Speed at Feed

I just wanted to remind you all about tomorrow’s get-together. We’ll be meeting at Feed Art Center from 3:00 until about 7:00 to work on making some paintings. I picked up a bunch of brushes and acrylic paint today so we should be all set to paint. I’m also bringing my old opaque projector so if anyone wants to work from an existing drawing or a photograph, this thing should make it pretty easy to transfer onto a canvas. Speaking of canvases: If you have one, great! Bring it. Otherwise, we have thirteen 12”x12” canvases that will be available for $10. If you have any particular brushes or paints you’d like to use, bring those too. I’ll also be bringing a few pizzas. Bringing some food or drinks to share would make you totally awesome.

Thesis

Really, all of this information is subject to change, but for now, my graduate thesis show is scheduled to open on May 17. Looking at a calender, it seems like a long time til May. But when I think of the amount of work I need to get finished, it seems like it is way too soon. Whatever. I'll keep reporting on any changes to the plan and, when the show is up, I hope you'll come check it out.

Carpel Tunnel

Well, I was planning on taking the day off from actually printing anything today. I've been running that squeegee across screens so much over the last few weeks that my wrist is really killing me. I have plenty of screens that need to be cleaned so I figured I would just clear the emulsion off all of them and get them ready to print tomorrow, giving my wrist a rest. Now that I'm here in the studio, though, I'm feeling the urge to print some colors. I think I'll just print the two screens that are already exposed and then chill out for the rest of the day. Maybe I'll try to get some old negatives scanned.

Viewscreen

Things are really moving quickly. I've finished twelve prints in this series and I'm happy with nine of them. My goal (for the purposes of earning a degree) is 24 prints. If I can keep up this pace, I'll be done with the prints a couple of weeks before then end of the semester. That should give me plenty of time to work on my thesis paper. Sometime this week I'm going to try to get a date scheduled for my thesis exhibition. I think it will be in early May. I'd like to apply for a small grant through kickstarter to help cover the cost of matting and framing the prints. I won't need a ton of money compared to the amounts I've seen other grant writers receive. I'm thinking it should be around $600. So that should be pretty easy to raise. If anyone has a kickstarter invite, or knows how to get one, please let me know. After this show is over I don't know what I'm going to do with myself.

Saturday and Sunday

Yesterday was pretty awesome. East Meets West went really great. Stefen and Manpreet played a few improvised compositions and answered questions about the development of the Indian tabla drums, the different schools of traditional Tabla technique, and how Indian time signatures can be incorporated into western music. Approximately 45 people (pushing our space capacity) showed up to watch the performance and take part in the discussion. We collected a huge box of canned goods and other non-perishables for out local food banks. There are a lot of pictures on Flickr. In most of them you can see the Littlest Print Portfolio hanging behind the performers. I shot some video too, but it seems to be a little bit messed up. If I can't get the video straightened out, hopefully I at least can save the audio.

I worked all day today in the print studio and was able get a complete print done from start to finish; exposing all ten screens and printing all ten colors. I even managed to get most of the screens stripped and ready to be emulsified again tomorrow morning. I helped a new guy named Trio with his first prints too. It was a marathon print session and my wrists are killing me. For real.

Littlest Prints/East/West/Etc.

Michael and I hung up an exhibition made up of the entire Littlest Print Exchange portfolio at Feed the other day. I bought a ton of frames at the dollar store and, even though they're cheaply made, they actually look pretty nice hanging on the walls. I mounted each print inside its frame using simple photo corners. So the whole exhibit went together for just over $50. Check out a few more pics at Flickr. We wanted to get something hung in time for tomorrow's musical performance and food drive. Stefen Robinson (AKA Yea Big) and Manpreet Bedi are putting on a show combining traditional Indian rythmic drumming and American mandolin improvisation and we're also collecting canned goods for out local food pantries. It should be pretty cool. Plus, thanks to Bill Yohnka and Allison Beasley, we got to go on the radio this morning to promote the event.

After that radio interview I spent the rest of the day working on screen prints and screwing around with some ceramic projects again.

Sensitizer

Back in the studio this week cranking out prints. I finished this mexican donkey and another one and then got all my screens emulsified and ready to print again. I bought a bunch of screens over the holiday so now I have twelve. This is going to make finishing work go much quicker. I'm about to buy a big bucket of emulsion too, just to make sure I have it when the studio's bucket runs dry or mysteriously disappears. I bought a small quart container but when I opened it to mix in the sensitizer I found out that the emulsion was a solid mass of jelly. I'm not sure if that happened because it got too cold during shipping or what. I'm going to try sending it back. We saw Up in the Air tonight and I really liked it but it is pretty sad. Oh, yeah, I just posted a new show at Captive Werewolf.

Block Printing

I started my block printing workshop at Feed last Monday. My plan was to work on a design or drawing on the first session, start carving on the second and finish up on the third week by pulling a few prints. Things went faster than I thought and everyone was already carving on their blocks before the end of the first session. Since things were moving so quickly, I decided to make it a multiple color project. I took my block home to make sure it was finished so I can demonstrate printing and setting up the second block for registration next week. Tonight I pulled a proof off the block.

If anybody wants to join in, I'm willing to push the workshop a week longer for new folks. We'll be starting next Monday at around five.

Art House Sketchbook

I finally finished up this moleskine for Art House Co-op's Sketchbook Project. I've been dragging my feet on it since I didn't really know what I wanted to do. I'm not really much of a sketcher and I didn't actually want to spend a huge amount of time filling pages with drawings and then just send the book away and never get it back. In the end, I replaced all the thin pages with more substantial ones, to which I attached small manila envelopes filled with prints of photographs. It isn't the most elaborate thing I could have done, but in the end, it looks clean and nice. Since I waited so long, the book won't make it in time for the January 4th deadline, but I think it will be fine anyway. Art House is planning to send the entire library of sketchbooks created for the project on a traveling exhibit across the country. Right now there are shows scheduled for Atlanta, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Saint Louis.

A Decade

Happy new year. Here's what I've been up to this week.

The print studio has been closed for the holidays, so I've just been trying to get a bunch of color separations ready for when I can get back in there. I really wanted to keep all the prints down to 10 colors, however, some of the photos look so much better at 12 or 13 that I feel like I have to do the extra work.

Michael and I finished painting the walls at Feed last Monday. The white really looks a lot better than the yellow that was there before. I've also been getting ready for my blockprinting workshop by ordering supplies and researching images to show as examples of printing methods.

All the portfolios for the Littlest Print Exchange were shipped out a few weeks ago and have hopefully arrived by now. I posted scans of all the prints for the world to see and put up an exhibit of some of those prints at Captive Werewolf. I'll show the entire portfolio at Feed one of these days and hopefully put together a show of them at the GSU gallery as well. This exchange will certainly become an annual event, so I'm thinking of how to make it run easier for 2010.

I'm sure I did some other things this week, but I can't think of anything right now.