Prep work

I don't have any new prints to show, but I have been working hard on some new pieces, welding infrastructure and carving, getting new screens stretched and buying fabric.

Last Demo of the Semester: Litho

Brian and I finished up our print survey class with the hardest of the media: lithography. It was barbaric: students had to grain the stones themselves with the levigators and carburundum grit, a lengthy process which left a few so beat that they didn't have much left to put into the actual drawings on the stone. Brian was lead on the litho assignment, so I took over the secondary processes. During the printing process, I showed a quick and dirty chine colle using UHU gluestick (it's acid free). Because we required two of their final prints to be experimental in some way, I also showed them how to do an easy butcher paper stencil screenprint over the lithographs.

The mustiness evokes memories, unbidden and inevitable. But memory evoked can be both pleasurable and painful, and she recalls the closet stuffed with winter blankets, the cramped attic, the small spaces of a house. The memories evoked are of space that is small and cramped, a space that perhaps one could have fit into when young during a game of hide and seek but is now much too small to accommodate the adult frame of the viewer. It is perhaps of a linen closet in a relative’s house, or the tiny fragmented space under the stairs.




"No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through my whole body, and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me," he wrote. "An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses...with no suggestion of its origin...
"Suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was of a little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings...my Aunt Leonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea....Immediately the old gray house on the street, where her room was, rose up like a stage set...and the entire town, with its people and houses, gardens, church, and surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being from my cup of tea."

Co-lab

A whole bunch of art jams from being bored in class.








THese are by Justin Schaefer, myself, and Chris Whose-Last-Name-I-Can't-Recall. We are very productive students.

Sketchbook

I've been working on some very large prints for my upcoming thesis exhibition (opening May 22nd!) and so haven't been making so many impressive weekly prints. Nonetheless, I'm still working!

As part of the lithograph assignment we gave our class we asked for two experimental multi-media prints. I gave the class a quick butcher paper stencil screenprint demo (which took about 10 minutes total) to give them an option that was fast and easy for one of their multi media prints. I pulled the screenprints onto a lithograph first, and then while cleaning up pulled the last of the ink onto my sketchbook.

Unwitting Collaborator, part IV

This one i know the original author. The dot pattern is from when I helped Brian Borlaug install his "Reagan is Turning 100!" show. Brian isn't a screenprinter, but wanted to screenprint directly onto the walls of the gallery, which took a bit of troubleshooting but eventually we figured it out. This print is a combination of relief and screenprinting.



This was part of the Quotidian encounters show curated by Christian Salcedo Ward.

Screen Demo

The assignment for my 370 class was to do a three color screenprint with overlapping, transparent colors, making the stencil on the screen with screen daring fluid and screen fill. This demo print is not to the same standard that I've been trying to stick to for demo prints. I've been trying to make all of the demo prints at least a little exciting, but this one I did a little last minute.

At Minona

Gary Spisak started a donation based coffee shop in his studio at Cal State Long Beach. It's called Minona, after the street he grew up on and an African goddess of fertility. Minona is open whenever Garry feels like having it open, and the offerings besides coffee vary--once he had vegan Guiness ice cream.

Gary invited me to do a piece on the windows of Minona, so I screenprinted these figures. Screenprinting on glass works out ok, and it's easy to clean the ink off and start over if you mess up, but the ink takes quite a long time to dry, and it easily squishes out while screening because none of it is absorbed like it is with paper.

These photos reveal just how little of a photographer I am:

In the corner

This print (or this diptych of sorts) exists both as a 2D regular print, and as a 3D relief print on fabric.



Perception of scale operates in such a funny way. Seen two dimensionally, the figures are imposing, frightening in their strangeness and read as large, even looming. But three dimensionally, when they are in our space with us, they are pathetic, the viewer suddenly wishes to protect them.

Claire

This is another print in my ongoing portrait project series. I need to come up with a better name for the series than that, too.

As I've improved with screenprinting, I've increased the size of the image. One of the issues with doing a larger stencil is the ability to have even adequate pressure over the entirety of the image, which is no small feat. There's a reason why doing a large even layer of a single color is the hardest thing to do in screenprinting. Doing small runs, printing only one image in an evening (and printing in the evening when it's cooler and less likely to dry rapidly), and overcompensating with the ink are remedies for the difficulty of pulling a large even layer of ink.



