Inked Steve Block

Steve block inked and printed, before the ink is cleaned off the block.

Starting to Cut Steve's Block

In and out of the oven with this piece of lino over the last few hours. A bit of cutting, a bit of warming and then more cutting.

Steve

One of my holiday tasks is to continue work on making prints of people I know. These images are parts of a sketch of Steve, working from a photo I took months ago. The whole sketch has now been transferred to the block and the block is warming up in the oven as the lino feels pretty hard - not quite sure how old it is.

Bamboo Forest

When I was in Japan I spent a little (far too little) time in Kyoto.

While I was there I walked up a road in the middle of a bamboo forest. I walked and walked up the hill away from my friends and listened to the sounds of the bamboo forest. There was a bit of a breeze and the bamboo swayed in it. The tops of the bamboo hit one another and the sounds they made were an unsyncopated rhythm of hollow clacks. Quite eerie and beautiful.

When I came home I immediately made a series of prints of bamboo forests.

Red & Brown Forest

I am still going through my boxes full of small blocks looking for interesting combinations.

This print is composed of two linoblocks. One is a swirly pattern that I use alternately as sky or water and this one was printed once and overprinted using a different portion of the block. The second lino is the tree block, here printed in two colours and offset slightly so that the trees appear to be different. The curved green pattern behind the trees is an old piece of wood that was wire brushed to bring out the grain. Again it was printed twice using two different colours and printing different sections of the block to give variety.

Altogether, a lot of movement going on in the background in contrast to the trees in front.

Sold December 5, 2009.

Thirty Three Bags of Apples

At the front of my house I share an apple tree with my next door neighbour. The tree is pretty old and produces full size apples which are actually good as eating or cooking apples - or they would be if they didn't have so many worms in them.

Unfortunately the apples fall off the tree before they are properly ripe and when they hit the sidewalk, the driveway and the road they split. Which brings on the wasps and generaly leaves everything a little messy.

And when they fall, do they ever fall. Lots and lots of them. I pick them up in the morning before I go to work. I pick them up in the evening when I come home from work. I sometimes pick them up again before I go to bed. I pick them out of my shrubs. I pick them from under the cars parked on the street. I pick them up from along the curb. I pick them off of my front walk. I clean them off of my neighbours front walk and my neighbours front lawn (she's old).

Oh, I pick them up and pick them up and pick them up. Thirty three bags in one week is the record!

Moleskine Covers

Over the summer I got out my stash of Japanese papers I used to use for papier mache and started printing covers for Moleskine 5" x 8" notebooks. Lots of fun.

Field of Running Horses

I have neglected the blog shamefully! Check the date of my last post.

Still making some 6" x 6" one of a kind prints.

I made 50 or 60 two years ago and they are long ago sold. So here I go making a few more. I am using much more transparent base with my inks so that the colour layering is visible which adds another layer of interest to the print.

Sold December 12, 2009.

Red Fish Swimming

I have to admit I like a lot of the names I give my prints because they are often just off the top of my head and relate very directly to the print. So Red Fish Swimming really is about red fish swimming. You've got the fish, you've got the water - they have to be swimming - right?. And unless you are colourblind, yes they are red.

Blue Horse Running

Another 'cobbled' together print.

The sky is from another reject block. What was I thinking at the time? It is a great block. Good thing I didn't throw it out. I learned that lesson a few years ago when I came across a proof of a print that I thought, at the time, was a lousy image, but years later saw that it was actually quite good. Did I still have the blocks? Nope. Too bad - so sad. I still have the proof though. The colours are a bit wishy washy, but the image definitely had potential. Sigh.

The landform is from a print that never made it through the proofing stage, but by this time I knew better and I saved the blocks and lo and behold this block is actually quite useful. I think I may have to make a few more blocks like this for more variety.

And the horse. Ah, that little horse block has been around for a long time now. When I first cut the block, I didn't have any real use for him. It was only a couple of years later in 1999 that I editioned him up in a print called Running Horse. And now he is continuing to run through all sorts of one-of-a-kind prints.

More Holland Willows

I have been on a bit of a printing binge lately and have been experimenting with a series of small one of a kind prints using a combination of existing and purpose cut blocks.

This print is made from two of my recent pollarded willow trees. The waves come from a block I made in 1995 (!) and the land under the trees comes from an envelope of blocks that never were completed as prints (it was fun going through those rejected blocks - not all of them were bad at all). The background block is one that I tend to use over and over and is the inspiration for the name of this print - Misty Day 2 (the first Misty Day sold too quickly for me to blog about it).

All in all, I like the freedom this random method gives me and I have made about 30 or so of these prints so far. Not all of them are willow trees!

Hassium

Hassium was synthesized in 1984 in Darmstadt Germany by Peter Armbruster, Gottfried Munzenberg et al. Atoms of lead were bombarded with ions of iron with a linear accelerator to produce Hassium. It is classified as a transition metal and its appearnce is unknown, but assumed to be silvery white or metallic grey. It is highly radioactive. The name Hassium comes from the Latin for the German State of Hesse where Darmstadt is located.

