New Drawing Book Piece

Here's a new piece that I assembled from scraps I had laying around. The Rembrandt self-portrait copy is from a few years back when I was demonstrating linocuts. The same goes for the trilobites. The watercolored background is a little more interesting. I normally keep a scrap of paper laying around on my desk in order to clean out watercolor brushes. Usually that paper looks like what it is: a mess. But this time it turned out looking like a real watercolor! So I kept it and put it into my magnificent collage.

Collage-o-rama

Yes, you say. That's all very "interesting", you say. But what does it mean? Always with the what does it mean. Why can't you folks just look at a piece of artwork and appreciate it for its plastic qualities? ("Plastic" is a word which here means characterized by an emphasis on formal structure.) Notice the three horizontal bands in the composition: black pen, COLOR!, black pen. It's visual action sandwiched by calm line work. What about the left hand side being filled with imagery and it being offset by the right hand side's minimal imagery? That's some dynamic symmetry for ya! How does the seemingly random watercolor relate to the rigidity of the linocut line work? What tension! What part does the text play in how we see this piece? The big, fat letters are on the left, under the portrait and large trilobite; while the monster head is on the right, above the visually light, skinny letters and small trilobite. It seems to provide a sense of movement or tumbling as the heavy top right wants to fall over into the thinner, emptier bottom right. Or does the imagery on the left-hand side anchor it sufficiently?

Wow! Such questions to ponder before we ever get to what does it "mean". Artwork is not a didactic book, it is meant to be seen first, and then we can think about what it means. By the way, I won't tell you what this means. Maybe it doesn't mean much of anything. Or maybe it comments on the vision of the great artist, Rembrandt and what his powers of seeing were able to behold. Your choice.

Family resemblances part II

Here's the part where I tell you of my woes. Many thousands of you will have missed my post on Monday. Because there wasn't one. I will just chalk it up to the fact that I have a newborn along with five other kids and a lovely wife who need my attention. If keeping a blog could be construed as a rather selfish thing to do – especially one that is almost completely about my own artwork – then writing one while life is swirling at hurricane speed most certainly is.

So this is my version of a clip show. All of these are from Family Resemblances just like last week. As I said, I really love that book and want to show you a fair bit of it! (Not all of it, not by a looooong shot!) We have lots of woodcuts, collages, maker and watercolor work.

Nostaglia

I am feeling what an old student of mine called "nostaglia". This is because, of course, I JUST FINISHED MY DRAWING BOOK, Dreams and Visions! I have been working on this slowly since October of 2013. The key word here is slowly. All of my drawing books take some time to finish, but, increasingly, they are taking longer and longer.

With my new drawing book, I want to try something... old. Natural History was my first hand bound book and I finished it up something like 14 or 15 years ago. It has a ton of pages, but I was flying through them. I think it was because I hadn't really conceived of my drawing books as actual "artwork" at the time. It was somewhere towards the middle of that book that I realized I was making good drawings and that this could be more than a "sketchbook", it could be an Artist's Book. (If that doesn't sound asinine and pretentious, then I don't know the meaning of the words.) Whatever terminology you want to apply to the book, the fact is, I started poring over my books – sometimes taking years to finish one. I don't want to do that with this new book. But I say that with every new book I start and... well, stuff happens.

So, on to the nostalgia part of this post. I want to give something of a brief overview of my books. I have no idea if that is of any interest to you, but it is to me, and since I am doing all the writing here, I'll just indulge myself. Probably one or two of you will remember that I have already written about my drawing books in the past. That's true, but I want to deal with each of the books in a little more individual detail.

Natural History is not the first book of drawings that I made, but it is my first hand bound book. About half way through I started to think of it as a body of related drawings. Not that that changed what I was doing, it just helped me to have a way of thinking about the book as I was making it.

This is the first image in the book. An introduction.

There is a lot of collage in this book along with a fair amount of animal parts. There are a couple of praying mantis legs in there if you take a good look!

Monsters and anatomy. I'm sure this is a surprise to you.

Bugs, bones and printmaking and even a little bit of pro to-gyotaku before I knew what that was! The tiny little fish is real. It's been there for about 15 years, so I'm not too worried about it decomposing.

Fish, printmaking, and the internal anatomy of humilobites. At least I'm consistent. 

Again with the collage!

I have always understood my interest in the natural world. So that was a given for me as I started making this book. But I have always had an interest in the para-natural world as well. (I just made that word up, feel free to use it in your everyday life, but make sure you point people back to me. I'm getting in touch with the proper authorities to trademark it as I type this.) So the old category of "natural history" fit well for me. Way back in the olden days, back when things like cabinets of curiosities were in vogue, plants, animals, shells, oddities, "monsters", creepy pickled fruits. Anything that caught the eye was a go and it all fell under the same quasi-category. And that's where I found the work in this book.

The End

Did your heart skip a beat? Did you get a panicky feeling as your throat seized up a little? Did you think the title to this post meat I was done with writing for the interwebs? Climb down off the ceiling and relax. All I meant was I have finished my current drawing book. Well, mostly.

