Elizabeth Brinton, Artist

Why Printmaking?

2012-01-17T11:04:00.000-08:00

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

2011-10-24T15:55:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-14T13:30:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-27T11:35:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-21T15:24:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-14T19:31:00.000-07:00

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.

The Distilled Image

2011-09-06T10:23:00.000-07:00

Cuban Dahlias

A Screenprint, edition of 12

18 x 25

This is printed on Arches 88, full sheet. The idea came from a painting that has been hanging around here for awhile, which has many more colors and subtlties of brushwork with colors peeking through. So there is a naturally occuring simpification when creating a print, (and an indirect process of layering and stopping, and making new stencils). This is the beauty of printmaking. Working through process to get to best parts of the image. The "Cuban" part of the title refers to the music in the studio that kept the energy up toward the finish, supporting a rythmic quality in the shapes and the interactions of parts. I just realized I have done several prints now with nice moons. I could call them a series.

Masks, Painting, Prep for Summer Screenprint

2011-07-23T14:30:00.000-07:00

The ceramic masks are a kind of fun and relief from the labor of printmaking, and painting. They refresh my mind, wake up my hands, and bring the opportunity for play.

This one is just finished. There are three more in a final phase.

Planning to gear up for sketching in the warm part of the year. Outdoors, just whatever I see. Planning to try the waterbrushes, which are nice tools. A brush tip with a hollow plastic handle for water. Makes a portable watercolor tool, which I hear is in wide use now, especially in Japan. I will report on it's use. Next year more sketching on trips, maybe more figures.

Some little jewels from the garden:

Just today sketched out in charcoal on horizontal canvas. How to retain the hot feeling of the light, the tiny sweetness of the flowers and shapes, and to make it say all it has to say in as elegant and true way as possible. Those are my tasks. My job is fun.

Acrylic Sketches in Red and Blue

2011-07-17T15:42:00.000-07:00

Good Day

2011-07-17T00:03:00.000-07:00

Today I saw that my sketchbook (Rome and Home) for the Arthouse project is in Chicago.
I sold a large print to someone who will love it.
I am finished with a poster design.
I had a wonderful time with friends this evening,
I have lots of work in the works.
I am able to feel both sad and happy for another friend who moved away today. Equal sad and happy for a great person who is moving forward in life.
I am sleeping, not going out too late. Balance is the key.
It feels good to feel it, to just let it all be.

Actual Work

2011-07-07T19:26:00.000-07:00

Drawings for commissioned poster design must be submitted tomorrow and I am so tired. I have finally fallen totally to an unrecoverable depth of tango addiction and I have force myself to get enough rest in order to be as involved in the work as I am in the tango. I ignore people who want to visit the studio, I sleep very little. Twice this week I was still up when the light came and the birds started singing. You know it is really nice then, and who wants to go to bed on a summer day?

It is still amazing how much you get done though, when you have a lot to do.
I'll post the poster when it's done. I HAVE to stay home tonight. And sleep.

Making Things

2011-06-30T10:07:00.000-07:00

Making a large skeleton out of clay, it may wear red high heels like a Mexican Katrina. Making a dress. Making the garden into less jungle, more garden. Making arroz con pollo, hot. Making a canvas, horizontal, large, and filled with flowers. Making things. Then I will make a screenprint about summer. That is what life is. I get real dirty every day, and then take a shower and start all over. This is true wealth.

Lost the pictures for the last sequence of masks, but will post the finished pics here when I can sit down and fight with the empty dead shell of technology.
Until then I will be with the real things.

News

2011-05-18T20:30:00.001-07:00

Work included in "Forces At Play", Runyan Gallery, Newport, Oregon, during June and July, 2011.

Cascade AIDS Project Annual Art Auction

2011-05-08T13:49:00.000-07:00

Painting At The Party Table, an acrylic painting, sold at auction for CAP, a great organization, and I do mean organization. They know how to raise funds and they do it right. The piece sold for a very good price to a collector in Portland. Never does a sale feel so good as when the entire proceeds go to such a worthy cause. Total gratitude.

