Leap Day!

 Well, I've been a bad blogger for most of February so I'll use this timely leap-day to catch up.   The prints are really coming together.  My strategy was to make a lot of plates and not labor over them just spend some time cranking them out.  Yesterday that strategy proved to be a good one when I finally started to see my project as a conclusive thing and not just a continual creative journey digging myself deeper into the endless hole of ideas.  I've picked the images that will make up the body of images of my project.  My task now is to develop the plates to a successful place and devote the rest of the semester to printing.  The exciting thing about my epiphany that really gives me some faith as an artist is that somehow in letting myself work freely, I realized that the images are related and are starting to suggest themes I originally intended to pursue: dream imagery, sleeping figures, and surreal spaces that stradle being defined as dream or reality.  And in a personal triumph, I even came upon making an image of the moon, an idea I've always held onto but that I've never really figured out how or why to execute.

Enough blabbering here is the work:

these guys are from these photos (I don't know that this is that important) of my brother and sister (this isn't important either):

                                        
so ... I noticed the lovely round shape between them, which Janie pointed out to me is a composition I have a habit of turning to .. I scaned the prints and played with them on photoshop after a brief period of confusion as to what to do with all the space I have on the plates ... (these are unlike the other plates I'm working on which are teeny tiny .. these are 13x17")

I tried making the figures bigger ...

photoshop saved me:

I played around enough until I got this which I'm really excited about and have already started working on the plates.

Today I went back to this etching, a single image divided into two strips:

and here is the current state of some plates which I will be finishing up within the next week or two:

 ok back to work! I'll update this when I have more recent photos!

new print - happy february

This week I worked on a small copper plate -- aprox. 6" x 6" based on a photo of a boy I saw on a visit to Viterbo in Italy.

                 

I spent most of the week developing the plate and running quick impressions to see how it was progressing. 

                                                              

This past weekend, I started experimenting with different printing techmiques to add atmosphere to the portrait.  I worked on 4 different plates of the same size with different aquatinted abstract plates and did the first run of experimenting with this type of layering.  After this first try, there's a lot more I want to try - especially because I made the mistake of doing a roll-on of transparent red over one of the five layers in each of these prints. 

                                                                             

                                                          

This week I'm going to try different experimental layering with this plate and try printing with other plates in different configurations on the paper in starting to think about the paper as an important element in the print.  I'd also like to start a new key plate.   I'm feeling great about this piece and having fun playing with it and have a lot in mind for the next things to tackle. 

I'm taking a Modern Art History class this semester and came across Charles Harrison's essay "Bonnard and Matisse: expression and emotion" in one of my textbooks, Art of the Avant-Gardes edited by Paul Wood and Steven Edwards.  So far, the class has put many art movements that I was familiar with into their historical contexts and in relation to eachother.  The period from the beginning of the twentieth century to World War II was a very tumultuous one in art history.  Artists were breaking free from traditions and going in all directions, motivated by social and political change that gave way to new theories on the purpose of art and representation.

I have always loved the work of Matisse and Bonnard (as I've talked about before), but never learned about the context of their work.   I wanted to shared some of the things I learned from this essay that in many ways deepened my understanding and respect for their work given the climate it was created in and a new understanding about the depths that seemingly representational art can reach.

Their work stands apart from the radical avant-garde artists of their time who were discovering Cubism, Futurism, Dada, Constructivism, and more blatant Abstraction.   Their work remained pictorial, but was definitely new and its own departure from the traditions of the past.  Their styles are different from each other, but shared similar themes and subjects.

To me, it may be more impressive that they were able to explore emotion and expression in a way that is almost tricking us -- it looks like traditional, picturemaking -- representational landscapes, figures and still lives, but is actually much more complicated than that.   Harrison talks about "the assumption of the painters' conservatisim ... that their work is not as straightforwardly preoccupied with pleasure and harmony as it may seem on a superficial reading."  They look true to life, but the spaces depicted were actually highly constructed  and not intended to represent life but to represent an experience.   For example, on a second look at Bonnard's Mirror on the Wash Stand we notice how perplexing rather than obvious this space is.  Where is the artist in this mirror that faces us so directly? Where is the viewer in this space? Where are we or the artist in relation to this woman?

