and sewing machines and record players ubiquitous on t-shirts and things.
The antique-y stuff being way overdone, etc. Which I think is pretty true. Like, it's likable, or it wouldn't be so popular, but its pretty played.

Pink & black are very expected color combos, the stencils are understood and thus basically forgettable. What mystery holds them in one's mind?

So there's the possibility that I could make a statement about the incessant regurgitation of it all, but chances are I want to push it in a different direction.

This one was cool because they got it, the idea that it's a woodcut but it's a doodle in a notebook, a sort of mixing of mediums.
This one was probably the most positive of the bright stencil pieces, because of the rhino. The power of juxtaposition was definitely something I took away from the critique as a whole, the idea of bringing together things which are not normally together. In Lindsay's piece, the head and the flamingo I gave her did some fun things together, starting to speak about gender roles through the associations of a classical nude beside a bald head.

But the most successful piece was the diptych, the one I believe I did last. I used a combination of three colors already rolled out by my colleagues as they were cleaning up and putting away flats and cleaning up the slabs.

The layers of colors started to build this rich atmosphere and then I cut out several figures of the same girl with cardboard from a cereal box, leaving them more vague than figures from the previous pieces. I ran it through with some major pressure and got a beautiful embossing which ghosted the ink at the edges so that the figures were white before they were indented. Really, some beautiful effects with the earthy palette and the bright figures on the rag paper.

So I'm planning to focus more on my palette in the future, planning colors and their relations in advance, while letting "subject matter" be more loose instead of being hyper-objective. Also, to let things come from my own head and my own hand. We'll see what that means.

Matrix Variation.

2008-09-17T20:48:00.000-07:00

I decided now was a good time to try out the masonite board, while I'm experimenting. Word on the street was the board carves like canned cranberry sauce, but can't hold ink to save its fibrous soul. True enough, it carved pretty easily, although sometimes cuts would grow raggedy paper-towel edges. (It's more like hyper-compressed cardboard than wood in some ways.) I could see the glossy slickness of the printing surface and went ahead and preemptively sanded it down, just enough to lose the sheen. I applied ink as usual and it printed beautifully. In fact, I actually just realized that I never sealed it, and it still printed fine and didn't seem to take up more than the usual ink.

In some ways, though, it was too easy and predictable. I liked the dialogue I had carving the birch-faced plywood, where things would go a little wrong and I'd change plans, or I had to really work with (not against) it and love the wood a little. It just seemed like a much more relational and natural process with the wood than with the masonite.

Sick doesn't stand a chance.

2008-09-16T22:27:00.000-07:00

My immune system keeps tugging my sleeve saying "Slooooowwwww dooowwwwnnnn," but I simply don't listen. Today was a super-productive day in the studio, and I feel really good about the exploration I did and the prints I pulled.

vinyl:
I printed the record. First, I just used it as a flat with some cutouts from the insert. I ran it through the press (blanket-less, no less) and the album didn't break, but it did slice my moist paper like it was removing crusts from PB&J.
The first print in hot pink was one of those which doesn't turn out how you meant it to. They teach you in core classes to say "Well, I was going for that effect," and then it's really quite good. . . but it was that feeling when you take ceramics out of the kiln and you swear someone mislabeled the glaze. In actuality, I was swearing that the press was bojangled. One side's adjuster made funny noises and wouldn't crank, while the other side of the roller didn't get contact on my print. I think in all the hubbub the alignment had gone a whole number off, but somewhere along the way we sorted it out again, and I did another print in a classic black with figures I cut out last night, only half-covering the record (to get away from the same-ness and symmetry of the full circle.) It turned out magnificently. It's on tracing paper, which I really like working with. It makes it easy to incorporate other things later.

speaking of other things:
I got a VIP escort to visit senior studios during class today. Very fun. Also some juniors, like Annie, doing pronto prints and other fun things I long to learn. One senior's work, though, was right up my alley. Found images from old books, printed on, cut out, rearranged, silhouetted, with deep-sea divers (or were they astronauts?) and dripping bodies. Really fantastic stuff. Very liberating to see that I really do have the freedom to pull in a lot of disparate elements and not just stick to arches & ink. I might go back and ask if I could take a picture or two to post with credits.

On a sad note, Baby Canon died today and I'm more than two thirds sure I didn't bring the charger to school. So tomorrow evening I'll bring Lady Nikon with me to the studio and by Friday, Serious Sharks will be 8.12 X 10^36 more exciting.

One last piece of excitement; my good friend Siena is in the other printmaking elective with Tom Huck and she showed me his website today. It's evilprints.com
Again, it's worthwhile to see what other people are up to in prinmaking. This is a print he made for Missouri's Art the Vote campaign.

Maybe I'll think about a political matrix in the future.

ideas. . .

