Printmaking Fun and Fellowship

After a couple of weeks of the bitterest of winter weather, pre-spring has sprung again. All this week we woke up to the glorious singing of blackbirds outside and sun streaming in through windows.

This weekend my friend Mariann Johansen-Ellis came to do some photo etching with us. She brought her sister Monica. Mariann runs a printmaking school in a beautiful historic village in southern Spain. Her sister runs a Bed & Breakfast in central France.

It is such a great treat for me when I have the opportunity to work with someone I enjoy so well. We share ideas and laugh a lot.

I hadn't met Monica before, although I had heard all about her adventures from Mariann. She and her husband have taken a derelict building and turned it into an incredible holiday destination. We can hardly wait to find a time to reserve a room.

Mariann is going to be offering photo etching courses at her school but she hasn't as yet built the exposure box. She wanted to come try out ours to see if the process suited her. It is wonderful to work with someone with so much experience. She came prepared with lots of photos to work from. She was very well organized and knew exactly what she wanted to discover and she answered a lot of her own questions by experiments she made with the materials.

One critical element to the success of a photo etched print, is the choice of the proper photo to work with. An image like the one below, with a range of values nicely balanced over the entire picture works very well indeed.

Like myself, Mariann learns much more easily by doing, rather than by reading. Rick showed her all the steps once and after that she was off and running.

My favorite part of photo etching is the development process, done in a plain water bath. It seems rather magical to gently brush the plate and have an image begin to emerge. It reminds us of the movie Blowup.

Mariann is a really excellent printmaker and generous teacher. She has several videos on various aspects of printmaking on her site. I never fail to get some new insights from working with her.

We had one intensive day in the studio. Mariann produced 5 plates. Some worked better than others. She specifically brought various kinds of photos to experiment with the process and push it to its limits.

The first step is always to make a transparency of the photo which is then used on top of the photo sensitive plate. Mariann immediately thought of adding marks on top of the photo with sharpie pens. What a great idea!

Some of her images were quite mysterious and abstract. This, a close up of a cactus plant, looks to me like something Georgia O'Keefe might have done

The time passed quickly and before we knew it the ladies had left, heading home via the Loire Valley. I would really like to live much closer to Mariann, as I enjoy her fellowship and company so much.

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I have decided to keep this blog as it has been over the last few years, a kind of report on our lives. I created a new space for my artistic endeavors. You can visit it via the link in the right hand sidebar if you would like.

All about baby...

This week we welcomed a new member into our family. Zinnie Lyse was born in Paris early on Tuesday morning, February 7th. She is a big girl, weighing 9.25 lbs (4.2 kilos). Rick and I put our last client of the week on the train Monday morning and drove on to Paris. We had the whole week free, which is unusual. A few hours after we arrived at Emily's house she went into labor. It was all so conveniently arranged!

Above you see a photo of the Parc de Sceaux, with Quinn riding his bike and Jos pushing his stroller (I suppose for when Quinn gets tired, which he never seems to do.) Emily and her family took a nice long walk here on Sunday afternoon. This beautiful urban park, located just south of Paris, not far from Emily's house, was the location of a long winter stroll taken by the whole family three years ago, the day before Quinn was born. No one had been back since. I suppose, then, that it has become a kind of tradition to visit just before giving birth.

All went very well with Emily and the baby. The labor was long but not difficult and when the time came for the actual birth it apparently went more quickly than the nurses at the clinic had ever seen before! Despite her large size, Zinnie simply slipped out.

I think we'd all forgotten what a perfume of paradise little babies bring along with them when they arrive. We all found ourselves whispering, trying to hold on to that angelic feeling surrounding us. Emily, who gave birth completely naturally was tired but recovered so quickly. She had no problems at all and of course the baby is just perfect in every way.

Her little hands remind me very much of Quinn's when he was born. I see differences in their faces, but they certainly have that family resemblance.

Uncle James did not want to miss the fun. When Emily went into labor we called him and he immediately booked a flight from Birmingham. Despite a big Air France strike, with all other flights around the time of his being cancelled, his plane made it over the channel without a hitch. But that seemed only right, as for this birth everything seemed to fall into perfect place.

Quinn's first meeting with his sister was wonderful He was really quite amazed to see her. After talking about her for so long, I don't think he ever really expected her to exit from Emily's large belly. 

He was a little nervous with her at first, but he got over that quickly and soon wanted to see what she could do. He tried to feed her some bread and was positively amazed to hear that she doesn't have any teeth! He was expecting her to crawl, because he knows that's what babies do. He was very generous in sharing his toys with her, plopping down offerings into her lap. She didn't seem interested. Here he is offering his cheek to receive a kiss from her. She did not oblige him. 

Papa, mama and baby are all doing fine. Everyone is back at home now. Zinnie was born on one of the coldest days of the year. It was -14° when Rick drove Emily and Jos to the clinic. But everyone is staying cozy and warm indoors.

When we left the clinic on the first evening after meeting the baby, we saw a huge orange moon suspended halfway up the sky. It was dramatic and beautiful, and for us a moon like this will now always be referred to as a Zinnie moon. It looked a lot like the photo below, although I did not get my own photo of it. I borrowed this one from here.

Photographer Stefano De Rosa

Two days after her birthday Zinnie received these custom-made cookies from one of Jos' producers in London. He was he same one who sent Jos two gargantuan bouquets of forced narcissus for Christmas. So adorable and extravagant!

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Although I could have stayed all week in Paris getting to know Zinnie and playing trains with Quinn, not to mention visiting with James and enjoying Emily and Jos's charming company, we came back home on Thursday afternoon to warm up our house. We were a little nervous that our pipes might have frozen.

