Three crazy weeks, and then back to the studio

Alright... where the heck were we before I started running all over the universe again?

Yes. Duck linocut in progress. Hm. Howzabout I share a little about where I've been the last couple of weeks, and then we'll get back to work, okay?

First: Birds in Art!!!! This is not just a legitimate excuse for being out of the studio, it's the best reason of the year for packing a bag and a rubber duck* and heading for Wisconsin.

My linocut, "Watching + Waiting," hanging in august company at
Birds in Art. (Yes, that's a Robert Bateman oil on the wall to the left.)

If you've never been to the Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, all I can say is that you've been missing out on some of the most inspiring exhibitions and community-minded events to be found. Anywhere. Trust me. Just go there.

And if you go in the autumn you will find the walls filled with their flagship exhibition, Birds in Art. It's one of the most prestigious wildlife art shows in the world, and it's always an honor to have work juried in to this exhibition. And, wow! I was surprised and touched to have work included in two other exhibits currently on view there: Regal Bearing: Bird Portraiture (from the museum's permanent collection), and a fun little collection of pages from the museum's guest books... including two I created during my residencies in 2018 and 2013.

I was barely home from Birds in Art when I turned around and headed downeast to Mount Desert Island, home of Acadia National Park and the Wendell Gilley Museum. The Gilley is a tiny gem of a museum, centered around a large collection of Wendell Gilley's bird carvings, but which also presents exhibitions of related work in paint, print, and sculpture.

I visited the Gilley to open conversations about upcoming collaborations... I'm excited to share what we're cooking up, but that will have to wait just a bit.

The day after I returned from the Gilley Museum I was up to my elbows in framing for another show, which I installed yesterday at the Gilsland Farm Audubon Center in Falmouth, Maine. It's a challenging space to photograph... a long, narrow gallery with floor-to-ceiling windows along one wall, so you'll just have to go there to see it for yourself. Show runs through October 28.

Whew! This morning I was finally back in the studio slinging ink, so you can expect an update from there in the next day or two.

*Oh. I suppose the rubber duck reference deserves an explanation. A few years ago the Woodson Museum staff gave Birds in Art artists a rubber duck and asked us to include it in social media posts. My ducky still travels... in fact this year our unfortunate travel delays enroute to Wausau had a silver lining: Ducky met our airline captain and got his Junior Pilot wings. You just never know where he'll turn up next. Kinda like a certain printmaker.  #birdsinartducky

Linocut in Progress: Sort of...

The best laid plans, and all that. It's September, and while one might hope that the end of summer would mean a slow down in the schedule, one would be engaging the aforementioned hope in vain.

I did get a fourth color pass printed on the current linocut in progress. It was, as I think I predicted, a fairly straightforward transparent blue.

Reduction linocut in progress, Step 4 revealed!

Instagram followers saw this sneak peek on the press... I think last Thursday. And yes, it's been an entire week without additional printing, but guess what? The ink is still damp. (Hello, Maine.) It's okay to print, I've just been a bit preoccupied. First the print:

The color looks streaky, but it's not. Wet ink, uneven table surface, bad photography.
The trifecta of horribleness.

And now for the excuses.

Friday/Saturday: Midcoast Audubon Lobster Bake Fundraiser. One day to shop and make fish chowder and cream puffins for 75 people, the next day to cook and serve lobsters, clams, corn, and potatoes in addition to aforementioned chowdah and dessert. (I bet you aren't on a board of directors that requires this kind of duty.)

Mmm. Lobster, corn, and taters smoked and steamed in a bed of seaweed.

Sunday: Studio and home visitors.

Monday: Prep for upcoming presentations. Attempt to run errands but... oh. Holiday. How rude. Do a little carving (!!!!), but not enough to print. Continue to fight ants in the studio.

Tuesday: Run all the errands not accomplished Monday and meet with a collector in Rockland.

Today: Laundry, haircut, and packing... because it's time for..... BIRDS IN ART! Tomorrow I'm off to Wisconsin for the opening of the exhibition at the Woodson Art Museum.

A ducky confab at the suitcase means it's time for Birds in Art!

And there went the week. Next week isn't much better in terms of available studio time– More visitors, more meetings, and framing for a show that I will hang September 19 at Maine Audubon's Gilsland Farm Nature Center.

Honestly. When someone tells you how wonderful it must be to be an artist, able to sit around and make prints all day long, send them to me. I'll set them straight. All of these other activities (ok, ok... all except the lobster bake) are part of the job, they just don't involve making art.

Hopefully I'll be able to sneak in and get the next color printed before I have to take off again (next Thursday), keep your fingers crossed for me!

