New abstract work - Torrit Grey

Thinking back over this week, I have to say that -- aside from "mayhem on litho street" (see previous post) I had a really good art week. In painting we started talking about abstraction which is my preferred style after all. It was a very busy and somewhat stressy week at work again, but I feel better about my project now than I did before. And I think that make it possible for me to let loose a bit and actually produce decent stuff.

The two pieces I painted this week are both abstractions, but both were developed out of the grid exercises about which I wrote just 2 blog entries ago. Only this time I went beyond the grid and used it just as a starting point. I quite like the resulting images. The first one (Tuesday) was done in brown tones only.

The other one (Thursday) is painted using a very unusual paint, namely "Gamblin Torrit Grey", which literally contains all pigments you can imagine. I painted that piece with Linseed oil and Stand oil as medium, instead of my more customary Gamblin Galkyd Lite. It will probably be a much glossier piece. But the paint also moves differently with pure oil medium.

For instance the wide stripes where I just moved ink with the palette knife across the piece would probably look a different had I used a more lean medium as the layers of oil don't move as freely over each other. I really like the effect.

Now about Torrit Grey. Gamblin does something really cool. Every year when they need to clean the filter system at their factory they take out all the dust they collected over the year which essentially is a mixture of every pigment imaginably. But instead of carting this off to a landfill, they just grind the dust into new oil paint. The yield is around 5000 tubes each time and they make those tubes freely available to artists. Because the consistency of the filter dust is different every year, Gamblin Torrit Grey is different every year. But it is typically some form of gray. And to make things even better, there is a contest to make a painting with Gamblin Torrit Gray (+ white + black) and the winner gets a gift certificate for Gamblin products. I really like that concept, and it's one of the reasons why I think Gamblin is so cool (among the other reasons is the wealth of information about painting materials on the Gamblin web site and that if you ask a tricky question you might actually get an email back from Robert Gamblin himself). Ok, I stop rambling. Here is more info on Torrit Grey on the Gamblin Web site... Oh and in case you wonder, this painting was done with 2006 Torrit Grey. The 2005 was more reddish and I haven't seen the 2007 Torrit Grey yet.

Epitaph for my landscape print...

Epitath doesn't sound good you might think, and you are right. Yes the print came out really nice when I printed it in blue on Tuesday but I had planned to pull a few more prints from that plate on Thursday in white on black paper.

At first I thought I had issues mixing the white ink - the consistency just never felt quite right. I actually threw out the whole batch of ink after I put it way too many different modifiers and had modified it beyond hope. The second batch was fine but when I did the wash-out and roll-up on the plate I noticed right away that something wasn't right. At first I wasn't sure if I just imagined it because - after all - this was my first litho I tried to print in white and a number of things are different when you do that. For instance, you don't rub up in asphaltum (it's dark so you don't want that on your plate for printing white). Instead you rub up with the actual white ink, thinned down with lithotine. But that just didn't look right. Did I do something wrong? Hard to say, so I pressed forward. I tried to wash out that thinned down ink just as you do with asphaltum, but not too much came off. Weird. So I tried to roll it up (which when you do it right tends to pull up those areas of ink where you don't want to have the ink/asphaltum. When I rolled up the plate it appeared as if there was just no image. Very strange. Just a white surface.

I won't bore you with too many details. The short story is: the plate was damaged beyond repair and I could not pull a single further print from it. And the kicker was: the mistake actually happened on Tuesday already when I did the first print run! And I really should have known better. Here is what happened:

When you archive a plate so you can print from it again you roll up with printing ink. Then let that dry, then do a few more steps to archive the plate. However... you do that only when you print in black. When you use color you do NOT under any circumstances want the ink to dry on your plate. Well, I was printing in blue. I rolled up the plate and then put it away over night. I had it right in my notes that I should not do that, but with the stress I had on Tuesday I mixed up my notes and instructions or so that was the death of that plate. When I started to wash out that (dried) ink, I had to use a lot of lithotine and then also lacquer thinner and that damaged the gum mask on the plate. Or rather: it just eliminated it. Indeed, the plate rolled up solid white because there was - in essence - no image left on the plate. I had literally eradicated the print on the litho plate...

