What I'm currently doing

I've been working on a new print for the past few weeks. It's part of my Paraguay series once again. The memories of my first (and longest) home keep coming back at me and sometimes I spend hours going through photographs and wishing I was there again, at least for a little while. My new print is about the zoological garden in Asuncion. One of my friends works there as a veterinarian and I've gotten a very special tour behind some of the fences last time I was out there, petting the back of a tapir and scratching a capibara behind its ears. (I didn't step into the Anaconda den). I did get spat at by an unbelievably lonely, angry and bitter solitary chimp that I can only pitty. It's a rather poor zoo, but I admire what my friend is doing there to improve the living conditions of some of the animals. In addition to the caged animals there is an extensive park for taking walks. The figure that ulitmately inspired this piece was the old blind beggar playing his guitar in the park on Sunday afternoons with the sticker on his instrument saying "Me siento un rey" ("I feel like a king"). Next to him sat a candy seller listening to him. I will never forget them.

Anyways, I was going to say all these things once I post the final print. My intention here is to post some sort of progress report for those of you who are interested in what I do and what process I go through to get to the final print. The two images I'm posting here are a watercolour sketch as a visual guide for where I need to etch the different tonal values (aquatints). The second image shows my copper plate at one of the stages of etching the aquatints with various areas being blocked out with asphaltum to resist the acid and not etch.

Steel facing plate

I got one of my plates steel faced at the print studio last week. That was a new experience for me and quite interesting to watch. I'm printing a fairly large edition with this plate (75) and after about half the edition I noticed that some of the aquatints were starting to wear down in one corner. I didn't want it to deteriorate more, so I decided to get the plate steel faced. I guess ideally you want to do that before you start editioning, but I thought better now than not at all. During the steel facing process, a thin layer of iron is plated onto the copper plate through an electroplating process. It doesn't change the image in any way, it just hardens the surface and therefore holds up longer to the printing process. Fragile surfaces like the aquatints can wear down during the repeated process of rubbing ink into the surface. I love the carbon coloured look of the plate, but it takes some adjusting with the wiping. I didn't quite know what tone to look for to know when I was done wiping, since I'm used to the reddish background of a copper plate.

Greetings from the Highpoint Center for Printmaking in Minneapolis

I moved to Minneapolis a few weeks ago and since September 1st I have a membership at the Highpoint Center for Printmaking. What an amazing facility it is! Spacious, super clean, well organized...it's a printmakers dream. Being new and being around so many professional printmakers is a bit intimidating, but I hope that'll change eventually. The staff around are super nice, so it shouldn't be too hard. We'll see where things will take me. I'm currently still working on some ideas I brought along with me. I'm hoping to make another one or two prints about Winnipeg before Christmas and I'm also continuing with my Paraguay print series. More about that later. I'm not quite ready to work with Minneapolis imagery quite yet. I think I have to get a little closer to my surroundings first before I can explore them in my work.

Exhibition in Morden

Awakening

Awakening.

Etching, screenprint, hand coloured.

30x30cm. 2011.

Spring has finally arrived and with it the geese have returned. In fact, it is the geese that are usually the first to herald the early days of spring. It was mid March this year when I heard the first two geese honking and flying by. It brought tears to my eyes. After the long Canadian winters I tend to get quite emotional at the first signs of spring and the geese in particular give me the joyous sense of awakening again at last. I had a sudden inspiration to make this print as a sequel to the Hibernation print from last year. I had a lot of fun drawing all the geese and the inevitable goose poop they leave behind to fertilize the fields. With this piece I had a lot less trouble with the photo etch of the figure and the textured softground in the background than I've had in the past. I guess I'm learning and starting to perfect some of the techniques.

Entre Itacurubí y San José

Entre Itacurubí y San José

Double Plate Colour Etching with Stencils.

40x60cm. 2011.

I finally got around to making another print of my Paraguay series. I'm hoping to extend the series a bit more in the near future so I can propose an exhibition in Asuncion sometime in 2012 or 1213. Entre Itacurubi y San Jose illustrates a stretch of Highway #2 that is lined with the most beautiful fruit stands all year round. Last time I visited, the merchandise was mandarines intricately tied to sticks, bags of oranges and grapefruit, pumpkins, gourds and peanuts glowing in all shades of orange, yellow and green. I remember a few years back when I came by the same area in December the stands were packed with pineapples and bananas. The displays, arrangements and colours are so inviting that you simply have to stop and buy some fruit. There is something about the lovingly arranged fruit in the makeshift little shelters seen only by the few passers by that strike a chord with me. To me they represent the abundance of fruit that we have all year round in Paraguay that I so miss in this winter stricken Canada. And so here you have another memory map of my dear home country.

Like Aregua and Asuncion, Entre Itacurubi y San Jose is a double plate etching. Since the two plates weren't quite enough to illustrate the vibrancy of the colours of the fruit stands, I decided to add two more colours with stencils. This is the first time I've really tried this technique and I'm very pleased how it turned out. I cut out stencils for the yellow and green shapes out of acetate and after I wipe each plate I roll some ink in relief onto the already inked plate (see the photographs below; the first two are the wiped copper plates with the relief roll and the last one is the print of the two). That way the yellow sits on the surface of the red-wiped plate and the green sits on the surface of the black-wiped plate. Then I print one plate after the other with exact registration and all four layers of colour blend together to create the image.

The Porch

The Porch.

Etching, Screenprint, Chine-Colle, Hand Coloured.

30x30cm. 2011.

Finally I can post the most recent print of my footprint series. I finished a proof just before my exhibition at Martha Street Studio, but I wasn't entirely happy with the piece and decided to continue working on the plate. After scraping back and re-etching Terry's face five times, it finally worked out OK. Instead of using the ImagOn photo process, I ended up screen printing a halftone image directly on to the copper plate with acrylic paint. The screen printed dot pattern was a lot more even than the developed photo emulsion, which never developed the image very evenly, overdeveloping some areas while under-developing others and therefore making an even etch impossible. Well, here it is. The image itself is of our happy days and on our dear screen porch in Winnipeg. The porch is out the back of our second floor apartment, right a tree level where the squirrel and the blue jay live. In summer it is such a lovely spot with some shade and some sun light. This is where we eat lovely dinners; this is where we sit for hours with friends enjoying company and a glass of wine; this is where we got married a few summers ago. This is a little corner where I truly feel at home.