My little helper

Where would I be without it? $0.99 from Bunnings, the ubiquitous Australian DIY store, and it's great: a little cork sanding block that handy people wrap with sandpaper to help them get into hard-to-reach places... I use it by wrapping it with strips of scrim (tartalan), telephone-book-paper or tissue paper, to polish up my plate. Because I get arthritis in my hands I often can't grip small things for long, so soft pads of wadded scrim are a nightmare. Wrapping the material tightly around the sanding block enables me to polish just the surface of an etching plate, without the material being pushed into the lines and wiping out too much ink. Naturally this wouldn't be suitable for all prints, but for the plate I'm working on at the moment it's ideal because I get a nice clean surface - no plate tone! - without the pain...


This is the naked sanding block...












Now it's wrapped in telephone paper, to keep it clean, before I wrap other things round it to work with

In Memoriam

I was a trifle disconcerted this afternoon, returning to printing that edition (32 down, only 8 to go!) after a morning having my hair cut and talking Focus business with Ann in town, to find a small, very dead, grey mouse paws down in my paper bath. I was about to push another sheet of 300gsm BFK Rives paper into the water when I realised the bath was occupied...

It takes a certain amount of effort to empty the big black tub: I need to wiggle it to the edge of the box it is sitting on, slide and tilt it gently over the edge and pour into a strategically placed bucket. Two buckets later and the tub can be hauled outside, empty, for a quick rinse round with the garden hose and then back into service!

Printing problems

Is there a collective noun for mosquitoes? Perhaps "a whine of mosquitoes"? I quite like the idea of a whine of mosquitoes, so therefore let me tell you that I had a whine of mosquitoes in my paper bath today. Clearly I rinsed out the paper bath and refilled it, but somehow every print I've pulled today has come out of the paper bath with at least one mosquito leg clinging to it.

Millipedes. Need I say more?

A laugh of kookaburras on the clothes line, mocking my efforts.

Arthritis. Getting older is no joke, especially when my right wrist - of course I am right-handed - is killing me, but I still have to print. Grrr.

[I've lost count and everything's stacked between boards for drying, but I think I've now done 20 really good prints for the edition]

Blogger lessons

I'm not good with technical things (or perhaps I should say that I don't want to get too good at technical things in case I have to start dealing with them myself), and so I had a sinking feeling when I opened this blog yesterday to discover that the right-hand side-bar had disappeared. It's not what you want to see...

I did all the right things: I cleared my cache, republished, discovered a cached version of the page via Google and replaced parts of my template with parts of the template from the cached version and republished. Again. Still no side-bar. So I joined the Blogger Help community, studiously read all related postings from other bloggers whose side-bars mysteriously disappeared, and only then did I post my own question.

I'm still very silly, because it transpires that I made a very simple and obvious mistake, only I didn't spot it! When I posted the picture of the little fish I hadn't edited it in Photoshop beforehand, as I usually do, and so it was too wide and pushed all the content from my side-bar way down the page because it couldnt' fit into its column. Doh! Problem now resolved and I've learned my lesson.

By the way, 13 good ones down, only 27 to go...

Three good prints today...

... hooray! And the faintest possibility of a book arts exhibition some time next year...

Close...

Remember how much trouble I had last time I printed from my PCA plate...? All the agonising about making the damned thing, and then I had to spend days chipping 'tar' out of the lines with a needle...? I have to say it rather put me off picking said plate up again and re-starting the edition, but needs must so I finally pushed myself into it yesterday.

And blow me! It took only THREE prints before my trusty loupe enabled me to detect the beginnings of it all over again. Three prints! So it looks as if I will have to clean off the damned plate every three prints with white spirit and a tooth brush if I'm ever to finish the task. Can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to it.

Little fishy

We take the dog for a walk on the beach most (ahem) mornings after we've dropped our daughter off to school, and usually there's some sort of treasure just lying there on the sand waiting for you to look...

Today's small joy was a tiny little fish, only 2 cms long, that shone so brightly in the sunshine that I saw it despite its miniscule size.

