A Lot of Art in the Basement

 I had an odd dream last night in which I visited an art show and sale being held in the basement of the Jersey Shore Arts Center, the building where my Studio is.  In fact, that Studio is in the basement as well, so I am very familiar with the environment.   The below photo from 2010 shows that I have been down there for quite a while, and have seen it many times.

Further, I have used the space as a subject in my own artwork more recently.  We had an Open Studio event earlier this year, and needing something to work on as a demonstration piece, I started a new woodcut with a subject I know well.  For the visual, I based it on actual spaces and architectural features found in the basement, to the point that when I recently showed the print to Kaitlyn in the office (education in relief printing, at her request), she recognized some of the basement features that I had employed.  The first proof of the resulting print can be seen below:

It's not exactly the actual architecture of the basement (I rearranged things a bit), but all the physical features are real things.  The idea of holding any kind of art event down there seems kind of strange, as many people are afraid to even go down there.  I have heard many people talk about this, and even on the day of the Open Studio, I heard a number of visitors remark how my space itself was much more inviting and enjoyable (better light, more comfortable and colorful) than the hallways immediately outside.  One visitor even mentioned later that her mother wasn't even sure if they were allowed to do down to the basement, as it looked dark and creepy, but the visitor had spent much time in my Studio and knew it would be fine.  Even before this I had given the piece a working title of Achluophobia, which is the official name for fear of darkness (not to be confused with fear of night).  Surprisingly, there is no official term for fear of basements, even though it is acknowledged as the room in a house that people fear the most.  Of the options given to me by the internet, this seemed most appropriate to the reality.

Anyway, in the dream, nothing was hung on the walls, as it wouldn't be, as there is no hanging system in place.  (the signs seen in to top photo are screwed into the brick walls, done by the building when Molly and I first moved in, a long time ago) Instead, everything was stacked in boxes on the floor, so one had to look through them to see what was there.  I had no boxes of items out there.  No one was supervising this exhibition and sale, so I have no idea how a purchase would be handled. (maybe there was a place upstairs to complete a purchase, of works brought up from the basement)  Some of the work was quite good- it was clear that the artist had put in a lot of work creating the piece.  Some looked low quality.  I didn't buy anything, which may be because I don't have a lot money these days, or maybe because I wouldn't have any place to put it, but some things struck me as worth owning.  And though I didn't recognize any specific area of the basement hallways, the architecture all seemed quite authentic, the kind of bricks and floors I've seen down there- maybe because I have spent time in recent months looking at them in detail as part of drawing them for this print.  

I don't know what any of this means, but it's about art and about this odd basement space I have spent much time in over the past few decades, so I figured it was worth an entry here.  Whether or not this will eventually be turned into another artwork I have no idea.

Nashville Show

 Took a trip up to the Studio for a few reasons.  One was to verify a few things related to my request for some kind of improvement in the basement conditions.  Another was because I wanted to stop by the supermarket and pick up a few things on the way home.  However, the big reason is that I realized that we are almost halfway through July now (got my car inspected yesterday) and I still haven't heard anything about the Robert Johnson show that Tom is organizing for us and others in Nashville.  Last I had heard from him, he was going to let me know this summer what was going on, and the summer is half over now. I'm not going to ask him about it yet, but I want to be prepared and ready to go when he is.  

I have pulled lots of proofs of prints from that series, including two of different sizes of the one he liked best (sent images a few months ago) and I have taken large format photos of all of them, but I did know that the one horizontal piece (his favorite of course) had some shadow on the left side,  Lights in my Studio space are not going to change any time soon, but it had occurred to me that my portable tack board is indeed portable, so there was no reason I couldn't put it in a different part of the room, or a different room for that matter, where the light would be better.  

First though, I stopped by the office.  Elyse had sent an email a few days ago, which I had replied to.  She told me today that she considered replying to that one, but hadn't.   (no questions were asked, so I didn't expect one)  I still hadn't heard anything about a windowless air conditioner, but she said that from what she had heard, they cost a lot more than the window models, so that's probably out.  And there are security concerns about us having a window model, even if the building creates some kind of mounting system, as at ground level it still may be easy for someone to push it in and gain access to our space.  (as I pointed out, that had already happened with just our regular windows and no air conditioner)  So nothing has been decided yet.  Good thing the basement is not unbearable yet.  

