goose game

Experimental Monotype Step by Step

Image | | Suzanne Edminster at Saltworkstudio

Monotypes are odd birds, strange fruit.  It’s not a painting, yet not reproducible.  It can’t clone, but emits ghosts, flickering between positive and negative images. Since it’s almost purely process, and resists planned end results,  it’s an artist’s playground.  Here’s my process to make one print, step by step.

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These are Akua intaglio Inks, made with soy oil for easy clean up. My glass worktop is an old shower door recycled by my husband.  The plate you see above is 18″ x 26″,  thin plastic from TAPP.  I’ve inked it up with warm colors and a few dark marks to get me started.  I used an etching press for the prints.DSCN0728

 

Above, the first run from the plate.  Below, another run, with magenta added for depth.

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Now I press on a goose I carved with a Dremel engraver and etching needles on a plastic plate.

DSCN0734On the right you can see “brayer geese” from running the brayer over the plate and transfering it. Ghost geese! Then, the strange point where Chance takes her hand to the process happened.  I wanted to add a dark layer in my next transfer.  I spread random lines of dark ink and picked it up with a large roller. The rounded pattern ended up looking like bird and egg forms!  I had just seen a Motherwell at the DeYoung and was reminded of his use of dark form over light.

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Here you can see the plexiglass plate set over the paper so I could get an idea of what it might look like.  Strange, but I found it compelling, so I rolled it through the press.

Suzanne Edminster, monotype, Goose Game
Suzanne Edminster, monotype, Goose Game

Finished!  At the same time, I had been working on another.  Both of these were done with the same plate.  I just kept wiping the plate and applying more colors in different variations.  Here is the second monotype in the series.

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It’s exhilarating to be aligned for a moment to the unpredictable processes of making.

Screwtape for Artists, Letter 4: Deserving

Image | | Suzanne Edminster at Saltworkstudio
Goose Game, Suzanne Edminster
Goose Game, Suzanne Edminster

For new readers, you can find an introduction to the Screwtape for Artists letters here.

My Dear Wormseed,

Excellent work lately, my friend. The Artist/Subject’s vague sense of victimization– our beloved martyred feeling, so handy for invisible destruction– is well under way. The joyous act of artmaking is actually quite difficult to martyrize, but you are doing a good job here. Humans make art under the most horrendous conditions. Art is a pernicious vermin that invades everywhere and is hard to stamp out.

Here’s a tip: remember that the coffin of the complaining victim is constructed with the nails of DESERVE. Whenever the Artist seems to move forward with energy, pound another DESERVING nail into that brainpan. She DESERVES a break, a cookie, an afternoon off, a cappuccino, to procrastinate just one more day. Here the DESERVE acts as a somehow “earned” reward. The more DESERVING, the less creating.

I am so glad that we have managed to sever the word from it’s original root, which has no “built-in” reward. It simply means to serve completely or fully. The Heroic Artist was very good for our cause in the 20th century: all those tortured men smoking and drinking and screwing themselves to death because they deserved it as artists. In the 21st century the women are taking the helm of the arts, and a new technique for destruction, victimization or the martyr impulse, must be assiduously and viciously cultivated.

In contagion,
Your scabrous Mentor,
Screwtape

Letter 1, Letter 2 and Letter 3.

The Goose Game

Goose Game board 2

The Goose Game is a series of 63 monoprints and monotypes based on my pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago. The Goose Game is also a European child’s board game similar to Chutes and Ladders with 63 squares. It may have been a mnemonic device used by the Templars to give illiterate medieval pilgrims a “map” to guide them. Forms of this labyrinth-style board game may stretch back to ancient Greece, where the legend is that Greek soldiers invented it to while away time on the beach during their ten-year siege on Troy.

Monoprint Making

I’m new to monoprint, but I have noticed that it seems to have a pronounced time element embedded into it. Once it runs through the press once, or twice, it is largely fixed, set, done. You get the feeling that each run of the press is a literal compression and limitation of energy, like the joint in a stalk of bamboo.

The press bed presents a threshold of before (the roller pressure) and after. In a metaphorical way, each print could be seen as a dream from the “bed” of the press, with traces remaining and fading.

