In the new year

Here I am banging the drum again - there are lots of people going around today wishing each other Happy New Year but they are so late  .....
New Years Day was actually Dec 22, the day after the shortest day of the year -ie New Year's Eve  - really, I fail to see why people are so puzzled about this  -- after all surely when the days begin to lengthen once more, this is a new year??

Anyway that's my view and I'm stickin' to  it!!

Here's something I made over the holidays  - you have already seen the first version:

As you can see from the block (above) I did a good deal more preparation and a good deal more cutting  and used only oil-based ink this time - even still it takes quite a while to build a satisfactory level of ink in the print -haven't had time yet to do any more - was making a couple of notebooks ( getting orders for them now) and was spending a lot of time looking at this

Cover with dust jacket

 

 

 

Cover and inside front cover

Sample page

There are 561 photographers featured from 150 years of photography each with a single image and while it is hardly an in-depth study, the sign-posts are there  and I have already discovered two artists whose work I will pursue:

 

Thomas  Florschuetz (b.1957, Germany) -Tryptych#77 - 3 C-type prints 1993

,

 

Fay Godwin ( 1931 -2005, German), Untitled - C-type print -1990 

 It will be interesting to find more work from these artists to see if there are other images like this.

I will come back over the next day or two with a few pictures I pcked up over the holidays

The path of rust

There have been tech problems.

I won't bore you but suffice it to say that I would wish technology to become a heap of rust at his moment,  ie its not doing what I want it to do.

There are some pictures I would love to put up but I can't get hold of them at present, but just in case people might think  I was on holidays of something like that here's a print I made yesterday:

 

Ok -what is it ? Here are some more clues:

 

 

 

Alright, explanations - about two years ago we had some trees cut down in the garden and one of them was a silver birch which grew into four separate trunks. The lowest section produced a number of pieces with this clover-shaped section and last year I brought this into the workshop in school and they kindly reduced it to cm thick slices.I have been thinking about it for some time so the other day I took the most even slice and cut an arabesque into it; then inked it with oil-based (water-based just kept soaking into it) and finally pulled the prints - proofs first:

 

 

.....by hand  using a baren and 5 cm roller to press.

 

I think I will take one of the other pieces and sand it down as flat as possible and try the same thing again.

 

Happy holidays!!!

 

 

 

 

The Flower-strewn path of idleness

Been very busy coming to end of semester but must show you one of the reasons I came to art school:

Its not in every library that you get homemade organic soup, bongos and a belly dancer

 

 

-and the soup was gorgeous!!

 

Thanks Joe

jogging on the path

The pace is hotting up coming up towards Christmas break with impending PowerPoint presentation, assessment and assignment for gothic together with studio work to be completed.
So I am going to show here a number of artists whose work has begun to impinge on my thinking if not necessarily to show in what I do.
I have just checked back along the path and I find that the last time I was talking about artists  it was  Bacon, Velickovic et al; while certainly their images would be basic to a lot of my thinking, two more photographers appeared and made a serious impact.

The first was an irish artist Amelia Stein (b.1958) whose attraction to old things generally, appealed:

I had already known of Amelia Stein, but not of John Coplans (1920- 2003) to whom I was recently introduced:

 

His unflinching self-portraits of the ageing body (but without ever picturing his face) chimed very strongly with what I wanted to do and has definitely influenced my work - photos, drawing and printmaking.

The advent of the Gothic seminar (already spoken of) drew in other influences which earlier I might have rejected but to which my mind has become much more open:

 

 

Hermann Nitsch (b. Vienna, 1938) was part of a Viennese group known as Aktion whose work involved large theatrical performances using entrails, carcasses and apparent blood with active participation:

 

 

This led to painting along similar lines:

 

 

This work has also fed into my thinking as has been apparent in the first corridor drawing (more to come), and the Box.

 

Recently I came across a review of a new book on the art of film director David Lynch (b.1946, Missoula, Montana) which proved to be the catalogue of a major retrospective of his art from !967 to now at PAFA (Pennsylvania); I knew that he was a lithographer but had not realised that he is still a very active artist:

 

 

Rock with Seven Eyes  -1996 - oil, mixed media on canvas

 

Gardenback -1968 -70

 

Figure witnessing the Orchestration of Time -1990 (detail)

 

Again there is much in his gothic approach the art and film that I would always have been attracted to but would not then have described it as such.

 

A number of other artists have come into my orbit recently one of whom might at first appear surprising:

 

 

 

Monika Gryzmala (b. 1970, Poland) draws in 3D with tape and paper clay  and her works make me think of the nerves sinews and blood vessels that hold the human body together and without which the same body would disintegrate and  dissolve.

 

In this survey there is one more artist whose work has been introduced to me unfailingly by my tutor Sercan Sahin and which has affected me deeply. But before showing this artist's work I would like to return briefly to the making of the Box:

 

 

These four images come from the making of the box and perhaps the influence of Nitsch might be apparent  but when I first looked at the work of Liliana Porter (b. 1941, Buenos Aires) I was quite stunned:

 

 

Red Shoes - acrylic & collage on paper 2010 (detail)

 

 

To Paint Red - acrylic on Paper 2010

 

There are many more like these and indeed they all have a little figure in them but that said I felt that if someone of this artists prominence could make work like this how much better I could feel about what I have been doing.

 But this is only a part of Porter's work:

 

 

Profile of a Bear that Left - collage -1999

 

Diptych - lithograph - 2012

 

Forty Years IV (hand, over triangle, one hand, left 1973) (2013)

chromogenic print
19x23"
edition of 5 plus 2 APS

 

I feel that I will be referring back to this artist again as much of  the content echoes my own concerns.

 

So saying I feel it is time to show some more of my own studio work and to indicate how I have been exploring the images and concepts developed overt the last few months.

 

Here are two stages in the production of a CMYK print the earlier components of which I showed in a recent post:

 

..and here is the final four -colour print which is of course a negative image:

 

 

0

Here are some variants where I printed the black(K) layer over other images:

 

 

 

In parallel with this I have been continuing two etch/aquatint projects:

 

(i) large scale- six plates in paired colours:

 

 

 

(ii) The Ear - Dissolution - these are the initial prints for a five image sequence which I hope to have finished by assessment:

 

 

 

The plates

 

 

 

The etches

 

The aquatint

 

 

And finally to come absolutely bang up to date the first (and only!) images from the initial roll of 120 in the Holga:

 

 

efforts at double-exposure which are encouraging - already halfway through second roll

 

 

As photographic ps I should celebrate the return of an old friend - my very first SLR - Minolta srt 100x - already loaded with 400ASA b/w and shooting!!

 

 

 

....complete with original strap -  honestly, it was very cool at the time...