Im-pressive Week Rolled By!

What an adventure!

I returned late last night from my week-long residency at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wisconsin, tired-but-wired after a fantastic experience. Today has been spent in the usual post-trip tasks– plodding through mail and hundreds of emails, filing receipts, paying some bills... dumping the contents of my suitcase next to the washing machine.

So it seems like it's time to take a little break from all that and share with you some highlights from my week.  I took paltry few photos myself, but the good folks at the Woodson are on the ball. All the images here are courtesy of the museum.

We. Are. PRINTMAKERS!

Putting the final color on the magpie demonstration piece.

In the week preceding the steamroller event I worked with about 200 middle and high school students to create small relief prints in lino and foam, and shared a "slide" show and print demonstration with adult visitors. Wisconsin State Representative Mandy Wright came to class one morning and tried her hand at a little printing, too.

Good technique, Mandy!

But the Big Event loomed large in our thoughts. Fortunately "our" steamroller had been delivered right before I arrived in Wausau, so Wednesday afternoon the staff and I gathered in the parking lot for a test run.

That's Dave in the orange shirt. Great job, Dave!

Museum facilities staffer Dave Jones carved an image inspired by a sculpture by Charlotte Darling-Diehl. We inked up his block, fired up the equipment and voila! Our first steamroller print! 

We also ran a test of the 24 x 36-inch lino I carved here in my studio. Compared to the 36 x 48 blocks the students would bring it suddenly seemed a bit wimpy! 

View from the driver's seat.

But hey! It turns out one can print lino with a steamroller. It held up just fine under pressure.

Suddenly it all became real. We were going to do this! (And it was going to work!) Wednesday night I was a happy camper and couldn't wait for Saturday.

And then came Thursday. 
Cloudy... rainy... cold Thursday. Snow in the forecast for parts of Wisconsin which might or might not include Wausau. I tried not to worry too much.

And then came Friday. At noon on Friday the trees on the museum grounds wore a blanket of ice. Freezing rain slicked the grass. I adjusted my expectations from "good weather" to "not horrible weather."

It took me a good 20 minutes to find the courage to lift the curtain and look outside Saturday morning. Not raining... Good. Not windy... excellent. And dare I imagine it? The clouds seem to be thinning. All systems go!

By noon the sun was out and we were off and running. I mean rolling. Over 100 area high school students had worked in teams to carve the 3x4-foot woodblocks, and we had 19 to put under the steamroller. 

Inking begins!

Moving the inked block into place

Placing the fabric

Pulling a print!

Wall of wonderfulness. Eventually we had prints all the way down the block! Click to embiggen.

After we pulled two prints each, the teen artists inked up their blocks again and we had great fun making steamroller t-shirts. Several observers asked if we had shirts for sale, which we hadn't considered... but who knows? Maybe next time!

Once the prints have had a little time to dry, they will be put on display at the museum... dates TBD.

In the meantime, check out the art blog of D.C. Everest High School, whose students were among those who participated in the project. Pop on over to WJFW TV-12 to see yours truly try to explain just what the heck all this is about in a video report here. AND.... there are hordes of photos on the museum's Facebook page here.

There is no way I can sufficiently express my gratitude to the staff and volunteers of the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum for their support of this project and for making a random conversation into an amazing week. I'm pretty sure that if you look up the word "excellence" in the dictionary, you'll find all of their faces smiling back at you.

Thanks also to the funders: The Community Foundation of North Central Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Arts Board, and the B.A. & Esther Greenheck Foundation. And let's not forget the food-ers! Thanks, Urban Street Bistro for firing up the grill for the event. Next time I want to eat one of everything. Except the cupcakes. I want two of those.

Coming up next: Crested Butte Arts Festival

Apparently my summer hasn't been chaotic enough yet– there are several big adventures yet to come.


First up, the Crested Butte Arts Festival. This will be my first such event (other than a little booth at our local Farmers Market a couple of summers ago) and WOW! I still have so much to do.

If you're in the area this coming weekend, come on by booth #7. (Lucky Seven? I hope so!) I'll have lots of linocuts and a few woodcuts to share, and maybe I'll even be working on a print! Shocking!

Festival opens Friday, August 3, 5:00pm until dark, and continues Saturday and Sunday from 10:00am to 5:00pm.

Trying to sort out a booth display with a mock setup in the dining room.

"Familiars" at the Paquette Gallery

With David's help I ticked one more thing off my pre-travel to-do list today: We hung the show! This afternoon we installed Familiars at the Paquette Gallery at the SteamPlant here in Salida. Because I'll be out of town the reception won't be until Friday, June 1, but that doesn't mean you can't stop by and take a look before then.

