My E-vite for the One of a Kind Christmas Show here in Toronto.  Just over a week to go!

I am busy preparing for the One of a Kind Christmas show here in Toronto.  I will be participating for the first five days of the show.

Along with original prints I will be showing Moleskine journals and papier mache bowls and platters.

Running Horse 1

This new one of a kind print was featured here

The Older I Get the Better I Was - Mencken

This print was in a very interesting Treasury on Etsy awhile ago -here.  I love the name of the Treasury - The secret love affair of Mr. & Mrs. Dada in etsyland!

In All Canadian Treasury on Etsy

This print is in a new All Canadian treasury on Etsy here - all white and black and red.  Very cool.

Kabuki Crest 15

One of my recent small one of a kind print. Available here.

The central motif is a family crest belonging to an acting family from Japanese Kabuki theatre. This Edo pattern was originally printed as a souvenir for Kabuki enthusiasts. Later the design was used to decorate clothing and small personal objects. I am continuing this tradition.

Barns Art Market in Toronto/Africa Pot 1

Off to the Barns Art Market at the Wychwood Barns in Toronto tomorrow with a batch of new prints.  Over this last week I made 42 new one of a kind small prints as I almost sold out of the ones I made for my last show.

Bamboo and Water

My latest large scale (20" x 26") print, one of a kind.  I am still reimagining the bamboo forest I walked through in Kyoto.

Available here.

Icing Glaze Vase

Back to printing West German vases - this time in black and white - and just concentrating on the textural quality of the glazes.

I like this one.  It is pretty darn cheerful with the big circles.  I think those designers had a lot of fun with their creations.

Available here.

Etsy Front Page

One of my prints - The Ridge Roof - was included in a Treasury that made it to the front page of Etsy.  Thank you MalcolmStudioShop.

New Crop of Small Prints

In preparing for my Barns Art Market show tomorrow I printed up a batch of 6" x6" one of a kind prints and these three are from that batch.

I had actually printed the watery backgrounds 2 or 3 years ago.  At that point, I think I had run out of ideas so I put the partially completed sheets away.  Of course, I would keep on coming across them in the studio and I would shuffle through them and wonder what the heck I ever thought I was going to do with them.

Now that they are finished it seems obvious what I should have done with them ...  hindsight is everything they say it is.

All SOLD.

Barns Art Market

This Saturday is fast approaching ............... and I am still waiting for my latest prints to finish drying.  The humidity has been slowly picking up and the drying times is getting really extended.  These prints are all signed and stamped, but not dry.  Waiting .... waiting .... waiting......

Carstens Ankara Vase

When I took my relief printing course, which got me started in all of this, we did a lot of collographs.  I've always enjoyed the textures and variations that can be achieved with this technique.  As I do not have a press I print these as relief blocks, not intaglio.


This print is my interpretation of a Carstens Ankara West German pottery art vase with a raised geometric pattern. 


Available for sale here.

A Purply Kind of Day

It has been a semi-sunny semi-rainy May long weekend.  You can tell it has rained today. 

I have this succulent on my patio table, bought at the Toronto Botanical Garden plant sale last week.  I have no idea what it is called or how it grows or anything, but the form and colour caught my eye. I haven't found a suitable pot for it yet - one that compliments the colour of the leaves - a purpley colour as you can see.

I also have a big glazed pot full of chives on the deck.  The chives live year round in the pot.  I just cut them back in the fall and pull a green plastic garbage bag over everything and tuck the ends underneath the pot.  They start to grow very early in the spring due to the southern exposure and the micro-climate generated by the plastic.  I have to be quick about getting plastic off before the chives get too tall or they are all bent and crumpled in a Hunchback of Notre Dame sort of manner.

I often forget to cut the flowers.  I have never remembered to snip the flowers while they are still buds.  I understand they are good in salads.  Some year I'll remember in time.  But today I did remember and cut a bunch and found a great little vase for them.

This is a hand painted thrifted vase bought years ago. The maker's mark is a curved Czecho-slovakia around a little vase with a lid on it.  In the middle of the vase is a W.  And the painter's initials are E.R.B.  I like the chive flowers in it.

Swept Away Linocut Print

My second print of a black and white windswept tree, done in 2005.  Compared to my current trees, this one is very dense and black, with most of the detail around the edges.  Available for sale here.

Windswept Tree

This is the print that got me started on black and white windswept trees back in 2004.  I think it is a great subject and one that I keep on returning to.

Barns Art Market

I have been accepted into the Barns Art Market, a new art venue in Toronto, located at the Artscape Wychwood Barns, a former TTC streetcar repair facility. It is now a community centre heavily into arts and culture.  It is the home of the Green Barns Farmer's Market which runs year round and this year Artscape has added an artist's street one Saturday a month running through the summer. My dates are:

June 18    
July 16
August 20

2011 Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition

I will be participating in the2011 Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition taking place on July 8, 9 and 10 at Nathan Phillips Square at Toronto City Hall.  It is the 50th anniversary of this show, as the image above attests to!  The granddaddy of outdoor shows in Toronto, to be sure and juried to boot.

There are so many outdoor shows in Toronto now.  The calendar is pretty crowded and I wonder if there are really enough quality artists and craftspeople to go around without making the shows a bit repetitive for the people who attend.  Here is a partial list:

Riverdale Art Walk - 1 weekend in June
Barns Art Market - 6 dates May to October
Distillery Art Market - weekends April to October
Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition - 1 weekend in July
Sunnyside Beach Juried Art Show and Sale - 1 to 2 weekends over the summer
Cabbagetown Arts Festival -1 weekend in September
Queen West Art Crawl - 1 weekend in September
Junction Arts Festival - 1 weekend in September
St. Clair Artwalk - 1 weekend in September

Well it looks as if there is a gap in August!