Harrison points out Bonnard's ability to "[invoke] in the imagination of the spectator of an other  ... with whom the world is seen as shared, however enclosed that world may turn out to be."  With this realization, Harrison argues that Bonnard's work goes beyond a "mere celebration of sensual pleasure and delight in nature" that he "may be seen to be more demanding of spectators than the decorative allure of his works might suggest."

The essay goes on and the main point that stood out and meant a lot to me was that both Matisse and Bonnard's ambition to "represent .. not what the world looks like, but rather what seeing feels like. ... It is not the real stuff of intimate moments that we are being offered, merely a demonstration of painting's extraordinary capacity to represent them."

I have always looked at these works as beautifully rendered moments from life.  I now understand  a new level of their brilliance beyond exceptional artistic rendering -- being reminded that "these are invented compositions, not moments from factual narratives."

This was just a little aside from tracking my IP trails, but I was so interested in this and wanted to share it.  It's also not totally random, this new understanding for the possible functions of representational art adds a lot of awareness in approaching my own work.

some etching starts

This week I worked on drawings, sketched and planned some ideas based on some references images, and realized that I should stop planning so much and jump into etchings - I liked Sadashi's suggestions in the crit last week that each interpretation -- from life to photograph to sketch to etching to print -- is a distancing from the original source image and that directly working on plates would be a more fresh and intuitive process.  Even though I said I wanted to create more developed complicated compositions in drawings, I found myself slowing down a lot and feeling much more tied down by my source imagery.  Getting myself into the print studio proved to be the best remedy for this.  The process of working on a copper plate allows for much more experimentation --- the medium itself creates its own results indirectly which helps me get past the references that I start my images from.

Here are the current states of the drawings I've been working on:

this is charcoal on an etching (the red part)

Here are the first impressions of two etching plates I began working on this week:





These are some studies that I've done of this same boy - the drawing this past week, the painting last semester -- I noticed and took his picture on a visit to Viterbo in Tuscany two summers ago.

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I also started these plates this week (the portrait of the boy is actually on one of them)

 Here's a good example of why the etching process  seems to be working so well for me. I found these square plates (there are 3 of them total -  all mixed and matched here) in the scrap bin and was going to use the backs to start new images.  As I was cleaning the spray-paint protected backs I started seeing great shapes forming so I aquatinted the blobs that from mid-cleaning and ended up with these abstract plates that have proven to serve as great beginnings.  Through layering and color a lot of things have been happening.  Unlike in drawing, these images came into being on their own with just a little of my direction.  These abstract forms get the image to a starting place for when I start adding figurative elements to the plates.   The portrait of the boy (above) is on one of these plates, and while it's only a first impression, it's a really good starting point.

I started another abstract plate that I am so far planning on using as a base for an etching that will eventually be a portrait.  This one was more planned than the square plates, inspired by a photo I took at the Louvre last spring:

I followed this image pretty strictly in drawing into and then aquatinting the new plate, but from the first impression the results were much more different than I expected.  Part of the reason for this surprise is that I printed on  Japanese paper which is very hard to print an etching on so I think a lot of the detail was lost and I may have also underwiped it.  I actually really like this image so far, but I think that I'll get a much different result (and probably more accurate picture of what state the plate is in) from  proofing the plate on a less delicate paper.

With this great start I'm eager to continue developing these plates this week and maybe start some new ones 

back to school

After an eye-opening review last month before the Christmas break, I have returned to drawing.   My reviewers pointed out that my ideas for expressing human gesture and emotion through portraiture, in relation to others, and with the introduction of imagery from dreams and memory was not coming through in a convincing way in my attempts at collage.  There was a disconnect and lack of urgency and emotion in the work, whereas these feelings are much more present and affecting in my drawings and prints.  The collages were an effective way to try things out quickly and play, and I still may use the technique for studies etc.  I'm really excited to come to this fairly obvious realization that I am allowed to draw -- really push the drawings -- but still, just draw.  So that's what I'm about to really dive into and what I started a bit over the break.

