The glamorous life of an artist, eh? Spending a Saturday afternoon sanding down sheets of MDF (with a dust mask on of course) and priming them with acrylic gesso and then sanding them down again. Tomorrow I’ll put on a layer of white acrylic paint. And sand them down again. Oh, the glamour!
A friend gave me a massive stack of paper recently and I’ve been sorting it out. There was a pile of drafting film, I think it might be Mark Resist (Mylar) which is really nice stuff, but the stack was creased and so I thought I’d use some for experimenting, trying out some ink and wash work over a large sheet of paper I’d previously coloured. I’ve been trying a few ideas out digitally but today it was back to the real world of ink and brushes; my own home-made walnut ink as it happens and a mixture of hog hair and Isabey watercolour brushes.
I’m still playing around with some of the random prints I have been doing over the past couple of weeks. I photographed one of the printed pieces of paper and uploaded it into the free Markers app on my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 and filled in the white areas with black, which completely altered the nature of the space. I know that’s stating the obvious, but I like seeing it like this (the white version is below).
I also discovered that the Markers drawing app is a blunt instrument that gives quite clumsy results for colouring in …. but I’m too miserly to buy a better one.
Keeping on with the randomness that I’ve been trying to inject into my arts practice for the past few weeks, I took a digital photo of the work I posted about yesterday and uploaded it (or should that be downloaded?) into the Markers app on my Samsung Galaxy Note 8 tablet and scribbled all over it. That was fun. Which is unusual for me, because doing art has never been fun. It’s really hard and I don’t enjoy it. It’s like an itch that has to be scratched. Satisfying when the scratching’s over though.
Entertaining blog from Thom Hickey exploring the life of songs. This one is fascinating, starting out in Texas in the 1950s and following its journey to London in the 1970s. With a great soundtrack. https://wp.me/p4pE0N-1I5
Cleaning Up. I’ve been doing some experimental printmaking onto some donated vintage paper the past few days, inspired by the random creative exercises of The Surrealists in the early 20th century. When I was cleaning up after the first day, where I used yellow ink (Caligo Safewash), I rolled my roller onto a large piece of paper to get the excess ink off. The next day, when I used red ink, I ripped a few strips of newspaper and put them onto the paper before I rolled the excess ink onto it. And finally, I did the same when I was cleaning the blue roller.
I really like it. I get my roller clean enough to wash AND I have some nice paper to work on. I think I’ll draw onto it with something dark, maybe black conté crayon or black oil bar, or maybe I’ll scan it into my Samsung Galaxy Tablet first and experiment before committing myself to paper.
After printing up all nine of my little brutalised randomised vinyl blocks yesterday in the final, blue, colour, I used up the ink that was left on a large sheet of Mylar, or Mark Resist, film. I’d already printed up the yellow and red leftover inks.
Waste Not, Want Not eh? I’ve no idea what I’m going to do with it, maybe collage?
I finally finished the random lino project I began a couple of weeks ago. I printed the final colour, Process Blue, today, using Caligo Safewash mixed with Extender in a 30:70 ratio. These were overprinted on two previous layers, Process Yellow and Process Magenta and I like the range of colours formed by the translucency of the inks. The purpose was to break through a creative block I’ve been wallowing in for the past couple of months and to take a chance with some randomness, following the example of the 20th century Surrealists, who often generated their ideas and concepts from creative exercises.
Has it worked? Well, I was hoping for something dark and insightful and what I have ended up with looks like 1950s frock fabric, but the process has certainly loosened up my approach to block (lino, wood) cut printing and germinated some ideas about developing my own semiotic imagery. Ooooh get me! This has taken me a long way to solving a particular problem I was having with one of my art projects, which was completely unexpected. RESULT!!!! 😀
This is an interesting blog that uses seasonal wild plants in delicious recipes and also gives a lotvof ghe mythological background as well. https://gathervictoria.com/2018/04/20/spellbinding-sweet-woodruff-cake-prosperity-magic/
Our local art gallery, The Glynn Vivian, is showing a fabulous exhibition of drawings and prints by the formidable German artist Käthe Kollwitz. I have admired her work and life for so many years, I’m beside myself to see this exhibition so close to home. I like to study artists I admire and copy from the great mistresses and masters. This is a digital study I made today from her woodcut “The Widow” from the early 1920s. She is very sparing with the cutting tool, there are surprisingly few cuts which I think increases its impact, the sense that the image has been ripped from the surrounding darkness. I didn’t finish it, there’s another hand in the original. I can never resist a good book and I bought the exhibition book as a birthday present to myself, it’s “Portrait Of The Artist: Käthe Kollwitz” by Frances Carey and Max Egremont, published by The British Museum and IKON.
I drew this with a, now ancient, Samsung Galaxy Note 8 tablet using a free app called Markers. I laid a black ground down and drew with white lines.
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