This information was not a lot to go on, but as you can see I managed. By combining the (old) symbol for radioactivity, with a portion of the Hesse Coat of Arms (rampant lion) and a Gothic style font (Germanic in feel) I came up with my version of the element Hassium for the Periodic Table Printmaking Project.

Periodic Table Printmaking Project

This is a print of one of my blocks for the Periodic Table Printmaking Project started by azuregrackle from Etsy.

I chose Hassium which, as it turns out, is one of those completely unknown elements. It was created in 1984, but there does not seem to be any use for it - maybe because it is radioactive!. It is a transition metal (hmmm - transitioning from something else or to something else?) and it might be a silvery colour. Not too much to go on visually.

So my starting point was the word Hassium, which is Latin for Hesse, the state in Germany where Hassium was discovered. This lion is part of the Hesse coat of arms. I am going to work in the notion of radioactivity as well. For my text (we have to show the periodic symbol and number on the print) I am going to use a Gothic font which could be considered Germanic.

Holland Willow and Double Willow

Staying true to the tree theme.

I like the look of pollarded trees with their thick knotted stumps. I suppose I like them because of the interesting shapes that are created by this style of pruning. It is the polar opposite of pruning a tree to enhance its natural form. And it is a form of pruning rarely seen in North America. The Getty Museum in California has pollarded trees as part of its landscape design and I have seen individual pollarded trees here in Toronto, usually on people's front lawns. But not as part of a designed urban landscape. Maybe it would cost too much to prune the trees all the time.

These prints are willow trees in Holland which are pruned every few years to create a crop of supple willow branches. I believe they are pruned just high enough so that the branches aren't eaten, but low enough for easy harvest. Though I wonder if the willow branches are still harvested at all. . I would like to make a larger print with a number of pollarded willows receding into the distance in a marshy landscape.

Double Willow is available for sale here.  Holland Willow is available for sale here.

Cloud Pine

I am staying simple for the moment and concentrating on trees.

This is a cloud pruned pine tree and is my print for Print Zero Studios' Print Exchange V. So far there are two confirmed exhibitions - the Florida Printmakers hosting at the University of Florida and the Sev Shoon Art Center/ BallardWorks who are hosting in Seattle. Their last exchange had 285 participants from from 18 countries and the show travelled to four states in the US.

Winter Trees

Simplicity achieved.

A simple rendition of winter trees against a snowy furrowed field. The starkness is just what I need in my printmaking life at the moment. Clean and cool and refreshing.

Winter Trees is available for sale here.

Multiple Squares Quilt Finished

The finished print. It took a long time from initial sketch to final print, but I am happy with the result.

I made the sketch last November/December and finished printing the edition during the first week of March. That is quite a lot of time for a low tech block print, though I was working on the Rayon Dress Quilt as well as a number of other prints at the same time ( and there is the day job which does eat into the time available). But I found that every step of the quilt prints took a lot longer than I thought. More planning.... more blocks... more proofing.... more revisions to the blocks.... proofing again.... hitting my head against the wall.... etc. etc. etc.

So my thoughts now are turning to simpler images and prints where I can get some immediate gratification. More spontaneity and less focus on process (even though printmakers love process).


Multiple Squares Quilt is available for sale here.

Multiple Squares Quilt - Work In Progress

A work in progress shot of the print that I have called the Multiple Squares Quilt. The print is based on one of my grandmother's quilts. Most of her quilts are composed of long strips of material, but this one is made of many small squares and must have taken much more time to make than most of the other quilts. I wonder if she worked on this in the winter time, when there would have been fewer visitors able to get to the farm on Southeast Ridge near Mabou, Cape Breton.

The Red Flute

Just a small print for fun. This was a bit of a break from all of the larger quilt prints I working on at the time. It was so nice to cut and print this one over a few days. For sale here.

The quilt prints were taking a huge amount of time in terms of making the blocks, proofing them, revising the blocks, reproofing. I was starting to drive myself mad with them.

Ingrid's New Golf Socks

So there I was wanting to make a print of argyle patterned socks. I don't know where that idea came from. The ether I suppose. At any rate, the idea was there so I pursued it, except that I didn't end up with argyle socks at all. They are socks alright, just not argyle ones.

I brought a proof of the print into work and I was thinking to myself 'Who in the world would actually wear socks that looked like this?. I mean, look at the colour and pattern combination. The robin's egg blue, the Dijon mustard yellow, the harsh red. No self respecting person would ever wear these. They are quite ugly'. But then I thought - maybe Ingrid would. (Obviously another thought out of the ether.)

To my surprise, when I showed them to her, Ingrid said they would make great golf socks. She is an avid golfer and, I suppose, has paid attention to fashion on the golf scene - unlike myself. So I asked if I could name the print after her and that was fine except she asked me to put the word 'new' in the title. As Ingrid explained it, she is terribly hard on her golf socks and they have holes in them all the time.

Available for sale here.