"Red Chair"

"Red Chair"
Sintra engraving on paper, acrylic paint
8.5" x 8.5" (unconstructed)

My new little papercraft print, "Red Chair," is on view right now in Milwaukee as part of PRNT:MK, the 2013 SGCI printmaking conference.  I'm not attending, sadly, because attending as someone not attached to a university in some way is crazy expensive.  So, I've been attending about every other year.  The picture at left was taken by Colin Roe Ledbetter of the portfolio my piece is included in, Assorted Delights.



 

This piece is also in the upcoming show Cloud 9, at the Trunk Space in Phoenix, AZ with a reception on April 5th.

The piece has an inner chamber, and if you peer through the windows in his torso you can see it, too. Though it's difficult to photograph, I've attempted it to give you some idea.

For the portfolio this piece was made for I needed to construct about 20 individual figures, each one taking a little over an hour to make.  By the time I'd finished cutting and gluing the last one I sort of hated them.  It's been a couple weeks now, so I no longer hold such loathing for the needless complexity I engineered into his construction.

 At left, you can see "Red Chair" inconstructed.

And here's Mulcifer the cat, diligently overseeing me as I print.

Three headed cat

I wanted to give all my friends a present for New Year's Day.  Originally, I though a family portrait (me, my partner, our cat) would be perfect, but the partner didn't want to be in it, and I thought it would send the wrong message if it was just me and the cat.  So it became just the cat, Mulcifer, which I think was the best to begin with anyway.

Two color relief print (a sintracut) with screenprint for the calendar bit.  Printed with Gamblin's Portland black on Rives BFK.

My inking glass slab is salvaged glass from discarded scanners.  The glass is thick and holds up well, plus it's for free.

I'm thinking about listing a couple of the leftover calendar's on my etsy.  Anyone interested?

Edited to add: If you want one, you can find it here.

Catman print from linoleum scraps

I've been doing my best to get Josephine Press tidied up this summer. The Press has been around, and in the same location, for nearly as long as I've been alive, so you can imagine that there are little bits of all sorts of things hidden away, some of them useful and some of them useless and long since expired. Like ink, for instance. I just found a drawer full of little pots of lovely custom colors some printer mixed up for a client years ago, all of them dried into solid lumps. But I also found a cache of linoleum scraps. They were destined to be thrown out, but I decided to try to use them to make some wee prints with. I can carve a little image in a sitting, and then print it when I have some downtown or after a workshop. This fellow I printed with the ink left over from the monoprint workshop last weekend, and used paper left over from old jobs (offprints and trial proofs, we have boxes of it) and some pretty blue hemp washi left over from a previous edition.

These are intended for postcards that I'll send to my friends who may already be tired of receiving postcards, but let me know if you're interested in doing a trade (print for print or something like that) because I'm up for it.

Techniques represented: linocut, and on the found paper: bokashi roll, screenprint, lithograph, photo etching, monoprint, and xerox solvency transfer.

The Catman and Woodcut Workshop

I have this character that is a my go-to for when I need to draw something quickly for a demonstration (see my Viscosity prints, for instance). I just finished up a woodcut workshop, and I had spent hours drawing out a beautiful bird carcass to use as the demo for the class and then I realized, an hour before the students were due to arrive, that I wouldn't have time to draw and carve the whole image and that using a really complex image would only freak out the students. So, the Catman. I drew the image minutes before the class started and was able to carve him inbetween helping the students. We used pine, which was horrid, but it was only fair that I made something with the same wood that they were using.

I printed him on white washi, a wretched Pepto pink paper as a kiss print (using the ghost ink as a gray, partially ink only a selected area), on fabric from the scrap bin, and with a little monotype overlay.