Sketchbook out in the World

2011-04-16T12:33:00.000-07:00

Received notification that the Sketchbook project has launched the travelling show, and my Sketchbook is on view now in Washington D.C. at Hillyer Art Space. I like how my work gets to go all over the place these days. I feel like it should call home and tell me how it's going.

News

2011-04-05T14:32:00.000-07:00

As spring comes to Oregon, Print Arts Northwest celebrates the bond between humanity and the natural world. Gathered from the PAN Exhibition Collection, And Yet We Belong presents the work of more than 20 professional printmakers using a wide range of techniques. The title of the show is drawn from Mary Oliver's poem "Blossom," which elegantly evokes the commonality of living things. Though individual in their approach, the artists selected for this exhibit each look to the natural world for inspiration and present an artistic vision befitting the exuberance of springtime.

Featuring:
Audrey Sochor
Carolyn Brookhart
Carrie Moore
Chi Meredith
Connie Mueller
Danuta Muszynska
Diane Flack
Elizabeth Brinton
Ellen Emerson
Gesine Janzen
Greg Pfarr
Jan Fowler
Kristine Blodget
Leslie Cheney-Parr
Mary Farrell
Mary Real
Mickey Weaver
R. Keaney Rathbun Robert Royhl
Sarah Horowitz
Sheryl Funkhouser Todd Sherman
Tony Lazorko
Yuji Hiratsuka

Center for the Humanities, Oregon State University
811 S.W. Jefferson Avenue
Corvallis, OR
(541)737-2450
http://oregonstate.edu/dept/humanities/

Horoscope

2011-03-31T11:10:00.000-07:00

You know that little horoscope in the morning paper or online? Well, I read one on my birthday this month that went something like this: "If you continue going down the same tunnel you risk driving yourself crazy." I think I know what this means, and it has to do with my work, and I have to spend some time figuring it out. I have to move forward. The past few years I, and nearly every artist I know, has had to think up all kinds of strategies for staying involved.

I have worked through tough times before, and I will again. But that is not the problem. The puzzle (more than a problem) is to bring the work forward into new forms. Alice, my assistant, went out to talk to the galleries a few months ago. She is good, just visits. People are always happy to see her. She tells me that work framed under glass is not selling well. I guessed at this, and thought about my own environment. I prefer something on/in fabric, canvas, clay, paper, wood, bone, stone, with no glass to isolate.. I look at a computer about as much as I can tolerate. Looking at, or through glass. A world so non-physical there , so dead, so frustrating, so empty no matter how many stories, or comments or ideas.

I want real things that get worn, have a patina, that I can touch, like I can touch you. Things that have aromas, things that give me goose bumps, that fly in the breeze, that get broken, that prove that we live in the moment by changing with our moods. So there is the first part of solving the puzzle of the tunnel.

Hawaiian Inspiration

2011-02-26T11:47:00.000-08:00

Inspiration is the perfect word for what happens to my art life in Hawaii. I just breath it in all humid and green and it comes out later as new colors shaped into fish and woman and the scent of papaya and red dust, and always something else which has no label. I take the process of printing to another level now. Layers have new reasons to be there: to obscure, in an enticing way, to amalgamate into what is indirect and mysterious. Always Hawaii makes me see my own place more clearly, inspired and put back into place here and now. I can't work fast enough to do it all.

We were dancing there, tango workshop. But it doesn't matter what we do there, it comes home with us and makes life deeper. Just being there is all that we have to do.

Printing, printing, printing

2011-02-05T10:01:00.000-08:00

In a time crunch to finish a screenprint for deadline. Spring submissions to Rental Sales Portland Art Museum always sneaks up on me. But what a great way to spend the day (and night), in the studio, in the zone, working it through. Just being there, that is life.

Planning for open studio in May, which is also a lovely time for the garden. Rhodies, iris, azalea, and and the big lilac should be a welcome sight for visitors.