Imprint

Well, the wait is over... I got the September issue of the Print Council of Australia's lovely magazine Imprint in the mail today - with my print in the centrefold as part of the 2008 print commission! And it's a good photo of the print, too, which is no mean feat as the blind embossing on the plate makes it difficult to represent accurately. Fingers crossed that people want to buy it.

Round and round

When I'm suffering from a lack of energy and/or inspiration I take a look at links people send me or I look at Blogger's 'Blogs of Note' and sometimes, not always, I find something interesting! Here's what I looked at today:

A strange house perched on a small island, which I got from Joanna Goddard's blog, 'A Cup of Jo', which is one of Blogger's Blogs of Note this month. From 'A Cup of Jo' I went to Tina Roth Eisenberg's blog and found Eric Tabuchi's fun truck alphabet, and curiously she took me back to the strange house perched on the small island again, but not until I laughed at the 'How to be a good boss' pdf file from Number 17, which took me back to the 'How to be a good client' article on Tina's blog. It's all suspiciously circular...

ArtMarketBlog

Another thank you to that nice man Mr Heather because while reading a comment he made on artistbooks.ning.com (again!) I came across Nicholas Forrest's blog, and a very interesting read it is too. Not only does he like printmakers generally he also happens to like Torres Straits Islander Dennis Nona, whose work I love, so we have at least two elements of good taste in common!

I'm not spending enough time on the internet doing blog stuff at the moment, and I need to get back to it. I keep finding great things to read, comment upon, think about, do... but it's always a compromise between art and life. I guess I haven't done too badly this year so far: I made the grade for the Print Council of Australia's 2008 commission, and my bridge book was acquired at the Southern Cross University Acquisitive Artists' Book Award, and I've got a number of other prints in progress and a second book going down to Sydney for a show soon with a bit of luck. Given the fact that we're building a house and Michael was so ill I don't know that I could have achieved much more this year but today I'm still managing to feel a bit melancholy about the amount of stuff not done. I'm going to take the melancholy indoors, however, as it's freezing in the studio at the moment and I need to persevere with some perspective drawings of the possible interior design of bits of our house. There are some practical things I can do with my art that make a difference for the whole family and that is one of them!

Green Door Studio

Check out Green Door Studio if you get the chance. I was alerted to their existence by Robert Heather on the Ning 'Artist Books 3.0' online community, so I went to have a peek at what they're doing with the 'Combat Paper' project. This is a collaborative project by Drew Matott and Drew Cameron, working with war veterans, activists and artists to 'retell' the stories of people in military service by using their uniforms to make paper and then books and images from their experiences of war.

The Mother of all Fun

OK so this isn't strictly speaking about my art practice, but what the hell. I've just crawled home after my third day of papermaking with the 21 kids in my daughter's Year One primary school class, and I think that this evening I am allowed to have beer. Or gin. Wine's good too... I'm not picky, just emotionally and physically exhausted!

I practiced on my daughter and 9 of her friends during the school holidays recently, fresh back from the papermaking course as I was, and we made over 50 sheets of paper. I pressed them onto the glass of our sliding windows to dry (and must remember to clean the windows before my parents-in-law arrive next week!), and it was a great success. Goodness only knows what they've all done with the paper since they made it, as my lovely daughter has simply filed it in her 'making' box and it will probably never be seen again.

The kids at school had a great time, though. I made all the pulp up the day before and experimented with dying one bucketful a lovely crimson with cold-water fabric dye suitable for cellulose (or that's what it said on the packet). Consequently my hands are slightly pinker than usual. I split the class into two groups: 10 on Monday and the rest on Tuesday afternoon, and we made 4 sheets each: one white, one red, one red sheet decorated with pulled and drawn finger marks before the sheet was couched, and one pink sheet. They got to take everything except the plain red sheet home; we're saving one red sheet per student for a different craft project later in the year. And today we moulded fresh sheets of paper around various objects, ranging from a lobster-shaped cracker used for cracking shellfish limbs to shells and a couple of turnips and lots of shapes in between.