Another inch to the right, please.

 About the show....

Familiar, n. In European folklore, familiar spirits (“familiars”) are supernatural entities believed to assist witches and cunning folk in their practice of magic.

Salida, Colorado printmaker Sherrie York finds her best relationships develop on foot. Inspired by almost a decade of wandering trails throughout Chaffee County, the woodcuts and linocuts included in “Familiars” represent places and creatures York knows well– and that she likes to believe know her, too.

The natural world is replete with wonders and relief printmaking, whilst not precisely magic, certainly has its moments of mystery and inexplicable surprise. From iconic waterfowl to intricate tangles of fallen leaves, the familiars haunting the Arkansas River valley inspire York to carve a place for herself in the landscape.

A print of monumental proportions

Those are the DM's feet at the far end of the City of the World.
I made him stand there for scale.

If you were reading Brush and Baren last autumn, you might recall a post about my participation in the City of the World project.

City of the World is the brainchild of printmaker and certifiable crazy woman Maria Arango Diener– the third of her Monumental Collaborative Puzzle Print projects.

Monumental? You can say that again.

Maria cut 5 large sheets of cherry plywood into over 100 small pieces and sent them off to printmakers around the globe. Each of us carved our respective block and sent it back to Maria who, with the help of a few friends, reassembled and printed the resulting massive piece. More precisely, they printed FIVE large pieces for each and everyone who participated. 600 prints. Amazing.

My City prints arrived in Saturday's post... and here they are taking up most of the living room floor today. Maria's got all the gory details, and even some video of the print party on the MCPP blog. Do pop over and check it out...

Finished? Or not.

Once the reflection was resolved (or so I thought), it was time to address the duck. This was all pretty straightforward and didn't take long, since very little carving was required to free Mr. Goldeneye from any entanglements with with rest of the image.

First some light purple in his head for a few highlights. Male goldeneye are black and white, but their feathers have an iridescent quality in the light.

The reflection of the duck in the water needs to be slightly off-color and value from the actual critter, so I tackled that with a brownish color.

A little bit more carving, and then the black.

Here's a close-up of the duck.

But there's a dilemma. Now that the duck is finished, the piece just doesn't seem to have the WOW factor that I saw in my head. It's a nice print, but does it make you go "ooooooh"?

My initial idea was to celebrate the abstract quality of the water reflection. The on-the-fly decision to add the woodgrain was exciting, but I don't know if it confused the concept.

The good news is that both blocks are still largely intact. I could potentially put one more darkish color in the reflection and see if that brings little more oomph to the image. I think there are 18 good prints to work with, so I could spare a couple as experiments.

I think it was Leonardo da Vinci who said "Art is never finished, only abandoned." For now I'll just sit with this piece for a couple of days and see if satisfaction grows.

In the meantime... yeah. I started another one.

Embiggenable version, if you'd like to contemplate solutions with me.
Or maybe you like it just the way it is....

Drama unfolds for the goldeneye

After the wood grain texture and the blue tones were sorted out it was finally time to remove a large amount of material from the linoleum block.

And then it was time to chew my fingernails a bit. What the heck color should go on next? I knew I wanted to suggest reflected trees, so green seemed logical. But how much green and what value? After a lot of hemming and hawing and mixing and remixing I settled on this sort of mid-value, warmish green and dove on in.

Holy mackerel! Did this thing suddenly take on a life of its own, or what? I got so excited at this point that I made the DM come in and admire the prints on the drying rack probably a dozen times. That night I barely slept.

And then, by the cold light of a new day, I realized I was stuck. What now? The reflection needed some more interest, but how to achieve that? The reference photo I looked at for the water pattern was just a flat dark, almost black, and not what I wanted. I carved a little bit more out of the reflection shapes and tried printing a brownish green. Ick.

How about a greener green? Also ick. Mostly boring.

Okay. How about another blend?

Freakin' gorgeous on the block, and none too shabby on paper. (Although this photo is way too warm, the paper is actually white, not cream.)

All that remains is the duck. I think.

Carrying on with the goldeneye print

After the light blue background step shown in the last post, I felt a need for something more.... interesting... in this print. Clearly this is going to be a duck-on-water sort of thing. It needs something special. Like, I dunno.... texture, maybe. Perhaps something like wood grain.

Yeah. Wood grain.

Off I went to see Ves, the carpenter at our neighborhood lumberyard, lino block under one arm and one of the prints under the other. He understood immediately what I was after, and reached straight into the scrap bin for a gorgeous piece of oak-veneer plywood. The grain fell in exactly the right place. It was meant to be, so Ves trimmed the oak board to the dimensions of my linoleum block and I toddled back to the studio with two boards under my arm.

