Table of Contents

Reflections

Bootcamp model: Roy
Self portrait as muppet
Something royal
Quite the juxtaposition

I think the BootCamp(see Supplementary Material) I attended helped me be looser with the core exercises in this section. I channeled all my ‘precision’ and ‘tightness’ towards that, and could then let chaos run amok in my self-portraits. What fun.

I had very little focus here. Looking back, my approach seems to be experimentation with little regard to what the outcome could have been. Perhaps my dissatisfaction with these works leads out from this.

Perhaps I just had too many irons in the fire this spring, along with my job, and that got in the way. I think if I were to dedicate a much longer period of time to this I might get somewhere I liked, but I don’t know if I would want to do so.

Research

I went down many rabbit holes during this section, as I watched all of “printmaking youtube”, read many articles, and skulked through all of printmaking Instagram. But, honestly, little of it seems to have settled into my brain and I can’t really point at anything that was useful.

I did learn that other types of printmaking are definitely not my thing. Lithography is mind blowing, and photographic techniques are just too many process steps — Too much like work. I considered leveraging cyanotype, but set that aside for another sunny day.

Exercises

Material Tests: Oil

heavy paint test
thick paint creates interesting contact texture
Palette as printing surface. Tape to help control registration
Post-printing, interesting transparency effects
Second printing picks up interesting patterns from the surface.
Testing carving the paint away using a plastic tip
Textured paper produces unsatisfactory results
Using cardboard to create patterns
printing on Duralar to play with transparency. Dislike texture
Using Duralar to create a smeared texture
Testing transfer from duralar to paper. Very interesting

Material Tests: Acrylic/Gelli Plate

Gelli plate image transfer
Oil on acrylic background
accidental abstraction

Exercise 3.1: Quick self portraits

This exercise seems designed to loosen me up and get me ready to make bigger moves in later exercises, rather than tightening up and getting too precise. The one-minute time limit per portrait had me breaking down any sort of complexity. Leveraged my phone camera to capture reference.

A selection of quick ink portraits

Exercise 3.2

oil stick
print & paint over
layering

I seem to have gotten hung up on a single one of my sketches. I enjoyed the process of layering, though it takes a lot of time.

The oil stick print puts me in mind of Latin American communist propaganda.

Exercise 3.3

Muppet Man
Carving with a plastic tip
Oil pastel over paint remnants
Layering!

Layering steps (not intended, but really should be exercise 3.4 I guess)

Goopy paint and scratching
Oil pastel reprint
Oil stick final layer

Exercise 3.4

Royal transformation
Using paint sticks to draw ontop of print

Haunted
In the assignment, I had a piece of paper to assist my printing onto tissue paper. This paper picked up paint that bled through, and created its own print. Going back in with paint, fingerprinting instead of using brush. Results are a bit haunted.

Supplementary Material

Collaboration? Submission? Something

  • A mutual on insta, @rachaelbarns.art, put out a call for collaborators, as they brainstormed and designed an installation piece to be hung along a trail in Norfolk. Their theme was the four elements, and something about her presentation sparked my imagination. The following words spilled out, as my mind filled with a winter storm:

    It yet burned
    The memory of storm, and lightning; of crashing thunder. Still raw yet bound in cedar and defiant living root.
    Spring will swallow these wounds in new grown bark.
  • Rachael then embroidered these words, and hung them up as part of a triptych of other people’s voices.
    https://www.instagram.com/p/C6gIUTSswdC/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
  • The project has since been accepted to be shown at @unconsumed.theshoefactory
  • Very exciting and fascinating to watch the project come together. I continue to take notes of my own ideas that might work as a larger project. There is a goal here.

Venice Biennale, and Corporate Creatives Art Auction

  • OCASA is working to organize a trip to the Venice Biennale. I haven’t been to Europe (for non-work reasons) since I was 13. If I can manage it, I’ll go. I wonder if my husband would want to tag along, or if he would just be bored as I wandered around with the other students?
  • Last fall I organized a “Corporate Creatives” group at my office. There are about a dozen of us, in a wide variety of practices. Looks like we’re going to try to organize an art auction (of self-made) works for the company’s charity drive in the fall. I debate between developing one of my plein air sketches into something finished, or a portrait of the winning bidder. Both require me to spend the summer practicing, but I’m game either way.

What is the opposite of Carrot People?

Time management is not always my strong suit. When I read that part 3 was about self-portraiture, I figured I’d sign up for a workshop on portraiture. I didn’t consider just how much work I’d be taking on, but so it goes. The BootCamp was run by the artist Arthur Gain (@arthurgain).

I like the realism in Arthur’s work and have followed him for a long time. He is ‘academic painting’ adjacent, which I don’t find terribly interesting, but there is a life to his paintings. Not sure how to describe it?

Anyway, as I’ve been thinking about a future project around identity and figure painting, I wanted to reground my fundamentals, I figured this was a good place to start. I have learned a ton.

All references are provided in BootCamp materials.

A few sketches, in no order. Some much better than others. holy cow have I been learning a ton

Plein Air in the Cold

Spent March break a few hours north of where I live. We rented a cottage on a frozen lake, and I brought my travel easel. Very enjoyable, but again I was reminded that oil paint doesn’t work well in subzero temperatures. Also, snow gets into the paint and causes strange texture effects.

All very enjoyable, and I really like the ‘sunlight on snow’ effect I captured in one piece. I think I want to develop a work from this sketch.

The freezing temperature, and the changing light, really forced me to work quickly.

Dress shirt jellyfish

I attended a gallery opening for a local textile artist (@susan_avishai) who creates works from recycled clothing. She had a series of altered dress shirts, and various jellyfish-like sculptures, which collectively planted the following image in my mind.

This work would use a shirt and tie from my first job in finance (yes, I still have them), and turn them into a consuming jellyfish creature. Cloth and cords would form hand-dyed tentacles, pulling from my mother’s textile work. Various portraits embedded in the tentacles would be the captured prey, conforming the imagery into business ID-cards.

There are too many ideas in this, I think, and I certainly don’t currently have the time. But it is fun to think about as it hangs (in my imagination) from my backyard tree and sways in the wind.