Relief Printmaking at Ghost Ranch, August 2013

Belatedly, I want to write about this year's trip to New Mexico and making my dream come true about spending a week at Ghost Ranch. I had heard of the place as the home of Georgia O'Keeffe, but only in recent years heard about the conference center and classes there from a friend who has taught writing classes there.  She told me about the printmaking class she wanted to take this year, and invited me to go along with her.  Although the Ghost Ranch experience was much more than the class itself, I will stick to writing about the class for this post.

The class was taught by Laura DeLind, an anthropologist and artist at Michigan State University, known for her linocuts.  Her prints are usually in black and white and feature natural objects and whimsical animals.  In this class, we got right down to the business of carving linoleum with Speedball carving tools and printing the result with an oil-based ink on different kinds of paper.  While making the cuts was tedious, that part was easy compared to the actual printing.  Getting a clear and even image without smudging was the hardest part for me.  Here is our class on our last work day with our latest prints hanging up to dry:

Here are the linocuts that I made.  The black in the cut linoleum is the part that was cut away (I couldn't clean out the ink after printing), and the lighter gray is what made the print. In other words, you have to cut the reverse of what you want to print.  If using words, the letters need to be cut backwards.  That's a little tricky when doing fancy letters, as I did in the block on the lower left.  I'll let you guess what it says :)

 And here are two prints that I made.  The first was an exercise to use a border and words.  The second was an exercise of using patterns to define spaces.

The "Ouch" linocut could be used to make a funny "get well" card if a friend has an accident, but I hope I don't have to use it.

More later about the New Mexico trip and Ghost Ranch.

Recent Paintings

It's been a slow summer, as far as art productivity, but I have completed three paintings since I posted the first of the 24x24 inch canvases that I had purchased.  The Southwest influence has become more obvious in two that I finished and named after my recent trip to New Mexico.

This one, I call "High Road to Taos".  If you have ever been on that road, you will understand why I was thinking of that trip when this appeared on my canvas.  I love that road because it reminds me of a West Virginia two-lane road, but with red rock formations instead of tree-covered mountains.

This year, I was lucky to be in Santa Fe during the Opera Season and splurged on a ticket to see "La Traviata".  What a treat that was!  This painting reflects the brilliant red dress worn by Violetta as well as the turquoise jewelry worn by the opera-goers.  

In my last painting, I deliberately began with a different palette of blues and greens, but ended up with mainly the three primary colors.  As with my other paintings, I started by putting down texture on the canvas, this time using wrinkled tissue paper.  The painting took the shapes of the wrinkles.  I named this one, "Into the Light."   

New Mexico Vacation Journal

This year's vacation was a long time in planning and was a dream come true.  With some good companions, I was able to explore Santa Fe, Taos, and Albuquerque without the time constraints of past trips.  The day we spent touring Georgia O'Keeffe's home and studio in Abiquiu, shopping at Bode's General Store, and taking in the scenery around Abiquiu was one of the highlights of the week.  The mountain scenery on the "High Road" from Santa Fe to Taos was awesome, and the late afternoon return trip via the Low Road was just as memorable for the sight of the Rio Grande valley with its golden cottonwood trees.

About a week before my departure for New Mexico, I stumbled upon two treasures in my favorite local antique store. One was an old tin watercolor paint palette, which I was delighted to find to make a travel palette. I removed the original paint pans, which were very rusty, and buffed out the rusty spots in the cover and mixing pan so that they wouldn't contaminate new paint. Then I glued in empty pans and filled them with my favorite colors. I was tickled that I could get a combination of 21 half and whole pans to fit exactly in the palette space.

The second treasure was an old book called "The Pony Boy Riders in New Mexico".  The book is one of a series, somewhat like the more famous Hardy Boys, except these tell the adventures of some schoolboys who spend their summers with their guardian exploring the West.  Although I haven't read the entire book, the gist of this story seems to relate to getting mixed up in some battles between Mexicans and Indians.

Although I am usually reluctant to damage or destroy any old book that would have any value as a collector's item, the pages are brown, very dry and coming loose from the binding.  Also, I found the treatment of the Native Americans in the book to be offensive and thought that using what is left of the book in my art would be a better use than preserving the story.

My first thought was to use the pages as a basis for journal page backgrounds, especially since the odd-numbered sides of the pages were titled "In New Mexico" at the top.  I pulled out a couple of pages from the back of the book and experimented with that, but found that the pages didn't hold up very well on their own, so I had to glue them down to a substrate page before working with them.  I then used some tinted and thinned gesso to cover most of the words, leaving just "In New Mexico" clearly visible.  I also used stamps and copies of maps to decorate some of the pages in advance.

The book's cover was in excellent shape and I decided it would be fun to use it for the journal cover.  I cut down the center of the back binding and reinforced the edges before using my "Bind-it-All" machine to punch for the spiral binding.


My friends who joined me on the trip got a chuckle out of naming ourselves "The Pony Girls."  They made sure that I wrote each day about the highlights of our trip.  I also made a couple of watercolor sketches on the watercolor paper I had bound in the back of the journal.  When I returned, I inserted photos in the blank spaces to complete the book.






I know this journal will be a lasting keepsake of one of the best weeks of my life.

New Mexico Art Adventure - 2011 - Printmaking

Blue skies, snow-topped mountains, pronghorns, and chili peppers greeted and delighted the WV and Ohio artists attending the 2011 New Mexico Art Adventure sponsored by Shrew'd Arts and led by artist Amy Flowers.  This year's theme was exploring the printer's art, with inspiration from the work of New Mexico's master printer, Gustave Baumann.

Our first day was spent in Santa Fe, where we visited the Governor's Palace Print Shop that features a reproduction of Baumann's studio with his actual furnishings, equipment and supplies.  The wall with his arranged pigments is an artwork in itself.

The curator explained the process Baumann used for his woodcut prints and showed us other printing presses and examples of books and other material printed there.  We went on to the NM Museum of History which currently has an exhibit of pages from the St. John's Bible.  The gorgeous artwork and calligraphy of Donald Jackson and his colleagues almost took my breath away.

For the rest of the week, we went on North to Cimarron, where we were inspired by the beauty of the mountains and worked on our art at the Casa del Gavilan. With guidance from Amy, we began carving rubber blocks and making monotype prints.  We also spent one day in Taos where we visited a print maker and watched a chine colle' in progress.

We used Golden Open Acrylic paints as our "ink" because it is slow-drying and mixes well with other media.




Here are some of the prints I made using different techniques and papers.