monoprint

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

A Wild Goose Chase and Mr. Turner

Image | | Suzanne Edminster at Saltworkstudio

 

 

Goose Game monoprint, Suzanne Edminster
Goose Game monoprint, Suzanne Edminster

I’ve making experimental monoprints in a series I call the Goose Game. All artists are on a wild goose chase, pursuing an ever-vanishing Muse. There’s no sense to it. Even inventors, or artists of function, have to get lost repeatedly, fumbling in the darkness, before the light goes on. Abstraction, or any creating from nothing, is just plain crazy.

goose game chop I had a chop made in the form of a rubber stamp. The symbols mean goose, board game, luck, art. A Shakespearean origin of the term “wild goose chase” said it was a kind of horse event where the leader swerved crazily around and the rest of the riders had to follow him. We follow our instincts up the mountain and into the muck and over continents, with the wild goose.

I just saw the film Mr. Turner, and I am so glad I did. He was on a wild goose chase of a new vision of land, water and air, though he was often reviled. Some people say “nothing happens” in the film. Nothing happens, except life. He coughs through bitter winters,  scribbling in notebooks, attacking the canvas, day after day until death. We walk with him through vast horizons and empty beaches; never again will we see these views so free of humanity. This film shows the big belly, humble scratching. and wide horizon of Turner’s creation. It’s a treat.  Everything happens.