Spring Painting Goals

Some Grocery Store Flowers 24 x 16, February 2012


I am putting long hours into paintings  Most of them get painted over with gesso and I reuse the canvas.  The few paintings that I like well enough have been used as the "cartoon" or maquette for making screen prints.  I found that the "finish" that I could achieve in printmaking was ultimately what I had been searching for.  It felt presentable, cool, and the fact is, my prints sold well, at least until this last recession.

Now, I do not like seeing things through glass.  All prints are on paper and must be framed with glass.  People look at glass screens all day.  Now softer surfaces please me so much more.  I don't want the distance created by the glass and the sense of preciousness.  And because of this I am hammering away all day and painting.  Who ever thought being an artist was fun?  Well, it can be fun, but try standing at an easel and and wielding a brush for a few hours.  You have to be strong mentally and physically.

When I am not in the studio I am dancing, practicing dancing, gardening, cooking, socializing, driving somewhere, going to market.  I no longer have a housekeeper.  I sleep when and how long I want to now, which is the only way I can keep going. I wonder how I produced so much when I had children at home?  Being young helped.

But the work.  The compositions are not troubling to me, or the color, or the mood (although I can get off the track as the weather changes).  It is bringing the brushwork to a more natural and refined stroke, and creating the finish.  What finish means to me is surface coherence, and a kind of all over non nervous consistency without looking too finished.  See why I am going crazy here?  I did not care about that when paintings were throw aways.  Now they are going to shows and I will have to let people look at them.   I am happy about that, but need to learn to paint better. Meantime, it is fun, I confess.

Why Printmaking?

Handmade prints, (etchings, lino and woodcuts, screen prints, lithography) as done by artisans, have lost their original function of creating multiples.  Other processes and now digital technology have taken over the job of disseminating images.  Screen print (aka serigraphy) does not use a press and the equipment is cheap and portable, and so if you wanted to have a revolution or a rock concert, a colorful screen printed poster was the way to go.

So why do we still make prints, and why do people like them, exhibit them, and collect them?

The fact that they are so lovingly made, on generally fine paper, and with a texture that you cannot get in a magazine or on a screen, gives them tactile qualities, and even aromas, that a mass produced copy can never have.

I love silk screen for a clean and eye popping effect of layered opaque color.  I started making prints in order to get that look.  It worked for my vision of what I wanted to put out there.  Working always with nature as my muse, this took out all the vagaries, the greys, the indecision presented by the messy world.
But the ability to make a lot of them did not interest me except as a technical challenge.  I learned from some fine printmakers who could do anything and could do it in their best jacket and not get a spot on it.
Gemini/Los Angeles master printers.  They did work for Frank Stella, Sam Francis, and many other big names, and had as part of their pay, printers proofs displayed in their workshops and homes.  It was a good education and put my University training in question.  These were the people who made a living at art and could not afford to make it a religion.

But the multiples did not matter too much to me as a reason to make screen prints.  The look that the print provided me did matter.  Put down a deep even swath of red in an instant, or painstakingly go over an area with gouache for an hour?   Easy.  Fast.  Changeable if needed.  Gorgeous like velvet on velvet, or sharp like enamel on metal.  I loved it, found my voice in it.  And that is enough.

Now I am looking at another way to say what I want to say about growth, life, botanical wonder, development and change.  Making prints that are not editions in the traditional sense, but are a changing set of images.  The edition starts with print 1/10 (for example) as a seedling, changing in print 2/10 to a tendril of growth, 3/10 to the first leaves, and on and on this way.  A set which is unique art work rather than an edition, and hangs as a large piece all together.  That is my idea.  And now seems like a good time.

Happy

Fun going on an adventure up North to pick up work, and returning with nothing, due to sales and a further show of the remainder.  Nice when finally one graduates to just have support and a little helpful recognition.   Many submissions and irons in the fire.  I feel mystified at how seriously I let things fall between the cracks for awhile, just working and piling things up instead of getting things out the door.  But it seems to be a sort of cycle.  This last one though was complicated by the tango obsession, which is cooling towards a calmer commitment and a part of life.   Work comes forward, and dance is re-creation.
We live more and more in a time when a work and life has to be approached full bore, and each person must really do more.  Do all we can, then just give it a little more.  Really. That is what it is going to take.  For everyone I think.  I learn it from my young adult kids.  All that education and talent, and still, they will have to take less, do more, and they will.  And so will we. AND we will play hard too.

The Delights of Fall

I put forth six pieces to a new regional art center, the Schack, in Everett Washington.  They will show them for only a few days.  I love harvest time.

Urban Sketchers

Even a complicated print has to start with a sketch.


I am enjoying the Urban Sketchers these days, often checking in just to see the world through the eyes of the draw-ers.   When I travel I like to sketch, it settles me into the place, and into really seeing.  You see a lot more when you slow way down, at a cafe, or on a bench in the square.  I find it kind of hard to hold still though. 
Lately there has been a discussion of the difference between "worked" art, and sketch.  Some people just sketch, and don't take on art as a profession.  And of course many, probably all professional artists, people with the vocation, sketch in one way or another.  So I failed to get the point of talking about it at all.
Some of these sketchers are so good, really much better at drawing than many people who make art as their profession.  There is something going on in this world that does not have to do with electrons.  And that has to be good.

Studio Re-Org

For over a week I have been literally knee deep in artworks on paper. See above. The remaining prints from editions going back to the late '70's, watercolor, drawings, sketchbooks, ephemera including children's work, photographs,little mementos etc.  However it is the safety and storage of the lifetime of prints which concerned me the most.  Here are the flat files, that last picture is sideways.  There are two matching closets each with two cabinets of 11 drawers each. 44 drawers. Reminiscent of putting up canned goods!  All that work all organized, labeled, catalogued along with edition numbers, (with records including the provenance of the work which is now out in collections, or galleries, or on the road somewhere).  For the last couple of years I have been stacking up home-made portfolios and then having to search through heavy stacks to get at things which always seemed to be at the bottom.  So it's nice for now, but it lead to a flurry of organization during which I could not work.  So that was difficult.  But well worth it.

It is crazy to look back and think about the time of the works, what I was doing, what was going on in my life and in the world.  All those public radio stories! So many changes, but art is always there, never missing, sketchbooks and pens and pencils and tools all ready for seeing the world through.   For expressing my particular vision in a world which for all of it's troubles, still remains the only and brilliant world that we have.

Looking forward the next phase.

Re-org

I bought four metal flat files from a surveying company that has fallen on hard times.  The company did the surveying for Microsoft campus.  You would think that would bring some security, but that is not the world we live in...
But, I got them for a song.  Nearly a ton of metal files with inch thick drawers.  I have the closet for them in the studio.  After a lot of cleaning and hauling they are in place, and now I have a week or so left of sorting, inventory, cataloging and recording.  Then, when I can again see my table tops, I go on. 

Looking forward to having all works on paper where they can be easily accessed for viewers, collectors, friends, and buyers of all sorts. It will make exhibit preparation so much easier.  No huge piles of portfolios and the strain of trying to get something out of the one on the bottom. And  just to have the few bottom drawers for collections of little things.  Origami papers, the small talismans and keys and jewels, rocks, feathers, little strange pots of pigment.  Indian carved blocks, photos, fragments, butterfly wings, plastic horse, fish, frog, what is left of a leaf.   Those bottom drawers there for my small friends.  Avantika, Ava, Saylor, the next kin or neighbor kid who opens the Pandora's box.  Or adds to it. Whatever.