Summer Joy

 

Summer Joy
10” x 8”
Reduction Relief Print
Limited Edition of Seven

In August, we went on a mini-garden tour. It was wonderful and inspiring. One of the gardens was part of a farm, that in addition to a greenhouse jam packed with an obscene bounty of vegetables, there were rows and rows of flowers grown from which the farmer makes natural fabric dyes (check out farmandfolk.com).

When I saw the row of Rudbeckia (which I learned yields a lovely pale gold dye), I knew the blossoms would be a fine subject for the reduction process. But it took me a few months to come back to this image. 

First, I did a rough drawing and then a second drawing using colored markers to think through each color. I feel like I'm starting to get the hang of the reduction technique, though this time, I forgot to reverse the image when I transferred it to the plate. However, I think I like the final print better with the image reversed. 

We’ve had an extremely dry and warm winter. It was starting to feel like early spring—but without any green. I think that's what drew me to the subject. 

Ironically, as I carved the plate for the final color pass of black ink, the weather changed and winter finally arrived, bringing us a good eight inches of snow. And there was more on the way…last night gave us another eight inches. Let the shoveling begin!

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.