Art Every Day

3×4 inch Mezzotint – first proof

There were a couple of things that inspired this print.

Robot Show at Boise Art Museum I saw the ‘All is full of Love’ video by  Bjork and was fascinated by the human features in the middle of the robot faces. It really coincided with my Eye image–I was trying to protray an organic, human element trapped in an artificial vessel. I started experimenting with robots with human elements, but that been done A LOT and tossed that idea for the moment. I’ve been doing some sketches on the Death Tarot card (which usually features a skeleton–the card signifies transformation and metamorphosis) so I have a bunch of skull images and drawings. This image just popped into my head–we all have death hovering as a part of our lives. It’s just a matter of time, isn’t it?

Be a little Outrageous – I always play it safe. Deep inside I actually do worry about what people think about my images, more specifically what my images say about me. I recently saw the ad that Lynda Benglis had in the November 1974 issue of ArtForum and I thought now THAT’S outrageous. I should loosen up a little! (not going to post that photo here. Image-google the artist’s name and you’ll know immediately what I’m referring to! Be warned, it’s a tad graphic…whoo boy) So, what I got out of all that: I shouldn’t worry about my art reflecting my thoughts and feelings, that’s what makes one image more interesting than another. And I really shouldn’t worry about what people think it says about me!

My husband has a favorite coffee mug that our son gave him some years back, but the handle is cracking so he stopped using it. I used it as a model for this mezzotint. My goal for this print was to gain confidence with the medium. The biggest challenge (for me at least) has been figuring out how to print correctly. I’ve got the scraping and burnishing part well understood, but getting the pressure just right has been a challenge. I’m so glad I took that workshop from Carol Wax because we learned a lot of troubleshooting that you just can’t get out of a book.

Here is the first print I pulled using a standard pressure like you would for etching, using 3 blankets–catcher, cushion and pusher. This scan doesn’t show exactly how the print looks, but I think you can see what I’m talking about. The blacks are weak, the details are muddy–you’d think that I messed up the plate!

Here is the same plate, same wiping technique, but I did various things to increase the pressure: Eliminated the cushion, cranked the pressure as far as I could get it and put four layers of dry stonehenge on top of the plate and the damp Rives BFK. Again, scans don’t really show this very well, but the difference between these two prints in real life is astonishing.

I just returned from a 3-day workshop with Carol Wax in Norwalk Connecticut to learn Mezzotint. For those of you that aren’t familiar with what a mezzotint is, it is an intaglio process that starts with a ground that is created by several means such as rolling it with a dry-point roulette or rocking the plate with a mezzotint rocker that creates 1,000s of tiny burrs on the plate. If the plate were printed when the ground is completed, the entire image would be black. The artist then creates the image in a ‘reductive’ manner–the burrs are scraped and polished back to white.

Here is my first print–I’m really happy with it. The image is 3×2 inches (not very big). It took 3-4 hours to create the ground using my 3-inch mezzotint rocker. Then, the image took about 2-3 hours to create, plus a little more for proofing and fine-tuning.

This one is the same print as the earlier post, but the ghost (where you run the plate back through the press again and pull off what little ink is left from the first pull).

I think I used every pencil I have building up the image on this one.

OK, maybe I’m obsessed. I just can’t stop working over my not-so-great prints! Here’s another couple I did this evening that I’m just tickled over…

Here’s the original two color monotype of my spotted vase that I’ve done so many times.

And, the enhanced version.

A fairly distorted cocktail (don’t they look like that by the end of the evening? Hmmm. Hope not!)

And, one that’s a little more fun!