What I hadn't appreciated was the amount of before and after work I'd be doing. Never mind the frantic hour I had with the kids each afternoon actually making the day's work... it was staying in the class for two hours afterwards, putting up sheets of paper onto the windows to dry and washing out couching cloths, cleaning up water, and today pulling 40 sheets of paper very quickly during the lunch recess so that the kids were each able to have a couple of goes at moulding! Plus the several hours of preparation last Sunday making the pulp. In the end it was a lot of effort, but a lovely result with no outlay except for the electricity used to blend up the pulp. And the children had so much fun. In the middle of the whirwind of activity I didn't really see how excited they all were, but their teacher said to me this afternoon that they've talked of little else all week, which made me feel really good.

I do enjoy teaching. A tiny little part of me points out that if I could combine such crafty activities for children with my previous business experience I could perhaps make a little niche for myself running paid children's workshops, particularly in the school holidays. But is that what I want to do? And wouldn't it take away from my attempts to turn my fine art practice into something that generates a (small) living? Perhaps the truth is that I should have trained as a teacher in the first place and then I would get paid for doing such things, but back when I was in my twenties I'd not really encountered children before and didn't realise how much my older self would enjoy them... so it wouldn't have happened anyway, and it's not on the cards now. No, what I really want to do is to earn enough money through making and selling my art that I can pay tax! And if I have a little bit of time in between I shall continue to be delighted to do crafty things with children.

Double chocolate please, hold the optimism

I thought I had it all worked out there, didn't I? Ho ho ho. Luckily I have Mr Willis to help me, because otherwise I'd still be ignorant...

It turns out that in addition to ALL the other mistakes I made last week printing this damned edition, I used too much chalk when dusting the plate just before printing. The chalk has mixed with the ink and set hard on the plate. I thought I'd cleaned the plate off successfully every couple of pulls and didn't worry about the 'blackness' still in the etched lines because in my (apparently limited!) experience the lines often 'go black', but it turns out the lovely aquatint I put into the lines is clogged with a baked-on mixture of ink and chalk.

I'm currently experimenting with various solvents to see which one will break down the mixture so that I can clean the plate off properly and start again! And I've put some tonic water in the freezer to cool down so that when I've finished my nightly taxi service, in a few minutes, I can have a large gin and tonic, because I feel like a twit. I'm saving the chocolate I mentioned until a bit later on... when hopefully I'll have a clean plate.

The nice thing about Willis is that although he always gives me a quizzical look when pointing out my mistakes, he manages not to be a patronising bastard about it, for which I am very grateful. It means I only feel slightly smaller. Anyway, Willis is about to embark on a fun-packed trip to the USA and UK, where he'll combine putting work into an exhibition that has been conceived of by Julian Schnabel with not one, but two, artists' residencies, so good luck to Willis and let's hope that I don't muck anything else up while he's away!

Chocolate

There are times when nothing will do except chocolate and I'm sure there are as many men as women who would agree (although I haven't met any of them yet).

I'm STILL in the middle of printing my edition, which adds up to 8 days of effort so far which can be broken down as follows: 1 day of easing myself into it, 1 day of super success when every print I pulled was good, 1 day of not achieving much because of family responsibilities followed by an evening in which I managed to pull 1 decent print and was about to pull another when I... managed to forget to put the etching paper on top of the plate and printed an excellent image onto newsprint. I went to bed, tired and frustrated. Unluckily for me, when I started again on Thursday I got it all wrong and pulled a series of awful prints on Friday, Saturday and Sunday as well.

It is only today that I've rediscovered my sanity, having worked out that of all the possible variables EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM needed some slight adjustment in order to get things back in order. What a pain it has been to work it all out... but now I have, I'd better pull off one last print before bed!

Personality DNA

I had fun this evening with a post I found on Jan Allsop's blog... I don't usually take much notice of personality tests but found the visual nature of this one very appealing, and slightly surprising since it concludes that I'm "very feminine", which is news to me! That's after doing a test a few years ago that identified that I have a 'masculine' brain with unusual (for a female) abilities in terms of pattern recognition, spacial awareness and map-reading skills which would, apparently, make me ideally suited to being an engineer. There you go!

