DATE: 12/03/2007 00:11:05 / MOOD: full of life


Anyone who has checked out my gallery has seen my lithographic attempts.  Of all the half tones that are on there, only 3 are successful lithographic prints. A couple are just pencil, one is a drypoint.  The rest are scans of the plate before i attempted to print it.  Early in my endeavors in this media, I spent over 100 hours on a very detailed plate, washed it out and attempted to print it, only to have it print blind.  From that time on, I have always documented my drawings by scanning them before the plate gets washed and, should all things fail and the plate refuses to print, at least I have something.  Out of frustration, I actually gave up on the process for a while, focusing on other media and other life pursuits.  However, lately and perhaps because of this forum, I have picked up the ball and am going to try again.  This time, I'm going to blog it. This diatribe is part one.

Waterless Lithography is a technique developed by Nik Semenoff, an ingenious professor of printmaking at the University of Saskatchewan.  It is considered fairly non-toxic and all the supplies can be found at your local hardware store.  (For some reason, I really think that's cool!) Instead of a stone, sheets of aluminum, mylar or glass can be used as the substrate.  For beginners and folks like me trying to get consistent at this, aluminum step flashing is the perfect size, cheap and you don't have to mess around with cutting it.  It's lightweight and can be taped into a sketch book in case plein air is your thing.  To make the aluminum plate more susceptible to bonding with the ground, I wash it with wall prep that one would use to clean a wall before painting. TSP without phosphates has sodium metasilicate in it that reacts with the aluminum and renders it more likely to bond strongly with the silica caulking that is used for the ground.

For this step 1, I prepped a plate and planned to do a sketch of my dog using both a sharpie and a 50 cent Pilot "Better Grip" ball point pen.  I've used these before and they work really well. They do not bind well to the aluminum and bind not at all to the silicone ground, so that after I have drawn directly on the plate and then applied the ground, the ground can't bond with the aluminum plate anywhere that has pen or sharpie ink on it.  If I do everything right, once the ground has set, I can wash off the sharpie and ball point pen and apply the ink.  However, I get ahead of myself.

Drawing on this plate takes a bit of getting used to, especially with the ball point pen.  It's slicker than snot on a door knob and feels just like walking over Pergo flooring in socks.  Not a whole lot of texture under your fingers and with the bright reflection of the aluminum, it can be hard to see the marks.  With my failure rate, I was bound and determined to just hammer out a lame sketch, but I started in on my dog and she was so beautiful and quiet and this great model and I just couldn't resist doing a full drawing.  I really hope I don't regret it.

I'm going to try and upload the plate at two stages of the drawing but I don't know if I can get it into this blog.  (My html coding skills are a little wanting.)



View Entry

DATE: 11/29/2007 21:35:01 / MOOD: disappointed

I just had my show reviewed.  It's part of a group show, three of us in separate hallways of a local TV Station/gallery.  Kind of a nifty set up, if you can find the building.  Not exactly on the beaten path.

The critic, who did manage to find the building, writes for a local weekly that reserves a large chunk of it's copy for the local arts scene.  He really did a good job on the review and it was nice to get the attention.

Of course, my luck, he didn't seem to care for my material at all, but hey, what's an ego for but to be taken down a peg, right?. My work was described as

Quote: "She’s a respectable draftsman who composes from photographs. Any of her seven black-and-white drawings and lithographs on display here would make decent card or book illustrations....very good at producing decorative images..."

I am bothered by the snipe that I draw from photos. Only one of those drawings, the Three Bears, came from a photo.  I used a photograph taken by a friend of mine because polar bears are hardly common road-kill in my neck of the woods and it was the best reference I could get short of buying a dog team and shushing up to Hudson Bay myself.

This poses a question, though: Why is illustration considered the lowest art form? Just because it's representational doesn't mean it's not expressive. The lithograph of my daughter came from a sketch I did of her while she slept.  My life at that time was as scrambled and convoluted as those blankets she's wrapped in and yet, with all the chaos, she slept on. It was a marvel to behold. How is that lithograph simply a snapshot of a moment?

This has brought up a thought, which for me can be a dangerous thing. I think that if fine art is the poetry of visual art then illustration must be the prose; the fiction, the non-fiction. Are Hawthorn, Twain, Thoreau considered lower literary artists than Keats, Dickinson and Whitman?

What do you folks think?

-M

 

View Entry

DATE: 11/28/2007 13:36:45 / MOOD: don't know

This is my first stab at a blog, but it kind of looks like fun throwing stuff up and seeing who salutes.  I'm also stalling because I have this clean canvas staring at me and lot's of empty plates wondering if I'm ever going to turn them into something interesting and since I have no looming deadline forcing me to spit out something, I sit here, creating run-on sentences for anyone else who chooses to avoid their canvases and plates.

I'm in the process of evolving from an illustrator who brings the message of others to graphic light, to figuring out my own message. I'm learning that this is really the hard part.  My tools have changed from digital to antiquated. I'm learning my way around lithography, intaglio, wood cut and painting with egg tempera.  Go figure.

 
So, I thought I might use this blog to see if I can garner advice and inspiration from others out there.  I'll throw up my adventures in waterless lithography and the fine art of making one's own paint and ground from chicken products and dirt.  This should be fun.  I can get pretty entertaining when I'm frustrated and these two types of media allow for a lot of that.

More to come

 -Marcia

View Entry