But first... I'm off to see if the last item of clothing is dry enough to put in the suitcase, and triple-check that I packed my toothbrush. Stay tuned!

Linocut in Progress: A mask and muddle

Whew! I don't know about you, but hot weather just makes me move like I'm under water. I started this edition with 26 prints (I've already trashed one), but it seems like it takes forever to print each color pass. This morning I got through three NOVA programs on PBS before I finished printing, and that didn't include clean up.

But I'm ahead of myself.

Things continue to be a bit weird in the color department. If you've been following along you know that the first color pass was a transparent peachy color and the second was a transparent lavender. Which of course gave me a rosier peach. But I needed to start dragging this whole image back into the realm of blues, soooooooo... the third color pass was a transparent blue.

Reduction linocut in progress: Step 3

Which is why everything now looks a bit gray. In good light with good photography you might be able to tell that it is blueish-gray... but in this case you'll just have to take my word for it.

And now the trouble. I seriously need the next color pass to look blue... AND I need it to be a rather pale blue, no darker than the current overall value of the image. What the heck am I gonna do?

Had I taken the time early on to cut a fussy mask and confined the peachy color to small areas, getting a light blue would be easy. But I traded the tedium of cutting masks for the anxiety of balancing opaque and transparent inks. I'm not sure that I did myself a favor either way.

ANYWAY. I got out the white. And my leftover bits of transparent blue from the previous color pass. And a little more blue ink. And just because I didn't have a large enough pile of ink, I got out some more transparent base, too.

The good news/bad news about using white is that it's opaque. Using it will help reduce the influence of the previous color passes on the new one. But it's also... opaque. (Have I mentioned that?) It's not as luminous as a transparent ink, so it's going to influence the quality of every single color that comes after it.

Hm.

I decided to take a weird sort of middle-ground. I mixed leftover scraps of the previous transparent blue with a blob of white. This made a nice pale blue that was more opaque than not. It was also unpleasantly... chalky.

So I added more transparent base. This might seem counter-productive, since my purpose here is to put down a color that looks blue, but my hope was to reduce that icky flat quality of the white ink.

I also decided to keep the color entirely out of the body of the bird. (What? You didn't know there was going to be a bird? Clearly you have not been paying attention. Water + bird = typical Sherrie linocut.) This meant cutting a mask, but a much simpler one than I faced 'way back at the beginning. Here it is in place on the inked block:

And, boy. That block looks kinda opaque, doesn't it? (Did I mention that white ink is opaque?)

Fingers crossed, breath held, assorted printmaking gods invoked.... and....

Reduction linocut in progress: Step 4

It worked! The blue is perhaps not quite as pale as I might have liked (although it's lighter than it appears in the photo), but it is definitely blue and I can work with it. In fact I think the next layer is going to be back to another transparent blue, but this time I'll let it interact with the bird.

Naturally we've got two days of hot and humid ahead of us, so I don't expect to print before Thursday. But I'll get the carving done and maybe start playing around with another idea while these prints get to the correct stage of dryness.

Any guesses about bird species yet? North American birders worth their waterfowling salt ought to be able to figure it out. The cool thing? It's a bird found in both Maine and Colorado in the winter. (Although when they do turn up in Colorado, everyone gets their birding knickers in a twist.)

Linocut in Progress (!!): Risky business

Hooray! I spent all day today in the studio. The second round of repairs to the press seems to be holding, the weather was cool and dry enough to work with the windows open and the ant infestation (about which I haven't even begun to rant) seemed under control... so I jumped on in.

Linocut in progress, Step 1

Well... actually... compared to how I usually jump in to these things, I did spend a fair amount of time thinking before I started. This image has an interesting (I hope) combination of warm and cool colors... a bit tricky to manage when one is using very transparent inks.

I decided to start with the warm color first... time will tell whether that was a good idea or not. Step 1 was a transparent peachy hue.

Step 2 was... lavender! My goal was to tone down the peachy color a bit and create an intermediate step before going to blues. Purple and yellow are complementary colors, so lavender seemed the best choice.

Linocut in progress, Step 2

These are quite lousy photos– I still haven't found a good setup for shooting work in progress– but you get the idea. It doesn't look at all lavender, but I didn't expect it to. It does have a nice sort of rosy tinge to it when you see it up close.

This particular image has some ink transfer from the Sharpie pen I used to draw the block, but I'm not worried about it. It will all be covered by subsequent color passes, and I rotate the prints with Sharpie transfer to the front of the printing queue, where they frequently end up as color testers anyway.

