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.

Bleeding heart tetra

Here's an old one. Sorta. I made this woodcut about 150 years ago back when I was keeping a 55 gallon tank full of fish. One of the fish took a kamikaze out of the tank and wound up on my drawing board. Ever since I cut this block (one of my first woodcuts) and printed it poorly a couple of times, it has been languishing in a drawer.

A couple of weeks back, I stumbled across it and decided to give it one more go. So here you are, a bleeding heart tetra in all his woodcut and watercolor glory.

A fish among the plants

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

Of Gyotaku, Real and Artificial

The number of gyotaku posts here are all out of proportion to the actual number of prints I have pulled. I am actually far more interested in making drawings of the fish than in pulling prints of them. "Ah," you say, "then why are you polluting the internet with all of your fancy fish rubbings when you could be showing us drawings?" Fair enough; here are two examples of "fish rubbings" as you so condescendingly refer to them.

This first one is perhaps a bit of a cheat - so maybe a little of your smarty pants-ness is warranted. This is a flounder that I bought for use in some of my classes (the kids don't always do so well with real fish - there are things like guts and eyeballs to consider). It's rubber. Okay!? So I made the print of my rubber fish on one side of transparent paper, painted the reverse side of the paper gold, cut the whole thing out and glued it to a fresh sheet of paper. I rather liked the result.

These lovely fish are golden shiners that I caught while fishing for bluegill. They're pretty much giant minnows. But they are very beautiful and if I had it to do again I would try to catch their color like I did here. Regardless, I think this is a successful print.

So here you are, an actual drawing of a fish. This is the prince of fishes, that most delicious of panfish, the majestic bluegill. For me, bluegill is what I call almost all of those fish that other people call brim or bream. They are quite beautiful in their own right and great fighters on light tackle.

And here we go with a little woodcut of a fish. Actually it's a tetra that I used to have in my fish tank. I often take some time to draw the fish that make it into my tanks. This one was a great model. It stayed very still for me the whole time. Probably because it was dead. That's the way it is sometimes. We artists have to be a hard-hearted lot when it comes to our fish drawings. We don't have to kill the little guys, but we must be willing to take advantage of the opportunity when it arises.

Ficus and Katydid. This is a woodcut I did six or so years ago. I have been working on my photoshop skills - and, well, here you go. The linework is woodcut and the rest is photoshop.