Beyond Printmaking: So Many Bunnies

 

For spring I spent a few evenings sketching rabbits (one lives in my yard and I have been watching for its tracks in the snow all winter)

I carved and printed a few of my favorite bunny images from the sketch sessions and loved how they turned out. Black and white is crisp and lovely!

 I wanted to enhance the block prints with some pen and ink. Sometimes I miss being able to draw and be spontaneous -- printmaking can become repetitive and predictable and careful - so I started adding pen and ink to the prints.

  

 Then, because it is spring after all, I felt like there needed to be some color, something fresh! So out come the water colors...

My favorite results are the ones that combine a little bit of everything. And now I have more bunnies than I can count....

Limited Confusion

As technology advances there is a challenge for printmakers to educate art viewers on what exactly we mean by a print and a limited edition...  now that anyone can easily create a print out on archival paper using a computer and fancy ink jet printer there are a lot of reproduced artworks out there sold as 'prints'.  But that is not the kind of print i make. To me a print requires some elbow grease... ink rolled out on a glass slab, transferred to a block, and pressed by hand onto paper.

Recently at an art event a fellow exhibitor asked me about my process and how many pieces i make in my editions...  because i print by hand and it takes time and incurs error i usually end up with 12 or fewer final images in my limited edition runs. (In fact my latest works are all intentionally unique and one of a kind, but that is another post yet to come).  Fellow exhibitor said his limited editions are 100 pieces.   I have heard of 1000 in an edition.  So what would you rather have for your investment? Something touched by hand that only a handful of people may share or something mass produced?  Not everyone cares about this, but i do.  So if i cant give you the image you want in a different size it isn't because i don't want to it is because that is not my process.  I am analog not digital.  And when you see me explaining passionately the glory of a hand touched piece you'll understand better the method of my madness.

now what?

so... after a week away from the studio i have to figure out where i left off and where to begin again...   it is like turning the water back on after leaving a house vacant for a long period of time... it stutters, pipes shake, there are spurts, and the first expelled stuff is kinda icky but then things clear out and you're good to go again.