The next step will be a pale blue. I am debating the merits of making it a more opaque color by adding some white, but I'm also considering masking out some areas, too. I probably won't be able to print tomorrow, so I have a little time to think about it. That's not exactly the same as planning, but it's about as close as I ever get.

Workshops everywhere, and some linos, too!

Whew! July and August... what happened to them?

After two weeks of workshops on at Hog Island Audubon Camp and a short workshop at Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge I immediately... led more workshops!

The first week of August I was joined by eleven fun and inspirational women for a week-long field sketching adventure, hosted by the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland. Naturally it was a week of record heat and humidity, but we were fortunate that our class met mornings and we were able to avoid the worst of the oppressive afternoons. We spent time at Owls Head Light, the Rockland South Beach, and in the garden (complete with chickens!) of one of our group members.

Sketching at Owls Head Light

We spent the hottest morning inside the museum, first drawing from Ai Wei Wei's Circle of Animals gold zodiac heads, and then taking a close look at the preliminary drawings for a number of Andrew Wyeth's paintings. Fun!

Sketching in the Ai Wei Wei exhibit at the Farnsworth Art Museum

The group had such a great time that we've scheduled a "reunion" sketch date next week in Rockport Harbor. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone again and filling a page or two of my own this time!

I thought I'd be getting back in the studio the following week, but I was called to sub for some workshop sessions back on Hog Island for Family Camp. This time I was sketching with kids and parents and grandparents...

Sketching in the gardens on Hog Island

Whew! All done now, right? Not quite! I had a pile of framing, packing and shipping to do for upcoming shows at Ann Korologos Gallery in Basalt, Colorado and Oh Be Joyful Gallery in Crested Butte, Colorado. It was the first time I had to manage all that in my new place, so it took extra time to figure out new working systems. But I got it all done, and I know at least some of the work has already made it to its destination.

At long last I got into the studio last week, to work on two small linocuts for Project Postcard, coming up during the Birds in Art exhibition at the Woodson Art Museum in Wisconsin. Carving went well, but the morning I set up to print... disaster!!!!

If you've been following along since my move you might know that Presston, my lovely 30 x 60 Takach press, came out of his 6-month storage adventure with a buckled laminate surface on the bed. After some panicked correspondence with the good folks at Takach I was just about to order a new press bed when my neighbor asked if he could take a look at it. 

He pronounced it fixable, and proceeded to help me pull up the loose portions of the laminate and re-adhere them. Hoorah! I got a couple of editions through the press in between the chaos of workshops and workshop prep and kept my fingers crossed.

Unfortunately, no doubt encouraged by our two weeks of record heat and humidity, the portions of the laminate that had been intact in June decided to pull up, creating a big bubble on half of the bed. There was enough flat space for me to print the two tiny (4 x 6) pieces I was working on, but once again I was dead in the water for anything else. 

This time when my neighbor came by we agreed that the best thing to do would be to remove the laminate across the entire press bed... including the areas we had fixed in June... and stick it all back down again. 

As you can imagine, this was a multi-hour, multi-day project. The old adhesive came up fairly easily, but the new stuff we put on in June? Ooph. We finally finished it yesterday. So far it all seems good... so tonight I tore down some paper and started to prep for a new, largeish lino! What a relief. No pun intended.

As for the little pieces created for Project Postcard, I'm afraid I can't show them to you. At least not in full until after the event. But I can make a silly warped image of them...

Assuming I don't run into any more press-related disasters I expect to have this new piece underway tomorrow, so hey! It looks like we might be getting back to our regularly scheduled... schedule. Stay tuned!

A little of this and a little of that...

The loon linocuts are still drying on the rack... getting close, but we've been really humid here this week so the last ink layer is still a little bit tacky.

In the meantime I'm keeping plenty busy! This past week I gave a quick Intro to Linocut workshop at the Maine Coastal Islands National Wildlife Refuge's headquarters in Rockland. The workshop was a nice wrap-up for my show there, which came down on Thursday.

The workshop was sponsored by the Friends of Maine Coastal Islands, a local non-profit that supports the Refuge's mission with education and outreach programs. 

We were sold out for the program, and the participants did such an amazing job creating small prints in a VERY short amount of time (about 90 minutes) that we're looking at scheduling another workshop this winter.

In the week ahead I'll be spending a lot of time up in Rockland, facilitating a week-long field sketching workshop through the Farnsworth Art Museum. If you've never visited the Farnsworth, you owe it to yourself to do so the next time you find yourself on the coast of Maine. The museum has an extensive collection of work by the Wyeth family and hosts spectacular visiting exhibitions as well. (Ai Weiwei's Circle of Animals is there right now... I think we'll spend a little time drawing them at some point this week!)

