Another Workshop, Another Demo

It seems that I just barely finished putting away all my tools and supplies from the recent woodcut workshop at the BAC, and now it's time to get them out again and prepare for another. The event in this case is called Creativity By The Sea, a weekend of art and craft workshops scattered all over Ocean Grove. It's being organized by Carol Bernard, mother of Michelle Bernard, long time friend of the Studio. Carol had first mentioned it to me in May, and distributed the forms over the summer. I delayed for a while, trying to see if I could coordinate something with Molly (who was also invited), but Molly finally officially declined for scheduling reasons. I figured it's a worthwhile opportunity, so I committed. It will be running in late March 2012, but she wants to get the advertising up now, so this week I sent her the specifics and a short bio. The last thing needed was a sample of the project, and there I had a problem. For practical reasons, I decided to go with using linoleum instead of wood. With only a one day workshop, wood just takes too long for new students to cut. Unfortunately, I've never taught it before, and I don't use the stuff, so I had no completed samples in stock. Time to make a new demonstration piece.

As with my last demonstration piece, to save time I decided to recycle an old image. This time I went back about 20 years. In the years between schools in Virginia and Illinois, I was in New Jersey working on an MA at Montclair State. During those years I regularly went to the annual River Blues festival in Philadelphia, held in an outdoor space overlooking the Delaware. It was just $10 a day, with 3 stages so there was music going most of the time, and a significant number of celebrated blues musicians in attendance. Saw some of the legends (John Lee Hooker, BB King, Buddy Guy, Gatemouth Brown) and many of the contemporary stars I was regularly playing on my radio show (most of the Alligator roster). One of my favorite performances of all those I had seen was on the acoustic stage, John Cephas (guitar) and Phil Wiggins (harmonica). A piedmont style duo reminiscent of legends Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, their Dog Days of August album was a new release when I was on the air in Williamsburg. The record was good, but live they were really good- the arrangements faithful to the recordings, just with a little extra emotion. I usually brought my camera and on that day I took several photos of them playing, as seen above. (it wasn't a high stage- we were all sitting on the paved ground to enjoy the show)

It was around that same time that I started doing woodcuts. I had by accident settled on a process of cutting the blocks, but instead of traditional inking and printing, I would place paper on top of the dry block, then roll inked brayers over the top to create something kind of like a rubbing. Using different types of brayers and viscosities of ink, and very thin Japanese papers, I was able to achieve some interesting effects. Probably around 1991 I made the above print, based on one of my photos (the middle one at the top) of John Cephas. I continued this process for about a year into my MFA, then switched to the more traditional printing method. This morning I was thinking about possibilities for a two color print and remembered the image. Luckily I had about a dozen examples in stock, and brought them, and the original photos to the Studio this afternoon.

One advantage of this older process was that the image could be very clearly seen through the back of the paper, so I used the mirrored image as the source for my new print. Years ago I had purchased a 4"x 6" piece of linoleum to use someday, and since that is the size I want to use for the workshop, it was perfect for my task today. I did a few rough pencil sketches on paper of the figure in horizontal and vertical formats and decided to go with the former. I sketched it out with pencil on the linoleum, on the right side in the above photo. I then went over the lines and shapes with a black marker to clarify what to cut, shown below.

I quickly cut out the design, mixed an indigo in water based relief ink, and pulled a proof, seen above. It looked good, so I re-inked the block and offset it onto a small piece of prepared plywood. (for the workshop all the blocks will be linoleum, but I don't have that handy right now) I used the transfer proof to break down where the second color would go, then cut the wood block. I mixed an orange color and pulled a proof of that, seen below.

I pulled 5 or 6 of that orange tone block, then mixed some more indigo and overprinted them with the key block. I didn't bother to set up a registration system, so I just eyeballed it. Below is the best proof made today. I wouldn't call it a great work of art, but it should serve the purpose of showing potential students what can be done. From the moment I picked up the pencil to the completion of the print, the process took about 3 hours. I think it's reasonable that people taking my workshop could complete a similar print in the 6 hours or so that it will run.

I sent the photos to Carol tonight. She says that they hope to have a website for the festival up by next week, with all the schedule and details. I'll post the link once I learn about it.