This Weekend at The Drawing Studio: make your own Monotypes!

New! The Monothon, a printmaking extravaganza. 4 hour blocks of printmaking for all levels of experience. Curious about printmaking? Learn while supporting TDS, and exhibit in theOctober Monothon show too! Pre-register, or pay at the door.

 What?? Monotypes all day long? Yes! 

Sign up and come down or come down and sign up! I'll be there to help out!

This is a totally fun way to spend your Saturday afternoon. 

Hope to see you there!

~Reb

Location map: link to The Drawing Studio is HERE. 

Parking: on the street or in the lovely new Centro Garage. Enter from Broadway going west and turn right going toward Congress...look for the "Centro" sign and turn before you keep going straight ahead onto Toole. 

More boats?

Yes, more boats! I made a new boat Solarplate today, and printed several prints.
And yesterday, I formalized where the boats come from with this handy diagram. If you want to know more about vesica piscis, read about it here.

Huh?? Maybe this will make more sense:

"Vesica Piscis, Gold Version", Intaglio-type with carborundum

9x12", 2008

"Vesica Piscis Orange", Intaglio-Type, 9x12", 2008

"Boats", Solarplate etching, 8x10", April 2013

Remember this monotype I created in Ron Pokrasso's workshop? I decided I really liked the imagery, so I made a Solarplate from the image this morning. "Monotypes" are one-of-a-kind prints but I wanted more. 

Monotype,  16x20", June 2013

Two boat prints from Catherine Kernan's workshop, July 2013:

3-color separation reduction monotype, 3x3"

Monotype, 22x30", July 2013

Two of the new Solarplate prints, based on the monotype I made in Ron's workshop. No titles yet, these were just done this afternoon. Photos were taken today with my iPad, so they aren't perfect. 

Solarplate etching, 1st print, 9-16-2013, 8x10"

Multi-plate Solarplate etching, 8th print, 9-16-2013; 8x10"

All of these images are copyrighted, so please contact me if you would like to use them or are interested in acquiring a print.  

More art coming soon!

~Rebecca

Santa Fe Summer: Shows at CCA & Folk Art Museum

Just as promised! I have lots of lovely photos of a couple of stand-out art shows I saw while in Santa Fe this summer.

First up, the Tako Kuchi: Kite Crazy in Japan exhibit at the Museum of International Folk Art on Museum Hill. This show runs thru March 2014 and if you are a fan of Japanese art forms, this show is wonderful! The only mistake I made was arriving a little less than an hour before they closed! So I didn't get the see the other exhibits in the museum.  This museum is really wonderful and I always make time to check out what's new there every time I'm in Santa Fe. This show was exceptional- the curation was well done, the hands-on stuff for kids (And adults!), there was video and even a small collection of moku hanga (Japanese woodcuts) featuring kites.

My favorite artist was Takeuchi Magojiro. His kites had an abstract quality about them that was lacking in the other kites. They were painted with a playful brush and had a wonderful lively sensibility to them.
I found some more info about Japanese kites and Magojiro as well as some fantastic contemporary kites online here, on the Drachen Foundation's Kite Journal.

Info about Takeuchi Magojiro, my favorite kite artist

Some of Magojiro-san's kites

Huge kite, probably about 8 feet tall

*****

The next day, I went to see a very special show at the Center for Contemporary Arts. I hadn't been to this gallery before and was more than pleasantly surprised....the show there, called "Making Places', was stunning.

The front of CCA

A close-up of the amazing sculpture!

About the show

It was a show of husband and wife artists Michael Moore and Linda Fleming. The show seemed to be part travelogue, part installation, and part retrospective. The gallery space was large and open and their pieces took over the whole space. There was video, audio, drawings, sketch books, paintings, sculpture, maquettes, slide shows, watercolors, and household items. The show struck me as a life journey, with influences of different homes, locations and art studios, road trips, walks in the woods, relationships with place, pet dogs, nature, and ordinary objects collected over the years. It was melancholy and joyous, epic in scale and sometimes small and intimate. There were studies, models, sketches, and family photos of artists as ordinary people with children, dogs, and lives.

There were no titles on the pieces that I remember. 

A wall of ephemera with artifacts in the cases in front.
These look like items from travels: maps,
photos, art show flyers and postcards, sketches. 

A humongous pencil drawing; gorgeous but incongruous
with the paintings, and maquettes nearby

The "rug" looked like one of the sculptures, only flattened

I love the 3-d effect that this painting has. It looks like you need

special glasses to see the mesa as intended

Pages from a sketch book lined two walls under the large paintings

Detail of the sketchbook pages with numerous sketches of cars, dogs, etc.

Table with books

Nikola Tesla!

I love this painting

The scale!

A wall of landscape watercolors; all apparently of the
same view of mountains. Done over
a period time. You can see the seasonal changes in the paintings. 

Detail of the landscapes

It was a stunning show overall, with a depth and breadth that was unusual. For some of the of the art works, I wasn't sure which artist had done which piece, but for me, it didn't really matter. It was a wonderful collection and  a wonderful show. Go see if you can, it's up for a few more weeks. More photos soon!

Ciao,

Reb

Catherine Kernan's Workshop: 4-color separations

 Hi everyone
I've been busy with various things plus the Labor Day holiday, etc. so I'm just starting to get back into posting some of the photos I took in Santa Fe during Catherine Kernan's workshop at MAS.
I took photos of the various demonstrations she did...here are some photos of two types of 4-color separations using monotype: trace monotype and reductive monotype. The former method doesn't use the press, the latter does. Each uses 4 PETG clear plastic plates, rolled up with red, yellow, blue, black or CMYK for the most part. The clear plates allow you to see an original drawing underneath and be able to register each plate as well as make sure your drawing stays true to the original.

Four-color with 4 plates. These are reductive monotypes: each plate have been rolled with a
solid color ink and the design was wiped away using a q-tip or rag. Each plate needs
to be run through the press in order: yellow, red, blue, black or light to dark. 

Printing the last plate onto the paper...the black plate (PETG plastic, so it's clear) is

registered to the previous image and run through the press. 

This print is a trace monotype using color separation as well: viscous
ink is rolled onto each plastic plate and the image is drawn using a sharp pencil on the back; the

original drawing is used to register each image.
The yellow plate still in registration position after "printing". 

You can see the reddish print on the right is almost finished
it's waiting for the black plate seen on the upper left. No press is needed with this method.

4-color trace monotype on the left and a 4-color reductive monotype on the right.

The reductive print was run through the press, the other was not.
The images are similar but each has it's own texture and character.

My own attempt at a 4-color trace monotype. You can really see the texture of
the paper and the mark of a pencil in this style of print.

My own attempt at a 4-color reductive monotype.
This one came out a bit better! All of our demo
plates we created in the workshop were tiny: only about 3" square.

An all-black reductive monotype. 

I will be doing a mini workshop on reductive monotypes such as the simple black on shown above this weekend at The Drawing Studio....it's a "try it out" session, so you can come down and learn to make your own monotype for 1-1/2 hours! I'll be demonstrating/teaching at 1:00pm in case you decide to check it out. 

More Santa Fe photos coming tomorrow, so be sure to check back.

Ciao,

~Reb