Making Little Movies. A Daffodil Painting, January 18, 2011

2011-01-19T16:43:00.000-08:00

Goodbye Picasso

2011-01-19T15:47:00.000-08:00

I think at last count I went to the big Picasso show in Seattle five times, spending a lot of time at each visit. The works were all from the Musee PIcasso in Paris, which is undergoing renovation. I remember being there but don't remember it being very spacious.. The galleries there are all smaller than those at SAM. I enjoy of course, that in Paris in the old mansion of the Musee Picasso in the Marais district, there is the atmosphere most close to the houses where Picasso painted. His world. But it is not every day that one can be there. But for a time here in Seattle I could see Picasso every day. If every student would just save the tuition money and go live in Paris, or Madrid, or Rome, and would go every day for a year or more to the main museums then, well, this would be progress towards a real education.

I am going to miss Picasso. Picasso changed the way painters paint. He gave us permission to go with the altered form, and yet, he left us painting as a viable path. All those daily friends of mine. Brushes, pigments, canvas, paper, the press, the day all day long as real and valuable work.

For many years I had a black and white picture of Picasso on the refrigerator. He was sitting at his table with bread made into hand shapes. Some friends who were not educated in art asked if this was my dad.

I said yes.

Print Arts Northwest

2011-01-05T11:46:00.000-08:00

I have work in this show which starts a tour in Portland.

Status Update

By Print Arts Northwest
PAN

First Thursday Opening Tomorrow!

PAN All Member Show: 30 Years of Printmaking 1981-2011

Swigert Commons, PNCA, Portland

I will miss the reception which is normal for me, but this time it is too bad, because there will be such good company. Printmaking is a very niche world, and the way that other printmakers think and live in their process is unique. I am one of them. But tomorrow, getting to Portland, then home to DJ on Friday, and hosting an event on Saturday? A bit much even for me. Maybe time to slow down, or make some choices. Or not.

Rome and Home in the current work project.

2010-11-30T17:35:00.000-08:00

Now I am really cooking on the Sketchbook Project and will have someone help me to upload to the official site and also here. The theme "scavenger" is being taken lightly. I am using influence from Rome. Sketches, papers, (found and other), ideas, thoughts, and photos from both Rome and Home. One page is titled "Rome in my Garden"...a bit of play with the problem of being in a mental sense, in two places at once.

I am a homebody and dislike travel, but still love to be (to make a home) for a period of time in another place. And so to get onto and airplane, my god, is a crazy-making thing. The spirit is left behind and cannot travel as fast as the body. Oh well. I go anyway. One must live fully and not miss things.

Rome is a homey city. And a year ago we were lucky enough to call it home for a little while.

The city is full of warm places. We fueled up on long afternoon meals of the best comfort food on the planet, along with wine, in order to have the strength for that journey into history and drama that every single step in Rome is. There are gardens, trees, ruins, words, art simple and direct. Beauty massive and muscular against the arabesque and delicate. Those pines trees against the winter sky.....those starlings in the twilight over the Tiber. I will call it home.

And so now, work. Winter, and work.

First Impressions

2010-10-18T17:32:00.000-07:00

As I work these days on multiple projects, sometimes energetically, sometimes in a lazy way, I reflect on the word of Leroy Setziol, a friend and mentor who is now gone. We just call him Roy. I have a carving that he made for me, in my living room, although he nearly took it back when he learned I was moving away from Salem....

He said this: When you are working, go with your first sensation of what to do. It is nearly always right. And so, having done this in a sort of default way, I became more attuned to these inner impulses. He was right of course. Go with it, not against it. What, actually, do we have to lose? It seems as though one gets the mind out of the way.

New Work and Stuff

2010-09-16T10:15:00.000-07:00

I finished this screenprint, or serigraph (if you want to be fancy, or french, and who doesn't), yesterday. I scared myself because I was going along so confidently until the last color (the black line), and I had a big idea, speaking of fancy, to print it in gold, blending from a soft gold at the top area to a bronze gold at the bottom. It looked weird, and I was up to my elbows in ink and running into a time crunch. So I got Alan to come out to the studio and he agreed that it wasn't working. I cleaned it all up and went for the black, which I should have known all along was the way to snap it together. I mix a special soft black, more like paynes gray (a mix of colors creating a warm soft deep gray). I like it. This print is about 17 x 25. Already it has a gallery to go to. Balancing the business and the studio life is challenging, but at this point I feel I owe it to the work to be complete in the sense of putting it back out there.