Back in the studio I'll be working on small, temporarily secret linos for Project Postcard at the opening of Birds in Art at the Woodson Art Museum in early September. What to do, what to do?

Linocut in Progress: Wrapping up the Loon

Two weeks out of the studio when the loon linocut was so close to completion was quite a wrench. However, now that I live so close to Hog Island I was able to jump back in to the studio the day after we wrapped up our session and immediately bury myself in ink.

Of course the finish wasn't nearly as easy as I thought it would be. I struggled mightily to find the right balance of bird and reflection. I didn't take photos of all the different ways I tried to manage it... but here's the second-to-last stage:

reduction linocut in progress, Step 9

It came down to a question of "feel" for the reflection. The darker version might have been more true to my reference, but the lighter, murkier version seemed to make the birds the clearer focal point.

Rather overexposed, but you get the idea

I consulted a couple of friends and colleagues (thank you, interwebs) and their reactions were as mixed as mine. In the end I went with the lighter reflection.

embiggenable with a click

We're in the throes of gray and rainy weather this week, so it will be a few days before I can get a good photograph of the final stage. This one is okay, and if you embiggen the image (click on it) you can get a fair look at it. All that's lacking now is a title... and several days' drying time.

This piece has been in the back of my mind since December, when I first agreed to create something for the upcoming International Loon / Diver Symposium hosted by the Biodiversity Research Institute in Portland. That it was another six months before I was able to get to work on it was an unexpected frustration, and it's been weighing heavily on my mind for a long time. To finally have a drying rack full of loons is immensely satisfying. And it lets me ponder my favorite question: What's next?

Time Out for Arts and Birding

Sketching in the flower garden, Hog Island Audubon Camp

The loon linocut sits waiting to be completed, and it will have to sit for one more week before I can get back in to the studio.

It has to be something pretty special to drag me away when a piece is as close to completion as the loon is, and Hog Island Audubon Camp is definitely special.

I've been traveling from Colorado to Maine to be an instructor at the camp since 2008. The commute is a lot shorter now that I live nearby, but that doesn't diminish the magic of island time.

This past week's session was Arts and Birding, and I was fortunate to team teach the drawing and painting track with the brilliant Jean Mackay. Campers spent a fun week practicing sketching and watercolor skills, working both in the field and in the lab. We hiked to beautiful locations and explored sea life in the intertidal zone, and of course we took a boat trip out to see puffins. Because what's Maine without puffins?

Tomorrow the campers arrive for Educator's Week, so there's more adventure to be had. But next weekend I'll be back in the studio and happily putting the last few passes on the loon. Stay tuned!

Drawing from the specimen collection (and, yes... they always looked this serious!)

Sharing work at nightly salon

Looking for sketching subjects at low tide

Obligatory puffin shot

Evening light at Hog Island

What's It All About Wednesday: Here!

"Here," reduction linocut, 12" x 18"  © Sherrie York

If it's Wednesday I'm on a boat, headed out to see puffins at Eastern Egg Rock and then do some hiking and sketching on Harbor Island.

Visits "to" Eastern Egg Rock are generally boat trips around Eastern Egg Rock. During the breeding season the 7-acre island is off limits to all but researchers and the occasional supervised visitor. One can get some great looks at birds from the water, but there's really nothing to compare with the opportunity to set foot on the island and spend some time in an observation blind. Which, I'm delighted to say, I've been able to do a couple of times.

Sitting in an observation blind is sort of like being backstage in a theatre. Puffins in particular are largely facing the grand stage of the sea, and from the blind one sees a lot of backsides, as well as off-stage interactions as birds quickly come and go from rocky burrows.

To help keep track of breeding success, researchers have labeled burrows and given names to landmarks across the island that can be seen from an observation blind but not from the water. In this linocut you can see bits of those markings. A careful observer might also notice that this adult bird is wearing a small silver identification band around its left leg. It's probable that this bird was banded on Egg Rock as a chick and has returned here to breed. Here to breed.

It's a funny title for an image, "Here." But for me this look at a puffin stretching its wings represents time and place in a unique way. Puffins were extirpated from the coast of Maine, and efforts by Project Puffin researchers over the past 40+ years have helped them return to historic breeding grounds like Eastern Egg Rock. But decades of study have also taught us a lot about the lives of these amazing birds, and the scientific record shows us the effects of a changing environment.

