New experiments

It was a long weekend and you might expect that I got a lot of art done. Well, not quite, because I am still very busy with setting up my show. But now, finally, most things are taken care of. What remains is mostly sending out invitation emails to those people who didn't get a post card (probably Wednesday) and then hanging the show on Friday. As the reception is almost a week later, that gives me plenty of time for everything else that may come up.

And I did do some art work. Actually I worked on two things. First of all did some monotypes again. I like this "painterly printmaking" as it is sometimes called, because it achieves interesting effects you cannot get easily (or not at all?) with normal painting. Monotype, in essence, is a one-of-a-kind print. One way to do a monotype is to paint not on canvas but on a metal or plexiglass plate. Then put paper on the plate and run both through a printing press. Running the plate through the press definitely modifies the painting so this is a one-time print. The remaining image on the plate can sometimes be printed a second time as "ghost" image. As the name suggests you get a much weaker impression. But you can paint over the ghost and incorporate the first painting into the next monotype and make a whole series of pieces this way. That much for theory.

I experimented a bit with oil paints and hand-transfer (meaning I didn't use a printing press but just rubbed the paper with a baren) on watercolor paper. The results were varied, but one piece came out quite interesting. It is shown on the left.


The other experiment I did this weekend has to do with the medium I used a lot in the past year: burlap. Many years ago I once saw a painting on canvas that was not stretched on normal stretcher bars but was stretched inside a frame using string that went through grommets in the fabric. That idea stuck in my mind for years now and finally it clicked that I had to try this with burlap and the earth tone oil paints I'm using. But first I had to figure out how to do this stretching technique. I needed to try building a prototype. The picture below shows the result. It came out relatively well, I think.

I used burlap thread, for obvious reasons. The outer frame consists of 4 regular stretcher bars. Ideally, this would be some different (aged?) wood. And there are multiple possibilities for attaching the thread to the frame: Here I just wrapped it around the frame, but I could also use hooks or screw-eyes inside the frame and string the thread through there. Many many possibilities. When I have some more time I sure will try some of them out. In the meantime... here is what this prototype looks like. I noticed that there are a lot of tricky problems to solve to get a well stretched piece of fabric this way. I guess there is a reason why this isn't done all the time ;) also it's really quite a lot of work to put these grommets into the fabric. But the effect is really neat.