My personalDNA Report

Getting ready

I can tell I'm procrastinating when cleaning the crusty saucepan that's been soaking in the sink for a day seems a more attractive proposition than snapping on my gloves, turning on the hot plate and starting printing my edition! But tomorrow I shall have no more excuses as I've torn all the paper, sorted out blotters and boards and tissue and dabbers and those little bits of card I use to put the ink on the plate. I've cleaned my work surfaces, put fresh water in the paper bath, mixed the ink and pulled the blankets into place on the press. All that remains to do is to make the damned prints, and it's the 50-odd hours of work in completing the whole edition that's bugging me, because I'm essentially a lazy creature and think that it sounds too much like hard work!

I had a lovely meet-up with Jan Allsop in a delightful coffee shop called 'Cocoa' on Friday, and how nice it is to re-connect with someone you haven't seen for ages but whom you suspect sees the world in much the same way that you do! We talked about all sorts of things, but in the end the conversational topic I keep grappling with, because it is at the core of my existence as an artist and many other things as well, is how to position my practice centrally when that seems to entail just the sort of selfishness that makes me feel uncomfortable, and which my mother told me wasn't anything to do with being a woman. I was brought up to do everything on the 'needs doing' list first, and if there was any time left once all the chores had been done then I might - if I'd been good - be allowed to do something for myself for a change. And I struggle with myself daily, usually because I don't realise that this is exactly what I'm doing, all too well! And then I find that I'm spending all my spare time moaning about not having enough time to do anything because of all the chores and I slip into being just the sort of boring person I can't stand...

So I'm trying really hard to stop myself, and came to the major decision that I'm going to reduce the amount of ironing and other disagreeable activities that I do, and try hard to do/make/enjoy some more art instead. Hoorah! Now that has been established so easily I'm going to procrastinate my way to bed.

Time flies...

... whether you're having fun or not, I think. I'm startled to see that it's over a month since I posted on this blog although I have managed to keep my 'daily drawings' more-or-less up-to-date. Things have been a bit tricky in the last little while, with Michael being very ill again, but hopefully we're over it now as we have a diagnosis and a treatment plan and Michael is responding well. Phew, because it was touch and go there for a while.

Anyway, from an art perspective a few things have sorted themselves out in my mind, the first of which is the progress of my PhD. You may remember that I am - allegedly - doing one. But if you're wondering what happened to it, I put it formally 'on hold' while moving over here, to give me a chance to settle into being in a different country and completely altering my life. Despite my good intentions and the intentions of my colleagues at UWE, however, things are not really working out. The sheer distance to travel to see anyone is a huge block to face-to-face communication, and electronic communications via email and the post-graduate forum have failed to take off not least because my UWE email ID was rescinded as soon as I put my PhD on hold! The consequence is that I have exchanged very little apart from vague Christmas greetings with my colleagues at UWE in the last year and I have had to reconsider my options. I should add, at this point, that I'm not criticising my supervisory team: it's obviously very hard for them to keep tabs on a candidate so far away, especially when that candidate wanders off for a year and says, 'see you when in 12 months' time'! So what's the answer? Well I think the answer is to move my PhD to a local institution, and Southern Cross University in Lismore is the likeliest candidate. I have explored the possibility with them, since I have links with Tim Mosely and Associate Professor Jan Davis, and the signs are encouraging although I obviously have to got through a formal application process. I am sad to be losing that link with UWE, which is a great place for visual arts, printmaking and artists' books but hopefully the professional connection will survive the cutting of PhD ties!

Meanwhile, if you read this blog and are interested in book arts in all their variety you might be interested in a new forum on the 'Ning' network called "Artist Books 3.0", set up by Robert Heather in Melbourne. Check it out and join us if it's up your street! I know that on-line networks aren't for everyone, but I find them incredibly useful (although I withdrew from Facebook about a week after joining up because it was such a pointless waste of time!!! Obviously I'm not sufficiently cool...), for a sense of community and as a source of information.

