Castle

Dreams of finding new unexplored places in familiar houses are like the locked chamber in Bluebeard's castle: the empty unoccupied places never offer actual habitability.

Unwitting Collaborator

It gives me great pains to throw something away that is still useful. This proclivity to hold onto things is constantly on the verge of A&E Hoarder territory that I rationalize away as my inclinations are towards usefulness, not sentimentality. This is willful self deception.

In the printshop, people discard old prints, old paper, and test proofs. I collect these, and layer over them each time I print something else. I print multiple times on a found piece until it's become something new, unrecognizeable to the original artist, and perhaps better, perhaps not. I have a drawer full of these in progress, but here are a few that I deemed "finished." Mediums include lithography, screenprint, monoserigraphy, letterpress, etching, relief, monotype, and hand drawing.

B-sides

screenprints in moleskine sketchbook:



The term "b-sides" in referrence to art process ephemera is shameless cribbed from Cein Watson.

Commercial applications thereof

Today I made a two color screenprint as the packaging for some barrattes. Medusa, a mermaid, and a man with just one big curl were the three motifs for the cards. I used discarded prints collected throughout the semester from other students and printed on the backside, then mounted them onto another sheet of paper before cutting them down--making a cardstock that, while laborious, has the added benefit of being for free.







I made a grid of six of the cards, two of each design, and burned it on the screen. But I was distracted while spraying out the screen after the initial exposure and ruined the second mermaid. I kind of liked the look, though, so I used screenfill to block out the text and outlined the mermaid's body, making this:


I'm going to use those as postcards and finally send some snail mail to my many long distance friends.