We're in the Studio, Quinn's in New York

It's been a glorious week of blue skies, magnificent sunrises and quiet days. I never loved winter when I lived in California, but here it has become one of my favorite seasons of the year. I have so much time to dream and play in my studio, which is about all I did this whole week.

Meanwhile, Quinn the world traveler (he has visited 9 countries already in his almost 3 years) is in New York City while his father plays in an off-Broadway production of Fragments, by Samuel Beckett and directed by Peter Brook. Read a review from the New York Times here.

The theater and hotel are near Central Park, so Quinn is spending lots of time out-of-doors in the glory of a late New England autumn.

Jos has days free to explore the park with Quinn. Emily has been helping teach a workshop at the theater.

Quinn had heard about the famous dinosaur bones in the Natural History Museum and he was really anticipating this visit. He asked me before he left if he was going to be allowed to feed the dinosaurs. I told him the problem was that they have no tummies.

Emily and James have always loved their uncle Andy, who lives in Rochester. He is the youngest brother of their late father, who died when they were about Quinn's age. Andy has many of the qualities their father had, so it is no wonder that he and his wife Marsha have always been dear to them. When they came to see the show, Quinn took to Andy and Marsha right away as well.

Quinn is enjoying the sights and sounds of the city. He especially likes the taxis. He got his own miniature version. When taken to Times Square he did pronounce it as boring, however.

In the park is a children's museum where there are lots of activities. I loved this picture of Quinn making a little sculpture.

So wonderful!

Emily and Quinn fly home tomorrow and we will spend next weekend with them. Jos stays on until the end of next week.

***

I had an energetic week in the studio, beginning with reorganizing and cleaning the space itself. It took me two full days to break down the boutique (which I do every winter), rearrange my furniture, scrub everything from top to botton, shuttle books up and down stairs to make room for even more books and in general set the stage for a productive winter season next to the cozy fireplace.

I experimented with a lot more chine collé, this being only one of many we printed. It is a fun process that deserves a lot more exploration.

I have hundreds of family photos and I always enjoy making little portraits of ancestors, which I also indulged myself in this week. Not one of these folks is still alive today.

I continued on my nature journal as well, though finding nature inside rather than out.

Here is a drawing some of the shells I collected during summer outings.

Towards the end of the week we decided to drag our photo etching box out of retirement in our garden shed and try once again to make it work. Rick made this box to expose photo-sensitive plates a couple of years ago and at first it seemed to work very well. We really enjoyed the process, even having a class one summer. All of a sudden it seemed to go all wrong and we couldn't get our plates to develop correctly. We didn't change our process but the images were not turning out with any contrast. The plates are fairly expensive, about 10€ a piece, so after spending a tidy sum trying to get a good result and failing, we retired our box altogether. We assumed that we had a bad batch of plates, that they had already been exposed to light, but our provider would not confirm a problem on their side, so we just shelved the whole process. I did buy a couple more several months ago since they were on sale and I've had them in my drawer since. Georges, who uses a much more expensive and professional process than this one (you can see it here) inspired us to try again. Here's the process step-by-step:

You begin with a photo and create a black and white positive on transparent film.

This will be exposed onto a photo-sensitive plate with this box, which shines a UV light onto the plate through the transparency.

The plate is posed on a backing board, the transparency is placed on top and a piece of glass is placed over this and squeezed in place with clamps to hold the plate and transparent image together snugly.

The UV light must be turned on before the plate is placed inside and needs to sufficiently warm up.

The plate is placed in the box and left to expose for three minutes. This is more or less like exposing a solar plate, but faster.

The transparency is removed and a half tone screen is placed over the plate in its place and again exposed to the light, this time for a minute and a half. This adds the half tone dots which allows for better printing of dark areas, like in a newspaper before the digital revolution.

The plate is developed in clear warm water. This is a completely non-toxic technique. We can already see here that this is working! The plate is a good one...much to my pleasure and disbelief.

The plate is dried with a hair dryer so that water streaks from the development process can be eliminated. This is actually the trickiest part of the whole thing.

The plate is put back in the box for a few minutes further harden the emulsion for printing. The edges are then beveled to prevent cutting the paper or press blankets.

Here's the finished plate. We haven't printed it at all yet, as it has to rest for a while but we can more or less tell that it has all developed rather well. Hopefully I can show you printed results next week.

