Mythmaking from the Other Side

New Growth, resurrected

2012-01-27T18:21:00.000-08:00

This poor drawing has been through so many evolutions; I've painted it three times, and this particular drawing has been modified on many occasions. This print is only the most recent version. But, thanks the excellent eyes of Kendall drawing prof Stephen Halko, who very gently pointed out that in a previous version, she had no neck, and to experimentation in Photoshop with levels and curves, which made me adjust the mid tones in the drawing, I think this is better. At least, now she has a neck, and is a proper print.
Another revelation for me was the discovery of this paper, hiding in my drawer for two years. I think it is a kind of katakana. The flecks in the paper are very beautiful. I think I might try mixing a little gold paint in with the ink next. Doesn't that sound yummy?

Hasn't snowed in a lifetime

2011-12-30T12:14:00.000-08:00

That title has nothing to do with this post. I just like how it sounds. And it happens to be true.

I haven't posted in a lifetime, either, and I have new images to post, but at the moment, I am camera- less. I have the first four panels of the triptych printed, and I'm getting ready to try the pochoir technique of coloring them. I'm going to make their skin blue, which references Anne Sexton's The White Snake from her Transformations collection of poetry. I also have the second four, but only in drawing form, and they aren't quite finished yet. I'm also trying to get back into the gold leaf groove by making a small panel. I'm on my second try at gilding. Wish me luck.

I have a camera coming, so I hope I can post images soon.

Maybe we'll have snow for the New Year.

Cheers.

New Navigator

2011-10-07T20:06:00.000-07:00

Artist kami

2011-10-06T11:08:00.000-07:00

Every time I try a new print method, it is a humbling experience. Real printmakers make everything look so easy. The good news is that I showed a student how to do it and she made a cool little print of a wrench. I love it when that happens.

Dreamer quilt, Finished!

2011-09-23T11:15:00.001-07:00

Phew! Glad that's done. On to the triptych. I just met with Jeanne the Carpenter and we worked out all of the details for the support. I started the drawings today and will post something soon.

For Karyl

2011-09-09T15:48:00.000-07:00

I've posted this drawing before, but this week, Karyl, the man/boat in this piece, died suddenly. I made the drawing because of a story my friend Lois tells about before she met Karyl, she was all sail and no boat, and together they worked just fine. Now, she has lost her boat. Now, she will have to do without the safe "boundaries" of Karyl's boat. Good travels, Karyl.

The Drawing Board (as in back to)

2011-09-03T17:03:00.000-07:00

Well, that didn't work....As I posted before, I had high hopes for the litho I did this summer, but it was unsuccessful. The litho gods just weren't smiling upon me, so while I did get a print, it isn't in color, much less pochoir. I'm still going to try pochoir, but I'm going to use a simpler image from an old painting about what a good listener my mom is. It's called Time to Listen and is in the collection at the Kalamazoo Hospice. And, I'm going to do it in photogravure, instead of litho. Time for a break from that.

Anyway, I'm glad to have the opportunity to re-work this image. I've always liked it, but it has some formal issues that I'm looking forward to fixing. As soon as the quilt is finished, I'll start on this drawing.

This is better, I think

2011-07-31T09:19:00.001-07:00

Well, I hope it's better, anyway. This is the version I'm going to transfer to the plate. I hope there isn't some glaring idiotic error in perspective that I haven't seen. Why can't I ever do anything the simple way?

Obsession : )

2011-07-29T09:18:00.000-07:00

Since Friday, I've worked on the powerlines. I hope they're closer to correct now. You can see the new version here: http://lynettesartblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/this-is-better-i-think.html

Today's IF challenge is obsession. I'm not a very obsessed person, except when it comes to artwork and getting it right. Currently, I am obsessing about those darned power lines. I always think my drawings will be easy, but then I end up setting very complex problems for myself. I want to have this drawn on the plate before I go to art camp. If all goes well, this will end up as a color litho using the pochoir method of printing, ala Mucha. If anybody has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them!

