Filed under: printmaking | Tags: art, artist, Ink, monoprint, Monotyping, print, Printing, printmaker, printmaking, Silicon carbide, visual art
It’s the end of winter semester! Boo hoo! Last night, I had my final class with a wonderful group of women. We all have different backgrounds (artist, art journalist, photographer, etc.), but we were all there as beginner printmakers. I will miss them…the running commentary…the oohs when a print was first peeled off of the press…the jokes about our shoddy skills. For you local people, Somerville Open Studios is coming up in a month, and one of my classmates will have her work on display then…I hope that I can go and see it! I wonder if she’ll include any of the prints that she made…I’ll give more details when it gets closer to the date.
Here are the prints from last night. I was working again with viscosity monotypes, as shown in the first two prints. But I also incorporated a carborundum plate into the mix, as shown in the third and fourth prints:
That was just one pass through the press…I liked how it turned out.
This one went through the press a few times:
The carborundum element in this next print are the lavender brushmarks. So, I printed that lavender carborundum plate on top of a monotype (thus creating a monoprint):
In this print, the dark purple areas are from a separate carborundum plate:
You’ll see this plate again in some of the following plates.
My teacher last night looked over my bevvy of prints, and tried to give me a little critique on a direction that I might pursue (as I am fairly all over the map, as you may have noticed). She noted that I typically either use a very linear/drawn/crisp language or a swirly/organic language. Why not combine them? Well…okay! I think that this may sound obvious, but if you see others’ work in the class, then you’d see how different all of our work was. I also felt that this was kind of a true assessment of me as a person…my left brain and right brain are fairly evenly balanced. I’m not saying that either half is brilliant, not so…but I think the balanced relationship between the two has been true for me. As an example, I got nearly identical scores in the SATs/GREs between my math and verbal (umm…not a perfect 800 on both, sheesh). So…instead of trying to be either one or the other, I’ll try to combine them. This is kind of hard, as I don’t really shift well between the two. But, I guess that’s part of the challenge.
Here are my prints from today. Again, I started with a monoprint:
Then, I started to layer in the carborundum plate:
and again:
And then, my printmaking teacher wanted to see the carborundum plate by itself. I think that she didn’t like all of my colorful craziness. So, here is the plate the first time…I didn’t do a good job wiping it:
Here is the second time that I inked and printed it:
See the difference? Then, here is the ghost of this print:
She really liked these. Hmmm! Shows how little I know! I thought that perhaps they were too simple. Next time, she wants me to layer in a very thin transparent layer…nothing too crazy, as I was doing above. She said that the previous ones were “just experiments”, and “now you need to focus.” Hmmm! I take it that she is not keen on the crazier ones. Well, good to know…less is more, perhaps! Any comments/suggestions???? Random thoughts? Artists that I should take a look at? 🙂
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slightly wonky 
Personally, I find simple to be hard. Knowing where to stop to hit that perfect balance.
Comment by lisa foster March 25, 2011 @ 7:35 pmYes, I think that you’re right! One would think that minimal takes no effort, but that’s not true, right? For an expert, minimal can come easily…for a novice, there is tons of trial and error. Sometimes I love a plate, but think that it needs more…then I do another layer, and then wish that I hadn’t! So much to learn…Thanks so much for your thoughts!
Comment by slightlywonky March 25, 2011 @ 9:08 pm