Thursday 9th Feb, 2012.

Our last day in print, its all over after to-day and again I can hardly believe our two weeks are gone.   On our last day we were working on our mini one day project 'clutter'.   We had to take four photos of what we perceived clutter to be.   I picked a bookshelf from home.

These are the images I worked from.   I decided to do a dry point etching because I hadn't done one yet in the elective.  I also used monoprint for some of the background.   

This is the first print I did,  Des suggested that I make the marks stronger to give depth.   He made an example one (making it look so easy)  in minutes and using mono and etching together he got a lovely effect.   I made my etching stronger and this is what happened.

 

 As the day went on I thought that I might have overdone it on making the marks stronger and in doing so it seemed to have thrown the balance of the etching as well.  So I decided that I would crop the etching and use the part I liked best, a section that I thought I could salvage.

Everything about this was much much better, I liked the format, the composition, and the marks.   I felt that this still conveyed clutter but on a smaller scale.   I also like the way your eye is drawn in a zig-zag  fashion from the top books across to the open book and down to the right.

So thats it,  my print elective is over and all that remains is for us to do is to put our work together for assessment.   Its been a hectic couple of weeks, got loads done and I'm whacked, but its been great and I really enjoyed it.   Print has given me the best excuse to close my kitchen for the weekend because for the first time in their lives my children don't want me to make sambos, bake or butter bread for them.  Why, my lovely  dirty hands.   Ah this is the life, thanks Des and Fiona.

Tuesday 7th Feb, 2012

Back in print workshop today and into our last week in this Elective.   To-day I wanted to try and nail the whole splash of water against the shower door without bleeding.    Last time I blogged I felt that maybe I was using too much white spirits so to day I decided to try and get it on the monoprint a little less liberally.   I flicked it on and I used my hands to clap it on, dispersing it in a much finer spray like way.   Of course after a few seconds it spreads (this being my previous problem) I didn't want it to spread too much.  Luckily it didn't and I was able to control it better.     Below are some of the results from this process.   

In this one I let the white spirits dribble down on to the monoprint, I like the result and I do get the sense of splash and water running off in the tray.

After a chat with Des I discovered another way to get this effect, using powder.   He showed me how if you scatter talc on to the monprint it lifts the ink completely with no need for white spirits and  no bleeding.   

This is what happened with the talc.

These look much cleaner and the results are not as random as using the white spirits.

 I was also looking at the plughole and the idea of washing away all the mayhem and tension that invaded my head space.   I still wanted to incorporate some stitching so these are some of the results from these ideas.

Thursday 2nd February, 2012

Back in print workshop this morning.   I revisited my water dripping on the shower door.   Didn't add as much white spirit this time.   Getting it to run down the page with the right amount of white spirit is hard.   If I use too much it spreads under the press and bleeds all over the page, kinda like the mushroom effect you get when using watercolours.   Not what I wanted, not enough and there is no real viscosity so it won't drip or move.  I've been thinking about how else I might do this and as I used knitting and stitching in semester one I've decided to try it again, this time on my prints.  As an experiment, I tried it on one of yesterdays prints, shown below.

I wanted to show the effect of the water sliding down the shower door.    I drew the water line on paper and I stitched it on to the print.

Stitching the water line on the print, was a slow process taking considerable time to do.   It reminded me that in semester one I came across the work of Ghada Amer, Annette Messagner, Kerry Mosley and  others who used stitching in their work.   To-day thanks to Fiona I found another artist Maurizio Anzeri who uses embroidery in his work also.   He stitches in to photographs of people creating another dimension that still lets you see into the original photo.    

This is the end result of the experimental  print showing the stitched waterlines against the shower door.

Below are some other  prints I did in the workshop this morning.  

Print Elective.   31st January, 2012.

I started my second elective yesterday.    On Friday we had a chat with Des and Fiona and they gave us a run through procedure and what was expected of us in the Print Workshop.   We also got our project brief 'space' and we got the weekend to think how we might interpret it.
Over the weekend I defined space as 'a continuous area that is free, unoccupied, available, as distance from one another, as room, interval, gap, as stacked, high-rise, multi-storey'.
However as the weekend progressed it became more and more apparent to me that space could mean something else entirely.   After very fraught discussions (being kind here) with two daughters planning a 21st birthday party, I needed head space and the only place to find this in my house last weekend was in the shower.
So yesterday I started to look at this personal space and how I was going to create a visual image from this experience.    I was hoping to convey a feeling of noise, mayhem, and argument outside the shower door and that it stayed there and didn't invade the shower cubicle.   Again how could I do this visually.   Colour was the answer and I looked at the colour wheel and harmony and disharmony of colours.   Other images I considered for the brief were alternative spaces such as the capsule hotels in Japan, rooms made of big cement pipes, rooms made with giant beer cans and pods high in the trees in Canada.

These are some other spaces I looked at for the project.

capsule hotel in Japan

inside the capsule hotel

room pod in Canada

room in a giant beer can in Denmark

I realised after I had picked these images that they were connected to the the shower in the sense that these spaces are also very personal, a refuge or a space to fit one person.

Below are the pictures I took in the shower, looking out and they are what sparked my initial ideas.

Here are the results of my mornings work in print.   The idea started to take on a life of its own once in the print room  and as well as disharmony I started to look at splash.  I tried to convey this through mono print using white spirits.  I hope to revisit this on Thursday and look at other ways to make marks and splash against the glass.

I had a lot of bleeding under the plasters I put on and this was because the white spirit diluted the ink and it got squashed out under the plaster in the press.   In print no 5 I got the affect I wanted by doubling the plaster so it soaked the ink much better.    Des tells me I can rework the others  and I hope to do so next time I'm in the print room.  The last prints are traces left behind on the newsprint I used to soak up some ink residue before I put them through the press.   Didn't bin them because I thought they were interesting in themselves and I just kinda like them.

End of painting elective, 28th January, 2012.

Can hardly believe our two week painting elective is over and gone.   To-day sees our worked marked and assessed and we move on to our next elective.   My next undertaking is print and I can't wait especially after having had a peek at the work that has just been done.   However first things first.   Last time  I blogged we were doing our weekend project for paint and I did promise to post my version of the 'Queen' however it turned out.    Well not wanting to break a promise I'll do so.   Its not finished, I never touched her crown and I didn't get to finish her lower face and neck.   Some of us felt that we needed more than the weekend to complete it.   I didn't spend all weekend on it, but I did spend a considerable amount of time working on it over two days.  

This is the result.   The first one is mine and the one below is a copy of Lucien Freud's.   I had great fun doing this, it was a project I really enjoyed.   I was pleased with my effort because I have never done anything like this before.

Below is a better photograph of the two side by side.

During the last week we did a lot of work painting our installations using tone.   We mixed our own black or dark tone and added two others with white.   We also used brushes something I found hard because I was much more comfortable using card or the palette knife, but there is nothing like a challenge.

This is what happened.

On our last day painting we also used warm tones.   I was working with blues so I added orange to warm up my tones.    This was added to the tone I had created first and I added white to make two other warm tones.

Below is the result.

The final exercise we did was one in mark making and before we knew it our elective was over.    The two weeks flew, they were intense and most of us were very tired going home on the Friday.   I have to say, tired and all that I was, I will look back on the Painting Elective as being most enjoyable and hope my other two selections are as satisfying.   So thank you Grainne and Sylvia.