Now back to the Sketchbook Project which has morphed into a little book of Roman still life memories made out of collage. I did not like the paper in the provided book, so I am taking it out, and putting in an accordion of rice paper to have a more durable and interesting surface and a better way to exhibit. I hear the show will come to Seattle.

September

2010-09-13T18:15:00.000-07:00

After nearly thirty years of working, off and on, but pretty consistently, in a technique of my own devising (reduction method) in serigraphy, that I continue to find more and deeper ways to use it. I use the natural world and color and pattern to reduce things to a little bit of perfume. Some colors, lines, all like scents that drift and change with the air and temperature. Fall is a favorite time. All ideas collected from the summer on this little plot in our 'burb get put up like jelly. All lined up under glass, ready to sustain someone through a darker day.

It has taken me a long time to finally get my voice across with this, and I always knew it was the way for me. Looking forward to a good run of work. I have places for the work to go. That is hard won as well, and I am grateful.

Falling into the Work

2010-09-09T17:21:00.000-07:00

A new website design will be up soon with new and older work, a link to this blog, and "buy" buttons. A continued relationship with Portland Art Museum Rental/Sales Gallery and the Print Arts Northwest keeps me busy with new work. The Sketchbook Project is ongoing. I am combining images of Rome and Home with scraps, sketches, found papers, ink, glue. I am taking the paper out of the provided book and putting in an accordion of good rice paper. The thing can be shown unfolded like a little screen. The completed book goes to five or six cities including Seattle before archiving at the Brooklyn Art Library. Rome and Home will blend together in the way they do in my memory and my work, my dreams. The golden color of Rome and cut out shapes of vases will tie it together, with some text handwritten as it reveals itself to me

I love late summer/early fall for work. I have put intention into this time as a practice, a discipline to bring myself back to over and over. The work has places to go and people to see it.

Quote

2010-08-02T14:22:00.000-07:00

"Each one of us is alone in the world. He is shut in a tower of brass, and can communicate with his fellows only by signs, and the signs have no common value, so that their sense is vague and uncertain. We seek pitifully to convey to others the treasures of our heart, but they have not the power to accept them, and so we go lonely, side by side but not together, unable to know our fellows and unknown by them. We are like people living in a country whose language they know so little that, with all manner of beautiful and profound things to say, they are condemned to the banalities of the conversation manual. The brain is seething with ideas, and they can only tell you the umbrella of the gardener’s aunt is in the house."
— W. Somerset Maugham, The Moon and Sixpence

The Sketchbook Project: 2011 » Art House Co-op | We build art projects and communities

2010-05-27T19:10:00.000-07:00

The Sketchbook Project: 2011 » Art House Co-op | We build art projects and communities

I will be producing a sketchbook for the project, to be archived at the
Brooklyn Art Library. My chosen theme: "I am a scavenger". I will use found scrap to start each image and go from there. I look forward to rediscovering the use of found elements, something I used to do a lot of, something I like very much.

Work

2010-05-06T16:56:00.000-07:00

I can get about a half day of deep concentration while painting. I can no longer listen to the radio, but sometimes music or lectures will be alright. Quiet is best. I am working fast to accomodate the season of bloom and fade and changing light in a form of shapes and signifiers of growth and change as they come right across to me. And then I have two screen-prints in progress. I have to work while it comes to me without such heavy effort, and to take what I can get!

I will have a print in this show. Nice that It is in my neighborhood for a change.

2010-03-26T10:17:00.000-07:00

TEN: SEATTLE PRINT ARTS 2010 ANNIVERSARY EXHIBITION

JURIED BY MICHAEL DARLING
May 14 – June 5, 2010
KAC Opening Reception: Thursday, May 13, 2010 6:00 – 8:30 PM

Kirkland Arts Center, in partnership with the Henry Gallery, is proud to present TEN: Seattle Print Arts 2010 Anniversary Exhibition.

