Dream On

Dream On, gouache & acrylic on paper on board, 12” x 12”

My, it's been almost 3 weeks since I've documented. I have been busy, but one of the reasons why I haven't documented is that my camera is in the shop. It's been a while since I noticed that the focus was a little soft, but a few weeks ago (when I was shooting And Along Came a Cloud), half the time the problem was way beyond 'soft focus.' I finally took it to the shop, expecting to get it back in a couple of weeks, but they called yesterday and apparently they have to send the lens back to the manufacturer. So we'll see how it all works out.

So besides not having a camera (the image above was taken with my cell phone), I've also been busy with Portland Open Studios application period (through March 15), and then of course jurying. We'll finish jurying this week, and then the fun part of preparing for the tour itself!

Wait a minute, didn't we JUST do this...?

Anyhow, Dream On is part of the on-going collaboration with Artist X and is in response to her piece called Party On.

The piece started with my initial reaction that I'm typically the wall flower at the party and the lawn mower at the bbq. Then it devolved into this nightmarish scenario (parties do strike some fear in my heart).

While I was working on this, my friend Steve was also documenting it's evolution. Poor guy, all he wanted to do was to come over and make some portraits of me while I was painting, and I went, "say...how about..."

So the camera, lights, computer and disk were set up, a little script was written to remind me to run the camera every two minutes or so. Steve also took some videos. It will be a while before we get to see the end results, but whatever it is, it's been an interesting experiment.

And since this piece was part of the collaboration with Artist X, we've also talked to Artist X about making a little video about her part of the collaboration.

And Along Came a Cloud

And Along Came a Cloud, gouache on paper on board, 10” x 10”

(I'm done with the painting part, I still need to airbrush on the acrylic medium later tonight, after it dries.)

This piece actually started a couple of weeks ago. I always have containers of JUST A LITTLE BIT OF PAINT left over. Too little to do anything with, but of course I can't just toss it out. So I actually got several pieces started just by adding lots of water to each color and pouring them on prepared panels. So here I've brushed on some colors and while the paper was still a bit damp, poured more colors on the panel and just moved the watery colors around by rotating and tilting the panel. This was so beautiful and I almost didn't want to do anything else with it.

But I'm not that type of an artist...you know, the type that knows to leave well enough alone.



So here I've really ruined a good thing:



And before the Big Finish. I struggled for a while to figure out what was bothering me here—and I'm still not sure that I've completely fixed the problem—but I think the red, circular intestine-looking thing really needed a break (ie, so it wasn't a complete enclosure). The finished image is the top image.



As always, I had the radio on as I was working on this, and I was reminded of spending my summers at my grandmother's house.

She was a devout Buddhist, and in the afternoons, we would always have the radio tuned to the station where they discussed the Buddhist sutras. The program was a mixture of Taiwanese and Sanskrit (with a Taiwanese or Mandarin accent, I suspect), neither of which I understood (or understand). But I can still remember the sounds and the voices. Now, whenever I hear Farsi, I'm instantly transported back to my grandmother's house, with the radio on, she bent over her sewing and I lying on the bed taking an afternoon rest.

Thorns, thorns, thorns

The rose thorns I collected and trimmed on 2/7 have been drying for almost 2 weeks. I figured they were ready. So here they are, sitting on some of that putty stuff. They started out very black, but now look more of a dull brown.



Here they are, after the first coat of alizarin crimson (acrylic):



And here half of them have had 2 coats of the gold and the rest just one coat. I'm leaving them varied like that:



I'm not sure what exactly what I'm doing with them yet, but I'm planning to use them for the piece that will be in the 10x10 show at City Hall in March.

About being a fraud, or a fool, or both

Being the night owl, I'm still on Valentine's Day time, even though it's officially the 15th. I don't get philosophical here very often (even though I'm a real navel-gazer in real life) but a friend sent me a link to a blog that sent me off on a wee tangent. So here's a pretty entertaining write-up on No One Knows WTF They're Doing, and here was my email back to my friend (with slight modifications) —

I always felt like a fraud when I was working as an engineer; I never got over that and I didn't want to continue feeling like that. As an artist, I don't feel like a fraud, but I also know that there's no way that I can know that I'm not a bad artist. (Steve M and I just had this conversation actually, yesterday.)