Another week come and gone. Holiday thoughts are starting to bubble up.

Enjoy your last days of November.

My Week in 32 Pictures

 dawn over Montmirail

we served 10 breakfasts this week

 blue bike outside the church

 sunny studio window

 

a  page from my nature journal

 the cathedral in La Ferté-Bernard

 the passageway that leads to the boulangerie in La Ferté-Bernard

 beet greens

 Mr. Crapaud

 window of the garden shed

 abandoned cabbage

 the last nasturtiums

 stocking up at the farmer's market

chine collé project step 1: paint the koschi paper with permanent ink

 chine collé project step 2: dampen the koschi paper carefully

chine collé project step 3: pose the inked plate and paper on the press bed

 chine collé project step 4: place dampened and spray-glued koschi on plate, glue up, towards paper

 chine collé project step 5: run through press

 mutabilis rose in front terrace garden on a sunny morning

 table set for Rick's birthday dinner

 a tiny snail emerges from the flower arrangement

 dogs were invited to church this week

 the local priest and his assistants get ready to say a blessing over all the dogs

 walking down our country road

farmer's gate

 seasonal colors

 a neighbor working in his garden

 local farm, ancient buildings

 empty nest

 little red pony in his green field

 Montmirail seen from across the valley

while I'm walking uphill, she's coasting down

November Blues and Grays

I remember when our friend and former neighbor Anita proclaimed passionately to us "je déteste le mois de Novembre!" We were surprised by her vehemence and at the time we all broke into laughter. I had never considered any particular month to be more or less vile than any other. She went on to explain that in November there is often quite a lot of fog and many gray days. She finds that kind of weather disorienting and a bit depressing. I had reason to remember the conversation this week as most of our days were overcast, chilly and incredibly uninviting.  As you can see from my opening photo, however, we had one notable exception. Friday dawned bright and cheerful. We practically leaped up from under our cozy quilt and raced out into our sunny day. One thing to be said for a spate of gray is that the contrasting day can be appreciated with almost religious fervor.

I took far too many photos and believe it or not, I have been very moderate in the ones I've actually posted. This forest walk, which I've blogged about many times never ceases to inspire me. This day was a particularly wonderful one and we found ourselves entirely uninterrupted as we traversed the ancient trail. The entrance-way is always so enchanting to me. I never get inured to its charm and magic.

Because so many leaves have fallen, the sun illuminated the pathway, making a colorful tunnel, which I call the rabbit hole.

The fallen leaves make for a pleasant surface to walk upon and add to the warm glowing atmosphere.

The colors of the leaves that remain are intensified and become incandescent in light.

Can you can notice the wooden platform, now in disrepair, at the center of this photo? There once was a treehouse in this large oak tree. The forest is a marvelous place for children to play. Safe and magical. When Rick recently had an old friend come stay with us, his two pre-adolescent boys spent hours here building forts and digging tunnels.

I found a sign along the route that expressed perfectly just how I was feeling. What a glorious day.

I collected a few leaves to take back to the studio from the leaf soup found on the pathways.

There are a few places along the way that open out to the countryside below. We sat down with our faces towards the sun and basked, enjoying the warmth, the sounds of the wind in the dry leaves, the birds singing in their hiding places and the gentle lowing of cows in the fields below. We didn't say a word. It was deeply relaxing, like a natural meditation and just those few minutes continued to nurture my soul throughout the gray days that again ensued.

I don't feel exactly like Anita, even on the grayest of days in November. I do like all the time that opens up for me, after our clients have left us. We do have one businessman who comes practically every week and stays at least three nights and sometimes as many as five. He's like our new roommate. He is very pleasant, not too chatty and appreciative of everything. He's also gone all day long to work, so he is certainly the perfect kind of roommate.

***

There do need to be strategies for eliminating the blues from wintery days and particularly nights, as days are short and evenings could seem endless. I nurtured myself in several ways these chilly evenings. Sitting next to a cozy fire, I re-watched the Marcel Pagnol trilogy: Marius, Fanny and César. These are truly classic films, created in the early thirties, just after the talkies came into being. The impact this story had on French culture and cinema can hardly be overstated. There are some lines that almost everyone here can quote by heart. If you remember, as I think I've mentioned here before, it was for these films that Alice Waters named her famous Berkeley, California restaurant Chez Panisse and even named her daughter after the main female character, Fanny. Here's just a taste from the first in the trilogy. The acting is, in my opinion, incredible.