So that landscape which was so much work to draw will remain a (very) limited edition print. Sad. It probably was my best lithography so far.

A stony landscape print

Ok, it's a corny pun related to "Lithography". Sorry, couldn't resist.

I didn't post too much about lithography lately. The reason was that I didn't achieve much in the past few weeks. We started with color lithography, which is much more work. Therefore it takes a lot longer to finish a piece. Then I had my work issues, which also held me up. But I'm at a point where I suddenly have 3 prints either completed or almost completed. The first of them is a single color print that was just printed using non-black (blue in this case). I'm planning to also print it in another color, possibly in white on black paper. Maybe even tomorrow already.

I also have a new piece for my "different spin" series ready for printing. That piece is ready for printing for at least 3 weeks, actually, but as multi-color printing is tricky I decided to print that one (probably a 3 or even 4 color print) after I have successfully tacked at least one 2-color print.

The print shown here is inspired by a photo of an area near the Dolomites in norther Italy, by the way. It's printed in blue on gray and tan paper. I show both colors here for comparison and I also show the plate. Although this print came out pretty good there is still some detail lost in the process and by comparing the plate and the prints this is quite visible. It just shows that there is still much to learn in lithography (no wonder - it takes years to become really good in that technique...)

Grid update

A while back (at the beginning of my stint at SJSU) we did these interesting grid exercises in the painting class and I posted several times about these exercises. A while later I made one more of these grid pieces, but I never had the chance to post about it (partly because this piece has a ton of paint on it and it took a while till it was dry enough to handle it for photographing). And this photo doesn't really do it justice. I need to pull out my photo lights and do a proper photo session with this one, when I have time (yeah, like that's going to happen any time soon...). The format of this piece is 40" x 30".

The earlier grid postings were on:
January 30
February 1
February 6
February 10.

For some reason it's impossible to get direct links to some of these posts out of blogger. Sorry.

The Gap

Here is a new piece I painted in class last Thursday, again a landscape. But I tried to create a pretty expressive piece, mostly playing with red/yellow vs. blue/black. Originally I had planned to go for a bleak, depressive mood and the idea was to convey that also in a matte sheen of the painting. For that reason I switched to a wax medium (which makes a matte paint film) rather than the medium I normally use, which creates a pretty glossy paint film. But then with the intense red in the background, the painting is less depressing and downcast than I had originally envisioned. We'll see how the matte finish of the piece will go with that once it's fully dried...

Work-Life Balance

As I mentioned before, the last few weeks were particularly busy in my professional (non-art) life. The idea I had in my mind was to work towards this deadline this week and then things would ease up a little bit and this would be really necessary because I'm literally working myself to pieces right now. I don't want to go into details but let's just say that after a certain meeting today it doesn't look like the pressure will lessen soon.

So with that in mind I went to my painting class. And - surprisingly - I had a really good painting session and I produced my first piece in week that I can actually show to people without being totally embrarrassed... It might have to do with the fact that I was at least under the illusion the pressure would be off for a while. Or maybe because I'm starting to get used to sleeping much less than my body needs, day after day? Who knows. Fact is that I was in a really good mood and the landscape we were working on came out really nice.

The only thing that bugged me a bit is that I felt it was a bit too smooth and bland and a bit too pretty. I wanted to put something into the foreground. The problem with that was that it redefined the space in the piece. At first it was a vast empty space. The moment I put something in the front, the space shrunk significantly. In a first attempt to keep the space large I put in a sandy plain but that didn't really work, so I planted trees in front of that. That worked, but of course now the space was significantly more compact. It worked OK, after all, but now the piece was seriously out of balance. The sky on the top right appeared too heavy so I started to lighten and smooth it (Don's suggestion which was a really good one). But the piece was still out of balance. Don suggested maybe a single tree on the side. I was hesitant to do that for a number of reasons, but in the end I did relent, grabbed the palette knife and plastered the present tree (along with all it's - erm - decorations) on the right. And that actually works pretty well.

Now it's not a pleasant landscape any more but a dark symbolic piece. However, given my work situation I felt as if my subconscious had spoken... and I decided to call the piece "Work-Life Balance" (which is a term invented by large corporations to rub in the fact that you don't have a life and whatever else you might have is out of balance...)