Pochoir

2011-07-25T17:06:00.000-07:00

I'm telling you, synchronous events keep happening. I was very lucky to see the Mucha exhibit in Taipei this month. It was an enormous, wonderful display of his lithos. I had my craft eyes on, and I didn't see any mistakes. Mucha was a master draftsman, and I don't know if he did his own lithos, but that work was very fine, too. I just found out today that the technique (I think) that Mucha used was a stencil method called pochoir. And guess what? In the course catalog for my upcoming class the description says it will cover "hand stencil techniques". I'd bet anything that pochoir is one of those techniques. This is the drawing I'm planning to use. Now that I see it on screen, I'll need to change a few things before I transfer it to a plate, and if you can't tell, there will be reflections of power lines in her eyes, and I'm thinking about maybe shadows of the lines across her face, but I'm not sure. The piece is called Cicada. It goes with the power lines, I swear.

POSCO

2011-07-22T09:43:00.000-07:00

The world is so synchronous sometimes. Last year while traveling in Korea, I stumbled upon a printmaking workshop in the basement of the Busan Museum of Modern Art. The workshop was being presented by the POSCO company, a major steel company in Korea. The purpose was to foster creativity in this employee group. Today, POSCO was mentioned in a conversation on Facebook as a driving positive force in S. Korea. I figure, if they think to do things like cultivate creativity through printmaking, they can't be all bad. I wonder if they'd be interested in making an inexpensive but quality version of my plates. I spend a fortune on those!

More experimenting

2011-07-16T08:38:00.001-07:00

I haven't posted to Illustration Friday for a while, and yesterday, the prompt was gesture. Because I am still shaking off jet lag, I was in my studio late last night and decided to try some monoprints for the first time. I'm on a bit of a mission to try as many techniques as I can before I'm done with grad school, and this was on my list. I also think this will be a nice technique to share with my students in the fall. So here are the two prints I made at 2:00am this morning. The lighter one is a doctored ghost image from the first print. As far as the prompt goes, the duckling isn't gesturing, but the images are gestural in nature.

Home again

2011-07-13T20:19:00.000-07:00

I just got home from a nice trip in Asia, where I saw some wonderful sights as well as some excellent art. This time, I was able to see both Shanghai and Taiwan. That was great because I had just read Shanghai Girls, the sequel to Snowflower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See, in which the action starts in Shanghai before the Communist Revolution and refers to Chiang Kai Shek and his opposition to Mao. I had no idea that the Chinese people were persecuted as much as the Japanese were in the '50's. Seeing those two cities gave me a "before and after" look at the Chinese. I have to say though, that the view on the Bund in Shanghai rivals any city view I've ever seen. Taiwan had the best art, though.

I also got to see Transformers 3 in 4D, which was amazing. And I saw a good Korean flick called Hello Ghost. I recommend both.

Anyway, I didn't do a lick of work while I was away, even though I had a drawing with me to work on. I was bugged by the missing toes in the Dreamer quilt, and the only thing I did was to mull over how to fix that. I think I figured it out.

So now, it's on to printing, coloring and sewing the tessellation and quilting the rest of it. I'm also going to work on some plates to get ready for summer camp : )

It's nice to be back in the cool green of Michigan.

New Quilt Face

2011-06-29T18:14:00.000-07:00

Sigh. After all of this work, I'm really sorry now to see that it bugs me that the mom's feet are cut off by the quilt blocks. I don't really think there is anything I can do about it. I still have the tessellation to print and add on, and I think I'm going to beef up the colors. I really hope my MFA committee thinks it's OK.

Four panels left to piece

2011-06-15T08:23:00.000-07:00

I have 12 of the 16 blocks of the new quilt pieced and quilted. I still don't exactly know how I'm going to join them together without hand stitching the backing, but I'm happy to have the time to make this progress.

In the meantime, I'm exchanging emails with Jeanne the Carpenter about my triptych. She is very logical and detail oriented, and we're coming along well on the design. If it works, it'll make a yummy project for next year at Kendall.

Shadows

2011-06-03T05:40:00.000-07:00

OK, I'm digging way back here, really to my very first drawing class at Idaho State, and then later when I made a print of the original drawing as a lino cut. But, it was the first thing that popped into my mind when I saw today's IF prompt, Shadows. I think this must have been the beginning of my tendency to be invisible.