That open-winged gesture is for me one of celebration and invocation. Here on this island is success and failure, possibility and opportunity, invitation and warning. Here be puffins.

Linocut in Progress: P-p-p-p-pochoir!

As I am typing this my over-full suitcase sits downstairs, ready for the long, exhausting twenty minute drive to the mainland dock for Hog Island Audubon Camp this afternoon. It's Arts and Birding week, so my bags include the usual sketching supplies, plus a few extras. When I say "a few" extras, I mean that I'm having to fight the temptation to keep throwing more stuff on the pile. It's the first time in ten years (read: ever) that I'm not having to consider air travel when packing for the island. I have to keep reminding myself that just because I can bring more stuff doesn't mean I should. I do, after all, have two big boxes of materials stashed in an island attic already. (Yes, I've been carving out a place for myself here in Maine, one pile of art supplies at a time, for the last decade.)

ANYWAY.... I had really hoped to get this linocut finished before I left, but of course this week we had record high heat and humidity. Not a great combination to facilitate working in the studio.

I did manage to get one more nice blended roll, brown to blue, printed late one night after the temperature and humidity levels fell. Sorry the photo is poor... photography happened late at night, too.

Loon, reduction linocut, Step 6

One of the most striking things about a loon, in addition to its graphic black-and-white plumage, is its lovely red eye. Of course that eye only covers about a quarter of an inch of the entire image, so what to do?

Yep, it's time to employ that century-old technique: pochoir.

Longtime readers of Brush and Baren have seen me employ pochoir before. I don't do it very often, but it comes in handy for tiny color areas like this. I could cut a mask, do some selective inking, and run everything through the press, but that's a lot of work with plenty of room for registration disasters. Pochoir allows me to apply the color directly to the prints by hand. (Thank you, French illustrators in the late 1800s.)

Mylar stencil for pochoir.

So. First I have to make the stencil. In this case I used clear acetate (mylar). I traced the major lines of the birds with a sharpie to give myself a reference point for lining things up. Then I cut out some holes. I decided that if I was going to go to the trouble of pouncing (pochoir) the eye, I might as well save myself a step by pouncing the beaks and breasts of the chicks, too.

Pochoir stencil placed over the print and in use.

I have a couple of stiff paint brushes with the bristles cut short that I use to apply the ink. I tap (pounce) the brush straight up and down in the ink and then on to the print through the stencil.

I try to use a light touch here, but if I get a little too much ink applied (which happened frequently with the red), I place a small piece of newsprint over the fresh ink and rub with my finger to strip off the excess.

Loon, reduction linocut, Step 7

Et voila! An eye and some beaks ready for the next darker application of ink color. I think I only have two steps to go now... a dark gray and an almost-black. Or maybe a full black... we'll see.

The bummer is that I won't be able to finish this until I'm done with my two weeks on the island! So close... and yet so far.

Linocut in Progress: So much blue and green!

Here on the coast of Maine it's been downright steamy for the last few days. The whole world seems green and blue and wet (not to mention hot), which has carried over into the studio, both literally and figuratively.

Step 4 ink roll out

Some of the fun of interpreting water in linocut is the excuse to use a lot of blended ink rolls. In this case the block I am working on is 12 x 12 inches in size, but my brayers and rollers jump in length from 8 to 18 inches. I haven't wanted to break out the big roller, so I've taken advantage of the natural division in the upper third of my composition to do a little faking. The 8" blended roll covers the bottom of the block, and a small 4" brayer takes care of the top.

Just as a reminder, here's a shot of steps 3 and 4 side-by-side.

Reduction linocut in progress, steps 3 and 4

And here's Step 4 all by itself.

Linocut in progress, Step 4

I was feeling pretty good about the water at this point... but the background foliage needs some more contrast, so of course that's going to have to make its way into the reflections. Another green-to-blue blended roll? Yippee.

Linocut in progress, Step 5

I think the water is just about finished except for the reflection of the birds, which will need to be toned down and warmed up. Well, maybe it's almost finished. You know me.

But here's the crazy part. I think I'm going to be able to wrap this whole edition up in under 10 color passes. What?!?!? That almost never happens, no matter how hard I try.

Of course just because I think this will be finished in a few more color passes doesn't mean it will be done soon. Why not? Because the day after tomorrow I'm off to Hog Island Audubon Camp and two weeks of workshop instruction.

Going to the island this year feels a little weird, since it now takes me only 20 minutes to get to the dock instead of the 20 hours that it sometimes took to get there from Colorado. But island magic is island magic no matter where on the mainland one starts from, so I'm looking forward to a little change in focus, even if the color palette stays much the same.