Ink Oxidation

Detail of print - Searching.

Edmonton is known for being extremely dry in winter. (Before we finally invested in a humidifier, the humidity in our apartment was down to 10%). Along with the dryness came an unforeseen problem with one of my prints (Searching). A few days after printing part of the edition, I noticed that my ink looked more brown than black; also, most of the lines lost their crisp form and looked like they were bleeding a bit (see short vertical lines). Instead of putting the prints between flattening boards right away, I let them air-dry to keep the thick and raised lines intact without squishing them down. Now I know that black ink, when it's quite thick on the paper and dries too fast, can oxidize and turn a dark rusty brown colour with a kind of iridescence. My initial response was dismay: a whole day's work lost! However, there are solutions to the problem. To take care of the oxidation, simply spray a thin layer of a drawing fixative spray, more like a mist, across the surface of the print and the oxidation disappears instantly and permanently. To prevent it from happening in the first place, I've seen people put a sheet of glassine over the freshly printed prints in the drying rack, which prevents the ink from drying too fast. Lesson learned.

Falling

Falling
Double-Plate Etching, Chine-Collé. 
60cm x 30cm. 2015. 


I just finished the fifth and last piece in my grieving series (for now). That does not mean I'm done grieving, but I want to move in a different direction with my work at the university. In fact, I already have changed gears and I've been working on this piece a little bit on the side, but I've refrained from posting any of my other work so far to retain some kind of continuity in this blog.

Falling is based on one of my first ink sketches from last semester that I thought had some potential to be worked into a print. It is based on a dream (more like a nightmare) about falling into a dark hole I've had and it deals with the feeling of loosing ground after the loss of my father. It deviates from my usual square format in this series; I doubled the square to give more of a sense of falling. Again I worked with photo-etching for the figure, for which I screen printed a halftone image with straight acrylic paint onto the copper plate as a resist template. The ink washes I replicated with soap ground and the grey patterning is line work with a little bit of aquatint on a second plate that I print on top of the black.
That's it for now. I'll post some of my experimental pieces soon that might thematically lead to my thesis work in the future.

Renewed Canada House in London Opens

Manitoba Room

Canada House, London

Yesterday was the royal opening of the revitalized Canada House on Trafalgar Square in London. After reading an article in the Winnipeg Free Press about a beautiful handmade oak table by J. Neufeld in the Manitoba Room and seeing a list of artists (I among them!) that are part of the Manitoba Room (see last paragraph in the article), I searched for images to see if my prints might be in any of the photographs from the opening. I was lucky and found one photo with My Winnipeg IV in it on the official Canada House website. There is an article about the art and design in the building as well as additional photos of other artworks if you want to take a look. 

Many thanks again to L.A. Pai Gallery in Ottawa for submitting my work!

Are You There?

Are You There?
Double Plate Etching, Chine-Collé.
30cm x 30cm. 2015. 

What happens after death? That eternal question will probably never get answered, and yet, I keep asking it. As part of the series in which I grieve the sudden loss of my father, I made another piece. (I'm also working on other pieces at the moment, but I'm not quite finished with this series yet).
This piece is a combination of two earlier prints from last semester. In a fluke experiment in which I combined two unfinished pieces a few months ago, I got an interesting proof, which I discarded as 'not what I wanted' at the time. After I had considerably altered both plates, I looked back at the proof and thought it was one of the most interesting pieces, so I decided to recreate a similar image to that lost proof. And here it is. This is a two plate print, printed on a warm toned Asian paper (Honen). One plate is black with the figures and the washes in the background. The second plate is a fine line pattern that I printed on top of the black in a lighter grey. (The lines are sitting raised on top of the black, which unfortunately isn't really visible in the photograph). The subtle lines and patterns are a kind of trace or presence that permeates everything, the body and the spirit. I find it hard to put into words what I am trying to portray in this piece, because I've worked more intuitively than I usually do. I'm experimenting with two different kinds of visual language (the washes or larger solid areas with photographic work, and the hand-drawn patterns and line work) and overlap both of them. This is my first tentative approach of layering imagery, which I find quite difficult to do, but which I've also wanted to try for a long time already, because layering images is so inherently part of printmaking. I like it and I hope it'll lend itself to my future work.

The Project Space - Julio Valdez Studio

Two of my prints, Waving Goodbye and Return, that won the 'Best in Show' award last year at the 4th Biennial FootPrint International at the Center for Contemporary Prints in Connecticut are currently part of a selection of this exhibition at The JVS Project Space in New York. The show runs from Jan. 18th until February 3rd.

Cover Images

Since Monday I'm back at the university and my second semester of my MFA has started. I'm in the early struggle stages of developing some new ideas. I've been gathering some books and reading materials and I have jotted down possible image ideas in writing, but I always have such a hard time picking up the pencil and starting to put my ideas into images on paper. Hopefully I'll have some new work to show soon.

In the meanwhile, two of my artworks, one earlier painting and a more recent print, have been featured on two publication covers recently: Winnipeg (2006) is on the cover of On Manitoba, the University of Manitoba Alumni Magazine, Fall 2014, and My Winnipeg III (2012) on the cover of the University of Manitoba Press Catalogue, Spring 2015.

WHERE Magazine - Artist Profile

WHERE Edmonton (Magazine) printed an artist profile about me. Fabian Flintoff, a board member at the Harcourt House Arts Center, met with me for an interview and to look at my prints a few months ago. He wrote the following piece which you can access online here or see image below (click image to enlarge).