Playing With Friends...

Been having some fun collaborating with a potter friend, Matt Wassenaar of Black Dog Pottery. He throws these amazing mugs and then I get to apply underglaze designs with brushes and my carved stamps. It has been ages since I worked on ceramics but I used to love hand building different things. I was never a great wheel thrower though, so this is a real treat!

 

 

Florida Welcomes You

Florida Welcomes You (detail) / Linocut and Graphite on Wood 

Created for FLA exhibit at MIZE GALLERY May 2021

In this piece I tried to capture the tropical shirts and vintage marketing flavors that were part of old Florida vacations… The famous citrus, pelicans, tropical plants, seashells, and alligators were all iconic symbols of this exotic get-away. I took my first Florida vacation as a kid with my mom in 1976. We went to Disney World, Busch Gardens and the Ringling Circus Museum but my favorite thing was the beach and collecting shells. Even as an adult Florida resident that natural magic never waned and I came to cherish the flora and fauna of Florida. The spontaneous graphite lines are in honor of the younger me that fell in love with the idea of Florida decades ago. For me they represent the underlying promise of fun in the sun that is part of the Florida lifestyle. They’re also intentionally made with pencil which is not as permanent as ink because the dream vacation is always temporary.

This piece was created by translating my original sketches into hand carved relief blocks, like large rubber stamps, that were then inked and printed carefully one at a time in layers onto the prepared wooden surface. This is a one-shot process, if you screw up you start over as there is no way to change things once the ink is on the wood. There were several layers involved—the background was white washed with gouache then the first layer of souvenir pennant shapes were printed in yellow and pastel sky blue. On top of that came the orange layer, then the dark blue layer, then the pencil lines added last. The blocks are printed with an archival dye ink that has a transparent quality that permits the layers of color to interact and change when combined.

 

April is National Poetry Month

 

In honor of National Poetry Month I created some postcards that I left in the Little Free Libraries in my neighborhood. It was my first Free Art Friday activity since moving to Minnesota and it was really fun. Nice that so many libraries are in my area, then I don't have to worry about work getting rained on or blowing away and becoming litter.  I'll be doing this again for sure!

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....

Sad but True...

Another news story has inspired me to make some art...   the latest, a story about a young bear that gets hooked on people food...  "Bear falls through skylight, eats cupcakes."  Of course it ends badly for the bear as is often the case when people and wild life cross paths.

Previously (in 2012) I made this piece inspired by another animal tragedy "Alligator bites hand off of tour boat guide" .  The insult to injury in that story is eventually the guide is charged with having fed the gators for the benefit of his business.

 

 I doubt people will ever be satisfied with their urge to sprawl and consume every parcel of land for their own use leaving nowhere for wildlife to be wild. Encroachment and using animals for entertainment are serious concerns.  Maybe someday we'll all learn to coexist. Until then I guess I'll keep immortalizing these stories in images.  Long live Cupcake.

exploring by way of a series

 

sometimes you dont know where you're going until you get there...

the past few days i've been exploring ritual masks of various cultural groups--

african, mexican, american -- first nations...  and thinking about the transformative power

of something hand made that took a dancer or shaman and assisted them in transcending

from the day to day world to a more magical spiritual realm...  i hope to capture a taste

of that ritual magic in my work and bring it back to our day to day lives.

images here of recent carved block and silk screen images in progress

sometimes i wonder how many little blocks will i have to carve before i am done with a topic.

sometimes you're never done and you revisit that imagery over and over for years not realizing the deeper theme but just following where the inspiration leads you.

sometimes exploring art is really you exploring yourself.

sometimes it is just fun to make things that look really dang cool.

just keep working, you'll know when you get there.

art is dead

i can tell you as an artist, sometimes all we think about is marketing, merchandising, competing, deadlines, applications, displays, selling, trying to make a living...  when you create in this mind set it can kill the very essence of what makes art art... a lucky few come naturally to a style that people can't get enough of and their needs merge seamlessly.  others have a patron supporting them removing that financial burden. the rest of us have day jobs and use what time we have left over to create whatever it is we're moved to make, helping to keep the art pure and unsullied by commercial appeal.  for the true artist art is often a compulsion, that drive to express and bring to reality some strange vision. this is the soul of living breathing art.  keep art alive. buy art. and make what you feel.
this keeps it more interesting for everyone- viewers, creators, all.

Carved Grotesques

current series of gargoyle inspired block prints and stamps

I've had a long running fascination with gargoyles: when I was young I watched the animated cartoon series on television and as an adult I've taken photos of "carved grotesques" (as they are also known--which totally fits the idea of my block prints perfectly!) wherever I have had the fortune to find them.  While I  knew the function of most gargoyles (serving, in addition to mere ornamentation, as a downspout for rain water to keep buildings from damage)  I only recently read of the practice of using anthropomorphized creatures on buildings (especially churches) to assist in converting Pagans to Christianity...  because in medieval times creatures had been attributed various mystical powers... and so these creatures were carved and have adorned public spaces for years, even centuries... and now I come along to continue the legacy in my small way, conveying my own perspective on them. As I'm coming to realize, these themes we use as artists are deep rooted and repeat without our always being aware of it.  I guess I am still that grade schooler loving the dark mystery of watchful sentries hovering above...

tower of london

miller and paine building lincoln nebraska

near mirror lake st petersburg florida

 

 

 

 

 

cemetery near dublin, ireland

state theater st petersburg florida

gargoyle screen print on shirts

when i see this, i make this

I recently spent a weekend in Palm Beach/West Palm Beach for an art event and was amazed by the hedges and shrubbery walls in use. It gave everything such a green lush yet private feel. And it reminded me of my love of strange topiary.  A good friend lives near a house with one monolithic shrub out front that the owner must pass thru to enter the front door. It seems magical like Edward Scissorhands was there.  If only....

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.

then and now... the german printmaking thing persists

I started learning German in college after my first trip to Germany and because of my penpal in Hamburg...and my family heritage... and it just seemed to fit...  at the same time I was learning printmaking which too has ties to Germany...  I made the image on the left "Ich Habe So Oft Von Deutschland Geträumt" (translation: I so often dreamed of Germany) at that time and just have now finished my version of "Rotkäppchen" (Red Riding Hood) shown on the right.   Now German is such a normal part of my life I can't believe I didn't always speak it-not that I'm fluent but I can get by at a party if the opportunity presents itself and it helps that usually people are kind enough to overlook my limited vocabulary and dodgy grammar...   and printmaking likewise is integral to who I've become. 

For fun you can read Red Riding Hood in both English and German simultaneously with this side by side comparison of text and translation: http://germanstories.vcu.edu/grimm/rot_dual.html
Enjoy!