The oak was pretty tough to carve, so I was glad I didn't need to do much detail. I just cleared out the space for the duck and its reflection and was ready to go. I used three small rollers (as opposed to the single large roller, which I had already returned to its owner) to produce a blend and printed away.

You saw a corner of it at that stage.

I liked the grain but it was a bit too pronounced for where this image is headed, so I inked up the lino block with a transparent medium blue and printed that over the entire print again. Got that? Solid from the lino, blend from the wood, solid from the lino again. The difference was subtle, but I think it was the right decision.

Just look at where that wood grain falls around the duck, will ya?

After this it was back to the lino block for some serious carving.

In case you were wondering

There IS printmaking going on here. I'm just keeping it to myself for a bit. Things are a tad... um... experimental... and I don't want to get anyone's hopes up. (Including mine.)

But I can show you one of the things I'm excited about with this one.

Tantalizing, isn't it?

Delight by post

Some embiggification is possible with clicking.

For the last several days folks on the Barenforum listserv have been gleefully announcing the arrival of prints from the most recent exchange. Perhaps you remember this project... 101 prints just 3.2 x 3.5 inches in size, sent off to a brave coordinator to be collated and returned as a set of 100 unique images.

"Wonderful!" the other participants exclaimed. "Beautiful, fascinating..." and all other sorts of superlatives.

But my mailbox remained empty and all I could exclaim was, "But where are mine?" (Pout. Pout.)

Today, however, I finally joined the ranks of happy exchangers. The long-anticipated parcel arrived, and in it was a lovely custom-made box, crafted for each exchange participant by our intrepid coordinator, Gayle Wohlken. (Above and beyond the call of duty, methinks.)

Within the ribbon-tied box (which you can just make out in the upper corner of the table in the photo above) was the most delightful assortment of woodcuts... single-color to bazillion-color, printed on everything from the most delicate translucent sheets to glossy cardstock. Every single one is charming, and the variety is utterly inspiring. It was all I could do to keep from running straight out to the studio after I spread them all out on the dining table. (Actually, I apologize that there are a few not pictured here. I didn't realize until I was scooping them all up again that some had stuck together.)

A few of these prints I watched evolve on the blogs of my virtual printmaker-friends, and it's wonderful to pick up the real thing. From your hands to mine... thank you.

I am SO glad I decided to participate in this celebration of prints and printmaker camaraderie. I shall certainly do it again. Eventually. ;-)

Things to do whilst waiting for ink to dry

In the ongoing list of things to do whilst waiting to proceed with prints in progress*:

# 12) Package up one's contribution to the Monumental Collaborative Puzzle Print project so that tomorrow one can
# 13) Take it to the post office.

All the gory details for Maria Arango's demonstration of insanity printmaker prowess can be found on the MCPP website and blog. The short version is that Maria cut several large sheets of cherry plywood into small, odd-shaped pieces and sent one to each of the more than 100 participating printmakers. We send our carved blocks back to her, she reassembles the puzzle and prints copies for each of us.

The project theme is "City of the World." I'm pretty sure that my block fits "behind" a house-shaped piece and "in front" of a skyscraper-shaped piece.. which made me think of an alleyway. Cities large and small have all sorts of creatures (also large and small) frequenting their alleys, especially at night.

Who-who-who goes there?

I had never carved cherry before, and I have to say I quite liked it. There are a couple of spots on this block where the carving went too deep... blame it on poorly sharpened tools and brief lapses of attention on the part of the carver. I just hope it prints okay... we're not to do test prints for risk of warping the blocks before they are returned to their mothership. Ummm, motherboard. Ummm, proper place in the puzzle.

(*What? You didn't see list items #1-11? Let's just say some things are best kept to oneself. Like laundry. And dishes. And whining.)

The Prints are in the Mail

No, really. All 101 tiny woodcuts for the Barenforum 50th print exchange are on their way to the coordinator in Ohio. Gayle's got a big job ahead of her! (I interleaved them with glassine for transport, which is why the top print in the stack looks so mysteriously vague.)

I can't wait to get back my own set of 100 different images from all the exchange participants.

I'm anxious, too, to get back to printing my own stuff. Well, that... and now I REALLY have to turn my attention to my block for the City of the World Monumental Collaborative Puzzle Print project. (Due in December.) I have a rough idea sketched out, just need to get it going.

"Waxwing Waits," 2.5 x 3.5 inches, woodcut

Epic printmaking

Lookit my new-today taller work surface! Sawhorses and a door.

Little by little I get more organized in Studio V. It's a slower process than I expected (or hoped), but it's getting there.