New idea, technical questions

2011-05-29T08:07:00.000-07:00

I have a new idea. I'm in the process of designing something for my MFA thesis show that will hopefully knock my committee's socks off. I think I know what I want to do, but I'm stuck on how.

Here's how it came about: I've been reading some contemporary versions of old fairy tales, one of which was Bluebeard, but this time, the wife avoids being killed by her husband simply by not succumbing to the curiosity of what is behind the final door. I also just read Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See, which has as a main element the secret language of Chinese women call nu shu. I started thinking about how throughout history, maybe keeping secrets was (is?) a survival tactic of many women, either in keeping them or respecting them.

I want to make a large triptych that opens like an altar piece, except one side will be locked, with the key available so that the viewer can open it if they want to. All of the surfaces will have printed images as well as painted elements. The problem to solve is how to build the thing. Normally, I'd just charge in and give it a go, but since this is for my thesis show, the craft has to be wonderful and I can't take three tries to get it that way. It needs to be light and strong, as well as beautifully made. Anyone know a good carpenter?

Laughing Woman

2011-05-24T06:03:00.001-07:00

For Sunday Sketches:

I've been having great fun thinking about captions for this little drypoint:

How about: "She cackled like a hag, thinking about how she would trick him. It would be for his own good."

Chicago

2011-05-20T09:48:00.000-07:00

I had a wonderful, awful day this week, 23+ hours long and filled with art, new friends and a healthy dose of odd luck. I went to see my new friends in Chicago who I met at Ox-Bow last summer. Maureen and I were in the same litho class taught by Mark P. at the AIC. Mark is a curator of prints and drawings there, but he is also an accomplished printmaker and teacher. Like me, Maureen has been an artist all her life and unlike me, has an amazing background in art history. She attended the AIC for her undergrad degree, and through her I got a peek into the art history associated with the school. It all made me want to go to Ox-Bow again this summer. We'll see.

One of the wonderful developments of the day was viewing a large work that was made up of several small woodcuts, assembled to make the image. Just like my quilts, except they were just laid out together on a big sheet of paper and framed. I'm thinking about not continuing the quilts and maybe collaging the prints end to end like this. I'm feeling the need to speed up the process.

Another cool thing was that Mark graciously pulled out some June Wayne prints for us to see, since I had just missed her show at the Institute. I couldn't have asked for a nicer day.

The bad luck came on the way home. My train broke down and we were stuck on the tracks for 4 hours. I'm no stranger to travel and I know that things like this happen and it is best to just buck up and get through it. But. On this particular train there were people who did not know this. One man also didn't know that it is very rude to have many loud conversations on his cellphone when others cannot escape hearing the conversation. I now know way too much about this stranger, and unfortunately, it isn't a nice picture.

Still, I loved the day, and discovered an excellent new novel to boot. But this post is too long already, so maybe I'll tell about it later!

First watercolors

2011-05-13T10:00:00.000-07:00

Here's my confession: I've painted and drawn and printed and sculpted, but I've never been able to do watercolor. It has been a bit of an issue lately, because my students really want to do it, but I've been dragging my feet for lack of knowledge. Recently, I found a book called Watercolor Painting for Dummies by Colette Pitcher, and look! Here are my first two projects from it. Ms. Pitcher gives clear and useful exercises to understand how to handle this medium, and does it with a sense of humor and good fun. And, surprise! The color theory is really the same as in other mediums. I don't know why that surprises me; it makes perfect sense. These two aren't great by any stretch, but they give me hope that I can figure this thing out.

The little landscape is actually just a little sketch I've been thinking about. This is (sort of) a picture of my wedding day. Just my luck, it was a typical Michigan winter ice storm that day, and I remember seeing all the old aunts creeping gingerly down the icy driveway, trying to keep their balance, arms full of packages. Today's challenge for IF is safari, which is a long journey over land (Truly. I looked it up.). It was a journey down the driveway for them, and a long journey since then for me as well. So, please think of this little sketch as a Michigan "safari". I'm just not sure what I was hunting for, even now.

Novice

2011-05-06T05:28:00.001-07:00

I made this drawing at the same time I made Guitar Kami and Journeyman. They are kind of a triptych, of the stages of development in learning an instrument and becoming an artist. We have a program at Ferris called Music Industry Management, a very popular program in which students learn the ins and outs of the music industry. Many of them are guitar players on the side, and they always look so cute and sort of vulnerable in their playing, underneath all the energy they put out. So, I'm entering this for today's IF challenge, beginner.

