Today's Job

    My students are doing value lessons right now, and one of my guilty secrets is that this large composite drawing (Mrs.Swift Learns to Speak Boy) is on my mind, because I think  this piece falls short in that regard. 

    In the process of adding values to the panels and increasing contrast, I'm finding that a couple of the panels don't quite fit together properly. The original finished work was translated into etchings and there was a compositional mechanism that covered up all of the joining edges. I was busy being a full time teacher, grad student and mom at the time, so I welcomed the shortcut. But now that I want the drawings themselves to shine, I have to make sure all of the pieces fit. This is the first re-do of the project. It is turning out to be a bit of an engineering project to get it right.

    This is a link to the printed version: Mrs. Swift Learns to Speak Boy

 

Resurrecting Mrs. Swift

   Every year, there is a show in Chicago about motherhood that I'd like to enter, but some of the pieces I have with that theme aren't in a presentable shape, or I don't have possession of them. The Scaffold painting I've been working on is one of them, and this is another. I just ordered a big mat board from Dick Blick, so that I can adhere these small panels onto a larger substrate. Then, my plan is to adjust the values so that it has higher contrast. The two panels that are missing have an error in size (I could explain why, but chalk it up to grad school and having to make-do on a schedule) and have to be re-drawn. Part of today's work involved cutting the new paper for those drawings. 

    This image started out as a very small drawing and then bloomed into an image for one of the paper quilts I made for my thesis show, titled, Mrs. Swift Learns to Speak Boy. The problem with the quilt and it's sister, Dreamer in Training, is that they are too fragile to enter in any competition where they would have to endure any amount of handling. I recently found the drawings that I used to make the prints for the quilts, and thought I should try to get them into a more presentable form. I hope I can do it.