Don't Let's Start.

Winter Colors.

They Might Be Giants sounds so good in the winter. I remembered this after a trivia question about them the other night at the Pizza Shop. When I lived in Morgantown, I would trudge to the studio in the snow, listening to them on CD. Remember CDs? Golly...

No snow here. February first it was warm enough to wear a tee shirt outside. What? 

I've spent a lot of time in the Print studio this past week...and I am having a great time. But what am I doing? Still not sure. I am trying to give myself the freedom to experiment and play, but I seem to not be very good at that anymore. I feel sort of shy around printmaking. I can spend hours mixing up some lovely ink, I am scraping the hell outta some plates, and it feels so very good to ink plates and crank them through the press, but.......so? I guess we are getting to know each other again.

Mmm.

Mmm....

I have been decisively destructive. I have so many small, odd-size zinc plates. Many are little "demo" plates from teaching, and in grad school I was such a hoarder of old zinc. So I have been sawing some of them into shapes to be printed together, and in combination with larger plates.

I'm just sick of small rectangular things. It feels far too safe. Boring. I'm bored with my small safe-sized drawings and prints. So I've been thinking lots about format. 

Looking at big full sheets of blank paper.

How wonderful are anti-fatigue mats!?

I have a feeling this can has been around longer than Penland's print program.
"Burnishine!"

So I'm thinking a lot, taking notes, listening to a lot of music, (mostly The Who) and looking forward to many more long studio days this month. 

Thank you for stopping in on the ol' blog.

King's Gold.

Most of the things I make tend to be intricate and detailed.

Obsessive.

I am skilled. I am good at lots of things. I'm good with my hands.

On the good days I feel pretty graceful in my movements.

I react and adapt pretty quickly to things.

But I want to make sure that everyone out there knows that this kind of thing happens:



I had been sitting on my studio floor talking to my brother on the phone, and to make the most of my time I had been drawing with this ink..."king's gold" by shaffer, in a glass jar with one of the little built in inkwells. Later in the evening I tripped, (or something) and watched as the jar rolled away across the hardwood floors with a loose lid, leaving little puddles along the way.

I didn't really freak out. I thought, "oh no. I liked that ink!" and "I'm never living in a place with carpets ever again."

Since I really liked the color of the ink, I didn't go straight for the paper towels. Instead, I quickly shuffled through "the archives" and found these old print pieces from grad school. Subtle-on-subtle, these were white silkscreen on mulberry paper, with monotype and some stitching. Parts from some of the ol' super-complicated installations...



I mopped up the floor with them. It felt right. And (as I expected) the ink rejected the silkscreen beautifully, so they are on their way to becoming something else.

Sometime.

So yeah. This happens. Hell, its just paper. The floor is fine.

My students would agree that I have clumsy moments. One day I dropped a zinc plate during a demo. I joked, "and then you throw your plate on the floor..." A student asked what that does to the plate. I responded that it reorganizes the molecular structure of the metal in preparation for going in the acid.



Today it has cooled off in California. I have a feeling I'll want to put on a sweater when I leave work this evening.

Now I'm going to go have a frank discussion with the silkscreen exposure unit, and ask it nicely...again....to behave properly with me in front of my students.