Up and down and round and round

I have had a bit of a rollercoaster two weeks, with good news and bad news. The high point was finding out that the print I've documented making on this blog has been selected by the Print Council of Australia (PCA) for its 2008 print commission. This is just great! The PCA exists to support printmaking and both established and emerging artists working in print media, and each year it commissions up to six artists to produce a limited edition print which is then distributed through a subscription scheme. I'm a member of the scheme myself, and by paying a bit more each year I can chose one print from the annual commision as well as receiving the usual member benefits. Imprint, the PCA's magazine on print media, is really interesting and the prints I've chosen through the commission scheme have been brilliant. You'll recall me writing several times about GW Bot, and although her work sells for vast sums of money (well out of my league!), through the PCA print commission I am now the proud owner of one of her prints. I am so pleased to have been chosen, and slightly stunned too. I really didn't expect it, given that I arrived in Australia less than two years ago... Now all I have to do is to produce six perfect proofs and an edition of forty perfect prints!

Last weekend was great fun: I attended Glen Skien's workshop on making boxes and books, at the Primrose Park Art & Craft Centre near Cremorne in the northern suburbs of Sydney. The building itself nestles in a wooded park, tucked down a steep and winding side road, and I was extremely glad that my friends knew where it was and were willing to take me there! I think the whole site used to be a sewage pumping station (and that the old stone building is the craft centre) and also a waste incinerator. It probably means that underneath the adjacent rugby/football/hockey pitches horrible contaminants are lurking, but it looks lovely.

I didn't realise that it was so far away from any shops and that refreshments weren't provided, but the lovely people who were on the course with me shared their food and were so kind. I had a great time and made new friends as well as running into a couple of old ones. How great, when I haven't been in Australia that long, to find myself recognising people when I walk into a workshop!

Susan Baran gave me a cheery greeting as I walked in, and it was lovely to meet her again. She is one of the leading members of Warringah Printmakers, where I attended Seraphina Martin's viscosity printmaking workshop last year. Susan was very helpful and gave me an impromptu introduction to solar plate etching, which I must make use of! Also at Primrose Park was Christina Cordero, whom I was thrilled to meet. She's someone whose name I seem to have known for years and I love her prints. I was very sad not to have had enough time to visit her just-finished exhibition at the Australian Galleries works on paper gallery in Paddington, but I just didn't get a chance this trip... Christina is a lovely person, very modest about her own work, and very encouraging.

The tutor, Glen Skien, is a printmaker and maker of artists books who lives in Brisbane. He's another modest, self-effacing person, and you would be hard-pressed to get much information out of him about what he does! But he runs the Silent Parrot Press as a vehicle for his own work, and it's beautiful. The object of the workshop was to show us all his method for tearing up and cutting out bits of prints - an ideal way to 'use up' duff prints or working prints that don't make the grade! - and collaging them onto book boards and boxes. So to begin with we made the boards and the boxes, and it was great to be able to make a hardback book; it's something I've read about but never attempted, and although the final binding is deficient in many ways I had great fun doing it and am inspired to do more...














It was lovely meeting all the people at the workshop, and I was particularly lucky to share a table with Sue Anderson who is a very talented and experienced bookbinder. I tried hard to find a good picture of one of her books up on the web but the only example I could find was this one, which with its cover of vellum and snakeskin, among other things, sounds fascinating and looks beautiful...

I stayed with friends in north Sydney, who were absolutely great, and had two wonderful nights' sleep. All was well when I got home, but on Wednesday the roof fell in as Michael was suddenly taken ill. Hopefully he'll be fine, but we've got a few tests to get through before we have a diagnosis and/or treatment and in the meantime I've fallen way behind with everything including my art...

Finally

It's Friday evening, but the crucial difference between this Friday evening and last Friday evening is that I've finished the damned print!

You'd have laughed to see the set up I had for soaking the sugar lift off the final version of the plate - I ended up with the large black plastic trough full of water balanced on top of my wheelbarrow, out in the car port, so that I could wheel the trough into the light as it faded (and also to help my back by raising it up a bit while I brushed off the stop-out varnish).













My nifty wheelbarrow setup!

Etching it was fun and games. I put on a killer aquatint and... left it in the acid for too long and bit it all off again. Second time around I was more careful and it worked, and then I had to cover up the aquatinted areas to protect them while biting the rest of the plate so that the embossed areas stand out enough when printed.