You see, in the grand tradition of putting carts before horses, I have finished the last two pages of my book before I have finished several of the preceding pages. Why have I adopted this devil-may-care attitude and thrown caution to the wind? Why am I mixing my metaphors? Because I thought of a pun and I couldn't wait to get it down on paper.

You know how sometimes you think of a pun, and then think everyone else will find it equally as clever as you do? And how they don't because, I guess, everyone else is dumb? Well, that's where I'm sitting right now. The smiles on my face and in my head speak to something insanely clever, funny even. Something along these lines:

There was a guy who sent ten different puns to friends in the hopes that at least some of them would make his pals laugh. Unfortunately, no pun in ten did.

But funnier!

I've teased enough. Here's the image:

Get it?! Huh? Do you get it?!

I assume since you've persevered this long, you'll want to know the medium here. This is a relief rolled collagraph with white ink and a collage of watercolored paper and decorative paper scraps.

And all you sharp eyed devils out there will recognize this fish as a version of the collagraph that I wrote about on January 12th.

Prints in Need of Redemption

Very often prints of mine turn out pretty good. Sometimes, they are good prints that got marred somehow and sometimes they turn out to be... lacking. Whatever the case, I rarely throw them away. I keep them for experiments. 

There are a lot of my old prints that have been reworked like this. In fact, I made an entire drawing book - Concerning Religious Affections - out of failed woodcuts and etchings. They provided a wonderful texture and backdrop to the atmosphere of the entire book.

The following images were taken from the drawing books Concerning Religious Affections and Family Resemblances.

Woodcut with collage and gold leaf 

Left: Relief printed etching and linocuts with gold leaf
Right: Woodcut with collage and gold leaf

Left: A mess
Right: Woodcut with collage, gouache, and gold leaf

Taking Pictures, Making Pictures

Remember waaaayyyy, waaaayyyyy back when people used film? Back when you used to drop off your film and quiver with anticipation at what you would get back in a day or two? Or one hour if you were a big spender? Or how about this; you discover the holy grail of photography: the roll of forgotten and undeveloped film. The suspense was intense.

Not so much anymore. Everyone has a million pictures on his phone and photographs are largely throw-away things. Oh well, that's the way things go.

But what about those old photos? I used to keep almost all of them. Even the really bad ones because who knows? Maybe I'll think of a good use for them. These are all photo-collages that I made using old photographs.

Dream of the Advancing Minotaurs

For the Dream of Advancing Minotaurs, I used a picture of an old etching and pictures of my Dad and myself holding up a bull skull like we're a couple of minotaurs. By the way, that bull skull was one of the best Christmas presents I have ever gotten.

Matt and Amy

Both of these images are temptation scenes. That's about all I want to say about them.

Nimrod and His Father

The pictures on the left are of an etching and woodcut while the drawing of the snake on the right is a preparatory piece for a linocut. It so happens that I've always seen these images as part of a whole composition. I suppose the way I have reinforced that conception is by having the far left coil of the snake spill over slightly onto the preceding page. 

Anywho, if you have a bunch of old photographs, hang on to them. They may come in handy.

How to Reheat Leftovers

Cherry pick the printmaking detritus for the good stuff. 

This isn't one of those posts abut sprucing up leftovers to please the whole finicky family, nor is it one of those screeds about being frugal, using everything you have to the fullest, composting, or even recycling. It's about collage. "Collage, you say? Why I went to collage, it was the best, most expensive 7 1/2 years of my life." Not "college" you doofus (are you even paying attention?), collage. You know, the assemblage of seeming disparate elements into a new coherent whole. Mostly it's a technique employed by artists when they don't want to put in the effort to draw or paint anything new. Why not just use scraps of old stuff and call it collage?

Collage: The artistic equivalent of stir fry. Nothing goes to waste and 
you get the satisfaction of cleaning out the refrigerator.

As a printmaker, I love collage. I have lots and lots of images or pieces of images that sort of worked out, but not really. Why not just cut out the good parts and stick them all together? It often happens that when you put the old images in new situations, new ideas suggest themselves. I will see relationships between images that I never saw before. Sometimes small collages lead to large-scale pieces, or entire new series.

Collage is more than just a greatest hits clip show. It's something new.

                                           

Sometimes - okay, all the time - I save cast off bits and pieces of things for future use: linocuts, fragments of interesting drawings, etc. Occasionally I gather them all together and make a collage. Sometimes they really work well together. And sometimes I have to live with them for a while before I can appreciate the jammed together glory that is collage.

As I mentioned earlier, I have begun a new drawing book. I made rules for my last book - I only drew things that I could observe from life. So far, it looks like I am rebelling against that rule in this book. I have drawn a lot of monsters so far. The woman on the left is real - I saw her at a conference and drew her while she was listening to an unbelievably boring session on something or another. A true confession, I have always loved minotaurs. I do not have any idea why. But here she is, a middle aged minotauress as she sits in quiet contemplation.

On the other side is a man contemplating Rembrandt. So I suppose these two are joined in the act of thinking. This head is made from the leftovers from a collage I did years ago. (I almost never throw things away.) Rembrandt comes from a demo piece for relief printmaking I did for school. There's no real reason to make a print of Rembrandt besides the fact that I love him even more than I do minotaurs.