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