Red House, Blue House, PDX

I haven't been posting lately largely for two reasons: Number one, my poor lappy laptop isn't working because the power cable ist kaput. Number two, netflix streaming, specifically Cake Boss. Cake Boss makes me want to say stuff in a New York accent, specifically "modelling chocolate" and "fondant", but I cannot, and should not be allowed to try. Because I am from West Yorkshire. Nonetheless, it is an entertaining show.

Anyhow, I wanted to show off my best efforts at screenprinting thus far. I am not sure I am completely at home with screenprinting as a medium. I have found it dreadfully frustrating at times, I always seem to be overflooding the screen or getting the consistency of the ink wrong. I ruined quite a bit of fancy Arches 88 paper trying to get my final projects nice (luckily I'm good at reusing paper). It also requires me to tackle colour more than I am comfortable with - an etching in black ink is fine, but multiple colours are so accessible for a screenprint it seems lame not to try. I came up with a colour scheme for these four final prints that was a bit more crazy and bright than I would have anticipated of myself, but I kinda felt like it.




That's an electric etching press, I am told it's a Heidelberg. And yes, it is pink. I'm shocked too.











Inspired by the expensive houses up in the West Hills of Portland. They always remind me of giant pigeon lofts.

I will definitely be doing more screenprinting. It is a magical process, when you manage to get everything right.

Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like a Peasant

Here's a linocut that I made the other night when I was supposed to be doing a million other things. For a start I am only supposed to be making screenprints for class, but I had this piece of lino lying around at home, and procrastination sometimes makes me creative. Anyhow.




The hands were posed as you see above, but I am thinking the position looks a little peculiar in this form. Which is fine, I will take peculiar over the threat of looking generic any day. But multiple people have told me they thought it looked better upside down, like so:




Weirdly I think that upside down the hands look like they belong to two separate people, one holding the hand of another in a sympathetic gesture. Which is hard for me to get my head around, remembering the actual pose this was based on.

Then of course it is best to check what the thing looks like sideways:





The latter could be quite affecting, since it looks a little like someone reaching up to grasp another's hand.

Help me out here, how does this piece look to you? And which view do you like best? And should I get back to doing all the work that is actually necessary for me to get done?

I think the moral of this story is that art doesn't have to be abstract impressionism for you to be confused about which way up it's supposed to go.