Yesterday was the big test of what the priorities are for the space. (Read: I had to get a lot of printing done.) You might recall that I decided to participate in the Barenforum 50th print exchange, which requires the delivery of 101 tiny prints by the end of the month. You may also recall that I decided to experiment with woodcuts. And that I did so right before moving in to a new space. Just call me the Queen of Too Much at Once.

Last week I thought I had an image sorted out. Something simple and single color.

Four discarded blocks and one winner!

It was a disaster. I carved four different blocks, and worked each of those multiple times. I even switched to back to the comfort zone of lino instead of wood. Nope. All I got was a pile of black and white prints that I didn't like.

A small portion of last week's Epic Fail. Magpies everywhere.

After several frustrating days my frantic brain finally conjured up Peter Jackson and Philippa Boyens talking about a beloved scene that they couldn't fit into the edit of "The Lord of the Rings." They tried it in the front of the film, in the middle, in the end. Couldn't make it work. Ultimately it was abandoned because Philippa said, "If you're having that much trouble it probably means the scene isn't right for the film as a whole."

If I was having that much trouble making the print work, then apparently it wasn't right for the project. On to the cutting room floor with it! Do. Over.

A scramble through my sketchbooks and photos brought me a new idea.. simpler design, but slightly more complex printing because it needed color. I printed the "rainbow" roll last week... and yesterday I spent eight straight hours printing the second color... 134 times!

100+ tiny prints on the new workbench! Phew!
Now if they'll only dry in time.

I printed lots of overage because the rainbow rolls were pretty variable. Not the end of the world, but I'd like the latitude to cull the extremes from the edition.

After eight back-tweaking hours yesterday it was VERY clear that a taller work surface was in order, so today I went down the street to the lumber yard and visited with "my" shop carpenter. Ves is a fabulous fellow who has helped me more times than I can count... cutting blocks and sifting through scrap wood to find me parts for building jigs and all sorts of things. Today he scored an old solid-core door and cut some 2x4s so I could make this (inexpensive!) workbench. The DM helped me haul everything up to the studio and put it together, and tonight it's a drying rack for all those little prints. Later this week it will be a printing surface! Hooray!

Woodcut experiments

Tiny woodcut experiments

Okay.... raise your hand if you're the sort of person who decides to try a brand new recipe on the night you will have dinner guests.

Or perhaps you can remember any number of times when you agreed to perform a task ("Sure. I can do that.") and then immediately set about learning how to do it. Usually under deadline.

Yup. That's me, too. Which is naturally why I decided to participate in my first-ever [Baren]forum print exchange now. It's Barenforum's 50th exchange, with 100 printmakers participating. (As opposed to the usual 30-something.) The format is tiny (2.5" x 3.5"), but 101 impressions are needed for the exchange. By October 1. Sorry, November 1. Wait. I think. I should check.

I know from previous experience with small prints that registration on tiny sheets of paper is far more challenging than it is on larger sheets, so a single-color image seems to be in order. But hmmm.... what to do and how to do it? Border print? Bleed print? Naturally I've also decided to carve wood instead of lino, which means I'm using less familiar tools on a less familiar surface. Experimentation required!

I'm not completely satisfied with any of these, but I think I'm headed in the right direction.

Meanwhile, we had a spectacular sunset this evening. Not just in the west, but in the entire sky. All of town glowed pink and orange. It would be challenging to try to interpret such images as relief prints. I don't think I'd have the slightest idea how to start. Which means.... Uh oh. Must. Resist. Idea. At least until 101 other little prints are done.

Spring ahead? Not with THIS print.

There's a pile of stuff by the front door, ready to be schlepped to the car and then south to Monte Vista tomorrow. I'm delighted that the weather seems to be cooperating for Saturday's field sketching workshop... although I'd be even happier if the word "breezy" weren't in the forecast. (When the National Weather Service says it will be "breezy" around here it usually means hold on to your hat. Or sketchbook, as the case may be.)

The progress of the current linocut seems to be stretched out by a sudden flurry of other activities: workshops every other weekend, contract jobs getting off the ground, logistical planning for events this summer. Getting the third color down yesterday in the midst of all the other stuff was really satisfying.

I also spent a little time mucking about with the new baby press. I'm not yet completely in love, but I've heard that happens sometimes with new arrivals. Bonding is not always immediate.

I tried a little woodcut, my first since last summer's seminar at Anderson Ranch Arts Center. A small scrap of thin plywood served as the block, but I can't say I was satisfied with it as a matrix. Too splintery, and too much "plate noise" in the background. I am enjoying the experimentation process: using different papers and different combinations of blanket, tympan, and press pressure. In this case I was also making bleed prints, which I never do in lino.