The difference, I guess, is being comfortable with being an artist, even if it means I was a bad one. I'm willing to put myself out there and make a fool of myself, because it's worth it. But being a bad engineer, it's not worth making a fool of myself for that. (Although, it can also be argued, following the thinking of the original blog that Jo sent, being a bad artist is not so dangerous to others, in most cases, so maybe that makes it easier...)

I guess it's like being in love with someone, you love them enough, you put yourself out there for that person even if it means making a fool of yourself.

On that note, hope you all had a wonderful Valentines Day!

Coming up for some air

January turned out to be Portland Open Studios All The Time...all day, all night, and all the times in between too. Since Jan 1, I've logged about 180 hours doing a variety of Portland Open Studios support, whether it's meetings, website, paypal, or just general chores and errands. Phew. Now I'm getting my life back, and the ants seem to be back too. Darn those ants.

Eliza brought me this little plant on her way to Santa Fe at the end of Dec, and now it's blooming happily. Bright magenta flowers on the bright orange window sill.



Got out and worked in the garden for the first time this week. Pruned a few of the roses and collected these gorgeous reddish black thorns. I've not been able to get the dark red thorns that I got a few years back, but these black ones are nice too. They are much smaller than the red ones from before. I have some ideas, we'll see if they dry in time.



Believe it or not, for an art project, I had to dig out my calculus book to look up a couple of things. I had forgotten that I had painted the inside cover of the book a few years back. I had been cleaning out my bookshelf and had a few books that I couldn't let go, not quite yet, and this was one of them.

So we'll just say this is an early Year of the Tiger greeting.

Solarplate intensive, relief, part II

First, some pretty flowers. This was from a clip art book:



(Technical details on the flower plate/print are all the same as for the plate below.)

Yesterday, it felt like spring here—it was warm and dry, and I was stuck inside learning how to do webforms using php. Today, I'm done with that, and it's cold and wet, just like how it's supposed to be in the middle of January.

So anyhow, again, this was made as a relief plate; paper was Rives Lightweight, printed dry. Plate on the print bed and paper on top. Printed through an etching press w/ very little pressure and no blanket, just a cardboard. Pretty much the same set up as the last entry, just the paper is different.

Now, this is the same plate as from the last entry, but printed on Rives Lightweight dry. The details from both entries are all showing the same areas, so you can open up two windows and look at both at the same time and compare.



Detail 1:



Detail 2:



Detail 3:



Looks like the text printed much better than the solids, and there's less of the movement on the edges that you can detect. That would make sense as well, since the paper is slightly thinner, and I'm pretty sure we did not change the pressure on the press, so there was less pressure that would move the paper in that direction. Also, the paper is dry, so the ink isn't going to spread as much.

OK, now I'm all caught up on the solarplate documentation!

Solarplate intensive, relief, part I

There are lots of pictures to show, so I'm breaking them up into two.

The plate was made as a relief plate; paper was BFK, dampened; printed through the etching press w/ little pressure, no blankets, just a cardboard. We tried both plate on the print bed and paper on top, and paper on the print bed and plate on top. This was printed with the plate on the print bed and paper on top.

So this plate was just lines of different thicknesses and text at different fonts and sizes:



Detail 1—look at how the 0.1 pt line wiggled around! The 0.5 pt line also has a bit of trouble:



Detail 2—8 pt line, a lot better. You can click on the images to see larger views:



Detail 3— good view of a solid area:



The edges are all definitely moving around some for everything—text, solids, and lines. I'm going to guess that's mostly due to how we're printing them—through the etching press with a cardboard on top. I can picture in my head how the way the roller moves across at a very slight pressure would create a subtle movement. And notice that the soft edges are mostly on one side of the solid lines in detail 2 & 3 above! So my guess is that if I were to mount this type high and print it letterpress, I wouldn't see those wiggly edges on the bottom of the thick lines and the square.

Solarplate intensive, etching

OK, I was not very good about documenting my solarplate intensive. So Barbara Mason and I met two more times, once to run more etching tests, and once to run some relief print tests. Here are some of the etching tests.