Core meltdown

As I mentioned in my last post, the last 2 weeks were not particularly good ones. Yes, I had that show which was great but I was (am) also so overloaded with work that I have a hard time concentrating, am short on sleep (and short tempered) and generally pretty miserable. You cannot do art in such a state of mind I find. And if you try it will typically come out pretty badly. Or, even more likely, you'll make stupid mistakes which ruin a lot of work.

Case in point is latest lithography plate. Yes, there were not too many postings about lithography recently, eh? What's up with that? Well... I did 5 lithos so far and the last 2 didn't work out. It's as simple as that. The first three were mostly experiments and those worked great. But my self-portrait "chuck close style" totally "filled in" so I can maybe use that as a background some time, but not much more.

Then I did a landscape sketch using ink droplets which had the potential to become a pretty nice print. But so many things went wrong with that print that the only rational (!) explanation is that the plate was cursed. I mean really:

• the tusche didn't look right after "drawing" the image
  
• the first etch didn't appear to work
  
• when I did a washout before the second etch nothing came off in the rag which has never happened before and that freaked me out. But I decided to go forward anyway and it appeared to be fine after all.
  
• The rollup appeared to be fine but then it came out really weak (after like 12+ rolls)
• The second etch was a disaster because we ran out of etching solution and I really needed a stronger etch to start with but didn't want to handle the phosphoric acid without instruction as we hadn't made stronger etches by ourselves yet (and I didn't even know were the tools were to measure the strength of the solution)
• When I did my first test prints somebody walked off with all my proofing paper (by accident of course but that still is - erm - a problem when you are in the middle of printing)
• The I accidentially smeared a wad of grease over the whole plate
• I successfully mastered my first "wet washout" to save the plate (which is a pretty laborious and involved "rescue operation")
  
• Minutes later, right after I pull one successful proof I get a phone call (forgot to turn that darn cell phone off) and as I pick up I wipe grease all over the plate again.

That was the straw that broke the camels back. I did NOT want to go through a second wet washout with that friggin plate. I totally blew my top! I mean, how many things can reasonably go wrong in one stupid print!!! I grabbed that plate and started tearing into it - while still talking on the phone. A colleage in the shop tried to restrain me, grabbing my arm, yelling "no, don't do it". To the poor person on the phone it must have sounded like total pandaemonium up in the print room. I crumpled up the plate and that felt really good. The only thing that kept me from crumpling that darn thing into a big ball or folding it into an airplan and throwing it out the window was that the windows don't open far enough. Probably good because I might have hit somebody and this is a metal plate, after all (darn hard to fold too, even if you are acting in anger)

The only sad thing was that this was probably the best litho I had made in this course so far.

Chrome!

I am a bit behind with my postings and this posting is about stuff I have created over 2 weeks ago. There is also another decent piece that I create the same week and I'll post about that some time soon. However, after that, it went only downhill (see next posting). Work became totally crazy and unpleasant you cannot make art when you are under pressure (except when you are a printing plate). But I'll talk about that next time. Now for more positive stuff.

A bit over 2 weeks ago we did still lives with a chrome toaster. I created two "showable ones" of these and here they are. The first one has a bit of a blue tint. Let's just say that's from "Andreas' blue period" ;) It looks decent exactly as long as you haven't looked at the second one I did...

The other one, though, turned out pretty nice, especially considering that this was done relatively quickly. The fruit in the still life still leave a lot to be desired... maybe I should put potatoes next to the toaster as I seem to have a better feel for those...?

One of the intersting lessons I learnt from the chrome exercises is that you really need to tone down the whole piece a lot. Only then can the strongest highlights really do their magic. And when you put a strong highlight on at the end, then these highlights have a tendence to "float" in the image, as if they are not really part of the object. So you have to "anchor them down" into the object. And the way that is down is to brush (with a dry brush) from the darker area bordering the highlight into the highlight. But not from all sides, but from the two main sides of the highlight. So if that is a reflecting edge on the toaster, you'd brush in from the left and right sides of that highlight along the edge (as seen on the 2nd toaster)