Fiber Art

I had assumed that my next piece would be the Asbury boardwalk print, but I've decided to finish something else to meet a quick deadline.  It seems hard to believe, here in July, but there will only be two more shows in Belmar that I would likely be a part of, both new ideas for this year's schedule.  One  is a show devoted to the classes begin offered, open to any student from 2014.  ( I am not, but I've been told that they might want me to put in a piece as the instructor to show what woodcut is like)  The other  one is one devoted to fiber arts, which includes fabric and paper.  Not my usual way of working, but I remembered that I have this above piece, a mixed media collage.  It's fairly old, dating back to Carbondale, so around 20 years old.  I have no memory of why I did it, other than perhaps curiosity about trying a process.  I would have acquired the various decorative papers at the Pearl in Paramus, but I don't remember if I got them just to do this, or had them in stock.  The design is based on a charcoal figure drawing from the class I used to sit in on from time to time.

My memory is that I drew and cut the image first.  I proofed it on a piece of Japanese unryu paper using a very lightly colored water based ink, barely visible.  Then I cut/tore pieces of colored paper into shapes that roughly corresponded to the composition of the print.  These pieces were glued down to the surface of the proof, like a jigsaw puzzle.  When it was dry, I inked the block with relief ink, carefully placed my assembled collage on top, and ran it through a press.  Luckily it worked on the first try.  Having shown that I could do it, I never did repeat the process, and the piece was never framed or mounted for display purposes.  In recent years I have shown it to my local print classes, as an example of a possibility of relief printing.

A few years ago I taught a one day class in linocut in my Studio, as part of a special Ocean Grove art weekend.  The limited time for the workshop meant we had to keep things simple, but I picked up a few more types of colored paper locally to have available for that class, and some used it.  I have also brought my rolls of colored exotic papers to the woodcut class at times, and some of my students will try a piece to see how color and texture can affect the design of their woodcut.

As I said, I hadn't been thinking about being in this fiber show, but then I remembered this piece.  It's bold, likely different from anything else they'll see, and it meets the rules of the show.  My biggest concern is that it's a unique piece, and one that I use to show in class.  Not that it's likely to happen, but if it sold, I wouldn't have one any more.  So I made sure that I still had the block post-Sandy (and I do), and since I have lots of colored paper, I decided I'd quickly make another one specifically to put in the show.  And since I have a new round of woodcut classes beginning next week, the piece can also be used to teach a specific lesson.

I'm going to do this one in a more traditional chine colle process.  The thin colored paper pieces will be printed and mounted to the backing paper at the same time.  My first step was taking a pencil rubbing of the block on a piece of newsprint, shown above in progress.  When that was done, I went over the pencil with a black marker, to firm up where the black and gray shapes are, shown below next to the original wood.

The next step will be to choose which colors I will use this time, and then to cut out the pieces to match the spaces where they will be appearing in the print.  It all goes together next week.