This exhibition is part of Seattle Print Arts' ten-year anniversary celebration. Juried this year by Seattle Art Museum curator Michael Darling, the biennial exhibition of work by Seattle Print Arts members represents a wide range of ideas and techniques informed by printmaking practices and drawing.

Kirkland Arts Center, 620 Market Street, Kirkland
Lecture by Michael Darling
Henry Gallery, May 20th, 2010
Pulp Friction: Expanding the Definition of "Works on Paper"
The lecture would look at contemporary artists working on paper today, with an emphasis on those who are treating paper in an innovative and ambitious way.
Michael Darling is the Jon and Mary Shirley Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Seattle Art Museum, and guest juror for the Membership Exhibition.

Henry Art Gallery
University of Washington,15th Avenue NE & 41st Street, Seattle

2010 Cascade AIDS Project

2010-03-01T10:24:00.000-08:00

Juried artist featured in the 21st Annual Art Evening and Auction. Benefiting the Cascade AIDS Project.
May 1st, 2010.
Pleased to be able to participate once again in this important cause.
cascadeaids.org for information.

News: Newport Visual Art Center

2010-01-04T11:26:00.000-08:00

I am pleased to have work in this Oregon show this month.

http://www.coastarts.org/home.cfm?dir_cat=94932

Winter's Passing-The Art of the Print

An Online Art Project

2010-01-04T09:28:00.000-08:00

http://www.gitouttamyface.com/

Artist and blogger Sheree Rensel is cooking up an online show. Hey the art world is changing, may as well get on board.

Rome and Me

2009-12-25T16:44:00.000-08:00

Friday, December 25, 2009

Rome and Me

Being in Rome: The whole world is violent as seen in the artworks and stories left there. Bloodshed and martyrdom, domination, rule through fear, darkness. That's what the world seems to be. Confirmed today in the news, and yesterday in the evidence.
The best and most meaningful artwork for me: The private, decorative, and domestic work of the houses of ancient Rome. No blood, nobody crucified, upside down or right side up, no one burned at the stake or roasted on a spit. Just orange trees, birds, plant life, and the sky. Eternal, and there whether you suffer or not. Perfect. And comissioned by women. Go figure. The frescoes of the private rooms of the wives of the emperors. The best, and most vibrant and enduring art in Rome. For me. About me, and about what I am about.

In recent conversations about my own work and the future of my place in the art world, I have been challenged by the proponents of angst. The dark side is very very popular in art. You can make a lot of money making people sad, or making them appear to be sophisticated. It is much cooler to have a tortured painting on your wall. Sunshine is not in. There is value in knowing just who you are...even in knowing how simple you are.

Well, I have nothing to contribute to darkness. So much of it is already available, that I hate to add to the whole stinking pile of it. In fact I am unable, and disinterested in adding to the constant barrage of blood and war, of hatred and violence. Easy to get that on the news, in the paper. All over the place
Time for something else. I only started making art when I was very young, to express my own delight in nature, in life, in pattern, color, scent, sex, love, the sky, the starlings over the river at twilight. Why not? Why change now? It might not be so cool, but it is as old as the House of Livia. And that is my house.

Just before the guard kicked me off...

2009-12-17T02:22:00.000-08:00

Harvest Moon

2009-11-15T16:07:00.000-08:00

This silkscreen is finished, and submitted to winter shows along with other things. My advice to myself is to take note of how much easier it seems to do this when the studio is all geared up and equipped properly. New wash out area in the shower stall, better layout, placement of supplies and equipment: Time well spent during the interesting dip in the economy.

The print was created using a simplification of forms and containment through line and block of color. I had an epiphany of sorts in California this fall, about meaning and beauty, but it does not have words at the moment. Just pictures.

Print Progress, continued

2009-10-23T14:57:00.000-07:00

Who is copying whom.

2009-10-23T13:55:00.000-07:00

Some more stages of the "Harvest Moon" silk-screen print, and a photo of the screen with the painted stencil.

This print is in the home stretch. I have sketches for the next work, with the goal of getting the figure into the work in a way that reads well.

