slightly wonky

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? 🙂