These are 7” long test strips. If you click on the image you will get larger images. The left was created with a sheet of mylar that had been painted with acrylic (black) mixed with matte medium for various degrees of transparency/opacity. The right is a b&w copy of a color gouache painting.



This next image was from a 5”x7” plate (exposed from a b&w copy of a color gouache painting) that was printed twice. Once with a reddish brown, and again with the plate rotated 180 deg in black (I think?).



Ignore the stripe down the middle...have I mentioned how much I hate my all-in-one-printer-scanner before? This was from a b&w copy of a pencil sketch. This is printed just once through the press—I wiped the plate as normal for an etching (with water based ink), and on top of that Barbara rolled an oil based ink on with a brayer. Since oil and water don't mix, she does not pick up the water based ink on the brayer and she can edition without having to clean up the brayer in between each print (tricky)!



Another sketch from my sketch book, only this plate got wet in the upper right corner before we exposed it. We went on to expose, wash, harden and print anyhow, just so I can see what happens. So that's what happens. A big blotch. The gray squarish areas are from my original—this was from my sketch book so those are the pages/corners you see. (The sketch is based on a Persian miniature.)



One last etching. Again, a b&w sketch from my sketch book. Made the same way as the sprouted potato above. Horizontal line from my scanner...have I mentioned...



Next up, the relief plates, tomorrow.

Cosmic Laundry

Cosmic Laundry, 2010, gouache on paper on board

What can be more familiar than having your laundry commingle? I can eat with a stranger at a communal table, I can sit next to a stranger on public transportation, but having my dirty clothes washed with another's dirty clothes implies some kind of a familiarity, intimacy, and friendship.

This is the 6th piece of my collaboration with Artist X. And although she has given me permission to use her name, I rather like the sound of Artist X. You can go to my website though, and see her name, right there in black & white.

I'm responding to her piece in which she had painted two faces. Two faces that can be interpreted either as merging into one, or that one is obscuring the other. The first thought that came to my mind was the Rumi poem—

I, you, she, we.
In the garden of mystic lovers
these are not true distinctions.

There are various translations of this poem, mostly in the first line—some versions go on quite extensively listing all pronouns.

I wanted to follow the composition of Artist X's piece, and here's how it started. You can see the two faces. This is a fairly faithful copy of her composition in terms of locations of features.



From there, I went on to a garden-like space in the clouds. But this failed to get across what I had in mind, which was something that implied the intimacy of “these are not true distinctions”, which then brought us to cosmic laundry.



Although there are details in the finished painting that aren't showing up in the image (there are lots of 'stitching' and 'patches' in the laundry on the line), I actually think this is kind of an ugly painting. But I'm fine with that.

What is rather scary though, is how similar this painting is to Trip, which is documented here. The same curvy line down the middle; the two panels of fabric attached at a single point; the way the space is divided up into clouds and landscape, although the two are reversed; the similar plant shape, although the plant shape in Trip was definitely meant as 'wheat'—both a symbol of the wheat-growing west and a symbol of prosperity and abundance—and the plant shape here was more dictated by following the shapes of lips.

The scary part was that I thought I was trying something different, but turns out, not.

Internet friend search intrigue?

Completely unrelated to art—

As always, at Christmas time, my mom gets to reminiscing and asks me about my friends from high school and college. And as always, this gets me started looking for people between Christmas and New Year.

I have a couple of friends (sisters) who have been very difficult to find, but this year, I seemed to have found the tracks of the younger sister on veromi.com. We'll call her 'Lily Doe.' And according to veromi.com, she's now married to 'Joseph D. Smith.' (Not their real names, of course.)

Then I proceeded to find 'Lily Smith' on linkedin.com—the right college, a very reasonable location and probable career...terrific! I contacted her via linkedin. Then I never heard back.

So I figured, well, wrong person despite the good match, or she wasn't interested in renewing my acquaintance. That was that.

Today, I went to update the profile photo for my facebook fan page (yes, there is one...), and boom, I have a new fan, and it's one 'Joseph D. Smith,' middle initials and all!

Curious.

I have written 'Joseph D. Smith,' hoping to maybe fill in some of the blanks. We'll see what I hear back.