It looks a bit surreal, but this is the plate in the water as I finished brushing off the stop-out











Once etched - finally - it took a while to work out how to ink up the plate. I have to be very careful applying the ink so that it doesn't get into the areas that I want to appear as an embossed white-on-white texture on the print, which means careful application and removal of the ink. Having practised three-cloth wiping, I tried chalking the embossed areas and using tissue paper for a final polish-up of the plate surface to remove tone, and I think I've got there. It took half a dozen goes to produce a bon a tirer print, but I did it, dried it, packed it and couriered it off to Melbourne on Monday morning.

The final print - but this was taken before it was flattened so forgive the kinks in the paper!


I know it arrived safely so now all I have to do is wait to hear back whether it's been chosen or rejected. I must say that I have no high hopes of it being selected, partly because I have no idea of what other prints will be offered, but also because I can't seem to make any judgement about my own work. If I like it other people don't, and if I don't like it then other people do! Or at least, that's how it seems.

The Big Battle of Juanbung Swamp

It's 10pm and I've been printing all day, all week in fact, and I am tired tired tired, but what is worse is that I'm not much better off than I was when I wrote my last post on Monday!

I am having a huge battle with my print, although I guess I knew that it would probably turn out this way because it often does and it's partly to do with the 'artistic process' generally rather than my own specific quirks. I mean, how do you decide when something's finished? Or if it's 'good'? Or even if it's good enough? Each artist has their own point when they have to stop/recognise that it's right/realise that if they do anything else to a piece of work they'll ruin it. I seem to keep working and working and working at it until I just can't face doing any more. Along the way I will have had a few happy moments of thinking that perhaps what I'm doing is 'good' in some glimpsed-at way and more unhappy moments when I think it's all rubbish and that I should just throw in the towel right now. It's a bit of a roller-coaster.

The last few days have been a real roller-coaster as I've grappled with yet more unfamiliar techniques. Art-school aquatint theory says that it well-nigh impossible to lay one aquatint over another when using an aquatint box to distribute the rosin evenly on the plate, or at least that's what I was taught in printmaking evening classes. But it turns out that if you use the rough-and-ready method of sprinkling rosin over your plate from a flour-shaker with muslin tied tightly around the top then you can, actually, layer several aquatints over each other to beneficial effect, so that's what I've been doing. I imagine it must have looked quite funny as I sat patiently sprinkling rosin onto my plate on the back verandah, wearing my P3 face mask, and then teetered on a chair to blow-torch the underside of the plate which was suspended from the verandah roof on two wire coat hangers with one of the racks from our gas barbeque creating a shelf on which the plate could sit... I hate to think what would have happened if I'd toppled over!

Fortunately I was able to apply the aquatint, but unfortunately it wasn't particularly successful and J 'P for perfectionist' Willis did point that out. I should say here that he was only articulating what I knew but had hoped he wouldn't notice, but Willis isn't a perfectionist screen printing artist-cum-art tutor for nothing and he noticed straight away. His advice, which is usually well worth having, was for me to bite-out the existing aquatint, thus creating a deeper line on the plate which sounded attractive, and then to re-apply the aquatint into the deeper line, thus creating a better aquatint AND a nice embossed mark all at the same time.

Sadly all did not quite go according to our plan. I was able to bite-out the existing aquatint and re-apply a new one (and believe me, this was a convoluted process involving cleaning and degreasing the plate, rolling on a hard ground using a hard roller so as to protect the flat surface of the plate while revealing the lines so that they could bite properly and having to do tricky things like stop-out the back of the plate without damaging the hard ground on the front) but... in the end the rosin dust settled nicely into the 'floor' of the bitten-out line, and didn't adhere to the sides, which meant that when the line printed there was much less definition of the edges and in some places not enough aquatint to hold the ink. ^%$(*$ !!!

I am, of course, up against a tight deadline and I still have to work out how best to ink and wipe the darned plate, but now I'm going to have to re-make the plate (and try to salvage this version by re-aquatinting it again in the very faint hope that things might improve), from scratch. Drat and tarnation, I say. And now I have to clean up which is NOT my favourite part of printmaking.