The extent of the list does show a maturity in the grass roots arts life in this city.  A huge leap forward from 50 years ago

Three Tree Hill

Another one of a kind 6"x6" print.  Recently sold on Etsy and on its way to China, where it will join a number of my other prints.

Mabou Coal Mines Beach

I was just in Cape Breton and took the opportunity to go down to Mabou Coal Mines Beach.  I have only known this beach in the summer and it is the same, but different. All of the colours were darker and cooler

The tide was high and the day was cold, but still - very still.  And very misty in the distance. The water was flat, flat, flat with only ripples.  It didn't actually disappear into the sky, but if it had been mistier it would have. My sister and I walked as far as we could without walking into the Northumberland Strait.  I tested the water and it was the sort of cold that would numb you in seconds.

The beach didn't have too much shingle on it, but high up on the beach were mounds and mounds of fine graded stones.  Not much else, some seaweed, a bit of driftwood, a few shells.  No dead cows.  We did once find a dead cow here.

Leaning Willow & Double Brown Willow Prints

Not exactly a bamboo print.  Actually not a bamboo print at all.  I have gone back into my boxes of small blocks and printed up a number of 6" x 6" one of a kind prints that I have listed in my Etsy shop.

This is one way of using up little bits ink leftover from other prints.  This means that the prints tend to resemble one another in their colour selections.  I made a lot of these prints in 2007 and you could tell the different print runs as the colourway changed significantly from print run to print run.

Well, all of those prints are long gone, but I recently came across a small stash of paper ripped to the 6" x 6" size, so waste not - want not.  I'll keep making them until the stash is used up.

Leaning Bamboo can be found here and Double Brown Willow can be found here.

Kyoto Bamboo Print

When I got back from that trip to Japan in 2008 I immediately made prints featuring bamboo.  Small prints, medium sized prints, great big prints, colourful prints - no black and white prints though.  That short walk through the bamboo forest certainly inspired an awful lot of printing in a very short time.

Well I've started on bamboo prints again.  I love the verticality of the trunks and the fact that I can overprint them and make a real forest.  Not that I did that in this print.  I think I was in a stark mood when I made this.  The print is made of three blocks, just placed where I wanted them and taped down before I rolled the ink on.  I am getting a feeling I will do red bamboo next.  Or red and black.

I have never yet captured the feeling of that forest.

Kyoto Bamboo can be found here.

Kyoto Bamboo

When I was in Kyoto I visited a number of temples which were all in beautiful and serene garden settings. At one of the temples there was a bamboo forest with a small road winding up the hill. There was a breeze and I could hear the tops of the bamboo hitting one another with a clacking sound - so unlike the sounds of the forests I know. Running along side the road was a low stone wall and set on top of the wall was a fence made of some sort of straw like material all woven together. It was sublime.


I walked up the road listening to the bamboo clacking away and thought that I never wanted to leave.  Can you just imagine walking around that corner of the road and just disappearing?  I could.  

Etsy Front Page

My aphorism print - Worrying solves nothing - made it onto Etsy's front page last Thursday night.  I was asleep (of course) and missed it.  Other people were awake though because my shop views went through the proverbial roof.

Thank you RenataandJonathan for putting this Treasury together.

Double Pine

My most recent black and white tree print.  I like the ground plane - it has a nice interleaving texture.  Sometimes the sketch on the lino is only the first idea and that idea changes as I cut.

Double Pine is available for sale here.

Japanese Pine

Another black and white print!

This is my usual size - about 8" wide and 11" tall.  But I find myself considering using a full piece of paper which is 20" x 26" and use that size to jump up in scale considerably.  Still using trees.  Still in black and white.The idea has been in my mind for awhile - long skinny trunks with branches and needles only at the top.

So today I was looking at a print by Marten Hazelaar of anemones, which is just exactly what I was visualizing.  It is a stunning print.  So I had better get to work on mine.

Japanese Pine is available for sale here.

Pine Tree & Stream

Another black and white print - a little more complicated than my usual.  If I were to cut it again I would leave the trunk and branches completely black.  I do like the gravel walkway though.

Pine Tree & Stream is available for sale here.

Moss Green Forest

In this print  have combined two separate tree blocks which have been printed multiple times over a background of stripes.  When I look at it I am reminded of reforestation projects where the trees are planted in grids - all lined up in rows like sentinels.

Bamboo Forest

When I was in Kyoto I walked on a roadway through a bamboo forest and listened to the clacking sounds of the bamboo in the breeze.  The road wound up through the forest and on either side of the road was a stone wall with a woven brush fence on top of it. I didn't want to leave - it was too beautiful.

Inspired by Hundertwasser

I have a lot of leftover pieces of linoleum - long thin pieces stored in my studio.  I've pulled them out of the cupboard, considered them, put them back and then repeated the process a few months later.  I never threw them out because I always thought I would come up with some printerly idea for them.  Well the idea struck last August here.

I had an opportunity to revisit Hundertwasser's work and the 'AHA' button went off in my head.  One block was quickly cut, then all sorts of other things intervened and finally this February I made enough blocks to produce this print.

This style of print lets me work with patterns - lots of patterns - love it.  I can also combine the patterns with the striped backgrounds that I started to use when I made prints of my grandmother's quilts. All in all, a very satisfactory combination of ideas.

Hundertwasser Inspired Blocks

About six months ago I was reintroduced to Hundertwasser - his images, patterns and colours - of course very inspirational for me because of all of the patterns. Now I have the time to start to explore some of the ideas that I had then and to start to translate them into prints. I have cut three blocks so far and have any number left to go.