Trojan horse on hold

2011-05-01T07:13:00.000-07:00

For those of you who are interested in the status of the Trojan horse that was so cleverly left in the KCAD building a few weeks ago by the Calvin College art students, I finally have a tiny bit of information. According to a Kendall professor, the horse has been moved to a safe location and is waiting for the Kendall students to craft a response. I've heard a couple of good suggestions, but I won't spill them here. I really hope the Kendall students don't let this pass. Maybe I'll sneak down and do the deed myself!

Dry Point Day 1

2011-04-26T07:17:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of the day, I was surprised because no one wanted to make a print! Then, gradually, a few changed their minds and in the end, I'll have ten students printing tomorrow. Probably a good number to start a new project. A couple of them had really good drawings to work with, so we might get some good ones.

Switching over to teaching fine art has been an interesting experience. I have to admit I've been a bit clueless about how the change would affect me and my teaching. I guess I've always approached teaching drawing from a fine art point of view, because that's who I am. But now that I've done it for a year, I'm trying to think about how the course should truly be. The purpose of the course is to turn them on to art and art making, along with showing them some basic skills. I also want it to be fun, without doing a disservice to art.

In all, though, I think this has been a good change for me. So many things that I dearly loved have passed out of my life. There have been buckets of tears for these things. One of the lessons that I've learned is that impermanence is best embraced. Endings can be painful, but it's better to embrace the change and be in harmony with impermanence.

What if I made my next quilt out of the bike image, and then the next could be when she finally takes flight?

Tomorrow is Drypoint Day

2011-04-24T14:27:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, I'm going to get my ARTS 101 classes started on drypoint. We are making do with a lot of things, so today I ground down some nails to the sharpest point I could to use as drypoint scribes. This will be my first time teaching printmaking. I hope it goes OK.

Making those scribes brought Frank Morgan up for me again. I'm not sure why I started thinking about him lately, or what made me look up Carol Estrup's site in the first place. She is amazing for making a web page for Frank. I wonder what he would think of it. Anyway, while grinding those scribes, I had strong memories of one of the first things Frank taught me, which was how to make tools. He gave me some scraps of wood, some spring steel and the grinder, showed me what to do and I spent a few weeks making tools that are meant to last a lifetime. The handles were turned on a makeshift lathe that Frank had set up with his grinder and vise. I ground the steel to the shape I wanted and attached them to the handles with fine silver wire. Two of my favorites are a very small, fine chisel, and a knife that can be ground down until there is no more wood left to hold it. Wasn't that an amazing gift?

I wish the wings would kick in

2011-04-23T17:07:00.000-07:00

I've just discovered whole other worlds of artist bloggers our there! It all started for me with Illustration Friday, which I love. But after visiting blogs from IF, I've found Paint Party Friday and now Sunday Sketches. It is so fun to connect with all of these kindred spirits. I'm still buried, but making headway with the papers, so I'm posting this for my first entry to Sunday Sketches. Below is my original post for this sketch:

Well....I'm buried under a ton of grading and should be doing it, but instead I've been thinking all day about the IF prompt, "bicycle". This is the part of the semester when everything becomes very concentrated and intense, and it requires a lot of effort to stay above water. Last year, and even last semester, I had an image of myself barely keeping my nose out of water, I was so overwhelmed. This semester there has been some improvement. At least now I have a bike that paddles, and a new set of wings. Once the wings start working, I'll be out of the danger zone. Sorry this is just a sketch. I'll get back to it in a few weeks when I hit dry land again : )

When I lived in San Diego, my bike was my primary mode of transportation. I got into a few scrapes with opening car doors, ran down an old lady (I'm not kidding and I am very, very sorry for it) and got a ticket (still not kidding). But my most memorable and scary experience was when, as I was flying down a very busy 4 lane street that is a very steep hill, an exhibitionist opened his car door out into my lane and stepped out of his car to face me. He was stark naked. Again, not kidding. I was furious with him because losing control on that street and hill would have been disastrous. I yelled at him all the way down the hill.