 I took advantage of living in NY and visited some  museums over break.  My first stop was at the Frick Collection, where they were having a special exhibit of Picasso's drawings.  As if I didn't need to be convinced even more, Picasso is a genius.  He gets gesture so good.  That there is such a range of styles in the work -- just drawings by the way -- really shows just how confident his hand was. Here are some little sketches I did while I was there. (No pen by the way allowed in the Frick ... okay ...)

based on :

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detail of hands from:

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from:

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Some other drawings I was especially looking at

I also went to see the recently re-opened of the galleries for the Art of Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia at the Met which have been talked about everywhere.  The collection was pretty incredible. I spent most of my time looking at the Indian miniatures:

Here I was looking at the trees and the river in the bottom left-hand corner. The work is precise yet still comfortable .... wish I had had space in my tiny sketchbook to finish the orange demon figure .. only got one of his feet in

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I started working on this drawing at home

                            

based on this photo I took of my friend Sarah:

This is just one more important thing I took away from my review:  the quesiton of working from photographs.  In a nutshell, it's okay to work from photos as long as you keep yourself in check that you aren't being to faithful to every exact element frozen in the photo - it's important to stay loose and dedicated to developing the drawing not the image it's inspired from.

This  week I worked on preparing my IP mid-year review presentation, began to work on an etching and began some studies for possible paintings.

My preparation for my presentation led me to do some more research on Bonnard in a wonderful book I have on him.


here are some quotes I took that I thought were very interesting and reflect a lot of what I'm aiming to do with my own work:

In talking about Bonnard being a pioneer who took Impressionism to the next level almost re-invented:
"forged a union between external and internal reality ... built a bridge between ... Impressionism and Symbolism"

On his influence from Japanese art and the ukiyo-e aesthetic: "these things .. were extremely skillful and lively.  I understood immediately from these crude images that color could express all things without needing modeling or relief.  It seemed to me then that it was possible to translate light, form and character with nothing more than color."

Bonnard subject matter:  His "practice of 'intimism,' what he called 'a taste for everyday spectacles,' and 'the ability to draw emotion from the modest acts of life,' dependent on his ability to foreshorten the space and to frame the encounter."

Bonnard's experience as a printmaker:  "watching 'the transfer from the fixed matrix of one surface to another' trained him to think of entire composition in terms of fewer colors and ... led to his close study of relationships among hues .."

His influence from Gauguin and his adoption of some Eastern aesthetics - "flat colors and strong lines" like in this painting, "The Vision After the Sermon"



Bonnard's use of color and light:
"Unlike the Fauves whose reaction [to color photography] was in essence to defend painting by embracing the opacity of pure flat color and the powerful vibrations of complementary red and green, Bonnard chose to  embrace the translucency of color film. ... instead of fighting the idea of the mechanized transfer of images, Bonnard became its student and, in so doing, adopted divisionist color, adopted  the various schema of the impressionists but, as he said, 'wanted to go further than the naturalistic impression of color.'"


Bonnard on the importance of drawing: "'You must draw continually so as to always have a repertoire of forms at hand' and to make his drawing more automatically attuned to his senses."

and the best one:  "It was, he said, 'Not a matter of painting life, but of bringing life to painting.'"


The Palm, 1926


The Terrace at Vernonnet, 1920/39

First and foremost,  it makes me very happy to finally learn more about someone whose work I have always admired and find that his philosophy on art-making resonate so much with me and captures in words some of my own sentiments.  -- His use of flat imagery, distorted space that creates his own form of realism, bold areas of color, the use of light, even his subject matter - figures, intimate domestic scenes --

His influence from Japanese prints, the use of the photograph, and the fact that Bonnard never painted from life help explain how his works have a distorted, distanced sense of reality and certain flatness - to me they are simultaneously suspended in time and full of life in a dreamlike way.  My influence of Medieval art and some of the Indian and Middle Eastern Art share a lot with what Bonnard was doing. In turning my attention to painting and etching I will keep these thoughts from Bonnard in mind.  In the same way I have been constructing collages, I started this week with reference images and have been doing a lot of sketching and studies in paint trying to come up with a composition.

I like the sketches so far, but am still challenged by how to make a complete composition and what I want to say with these images.  All of these studies are from photographs I've taken of family members and strangers.  I chose them more or less at random, but can see that they are either two people interacting or one person alone.

Here is the copper plate I started to work on and one failed experiment with it. And the (successful, I think) collage it came from.

I bought some beautiful peonies for myself. They've opened even as today passed - I'm taking pics as they get prettier and prettier.  They smell pretty good too.