Boardwalk Showers

Over the past couple of days I wrote out several Christmas cards, all for people who had sent them to me this holiday season. With light snow beginning to fall, I dashed out to the post office to send them on their way (all out of state), then quickly back home with a new project to work on while the next winter storm raged outside. As it turned out, we had zero accumulations, but I got a lot of work done.

My next project is the 7th print in the boardwalk series, this one built around the idea of a shower/changing room. Like the tattoo print, this is one that has specific links to both the contemporary boardwalk and the original Japanese culture of the Floating World. The public bath house was a common enough subject in those ukiyo-e prints, both a visualization of then contemporary culture and perhaps an excuse to make nudes the subject of an artwork. (while these prints were often meant to provide some voyeuristic thrills, they are a far cry from the very explicit images that many people think of when the subject of Japanese prints comes up) Meanwhile, back in New Jersey, every boardwalk is next to a beach, and using that beach often results in a need to change in and out of bathing suits, to wash off salt water and sunscreen, etc. Some of this is done in opposition to stated rules (most public restrooms officially ban their use as changing rooms), but some boardwalks do have proper facilities. The obvious overlaps between the two cultures made it a natural for this series, so I put it on the original subject list when I started working on the series a few years ago.

An early concept is shown above. I had considered doing side by side panel comparisons of a men's and women's locker/shower room, but later decided to stay with the continuous scene across two panels that I've used in all the rest. I returned to the idea about a year ago, bringing a model into the Studio to pose for several potential figures in the planned print. However, to meet deadlines related to various specific projects, I put off further work on it and completed some other prints in 2010. Now I'm ready to go back to work, and the shower room print is the idea most ready to go into production.

The next step was to work out the new composition. My new version is based on a right-angled room, with showers on one end, lockers on the other. I picked figures from last December's session, and a few poses from Belmar sessions (such as this one) that would also work for the print. For the showers I decided to go with individual curtained stalls rather than a group shower, but this left the problem of how to show the figures. At first I was thinking of just having all those curtains slightly askew to reveal the figures, but that struck me as illogical. In the last few weeks I finally came up with a better solution- close the shower curtains, make them translucent, and show indications of the bathers through them. (this comes with another association with those old Japanese prints- silhouetted figures seen through paper screen walls). Normally my paper compositional sketches are as rough as the one shown above, and then I work it all out on the block itself, but then last week my wood was in the Studio, and I was snowbound at home, so I used the down time to produce a fairly detailed paper sketch, seen below.

A few days ago I finally was able to retrieve the block and prepare it, and brought it home. I spent most of the afternoon starting the block drawing, putting in the four major figures from the above drawing. I fixed some of the proportion and scale issues from one to the next, though I will have to work more on all four before they are satisfactory to me. Below is today's progress.

Next I will be adding in some more of the architecture and the two curtained bathers, in time for next week's critique I hope. I think I want to add one more new figure, next to the foreground figure (those crossed arms will be helping her hold a towel draped on her) on the left side. I was planning to bring the model back again to figure light and shadow, but I'll have her take a few new poses (for this and other boardwalk prints) while she's around.