This is from a photograph of my little sister Claire Taylor, who is also a printmaker and artist, taken at my second oldest brother Blue's wedding. Claire says is looks both like her and our brother Orson. It's a big family we have.



Here's one of the ghosts:

Steve

This print is from another demo of monoserigraphy that I did for Kimiko Miyoshi's monoprint class. I tried to improve it this time, because I know some of the students in the class have seen me do this before: I revised the handout, made it more concise, added a part about registration at point of exposure, and added a few bits that I've figured out over the last few months.





I got mad sweaty while I was doing this, too. It's probably because of all the coffee I had at Minona while preparing the screens throughout the day, in and out of my studio.

Monopoly

When we played the boardgame Monopoly, in which you pretend to be a tiny venture capitalist, there’s an extension of the rules called free parking that we never ceased to enforce. All of the fines paid in multicolored game money were placed in the center of the board, to be awarded to the lucky player whose tiny metal car, hat, or shoe lands on the “free parking” square.



The official rules of Monopoly never mention free parking being used in this way, and the game designers only intended that square to be a break, not a sudden windfall, going so far as to insist in interviews that to play this way, to structure the game to have such a big random award, is not to play Monopoly at all.



Everyone wants there to be a reward just for participating, something so good that can happen because you chose to grind away in the system.





The reward at free parking perpetuates the game endlessly, as no one will ever be bankrupted, so like a sitcom past its prime, the players have no risk and move around the board endlessly.

facebook public page for camilla taylor

First Copper Etching

My co-teacher, Brian Borlaug, works almost primarily in copper etching, so for our print survey class he wanted to cover copper for the intaglio section. I've only ever worked with zinc, and the etching class at CSULB also is done with zinc, so I took the opportunity to learn with copper along with the students. We had each of the students do a tiny 3" by 3" copper plate first to get the hang of the medium, in addition to their big plate for the assignment.

Unravelling

This new print is the largest paper print I've ever made. It's 5' by 4' and I had to go buy fleece to jimmy rig as felts because none of the shop felts were anywhere big enough to cover the plate while printing. Fleece doens't work quite as well, but it will do in a pinch. This print is still untitled.



And for extra behind the scenes stuff, here's a picture of the registration guide and of my class critting the piece.

Unwitting Collaborator, part III

Screenprint over found etching

Redemption

Last week while the students were busily working on their monotypes, Brian and I sporadically painted on a large plexi inbetween helping the students. At the end of the day, we tried to print it but by then the ink had just totally dried out and was so sticky it tore the paper instead of transferring. Brian said we should just throw it away, but I had just that very morning told the students to hang on to their crappy old prints so they could rework them later on. I couldn't just throw it away now!

The paper was so torn that I needed to layer washi all over it to maintain any structural integrity. The paper was originally BFK cream, and I chine colle-ed two large sheets of white kitti katta over top when I printed the image, done in black and Payne's grey. The image is from a drawing of people falling through space done while flying back from NYC to LA. I must be a wonderful seat mate for long flights.

From the side

A coyote runs across the street, from the school to the neighborhood--disappearing.

First day of class

Today I had my first day of being an actual real live teacher. Brian Borlaug and I are teaching the print survey class at CSULB this semester, and the first assignment we gave was monotype. I took lead on this one because I'm a bit more adept at it.

This first print for the demo is reductive mark making. This one is done with just graphite ink, using Q-tips as brushes. We have some of these amazing Japanese q-tips in the shop, and I try to use them sparingly so they don't run out too fast.

Small People

In the past couple of months I've been really getting into making jewelry and wearables. It's sort of a waste of time right now, as I should be devoting more of my efforts into my thesis project and not into things that don't relate to my thesis. Well, at least I'll be brilliantly accessorized when that final show rolls around in the spring.

I made these in an "edition" of 100. The quotation marks are because the doll brooches aren't prints, though the faces are made partially with a mold, so editioning them is a little different. Each doll comes packaged in a frame tin with a unique mixed technique print in the back.