Summer of Cutting

Normally the summer is a time when I expect to get work done on some prints, when I'm not busy with college classes and all that goes with them.  Not this summer.  As mentioned here previously, I took a job with the supermarket which has become a 40 hour per week deal, more than any job I have worked in decades.  Working in the deli, I spend a lot of time cutting meats and cheeses, but no wood has been cut this summer.  My usual Belmar woodcut classes didn't happen for lack of committed students.  I also cut the lawn on a regular basis, though that has been less lately as we have had heat waves and drought conditions most of the summer.  No rain and the grass doesn't grow.

So a lot of cutting, but not the material I know best.  I'd love to get back to it soon.  The supermarket series remains on hold.  I thought a bit about adding to the boardwalk series, but those pieces take a lot of planning before they are ready to start.  But lately I have been thinking about something related to the idea that I have spent recent months cutting everything but wood.  I was at my community college today doing some pre-semester stuff, and had some time to kill between tasks, so I grabbed a sheet of copy paper, a ball point pen, and started sketching a few things.

I took notes on some variations on the theme of cutting, but these early sketches are deli related.  I don't consider these part of the supermarket series, which is specifically about weird but true events, while these are referencing things done all day every day.  There's no practical way to do these from actual observation, so these are memory sketches, and such will be the case if this turns into something.  However, hundreds of hours of slicing does build up a lot of memory.  The above sketch shows meat on the slicer from two different sides.  Below is using a razor bladed box cutter to open a vacuum sealed piece of meat, which is how we quickly get them open.

What I'm thinking right now is this wouldn't be a series, but instead a complex composition mixing pieces of cutting ideas related to this summer.  And probably a colored piece.  If I can expand the idea over the next few weeks, I'll try taking it to the next stage.