***

Another way we nurtured our souls during evenings was to begin reading The Shadow of the Wind, by Carolos Ruiz Zafrón out loud to each other. Does reading/listening to beautifully crafted prose fill you with a sense of well-being, the way it does me? Here is the opening paragraph, a mysterious painting in words:

"A secret's worth depends on the people from whom it must be kept. My first thought on waking was to tell my best friend about the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Tomás Aguilar was a classmate who devoted his free time and his talent to the invention of wonderfully ingenious but bizarre contraptions such as the aerostatic dart or the dynamo spinning top. I pictured us both, equipped with torches and compasses, uncovering the mysteries of those bibliographic catacombs. Who better than Tomás to share my secret? Then, remembering my promise, I decided that circumstances advised me to adopt what in detective novels is termed a different 'modus operandi'. At noon I approached my father to quiz him about the book and about Julián Carax - both of which must be famous, I assumed. My plan was to get my hands on the complete works and read them all by the end of the week. To my surprise, I discovered that my father, a natural-born librarian and a walking lexicon of publishers' catalogs and oddities, had never heard of The Shadow of the Wind or Julián Carax. Intrigued, he examined the printing history on the back of the title page for clues."

The story takes place in Barcelona and the city itself becomes a major character. One thing I respect tremendously about Carlos Zafrón is that he has steadfastly refused to sell the film rights to his story, which has a tremendous following all around the world. He said in an interview with The World Book Club that he felt it would be a betrayal to his readership and that anyway he already had enough money. He got a standing ovation.

***

Of course the daylight hours are easily spent in the atelier. I had fun working with some chine collé this week, following a technique I learned from Georges. Taking a very thin piece of Japanese rice paper, I applied some permanent ink to the sheet, which was cut to the size of an etching plate. After the ink had dried, I printed the plate, this one a slightly abstract image of the Pyrenees mountains, and glued the paper on top, which added some abstract color to the image. I have been suffering over this plate for months, liking parts of it and being very displeased with other bits. This gives me a way back in. I intend to try a few more ideas, but I'm liking the direction it's going.

Another plate, my Paris street scene, has been on my desk for even longer. I've been trying to get everything the way I like it and it hasn't been easy. Originally I created it as two plates, one for all the color (applied à la poupée) and one for the black drawing. To apply the color this way takes at least a quarter of an hour per pass. Being a bit lazy and impatient with that laborious process, I also tried the chine collé technique on this one.

The color came out much more abstractly than I had intended, but in a way I like the freedom of it too. Georges, who arrives later today on a train from Paris, has bought me some more Japanese paper and I intend to try a lot more of this gratifying process in the coming week.

***

I also made some progress on Jos' website and logo which I was charged to create for him. He is currently in New York in his off-Broadway production of Samuel Beckett's Fragments and his manager insisted that he really DOES have to get his website done and have some kind of card to give out. We struggled so hard with an image to represent him, since the work he does runs the gamut from acting to directing, from slapstick to classic serious theater. He's a teacher, consultant, actor and director. I began with an image of his face and he really didn't like that, as no one expression could really capture the whole message. He requested a paper airplane as he liked the idea of the folding and the flight as a metaphor for his work; besides which airplanes are a personal passion of his. He also wanted a kind of abstract feeling. He especially likes the work of Paul Klee. My original effort had very straight lines, but he wanted something a bit messier looking. Here's the result we were all rather pleased with. A simple plane, mapped with a Kleesque pattern with lines distressed and a cartoonish flight line. It's fun and a bit mysterious if you don't have all the background, which is just how he liked it.

***

And finally my journal. (Somehow I thought I would have nothing to say this week, now I feel I must be trying your patience!) Another thing inspired by our sunny walk in the woods was beginning a nature journal to record some thoughts and images from around the neighborhood. I like this idea so much, although I generally lose steam. We shall see. This week, so far I haven't missed a day since i began it.

 

***

I took down my dried hydrangeas from the cellar and arranged them for the entryway. Our garden has nothing more to offer us until next year. I like the dried flowers, they feel so seasonal and they will last at least until Christmas, I hope, before I grow tired of them.