After this weekend's workshop I'll only be home a couple of days before heading out again. Could this be the most protracted print production ever? Our clocks might be springing ahead this weekend, but linos are definitely dawdling.

Of giraffes and steamrollers

My friend Jean Gumpper teaches printmaking at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. She also taught me a thing or two this past August at Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and whoo-EEE. That woman is amazing.

She also might be slightly out of her mind. Which sort of goes without saying if one is a printmaker, but there are extremes even in this particular subculture.

I knew I was headed to The Springs this week, so a few days ago I sent Jean a note to see if she was available for a cuppa and found out that today was going to be Steamroller Printing Day. Her students had been laboring over huge woodcuts and this was the day they'd go under the rollers.

So of COURSE I was there to watch some of the fun. I shot a bunch of video, but am not inclined to figure out how to use the editing software at this exact moment, so you'll have to settle for stills clipped from the file. You've all heard me muttering about wanting to work BIGGER, and today did nothing to stifle that desire. All the way home I was wondering if there's a place here in Salida that I could rent one of these little babies myself. And where I might find a suitable expanse of pavement. And bigger carving tools.

Oh? And the giraffes? While I was in town I took an hour to stop in at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo and make a few sketches. Bullfrogs, orangutans, and a giraffe in a position I'd never seen before. I kept wondering if s/he was going to be able to get up again.

Going back to work on my lino tomorrow is going to seem pretty darn tame after today.

Project Woodcut

Monday morning, August 2. Day One of Transforming the Landscape with the amazing Jean Gumpper.

After a get-acquainted session with fellow workshopmates, faculty, and staff, we all picked up our pencils and color tools and some scraps of paper and headed out to a lush little creek behind the Anderson Ranch Arts Center campus.

Time for "Project Woodcut."

You know... kinda like that crazy Project Runway show. (Which I've only seen because I recently stayed in a condo that had cable.) Short time limit, narrow parameters, race to the finish. Our version did not (thank goodness) have the drama of personality and high stakes of potential big money. But it did go something like this: 15 minutes to collect sketches and color samples. Minimum 3 color woodcut print in an edition of 8 due by 6:00pm.

Epic. Especially since we also had bits of instruction worked in to the day as things came up. How to prepare and carve wood plates. How to mix transparent inks. How to ink up the plate. How to register for a bleed print. How to run plates through the press. How to clean up and then mix the next color. How to think about the effect of transparent inks on each other. How to keep carving tools sharp.

Did I mention it was epic?

It was so high speed that I didn't have time to take many pictures, but I do have a few to provide a glimpse of the day.

Here are my sketches from the 15-minute reference-gathering episode:

In the end I opted for the sketch of fireweed on the right because the shapes were big and simple and I had no idea how it would feel to carve wood instead of lino. It was a good choice, if a bit literal and timid. Our print size was only 3 x 5 inches, so it seemed crazy to get TOO detailed.

The first two colors were pinks, as you might have guessed, but the third was a bright lime green, which since it was transparent gave me this:

Orange! Which is what I wanted for the stems, but a nice surprise. (Surprising in that it worked out, I mean.) Jean had an extremely handy piece of old-school graphic technology which doesn't seem to be available any more: a Pantone color overlay fan book. The transparent-on-mylar kind, not the solid-on-paper kind. If you have one... oooh! I know some printmakers who would give their firstborn to get ahold of it. (Well, I know at least one who is presently searching hard.)

Anyway, the overlay book made it possible to try different transparent colors to get an idea of what might happen. I don't think I ever would have picked lime green over pink to get orange, but there you have it.

The fourth color (after the 6:00pm, 3-color deadline) was light green again, more opaque so it would stay that way, and then a fifth color, a darker green. By that time it was almost 10pm and I was more than ready to crash. Unfortunately I was also so wired from the day that I hardly slept, which became a theme for most of us the rest of the week.

On Tuesday we went on another source-material-gathering expedition and started a second print, about which more later. The sixth and last color didn't go down on this little thing until Wednesday, but OOH! I think it made the piece, don't you?

We printed on a variety of papers... very interesting to see how differently the inks responded to each surface.

So there you have it. My first-ever woodcut, concept to execution in one day (plus a little more). Yippee! At the end of the day, with what few brain cells I had still functioning, I made a list of seven Things I Had Never Done Before in Printmaking. (There were also a few Things I Haven't Done in 20 Years, like use a press.) Any day that has seven never-before-attempted skills added to it is a darn good one in my book. My mind was reeling, my feet were killing me, but oh! What a day.