People always say that my works is like Matisse, but it really isn't Matisse thought of women as objects, nice lemons or peaches or something like that. I think of women as me. I hope it shows in the work that I come by the feminine, and the domestic, honestly.

Yesterday I looked at some Shiko Munakata. He is one of my favorite artists. He came to my university to launch a fabulous show of his portrait prints. I met him. He was a cheerful man as his work suggests.

I just realized that another artist that I love, Mayumi Oda has been obviously influenced by Munakata. Some of her goddesses are just very similar to Munakata's figures. Only I do see that the women in her prints are feeling the water, the air, and the sun in a way that only a woman could convey. But still, I thought, Oh she is copying him! But then I looked at the Munakata and saw that he stole shamelessly from Picasso, who stole from everyone. So there you go. But no body can be anyone except themselves, and it shows in the nature of the line, just like handwriting.

Harvest Moon print progress October 16, 2009

2009-10-16T15:52:00.000-07:00

I refer to the silk-screens as "reduction prints" I reduce the open area of the silk with each new painted-on stencil, and that, by the time I am finished with the print, fills in all or almost all of that open area of silk. Therefore, color is built upon color for a richly textured layering of ink onto the paper. I will only print ten of this limited edition, and maybe a few trial proofs as I go about testing colors. I use CHT waterbased textile pigments mixed with either clear, opaque, or pearlescent bases. The pigments are powerful and strong, and give me what I reqire in terms of punch!

The image at the top of this group of photos is a painting on paper, which is the "cartoon" for the print. I place the painting under the screen so that I can see it as I paint on the stencils. Each stencil preserves the areas of the previously printed color. I came upon this process by trial and error, and I worked out how to get the look that I wanted. I can work in a medium which is known for bright layers of color, but without the hard edge. In the second picture you see the print with three colors done. There will be around twenty colors on this print. Ink is poured into the screen and squeegeed across with the paper underneath, in register guides to insure that the colors stack up correctly. I will be striving to print one or two colors per day in order to be done in two weeks.

I love positive images of beauty. I am not an existential or gothy type of artist. Color, the seasons, patterns, and modernity all matter a lot to me. I come by it honestly being a child of the 1950's and 60's.

Rental Sales Gallery Fall Show:

2009-10-12T11:53:00.001-07:00

Rental Sales Gallery Fall Show:

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Clay Mask Project

2009-10-01T16:42:00.000-07:00

Painting on Paper

2009-10-01T16:36:00.000-07:00

One of the Silk-Screen works being delivered tomorrow

2009-10-01T16:35:00.000-07:00

I Was Told There Would be No Math!

2009-10-01T11:53:00.000-07:00

Well, after all this time, I know better, my teachers were right, there are all kinds of situations where it is helpful to be able to do the numbers. But my math skills are unique at best. I only ruined two mat boards (at twelve dollars each!) getting work ready to go to Portland for the Rental Sales Gallery and for Print Arts Northwest. Fall season is a busy time for me, and with all the non-art work I get really anxious to get into the studio work that is creative. So, I think I am there now. Just deliver the work this weekend and get back to my projects.
A long time ago a friend spent a morning teaching me to cut mats. I have probably saved about a million dollars having this skill. I can pop them out perfectly...although not always the correct inner dimension. It's the fractions being devided that screws me up!
Other math: formulas for glazes and calculations of volume for plaster, inks, clays, paint recipes. Money, taxes, how to mix the perfect drink at then end of the day....by then it does not matter does it? And I can still use the inside portion of those mis-measured boards. Time to make some smaller work?

Studio when it's cleaned up for tour.

2009-09-30T10:21:00.000-07:00

It normally looks like a crazy person lives there...I will show you later.

Get it Done

2009-09-25T10:24:00.000-07:00

Framing serigraphs (silk-screen prints in plain english) to deliver to Portland for the Fall season.
There are many tasks around my work that simply have nothing to do with creating artwork. But it's alright, gets me out of town, and keeps it real. The weather might hold and it will be a glorious drive and then there will hopefully be sales. Either way, back in the studio I can forget business for a few hours and start my dance series in earnest.

2009-09-21T21:18:00.001-07:00

test will this show up.