Return of the Selfies

Took the past several days off, a combination of work and having our weekly heat wave and the need to remain air conditioned.  so here are some updates.

Last week I dropped by the Boatworks to photograph the latest version of the Art on the Line show, and received a little gift.  There was some cleaning and organizing going on, and Rebecca offered me a few items- three small tubes of water based relief ink, two small wooden spoons, and some sand paper.  I generally don't use the water based ink in my own art, though back when I was teaching 2D regularly I was using it to print student woodcuts.  However extra wooden spoons are always useful for class printing projects, and sandpaper never goes to waste.  I didn't expect that any of this could be useful right away, but art can be unpredictable.

I am currently working on my contribution to the BAC Selfies show.  Where I left off last week was learning that I couldn't use an image of tall roadside advertising signs (a print from my Fourth of July series, the block a victim of Sandy) to fill a space from an old print (same series) in making a new collaged piece, figuring I would just make something new.  I gave some thought to exactly what signs I might create for this new piece and then remembered I might have another source already done.

Several years ago I did a large piece called A History of Art, which celebrated all the things that I had been exposed to, and had consequently turned up in my art.  The super tall highway signs included all kinds of bold graphics as well as being an iconic symbol, so qualified on that basis, plus having been used as an image in something I had actually done.  So I included a typical gas/food/lodging combo in this 2008 print.  I knew I still had that block, figured the scale of the items would fit my intentions for this new collage piece, so planned to proof this section as collage material, on a day when I wasn't working and it wasn't 110 degrees.

Plus, I was able to use my newly acquired art materials.  Rolled out a combination of blue and black relief ink, and inked that section of the tower block.  Used some tape to mask the background between the poles, and used one of the new wooden spoons to print it onto a scrap of paper.  Made two, the better of which is shown below.

One good thing about water based ink is that it dries fast, so I can try coloring this piece as soon as I have time.  The space these signs will have to fit into is small, leaving room for only two of them, but that's fine.  While the ESSO sign made sense in an artwork about the past, the whole chain was converted to EXXON stations by the early 70's (wikipedia has the whole story if you aren't old enough to remember those days) so it makes no sense in a 90's based "selfie".