Sunday, October 22, 2006

I'm in love!!

Amazing, I have good news again! I was very lucky and found a very good deal on a brand new Ettan Etching press that was was sitting in somebody's home for 4 years, and never even got taken out of the original shipping box.

The press is a real beauty!! Look at that shining black surface, the smooth roller, the perfect alignment of the press bed, the... Well, I guess I must be in love :) I haven't felt like that since I bought my Aegis Trident Triathlon bike oh soo many years ago... *blush*

It's a mid-side press, just the right size for my purposes. Larger than my small press that I bought on eBay a few years ago, but it still fits on my table. And it's not so heavy that I need a concrete floor under it (I can actually lift it). As I don't have space for 2 presses I will be looking for a new home for the small one very soon, so in case you are interested, get in touch.

The series of photos show how the press arrived at my place and the various stages of set up till it was throning on my table, fully cleaned up. I can't wait to use it!!


Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Los Gatos Art Association Juried Show

I have very good news today. I submitted two monotypes to the Los Gatos Art Association Juried Member show and one of the two got accepted :) This is the first time I got a piece into a juried show and I'm just really thrilled by that! And the funny thing is that I really liked the other piece (the one that wasn't accepted) better -- I almost didn't submit the one that got picked, eventually! I guess that's how that goes. The funny thing is that several people told me in the meantime that they like the selected piece better. So something is obviously wrong with my taste in monotypes...

Be that as it may, I now have another show to look forward to. It starts later this week and the reception is this coming Sunday. Below are all the details. I hope you can make it and check out the monotype in person.

Just as comparison, the second image on this entry is the other submission, the one that didn't get selected. Let me know what you think. Am I just plain blind that I don't see that the selected piece is obviously the better one, or do I have some other hidden hangups that make me prefer that one?

Here are the details for the show:
Juror: Dr. Arthur Stein, SJSU
Dates: October 19 - November 11, 2006
Location: Los Gatos Art Museum - 4 Tait Avenue at W. Main St., Los Gatos, CA 95030
Hours: Wednesday-Sunday, Noon-4pm
Reception: Sunday October 22, 1pm - 4pm
[map] [museum web site]

Saturday, October 07, 2006

New plexiglass experiments

I haven't painted on acrylic glass (plexiglass) in several month (see this post from half a year ago) and it was time to return to that medium for a some experiments. I always loved the warm radiance you get from these pieces when they sit in sunlight (which might be one of the reasons I'm also so addicted to glass work lately). Of course you don't always have sunlight... but nothing is perfect in this world, rigth? ;)

The idea to take several pieces on plexiglass and mount them behind each other is not entirely new, of course. There were Op-art artists in the 60s or 70s who experimented with that concept already. And just very recently I saw a very similar idea at a show at the ICA where somebody (forgot her name now) mounted transparencies of photos behind each other to create a multi-layered narrative. Also a very interesting idea, but I'm more attracted to actually painting on the plexi, in particular because the photo transparencies tend to take away so much of the light (which is something that probably could be fixed with some tinkering)

So, here are two new experiments with the idea to mount several painted plexi plates behind each other. The key innovation for me here is to glue the plates together using acrylic spacers so that you get one solid piece. This works great for smaller formats - for larger formats I'd probably have to glue a reinforcement stripe on the outside - or just seal the whole package (which would also make sure it doesn't get any dirt or dust between the plates). I mixed regular brush work with the pointillism style I have used for my earlier plexi paintings.

Thoughts? Comments? Suggestions?

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Some really good news :)

Today I have some quite unexpected good news: about 1.5 years ago I participated in a print exchange with the Florida Printmakers. For that exchange I made a print in an edition of 15. The idea of the exchange is that you send the 15 prints there and get 15 other prints back - randomly selected from the other submissions. Now, usually, you'd keep an artist proof of the print or at least a photo for yourself, right? Well, unfortunately I messed up a few of the prints in the edition and there was no good print left for me and I had to send out the whole edition, literally.

Once the stuff was in the mail, I wanted to put a photo of the print on my web site and discovered to my horror - that I somehow didn't have a photo of the last stage of the print any more. Somehow, I must have deleted the wrong photo when cleaning up or I renamed files so I overwrote the last version or some other stupid mistake. After searching and searching through my "studio" I eventually admitted defeat - the print was simply gone. And that is the reason why on my web site, you can see the print "Geborgenheit II" in just two gray tones, whereas the print in the print exchange was a three color (gray) print (+ a 4th color from the paper)

But here is the good news: today I cleaned out my email folder and moved a lot of old email into an archive. While doing that I got rid of a lot of older email with large attachments. Not without checking the attachments first, of course. And guess what I found: there was one email to a friend that contained a smaller version of the last stage of "Geborgenheit II". And with that said: I present to you, finally, 1.5 years late, the final stage of Geborgenheit II as it was sent to the print exchange. Ta taaaaa!

Glass update...

This is a problem every budding glass blower faces sooner or later: even if you blow glass only every now and then, the rate of production soon exceeds the rate of how fast you can (and want to) give stuff away to friends and family. Of course you don't want to just throw the pieces away (that comes later when you have so much that you really keep only the good stuff. Right now every piece is so precious you keep it is if your life depended on it. Well, what to do with the various glass flowers I created in practice? Well, make a bouquet, of course!


And in the process of doing that I discovered why it's not such a good idea to make spiraling stems like I did! Those suckers don't want to stay upright in the sand but turn every way they please... The other thing I learnt is that I need to
learn to make more delicate blossoms, not things you can use a war clubs. They are top heavy! Well, it's all a learning process :)

A little bit of print making


Finally I'm finding time to work a bit on print making again. I'm in the middle of a pretty interesting linocut (2-3 colors, still deciding on that) which is an update version of "a different spin". When cleaning up the inks I was using yesterday night I played a bit with monotypes and here is one of the results of these experiments. Does it show I had a lot of stress at work in the past few weeks? Or maybe this happened only because I was reading too much in my Edvard Munch book again...? Anyway - here it is. Called "A scream" quite appropriately, I guess.