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:

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.

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.

Girl Twice

I will share a secret with you. The persons in the plate below are actually the same person twice.



Another collagraph, this one with fabric making up the background and my ubiquitous carborundum grit painting for the faces. I was uncertain about the fabric, it being so much taller than the rest of the plate. The embossing could have been overpowing, as could have the texture been. In the first inkings of the plate, the fabric was just way too obvious, but I think it worked out pretty well in the end.

The press at school is giant. I do big prints just because I can now, eating through paper with great rapidity, and seeing my savings dwindle in $2.50 increments with each print.



The image itself is 14 by 20, which only seems big because I'm a printmaker. Painters scoff at the miniaturized images in printmaking, the dictates of paper size and press ever present in the artist's considerations when working on a print.



I included this print in a portfolio for a grant application from the Los Angeles Printmaking Society, along with five other prints, three of which were three dimensional. So far, I only know that one of the graduate students in the program recieved the grant, but which one is still unknown. I hate hate hate waiting to find things out.