We are at a hinge in time right now, the Lunar New Year before the Spring Equinox.  This is my post 100, and I hope for a hundred more. I wish you good dreams in the year to come.

Chekhov’s Ashtray

Image | | Suzanne Edminster at Saltworkstudio
Goose Game series, Suzanne Edminster
Goose Game series, Suzanne Edminster

“Always remember the famous story of Anton Chekhov, who, when asked about his compositional method, picked up an ashtray and said, ‘This is my compositional method. Tomorrow I will write a story called ‘The Ashtray.'”

Anton Chekhov, from the book Cartooning by Ivan Brunetti

As a former smoker, ashtrays are fascinating fossils from a past life.  What a great prompt, though: write or create art based on memories of ashtrays.  I love this book by Brunetti, part of my interest in the uncharted land where word meets image.    Why are comics seen as lowbrow? Doesn’t it take twice as much skill to write a graphic novel as a “real” one?  What is so not-fine-art about cartooning? Will an artist who writes, or a writer who arts, inevitably be separated out into “better writer” or “better artist?” Not that I care.  Much.

Sometimes the random is all we need.

cartooning coverI’ve added Cartooning to my short shelf of astonishing books on creativity, applicable to any art form. Here’s the last paragraph.

“Although you have no control over the future, you have control over what your are creating right now, and if what you create is honest, it will be compelling.  Whether or not it is truly good will be decided long after you are dead. But if you hedge your bets, compromise, prevaricate… are are lost.  Something has to be at stake, a part of you has to die and be reborn into your work, if it is to ‘live’ on that sheet of paper, cave wall, or assemblage of pixels.  In the end, all we can do is try our best.  We are none of us perfect.”

Ivan Brunetti

Screwtape for Artists, Letter 2: Studio Time

Image | | Suzanne Edminster at Saltworkstudio
Goose Game series monoprint, Suzanne Edminster
Goose Game series monoprint, Suzanne Edminster

I decided to ask my artist friend Karina Nishi Marcus to join me in a studio time game. From January 30 to February 14, we’re going into our studios every day. The only rule is to walk in and touch something. That’s it. We’re curious what effect that it may have on our productivity. We do email check ins to report without judgement how we’re doing. I’ll let you know how it goes. Care to join us?

Here’s the second Screwtape letter for artists. In case you have just joined me, you can read the introduction to the letter series here. It is a letter to the demon Wormseed, who’s trying to capture the Artist’s soul.

My Stygian colleague Wormseed,

The situation with the Artist grows worse and worse. Each day she enters her studio, your goal fades like the bright colors of the Old Masters or the wild painting on Greek columns. You,  Wormseed, have been assigned to suffer Inquisition Number 25631 to remind you to keep working harder. It won’t end soon enough. If only you could succeed as well as the your brother Ifrit did recently in the book burnings.  Murdering books is the most delicious snack after eating souls.

I’m afraid you may have to concede defeat on keeping her out of the studio, a tactic which worked so well for so long. Now you must concentrate on subtleties. Early exposure of immature work is a sure-fire way to shut off the tap. Refusal to “practice the scales” of repetitive trials is also good. Perfectionism is a superbly subtle dagger… it bleeds out their disgusting passion for making in a very satisfactory manner.

I see you have activated the string of disquieting dreams that used to derail her from her work in the past. Even those seem to be ineffective: she’s broken their code and now know that they mean she is creating something new. However, a good nightmare or emotional crisis can go quite far. Just don’t let her make any art from them, or the jig is up.

I hope for your sake that you make more progress soon. A molecule of your diabolical existence vanishes each time a brush stroke or line is applied to paper, a reversed Dorian Grey. ( You were involved with him as well, though Oscar escaped us at the end, and after such a promising start. ) I have my faceted fly eye upon you. Do not fail again.

Your ball and chain,

Screwtape

P.S. Despite our continual efforts at the destruction of beauty, new painted caves continue to be found, obscured masterpieces restored. To offset this, the internet offers so many new opportunities for degrading artists, especially if they identify with digital “fame.” The hand of the artist is chopped off and dismembered from the Work, carried out to sea in an exquisite virtual tsunami of mediocrity. Divide et impera!