Can't forget about the elephants

These paintings were done by elephants in Thailand, evidently if you go there you can buy one for $15.

Humans are so egotistical

We so often forget that we are not the only ones who paint. Chimpanzees enjoy painting. In fact due to the construction of their arms and their massive strength they are capable of producing brush strokes that a human just physically cannot duplicate. These two paintings are by Congo, who produced over 400 drawings and paintings in his lifetime.

Emil Nolde

Prior to New York and abstract expressionism, the hot bed of the art world was in Germany in its own expressionism. There were a few different groups going on at this point in time, die Brucke, die blaue Reiter, and Bauhaus ( actually more based on Dadaism). The members of die Brucke through experimentation made several breakthroughs in printmaking technique. Emil Nolde was one of those members. He made lithographs, woodcuts, and is perhaps better known for his paintings, but by far his intaglio prints are what stand out. Out of the entire die Brucke group he was the only one with prior experience in intaglio, and he kept his secrets to himself. It is known though that starting in around 1907 he switched from using copper plates to iron. Reputedly because he liked the shine of the iron plates.

This is based off of a story I had heard the last time I went home. Evidently in times of war our military has the policy of paying people who bring in the fingers' of the enemy. Usually it is not our soldiers who get it though, after they do the work mercenary types who are sitting by watching everything come through and collect the fingers.

Bookbinding

Alright, well decided to try bookbinding. This is my first book I made it under the guidance of Aldren A. Watson's Bookbinding: A Manual of Instruction. He's a stickler, but his writing style and instructions are very concise. The paper used is all paper that I made last semester. The gray paper is made out of lint processed in a blender, the other is cotton rag with some silk thrown in. I kind of like the lint paper its got all kinds crap in it from hair to bits of yarn.

Revolutionary Buttons

Well here is a rather obscure fact about color intaglio. Shortly after LeBlon's invention of multiplate, after Newton's discoveries about optics, miniature multiplate images became quite popular in France in the form of men's buttons. The prints was bezel set under glass, and frequently they depicted scenes from the French revolution or more lascivious activities. The top button is an example of one of these print buttons.

Print Zero Print

Just playing around with color layering on this one, this is done with one plate (errr... two, top and bottom). I would like to do some more runs on it and am still considering trying it, but my paper was getting ripped apart. I ended up cutting the printed areas out and chine coleing them onto a different support. I learned some stuff on this one. Hopefully the Print Zero people won't mind if it's a little rough around the edges.

Well I finally actually had a serious conversation about my art here with one of the painting profs. He had some interesting things to say, most notably that most students he sees view art as being illustrative, but when he looks at my stuff he sees the opposite he sees illustration being viewed as art. He says those other people need to look at classical art history and looking more externally, but he thought in my case I need to be looking at modern art and much more internally. These were some of the artists he recomended that I look at. The top two are by Klee, the other two are by Guston.

Patron Saint of Printing Presses

St. Brigid of Ireland is the patron saint of printing presses, I am not quite sure why, it really didn't seem to fit into her story at all.

Snowing Again

We had another snow day today, it was snowing when I got up this morning at 8:00 am, and it is still going strong, very low visibility.

City Lights

Well last week was the day of the semester trip to New York, and my first time in NYC. I went off with my friend Amy (MFA ceramics) we ran through the Met, through the Natural History Museum. From there we took the subway to Greenwhich Village to meet up with her Aunt Ginie, we had a very good dinner at a small little restaurant. Then we took a taxi through rush hour traffic to only just barely make the bus back.

While at the Met we saw the Horse Fair by Rosa Bonheur, which was kind of exciting as we had just discussed that painting in history. Evidently Bonheur dressed like a man, and in fact had to have a special liscence to be a transvestite issued to her. Currently there is a theory out that her paintings were more than just horses, and that the unbearded youth in her paintings were in fact her (ie the figure that is almost dead center and is looking out at you)

Let it Snow, let it snow, let it snow

Piranesi

I have this sinking suspision that no one will show up

10 of Hearts

Ten of Hearts this one reminds me of circuses, but at any rate I tried taping some lace into my paper stencil to see if it would work to give a textural soft ground effect. I got some pretty good results with it.

Thoughts

Today Dr. Partridge had me going through the questionaires/surveys from a guest lecture that she had sponsored. At first I was rather amused to find a survey from one of the Marywood proffs that read "It actually felt like a university for a day." I shared this with another MFA and we got a laugh out of it, but as the day progressed I started to become more and more bothered by this. After all the faculty are kind of like the DNA of the university, they are the ones who determine the character of the university and the students success is a direct mirror of the proff's abilities. This proffs statement raised the question that since this individual is such an integral part of the university then why aren't they doing something about it? Then I started to think about some of my own passive aggressive behavior, negativity, and about my work. Some of these thoughts centered back to the fact that the MFA's outside of their semester reviews do not really have group critiques. One of the adjunct profs had assigned us the task of trying to organize our own critique where we set the parameters last semester. The idea was met with tremendous negativity by a few people, it ended up lasting for six hours and was really a bit of a dud as far as critiques go, but rather than looking at what went wrong and learning and trying it again, the idea was dropped and ridiculed. Well I started thinking about something the Hoff had told me after looking at my work, that I'm a risk taker. I started thinking about that and I'm thinking about trying to set up another open critique thing.

Well some anonymous commentator suggested that I look at the work of Demetri Bolaski. This is not him, in the course of the search I came accross this guy, Sergey Tyukanov, and I quite liked his stuff.

Resolution and Compromise

My weekly review with the Hoff went quite well today, he was happy with the king of clubs. And I was also able to present him with a compromise on a difference of opinion between us. Next semester I had wanted to start work on a very large multiplate dealing with some of the metaphors involved with Genesis. He had some serious issues about the size and the amount of time such a project would take. At anyrate I stumbled across the work of Louis-Marin Bonnet in Colorful Impressions: The Printmaking Revolution in 18th Century France. Marin was so proud of the color that he had achieved that he also made prints of each stage in printing, and gave a little bit of a written account for what he did for each print. As can be seen he did this print using only a la poupe techniques, and only one plate. The Hoff finds this method more acceptable, and he seemed pretty interested when I showed him the book.

Cards

These are two of my silk screened cards. Peter wasn't overly crazy about the three of hearts, for technical printing reasons. My registration is a bit off in the king of clubs I don't know how acceptable that is to the rest of the world. The hearts is a four color registration print, and the king is a six color registration. Both were done using a combination of paper and photo stencils

Joel! You didn't show us the right way to handle a dust box!

"With the shelf out and the flap closed, the resin is shaken into suspension by swinging the whole box over one's head from side to side and then bringing the box down to the floor with a slight thump to prevent any granules from clinging to the sides. This action looks to the bystander like a herculean task...Besides, it is good exercise-which even artists need."
B.F. Morrow
The Art of Aquatint