We all thought that winter might have forgotten about us, but it certainly arrived with a vengeance when it finally got around to coming. Europe is suffering one of the coldest spells on record. It has remained snowy and frozen for a couple of weeks, and longer in some parts. Days, however, often dawn bright and crystal blue. It makes it much easier to bear. If you enlarge the photo below, you can see lots of birds perching and diving through the sky. They seem to gather in large groups at the beginning of the day and always sit on the tallest roof tops where they can enjoy a view of the sunrise.

Rick caught this photo of me as I was just about to settle down on the couch for morning coffee. I love the golden light on these bright winter mornings.

Another reason to come back was to let Georges into the studio. He is madly printing up images for his April show in Paris. When he is in residence, I work at my table by the window upstairs. This is the same window where I took the photo of the birds at dawn. Later on in the morning there is lots of light streaming in. It is a pleasant place to work. 

What with all the excitement, I got very little art work accomplished. I made a few drawings and was dissatisfied with almost all of them. This one was the best of the group.

On Saturday evening our neighbor Anne came over for dinner and we set it up by the big fireplace downstairs. We are using this space a lot now as it is more difficult to heat up the big dining room. We positively roasted here with the big crackling fire.

Figuring it out...

What is more natural after spending a month drawing faces than to graduate to drawing whole bodies? So that's my challenge for this month. And it does seem a bit of a challenge, I must say. I really enjoyed the rather limited nature of a face drawing. I mean basically a few features, some hair (or not) on top and voila. You have yourself an image. Whole bodies, of course, present not only the greater challenge of getting all the disparate parts into a proper scale, dealing with fussy bits like hands (not so hard) and feet (harder for me) but then there is the whole issue of clothing, folds, wrinkles and all the complicated shadows they create. I mostly did simple line drawings in pen and ink this week. I worked much more slowly and more fiddlely than on the faces. It was difficult for me to allow myself to be abstract or loose. I'm beginning to believe that it's just not really me, as much as I like the liberty some of my favorite illustrator's take in proportion and placement. I myself find so much pleasure in trying to get the shapes and relationships true to the original. Which for me, by the way, are photographs taken from newspapers or magazines. I have an ever-growing collection. (Rick has to hide newspapers from me when he hasn't finished reading them as I tear out images I like without mercy.) I also like drawing from historical oil paintings. My art teachers always maintained that one should copy the masters throughout one's career as a very good exercise in discovering ways of visually interpreting form. I still find drawing to be a kind of meditation.

Following are samples of images from each day. The entire collection can be viewed here, although I really tossed away as many drawings as I saved.

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I have been spending a little less time etching these days, but that is mostly because our friend Georges is using the studio quite often to prepare for his show in Paris in April. I have had the opportunity to develop a couple of images for larger plates. The first is this one called Under the Big Top.

The second is called Lunch in a Paris Café. I haven't had the opportunity to experiment too much with colors, chine collé or other ways of printing these up, but I hope to have the time and space for that in the next couple of weeks.

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My printmaking friend Mariann Ellis (who by the way has just put up another wonderful video printmaking tutorial--she is very generous with her free instructions!) sent me this cute little book in the mail entitled From Colorado to the World and Back Again. It was initiated by Jill Bergman. She has sent out several little books like this (they are about 2 X 4") and asks that printmakers from around the world contribute a little print to put inside and then send it on to someone else. I have added my image of Girl with Cat and would now like to send it to another printmaker who would like to put any kind of print or stamp inside. If you are interested, please let me know, send me your address and I will mail it off to you right away, wherever you are in this wide world.

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It's been terribly cold in our corner of the world. Extreme weather seems to be the new normal.

We started the week out with a dusting of snow which quickly melted once the sun came up.

But we've ended the week with a real blizzard. In the space of just a few hours we are virtually snowbound.

To keep our weekend client warm and toasty, we set up her breakfas by our big fireplace downstairs.

Even with the cold, days have often been bright and crispy blue. Here the sun shines through the studio curtains.

Oil Painting

I've always enjoyed oil paint. It's so luscious and the colors are clear. It's lots of fun to push it around a canvas, and if you have the time you can rework it infinitely. Although it takes insanely long to dry, I much prefer it to acrylic which is more practical but just plain less beautiful. I had considered working in various mediums this week but in the end I didn't really want to switch to anything else. 

This is my last week with faces. I have drawn over 100 of them during the month. I found it such a wonderful exercise for myself to have a discrete focus. The human face is endlessly fascinating. At the same time, when you spend so many hours looking at just one thing, you do begin to get a sense for its structure. My two hours of drawing a day pass very quickly, and those moments have become practically my favorite time of the day. Next week I will begin with another subject and cycle through several media again.

I didn't do quite as many oil painting faces each day. They take a bit longer to accomplish. Here is a sampling. If you'd like to see the whole set, you can find them here.

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We have been spending quite a lot of time in Paris these last few weeks. We left home again on Friday to pass the weekend helping out and to celebrate Quinn's birthday. He turned 3 on Friday. When we left the house the sky was robin's egg blue and the day was warm like early spring. Passing through the forest of Montmirail, I had to stop and take a few photos of the sun filtering through the bare trees. It was one of those days that makes you want to sing.

By the end of the weekend it seemed that winter had finally descended on our corner of the world. The thermometer has taken a plunge downwards, well below freezing.

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Quinn had several birthday events. We participated in his pancake birthday breakfast party with his friend Lizzie.

 

We've spent the weekend putting together a new bed for Quinn, rearranging furniture, folding baby clothes, making bumpers for the cradle and recovering a couple of chairs. Never a dull moment!