As for the photo session, a quick glance at the other nearby rooms and hallways in the basement showed me they were no better than what I had, so I set up in my space.   First I tried moving the board out from where it is, but still facing the windows, the best source of light I have.  The print looked good, but the camera itself, held in from of the print to photograph it, still cast a slight shadow.   Not acceptable from my point of view.  So I moved the tack board at a right angle to the windows.  That was the answer.  I took a whole bunch of photos, of both the original and shortened versions, as I still don't know exactly what is wanted. But I am ready.  

Then came the hard part, trying to edit all these photos into images I can post here.  It's hard to tell just from looking at thumbnails what is good and not.  I didn't even know the number of the photo until after editing and moving it to the dashboard.  The best clue was that I could easily see which ones were the shorter (proper size) image, by looking at the left side where I made the change and shortened it.  

One of my edited images can be seen above.  I think it's the right one for this size, but I won't know for sure unless I email it to myself- the only way to verify the file size.  And a lot of this depends on what the gallery in Nashville wants, and I don't know if even Tom knows that.  Of course, I returned the space to the state it was when I got there.  

Blood Draw part 3

I had a little time today so I decided to go to the Studio and get a little work done.  After dropping off my stuff in my space, I checked to see that there was no dehumidifier in the kitchen (and there wasn't), then dropped by the office.  Elyse was in, but I was told she had a meeting going, so I decided to work first, and talk to her later.  

My plan for today was to fix those hands. the one part of the block I can work on without the help of anyone else.  As last time, I used my own left arm as the model, drawing it directly as the parts for my further arm (which will be my right arm in the resulting print), and drawing what I saw of it in a mirror for the nearer arm (the left arm in the print).  The nearer arm needed a little work, and now it is improved.  The further arm needed a lot of work, especially the hand and the giant thumb I had on there.  It made sense for where I started, but everything else had changed since, but that large thumb was still there.  Today's work brought it more in line with the other fingers on the hand, as well as gave it a scale that makes sense compared to the foreground hand.  I'm not saying that both of these are now done, but everything looks a lot better than it did last week.  A detail showing the two new and improved hands can be seen below:

The nurse hands are still there very rough, as I don't have a model yet.  The whole block as it now stands can be seen below here.  

I was by myself, but I could tell Molly had been there since my last visit. The rent check was missing, the boom box was set to radio, and the volume was up in the 7's (normally I keep it in the 3's).  For music I decided to go with my home burned disc of music from Shonen Knife, a three woman Japanese band that was well known in the 80's and early 90's, and has been written about on the blog back in July of 2019.  My disc just says songs from 1983 to 1986 (probably when they were recorded and first released over there), although it also includes a few live tracks that seem to have been recorded in Munich (from what I gather from stage banter), things I got from my friend Dave (who I turned into a fan), but I have no idea when or where they are from.  The one song that's notably different was in Japanese on the original record, and was now mostly in English on this live performance, so I'm thinking it was later, but I don't know.  As for why I picked this today, probably because lately tv has been full of commercials for the new live action Barbie movie, and this disc includes a Shonen Knife classic, "Twist Barbie", from the earliest studio album reissued in America.

After I was done drawing I went back to the office.  Elyse was now there, but had no idea what I was talking about with heat and humidity in the basement and the dehumidifiers we had in the past.  This I find odd, as I know what we had, and I even wrote about a conversation she and I had last July on this very topic, with her her remarking how intolerable the basement was and how unsuitable it was for us to work under such conditions.  Of course, her lack of desire to solve the problem may be the result of Molly having broken into the building last night instead of using her key or ID card or whatever.  (camera by the door reveals all)  I have a feeling it may be a while before this all gets resolved, but at least I don't get blamed for it.  

