Open Studio at Ardyne, Cromarty Arts Trust

Had a wonderful day opening my studio.  I had thought to cancel as we blown away the day before with a storm that left us powerless for 24 hours and some of Cromarty all over the weekend.  The weather was wild but some brave souls ventured out and came to visit.  I was particularly honoured with a visit from Robert and Sabine from Germany who travelled from Findhorn to see my work.  We had a wonderful exchange of thoughts and ideas.

Open Studios at Ardyne:  Sabine, John and of course me

Just realised I was being captured on camera (which it has to be said I am not usually fond of!)

Test Prints...fairly successful I think

So as the large embossed prints below took so long to print without a press I decided to do some small ones to work out colours and composition.  Really pleased and excited with them.

So first off I traced the outline of a gorgeous piece of seaweed and made the cutout as explained earlier and then rolled out the luscious greeny grey ink for the background.  Once this was dry I soaked the paper and then blind embossed by hand without the press.  I have used Fabriano 5/5 and somerset satin white to see which worked best.

The next step will be to do a seaweed drawing which will be placed towards the top of the print.

The other cut out

This blogger blog is infuriating...my apologies for images not in the right place...this is due to trying to get the image I want to appear on facebook and where as you used to be able to choose which image you posted, you now don't get an option so you have to trick it.  I will address this when I finish this residency.

So the other cut out......as I used wallpaper lining that came in a roll when I started cutting the shape it was all kind of curvy.  When I arrived in the studio the next morning it had escaped off the cutting map and created a lovely shape.  Very reminiscent of my architectural sculptures from a few years ago.  I became very excited and can see the future potential of this....

 

"art should spill out of being beautiful and move over to other aspects of life so that when we're not with the art it has nevertheless influenced our actions or our responses"  j. cage

Heading towards a first good final print

Just hoping I have not jumped the gun here by the statement in my title.  So using a full size sheet of Fabriano 50/50 gorgeous paper, it's lovely white printmaking paper, I have created two embossments of what I first thought was not a very successful woodblock print but it seems to have worked in this instance.  Using a scrubbing brush.  Sore wrist.
One inverse, one converse, trying to make up my mind which I prefer......Anyhow so these are now done and then....

I have made this second cut out as a template to do a monoprint on top of the above embossment and then....on top of that if it looks ok I am going to place a seaweed drawing. I am thinking a very pale whitish or transparent turquoisey blue.

So it will be a woodcut of seaweed, a shadow drawing of seaweed and a seaweed drawing itself!

The bigger Print

Ok....so I am creating a couple of big prints.  I have hand embossed two sheets of Fabriano 50/50 gorgeous paper....with the large woodcut of seaweed.  They are currently drying out.  I found this fab piece of seaweed yesterday on Cromarty Beach.

Drawn round it

And am now in the process of cutting it out to use as a stencil.

After banging out two embossments with a scrubbing brush and cutting with a scalpel my wrist is saying no no no so I am going to have to be patient.