Watching Steve Paint.

Watching Steve paint this week is making me hungry for the metallic taste of biting my nails with cad red under them (Don't do this it's very bad for you). I think I'm going to begin painting again. It takes up less room than printmaking anyway for now and I can't seem to get my shit together enough to make any prints. I did just buy a bunch of paper though to have on hand when I spontaneously decide to go for it.

Here's some blogs I've found and websites I've looked at recently.
I'm going to start back with the "Zorn" palette because in Cameron Bennett's class that's the one I enjoyed using the most- I used the others but I didn't really have fun using them like I did with the Zorn palette so I'm gonna bust out the ochre and move on with my life. It's about time I stopped quipping Cameron-isms at Steve and actually used them for a change.

Firstly I started looking up what the Zorn palette was becauseI had a brain fart and I was going "what's the palette we used with the four colors? It had like...red black white and another color. sepia? no. umber? no." So I googled "limited palette portrait 1860's" (why the 1860's? because my brain is amazing) and up pops Zorn, famous for his limited palette, born ~1860. VOILA - proof that it's all up there if only you can access it.

SO then I remember that Cara painted in this really austere beautiful aqua and yellow and cream palette that I FELL IN LOVE WITH. Cara- seriously. senior year work= lovely. Thanks  for giving me some of your naples yellow light off your palette- that dreamy hardboiled egg yoke color. Sadly, no one here seems to sell it. She started if I remember correctly by looking at Kanevsky who, as it turns out, has a really large and complicated palette with similar airy lovely results. I love the colors.
Also at the link, George Nick who is a great painter.

They are sort of like the pastel Thiebaud cakes I also am in love with.    I feel like everyone at art school has a brief torrid affair with Wayne Thiebaud and Jenny Saville etc. The love never goes away but you keep moving up and finding other artists to drool over.

I also found Lorraine Shirkus, who is really good with what looks like a palette knife- nice loose marks, and a great color scheme. These plums are really beautiful.

The links on her blog lead me to this great painter, Qiang-Huang who does an AMAZING painting a day and mas a really lovely workup quickly. He has a really great time lapse Demo I watched and loved because it confirmed everything I ever learned about painting- start with a big brush, block in your values, find your strong highlights and your strong darks, work vague to specific. the paintings are beautiful- seeing how he makes them is encouraging. Also looking at the ones that are sold and the ones that aren't sold, it also confirms my suspicion, you put a little orange in a painting and it'll sell. Bitches love orange. I've always thought it made a lot of sense to see what colors were trending that year in interior design and work with those. You would have an ever changing palette dictated by the people who are decorating their spaces and buying things to go in them. If you were that kind of person.

So you want to be a printmaker...

It has come to my attention that in order to be considered a printmaker you actually have to make distribute/sell or present prints. and the time to do that for me is...hope fully upcoming. why am I not entering the hundreds of prints I have in shows or contests? Because I'm a busy lady but I get the point. There's just something about the newness of work that's lovely. The old work I keep forgetting, isn't old to everybody, just me.

So perhaps I will enter some prints in some shows.

In the meantime- I'm making an inking table. Its turquoise. Also cutting new stencils based on my favorite print in the post beliw. Can't get over it. Gotta keep using the imagery.

Plants are back- Moving on with new ideas for gelatin

So lately I've been really wanting to get back into my printmaking. Missing what your life was about for years all of a sudden SUCKS and I want it back. I plan on starting up my prints again- working more with my hens and chicks patterns like in my large square prints. I want to do several smaller versions in all different colors. I really love the large ones but I think fall colors would be neat and a greyscale one would be bitchin.

Maybe still using gelatin I will make stencils to take up the ink instead of carving out of wood and continue my work and it's graphic sort of expression that way to still make pieces of a quality I enjoy. I have to find a way to stop the gelatin prints from being all random and ....unpredictable? It's hard, I know that is what they're supposed to be like and that's why people love them for layering pigments and getting unpredictable results.

SO things I want to try to keep my style but use this less hazardous less messy method of printmaking:

Stencils. Out of whatever I can get. Probably not mylar- although I love mylar stencils because they are washable and barely stainable, they don't pick up the ink like paper stencils, and they don't quite NOt pick up the innk either. They cause the ink to bubble into droplets. However I would want a stencil I could use over and over again. SO I'm not sure where to go from here. Maybe tar paper? Stencils Are needing some research and questions to artists who use them.

My second thought is Stamping. I have many blocks with only the lines left after making and hollowing out the print inside. Could I roll on a layer of ink to the gelatin or to the block, and then use my blocks to Stamp out the outlines of some duplicate monotypes? Like one would use tjaps with wax for Batik?

ANd my third idea. I could treat the gelatin like a block of wood or linoleum and reductively carve it out as I add print layers. I could recycle the gelatin in a blender to keep making and reusing the blocks. It's so soft, theres no way it would take the 12-40 hours carving wood can take.