Summer Still Life & A New Obsession

 

Summer Still Life
8” x 10”
Limited Edition Relief Print

I tried my hand at another reduction print, inspired by a photo I took last summer: the veggies dramatically bathed in bright sunlight, casting deep shadows across the surface. 

The reduction process, as I've mentioned before, is a bit scary. And for me, highly unpredictable. Determining what to cut and what to leave is still very challenging. While the process results in a limited number of prints, that's not necessarily a bad thing. There's only so much room in the studio after all. 

This piece was a welcome relief from my latest obsession, weaving. In early November I purchased a table loom and have been learning how to weave. My technique is rather crude at this point, and I’ll need hours decades of practice to improve. 

My first piece was experimenting with basic weaving (“plain weave”) and then creating simple shapes and patterns. I tore out the yarn many times and reworked many areas and at one point, accidentally cut my warp (the framework you weave the yarn, or “weft” through) and had to totally start over. However, I was not discouraged and kept at it. For any weavers out there, please excuse my amateur results. I hope to continue to improve.

Next, I jumped right to something complicated (yeah, no baby steps here) when I decided to try to create a landscape. Again, I “unwove” and rewove most of the piece several times to repair mistakes and after several weeks, finally finished it. I’m not crazy about it as it lost something through several reworkings. Plus, the craftsmanship is still very rough, but I learned a LOT and have seen incremental improvement.
 

High Country, Fall
16.5” x 12”

I was midway through completing the landscape piece for the second time (when I decided I needed a break) and created Summer Still Life.

Currently I’m experimenting with a smaller piece to learn “wedge weaving” …stay tuned for notes on how that turns out.

Reduction Printing: Madness?

Yellows & Greens

8” x 10”
Hand-rubbed Relief Print
Limited Edition

I was inspired by a summer day’s harvest of yellow squash and tomatillos. It seemed like a good subject to try using the reduction process to create the image. With the reduction process, you continually cut away portions of the plate, which results in the plate having only the material left that prints the color, which in this case, was a grey-black.

With relief printing, there are many steps. It’s kind of scary, really, as you have to get to the end of the steps to determine whether the result is successful or not. I'm still learning the reduction process and my efforts are still a bit crude.

First I start with a drawing.

 

Then, I trace the drawing. When the image is transferred to the plate, the tracing is flipped so the image is backward.

I then strengthen the image on the plate. In the image below, I have cut away the areas I want to be white.

Here, I have printed a lighter and a darker yellow, plus a light green. With each pass, I cut away the part of the plate that printed the colors I want to keep. You are overprinting lighter areas with the next darker color. 

It is really easy to accidentally cut away more than you planned to remove, which adds a level of challenge and excitement to the process. It's also difficult to capture the nuance of shape that you can with a drawing. Cutting shapes is tricky. 

Even though I have a system to help register each printing pass, another issue is miss-aligning the paper to the plate when you transfer each color.

Below, I have printed a slightly darker green and a blue. 

In the final image, you can see I printed the golden brown and then the gray-black.

 Viola! I started with 14 sheets and ended up with 10 final prints. It's not just art, it's an adventure!

Viola!