What I learned at Ox-Bow

I just finished a paper containing the information and techniques of lithography that I learned in Mark Pascale's class last summer. I'm going to try to make it available here, just in case, you know, you happen to have a litho lab in your garage and want to know how to use it. I learned all of the stuff in the paper in one week. Wow.

The News

I do have a new image to post, but not today, since I left it at school. It's a little charcoal drawing that is a result of a demo I did for my students.

The news is that the quilt is in ArtPrize, at the YMCA just off the Pearl Street exit on 131S.

And, I passed my "first-year" review at Kendall. Now I can really get busy on the work of the semester.

I'll post the drawing soon.

Finished!

For IF: This quilt has roots in the story Gulliver's Travels, by Jonathan Swift. Perhaps it can cause a little Deja Vu about the story.

Here it is: Mrs. Swift Learns to Speak Boy. What a marathon this was! On to the next one!

Quilting bee!

The are images from our first quilting bee, held at the Rankin Center Art Gallery on August 23, 2010. Thanks to Marian Sakalauskas, Karen Stanislav, Tim Eldred, Mariel Versluis and her talented niece Clover, Carrie Weis and Diane Cleland for all their hard work!

A Summer of Printmaking

For IF: I'm posting Tokyo Subway for this week's topic, which is artificial, for the light in the subway.

Since I last posted, I've been to Japan and South Korea, and briefly attended woodcut workshops in both, and I just got back from an intense week of learning lithography at Ox-Bow, with a wizard named Mark Pascale, who is also the curator of prints and drawings at the Art Institute of Chicago. I learned a ton, and found out that litho is mysterious, an almost alchemical process that is a big puzzle. I probably won't be able to leave it alone, now that the puzzle has been posed to me. I made two prints, one is a simple litho crayon drawing of a scene I saw over and over in Japan and Korea: salary men in dark suits, nodding off on their commute on the subway. The next is a tusche and crayon drawing. The image floated before my eyes shortly after I found out about the puzzle of litho. The title, "Looking for the Ding Dong Daddy" comes from the name of an intense acid wash of 36 drops of nitric acid to an ounce of gum arabic. A normal acid solution is about 8 drops. Mark told us that the term comes from a San Francisco cable car conductor who had a distinctive bell ring, and it was adopted by an artist who named the etch after him. I'm going to look this up again, to make sure I have my facts straight. Novice that I am, the tusche wash is very light, and the image looks a little burned out. But, oh, well. Live and learn. I have a feeling I'm at the beginning of another very long journey.

Close up

For IF: Birds are Prehistoric, right?

This is a close-up of the tessellation I used for my printed paper quilt, Mrs.Swift Learns to Speak Boy. It is a hand-colored photogravure print, and was used as the border for the quilt. If you'd like to see the whole thing, it is posted here: http://lynettesartblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/finished.html

This is how far I am: the tessellations have been sewn together and hand colored, but they are not yet sewn to the quilt face. I'm off to Japan and S. Korea tomorrow, so when I get back, I can finish it up. Then, I'll make paper for the batting and we can have our first quilting bee!

I'm so excited: while I'm in Kyoto, I'm going to a printing class taught by Michigan native and Japanese trained printmaker Richard Steiner. Can't wait!