Laying around on the floor

This weekend I thawed my prints out for the second time and printed one more color. I have read online that wet paper tends to mold and by freezing the paper one can avoid this issue and keep the paper's water content consistent. After my printing yesterday I was noticing the paper was feeling really soggy and the corners (important for registration) were beginning to breakdown.
Therefore I took all of the prints out today and they are now lying on my apartment floor. It is a good chance to see how well the edition is coming and how similar the prints are. They are doing all right, but I don't think there are any exactly the same. I hope my buddies running the print exchange will be understanding if my edition is not that hot.

Look at them all lined up in pretty rows. awww...

A different perspective.

Finally some Photos

So Printing is progressing along. It seems to be going rather smoothly surprisingly. Since I need an edition of 24 I am printing 50 pages with the hopes of some being ok. Back in my Intaglio days I was able to pull as few as 30 to get the same number of new prints, but that was after years of practice and really finding my groove for what works and doesn't work.
I remember being part of a visiting artist demonstration by the incredible intaglio artist Rocky Toner. She would take a coper plate to almost black with aquatint and then burnish back the whites resulting in a rich, vibrant, labor-intensive print. While she was printing she said that there would be fifty prints pulled. I asked how many of them she expected to be in the addition. "50, of course" she replied. The very next print had a big smudge in a white area; she kiddingly blamed me.
It seems the more experience we gain with printing the fewer "mess-up" prints we allow ourselves. Is this because we have become masters of our medium and flawless? Possibly, but it is very unlikely. It seems more reasonable to think that in experience comes overconfidence and recklessness. But, what the heck, if the print is good, get it done the way you need to.
Following are some images of my adventurous print thus far:

My first woodblock. After all of the problems with inks I mentioned in the previous post I ended up abandoning this design.

Here is the toxic proof. Pretty uneven and grainy. Plus it probably gave me cancer.

After three colors. That is right, three colors. I am printing way to lightly and the differences are very hard to see.

And here is where I am now. four colors down and maybe another ten to go. Can you see what the image is yet??!

Toxins and problems

So it has been a very interesting week. After returning from an amazing trip to YongShuo I was very excited to start the print. I finished carving the first block and even rolled out some yellow ink to pull a proof. I was digging the ink....a little too much. My hands...were so...liquid...
The ink had enough liquor thinner in it to clean a small country. I was quite high. Waking several hours later I discovered a so-so proof, a spiting headache and yellow ink all over myself. It was at this point I resolved to move to less toxic water soluble alternatives.
My first thought was to find some Speedball block printing ink and do it up. I was hesitant however because in my experience the ink is very very opaque, thick and flat. something I didn't want for this print. Choice was further cemented when I remembered I was in China, where non-common art supplies are...well....not common.
OK, so what is the next step? Internet research of course! I found some great pages like http://woodblockdreams.blogspot.com/ and http://www.barenforum.org/ . These pages seemed to be very focused on traditional Japanese Woodblock printing.
I am a tiny bit familiar with the Japanese school because I took a workshop once where one of the teachers was master printmaker Keiji Shinohara, but i wasn't in his class. We did go bowling together one night tho. There was something about keeping the paper damp though the entire process that made me cringe. I started experimenting on the caved block with dry paper.
So, this is my week, not counting all the craziness of work and life and getting a cold, etc.
"Too much rice past maybe? no, looks like crap. too much watercolor? still crap. wood needs water on it before it starts? hey, where did my carved lines go? ok, ok, fine. wet the paper first? better but still bad. More rice paste: better. More rice paste: better, but still funny. Maybe it is the paper? oh that helped. damn...now I am doing traditional woodblock printing."
And that is about where I am at. I now have paper I think is ok, i have finally learned how to make proper rice past, and I am getting better at learning the proper mixture of rice past, color and water. I could not find real supplies out here in China (you think I would since I am so close to Japan, but no) so i am using watercolor paint, watercolor paper, a cheep burnisher and a shoe bush. The prints might not be editionable, but that is ok. It has been a hard week, but I loved it. It is the printmaker in me, I am all about process.

Print Exchange!!!!

My close friend Tom and I were always together in college. We lived near each other so we would carpool to class. we were both printmakers so we had many classes together and were always sharing the studio pulling early morning editions. we would go out for beers and first Friday art walks. he is a good friend.
After college he went off to graduate school in printmaking and I moved to China and became a teacher. We try to stay in touch although our mutual laziness does hamper communication.
Anyway, a few days ago Tom sent me an email inviting me to participate in a print exchange with 20 other artists. The Theme is “I had a conversation with the basement of my brain.”
For those that do not know, a print exchange is when a group of printmakers all create prints around a certain theme, and then exchange them so every participant will have one copy or each print. Since there are 20 people in this exchange I will receive a package with 20 different prints including my own. All the prints need to be 8" x 10". I am using my girlfriend's parents' Hong Kong address to ship and receive. I just don't trust the mail out here on the mainland.

Here we go!

So here I am.
I have been living in China (Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong) for about one year and my art making has dropped off. It feels sometimes like when you teach art all of your artistic energy gets leached by your students. In some ways that is a good thing, i am excited and happy to help my students out. However it can be quite frustrating when your need to produce work is not filled. Recently I have been working very hard to produce again. I have made a few drawings and wow! are they different from what I was doing in college. Kind of crazy.
back in America, in school, I was a printmaker focusing on intaglio. It took a lot of hard work and dedication but after several years I was making prints I was proud. Now I do not have access to any of the necessary tools for intaglio. Been trying to draw, but it feels foreign and clumsy. Still I am pushing ahead.
Now I am going to start exploring with woodblock prints. I miss the process involved in printmaking and the beautiful layers that can be achieved.
This blog will keep an accout of my explorations, successes and failures. rock on!

The first Umbrella Drawing. Watercolor under painting, glued rice paper on top and then pen and ink drawing on rice paper. made last spring. (that yellow square drives me nuts!)

First drawing of the year. Watercolor and pen.

Drawing Two in progress