remembering san francisco

It’s been nice to be remembering my time in California last year, while I’ve had the Fog and Fault-lines exhibition on at Megalo Print Studio + Gallery in Canberra, and as I relate to the audience here my experience of the residency there.  While the works from the residency focused on the physical and natural environment, I was of course also interested in observing aspects of culture and politics etc, especially while I was travelling after the residency and spending more time in towns and cities.  So this week I’ve  been working on a new/old project, that I have had in mind since then but is only now starting to take form.  I’ve kept a San Franciso Chronicle (October 26, 2011) and various leaflets that I collected from the Occupy Camps in Berkley and San Francisco, and am planning to recreate them to produce a print as part of Megalo’s Megablah project.  So far I have made a wood engraving, based on the main photo from the Chronicle’s front page, and printed them on kozo paper, but that is only a part of the overall image, so stay tuned for more…

more natural characters

 

 

It is now a full month since my time at Fiskars Village Artist Residency in Finland.  It’s been a busy month of travel and seeing new things, but now I’m back in Australia (and back to winter), and busy with installing Fog and Faultines at Megalo Print Studio here in Canberra.  With all of that, four feet, the tumblr site for our residency project has been a little quite, but not any more.  The major outcome from the residency was a set of drypoint prints made collaboratively between myself and fellow resident David Wills, titled Natural Characters.  We are planning to upload all of these images to four feet, one per day over the next month or so.

more prints

 

 

The end of our residency here at Fiskars is looming rapidly, and so we have been working pretty solidly to try and get things done before our open studio show on Friday evening.  We have both been working on our various individual projects, like my little set of wood engravings, and Dave has been uploading new photo’s to Turnstile’s Shootin’ Gallery.  As well as all that, the main piece we are aiming to show we be a grid of 32 drypoint prints (with the odd relief printed collograph in there too), with each of us having contributed half the prints.  This is Dave’s first foray into printmaking since undergrad, so I’ve been helping him with all the inking and wiping a project like this entails.

Being on a short term residency in an unfamiliar place can call for some new approaches to things.  The ink I ended up with, was a Graphic Chemicals ‘Stiff Black’ etching ink.  It’s ok for wood engraving, but not nearly as foolproof as litho ink.  On the other hand it is way too sticky for wiping an intaglio plate – especially when you have been using the one piece of tarletan for way too long!  Lacking any plate oil, or ‘easy wipe’ compound, I’ve been adding a bit of the cheep oil paint that I picked up in the discount variety store in Karjaa one day.  I bought a little tube, not knowing what for, since there was a colour that matched the Falu Red colour of the houses.  Makes my black nice and warm.

Lots more prints to pull tomorrow, so I’d better get to bed.

If you happen to be in Fiskars this Friday (29th June) in the evening, 18-20, then do drop by at the Artist in Residence house to see the whole set!

 

 

open studio

Lucid Art Foundation hosted the open house and studio day this past weekend here at the JB Blunk residency.  It feels like the climax of artistic activity, since it was my chance to show what I’ve been doing.  Of course there are still a few things I want to finish in the little time left. I didn’t really manage any pictures of the crowd, since I was too busy talking and doing print demos then, but here are some from my installation.

 

Thanks to everyone who came along!

 

four weeks already

Today marks the four week mark, here at the JB Blunk residency, and I’m feeling very much settled in.  Not going to write a long post here today, but I’ve just posted some photos of work in progress to the residency blog here.  I’ll be posting to the residency blog as well as here over the next month.  Be sure to check out the older posts as well where you will see images of previous artists work as well as photos of the house and environs.

This is the wood workshop next to the studio.  On the table is a series of slices of thick pine bark, being prepared for printing from.

I’m off to California (but not yet)

The good news keeps coming. I’ve just been selected, along with three other artists, for the J.B. Blunk residency in Inverness, Northern California. About an hour and a half (by car) north from San Francisco apparently. I will have two months to live and work at the home and studio built by the late sculptor J.B. Blunk, set amongst nature reserves and hills. It looks fabulous. Plenty of pics and other information is on the residency web site. I will be there in August and September, 2011, so plenty of time yet to organise some other activities as well while I am over there. There seems to be plenty of interesting arts projects and organisations in the San Francisco area so I’m going to try and spend some time there too. Of course I can’t stop researching the area now and checking it out on google maps. Very excited to realise I’ll be seeing Redwood trees! (Look here for some great pictures of Redwoods – especially if you follow the links to trails at the bottom of the page – the closest to the residency is probably “Roy’s Redwoods”). As it happens there has been a poster of a Redwood from National Geographic magazine pinned to my studio wall for the last six months or so – fate perhaps.  I’ve stitched up a photo of my studio wall, with the Redwood poster on the far left.