2008-09-13T22:13:00.000-07:00

I had the CS40 retreat this weekend, so I haven't had a chance yet to spend time in the printmaking studio, but I've been sketching and brainstorming my next matrix (upload photos later.)

Here are the ideas floating around in my head:

•Can I carve and print a record? (I have a some duplicates lying around.)The other part of this question lies in whether it's woodcut style carvable or more suitable for etching or intaglio, which I don't know much about yet. . .

•Could I feasibly put together a small picture book and do a run of 10 or 20 editions, or is this a stretch to pull off this semester? I'm reading a compilation of letters from the poet Rilke and in it he says to his young protege that he must lie awake in the still of the night and ask whether if he had to live without writing he would rather die. If his soul does not respond with urgency that he must write, then he ought not write anything at all. That's a tall order for writers. Do I have something worth saying, esp. worth a book?

It would have to be something beyond Cody the Coat Hanger and what happened when he tried to go through the press.

Online Art Market.

2008-09-11T22:06:00.001-07:00

Artist: Viza Arlington
Title: Owl
Woodcut on Rives BFK with Chine Colle using tissue paper treated to balance the pH levels printed by hand with baren
Image size: 14.5 X 17.5 inches
paper size: 16X20 inches
edition: 50
price: $50
signed and numbered original print

So I was messing around on Etsy and found some woodblock artists who are working and selling their stuff now.

I've been thinking about my seven prints due next week, and how I'd like to combine different blocks and what kind of effects I can get, so this one is interesting to me,
especially as mLee talks about her process:

"My process consists of carving multiple, often intricate blocks of wood, I then hand print them layer by layer until I have a satisfying final image. I highlight vibrant colors, create fine details and textures in all of my pieces."

This one is $125.00

Current Block.

2008-09-11T21:12:00.000-07:00

So, last week when i momentarily had a car, I went thrift-storing a few times. At goodwill, Leah and Jasmine found a phantasmal dress which will likely make appearances at both Halloween (Tooth Fairy, anyone?) and Art Prom (it could fit any theme. . .)

I found something that was a cross between a leisure suit and a power rangers costume, and got a button up shirt for printmaking in. Later, Alex Gordon and I went the Missouri Council of the Blind Thrift Store which was having a most fantastic 50% off sale for labor day, and I got some old books of various types, some records, and also fell in love with a little old desk/chair combo

which I'm now refinishing for a friend's niece. (Perhaps some mini-updates on that later.)

Well, one of the books was called PETER GETS THE CHICKENPOX! It's all about this little wannabe cowboy, suddenly besmirched with spots, only it rhymes about the technical details of the appearance of a pock. According to the back, it's part of a series of "Medical Books for Children" and inside it looks like there was once even a certificate to be filled out by a physician, affirming that the book's owner once had chicken pox.

All of that to say, the illustrations are comical enough that I pulled inspiration from them for my first real woodblock. I'm working right now on an image of cowboy lasso'ing a shark. The shark comes from an offhand comment about the ridiculousness of sharks and dinosaurs and the subject matter of Angela's demo piece.

So far so good. Even the mistakes are just reminders of learning points; what shows and what doesn't when you carve, which effects you can get with which tools–I'm pretty happy with it.

Prin-tin-tin

2008-09-04T21:59:00.000-07:00

Demo (listen!) Day

2008-09-02T19:12:00.000-07:00

Today was mostly watch-and-learn, on the way to wood-carved bliss. Things gleaned:

Tools of the trade:
U-gouge - great for removal of large areas
V-gouge - more for precision incising, cuts gashes
knife - good to outline (score) design where gouge should stop
chisel - excellent use for graded effects (who says wood cuts are always stark/high contrast?)

Care for said tools:
Sharpening
use whetstone (needs oil) or slipstone (needs only water)
U-gouge: draw figure eights on stone with bottom edge, rocking back and forth to sharpen along full length of blade
straight edge carving tools: pull blade smoothly across stone in direction of the cut
remove burr (metal scrapings) with sandpaper
Conditioning
use a strop to keep tools in good working order (can use leather built or strip of leather mounted on block)
same motions as sharpening

Wood Characters
•luon - cheap crappy plywood (hey, you get what you pay for. good for big big stuff)
•birch-faced plywood - good grain w/out too much splinter
•masonite - carves like buttah, but hard to print with
•MDF - same story, it's particle board which can give a stamp-like effect
•designer woods like cherry and pear are lovely but pricey

On with it already. . .
~prep wood by sanding as needed
~plan design (pencil will let you down. count on sharpie.)
<--plan, as used here, means don't forget that your text will be backwards. ~stain wood to show what's carved and what's not (watercolor or watered down acrylic will due.) ~designate areas to be cut in red if you're anal like that ~ready, CARVE!

The first three in a series of artists to check out. . .

Anselm Kiefer

Edvard Munch

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

more later.