  

Blood Draw part 2

 

Well, no doctor appointments today.  No federal holiday.  Just hot.  A good day to get up to the Studio and do some work.  Actually the heat was part of it.  I know from experience that the basement gets damp and warm as the summer goes on, and it was as good a day as any to bring this up to the new person in charge. The upper floors, which also get very hot in summer in that historic building with no air conditioners, can install air conditioners in the windows, and the building will do that.  In the basement they can't, so we get some dehumidifiers, which do a good job, but none are out right now.  When I arrived, I checked.  Actually, the basement isn't too bad yet, but I know what will happen as the summer goes on.

So after dropping off my stuff, and picking up the block and print from my last piece (done at the Open Studio) I dropped by the office.  Elyse wasn't in (on vacation this week I am told), so I couldn't ask about the dehumidifiers yet, though Kaitlyn, who has been around a few years, knew exactly what I was talking about, so maybe it will get done without any more from me.  The print and the block were to show her, since she mentioned she had been trying relief printing of late.  She was impressed with the block (and the speed in which I got it done) and the print, with its dark black and clearly printed shapes and ink.  I told her that it was an oil based ink (Outlaw Black I believe), which she had already recognized, probably because that's what I told her to use last week.  She hasn't done that yet, but told me she did follow my advice and use something harder to print the linoleum and had better results than she had with a barren.  She wondered if it still wasn't right because she was using mounted (on fiberboard) linoleum instead of loose sheets, but I told her I've used both, and found no difference when it comes to printing.  Oil based ink, on the other hand, gives a much darker black, and stays wet for days, not the minutes you get with water based inks.  She may also invest in some better paper.  Meanwhile, she recognized the scenes from the basement and appreciated the idea when I told it to her.

Time to get to work.  I had the block ready to go.  For music I had seen I still had my Jazz/Blues set in my bag, so I went with some from that.  I started with the soundtrack from the David Cronenberg's film The Naked Lunch, which was a very strange film (only loosely based on what is reputed to be an even stranger novel) but the odd combination of the London Philharmonic and Ornette Coleman's saxophone playing worked very well as an appropriate way to accompany the hallucinatory nature of the film.  You can read more about it on this blog in June, 2019.  I followed that with fellow sax player John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, which seemed to be the only thing I had that made sense with the other album, and not a bad listen in itself.  Much to my surprise, this didn't get written about until March of this year.

As I said previously, I would prefer a live model to act as the nurse, but I figured either way, the first step was to draw myself, in pencil.  I did a quick thumbnail of what I had in mind for the composition, and then set about trying to draw such a thing.  

How do you get a side profile of a face?  My solution was two mirrors, looking into a hand held one at another mirror on my table that was actually reflecting my face from an appropriate angle.   Good enough for this roughed in sketch, which I will fix up later.  Both arms are actually the same arm, my left, once drawn as I looked at it in a mirror, once drawn right in front of me.  That far one in this early sketch needs a lot of work, especially that thumb, but this is all pencil, so it can and will be fixed.  An extremely rough version of the nurse is there,  just to tell me where she will go.  My plan is to finish all this in pencil, then darken the borders with drawing ink, and leave everything else until I put in the other figure.  I may have to erase some of what I will have drawn to put her in.  But it's a start.

The Fourth of July

 This is kind of an important day here at Studio Arrabbiata, mostly because of my series of the same title- done in grad school, an idea that came to me almost instantly and took a year to finish.  The resulting series, with its 366 woodcut prints, has been exhibited 4 times and is probably the thing I am best known for.  I used the set itself as a teaching device- a self bound book of photocopies of the entire series in order- an excellent way to show what is possible with a relief print.  (like so much else that I own, it's in storage and I can't get to it right now, but it should still be fine when I get it back)  Photos taken of the original prints were used to create a blog that lists the stories that go with each print, or at least what I remember of them, but then again, if I hadn't made the prints, it is unlikely that I would remember most of the incidents that inspired each print.  That was kind of the point of the series, perhaps an influence from the Dave Lasky mini-comic story that was one of the inspirations, that small incidents can be great things if remembered, and art is one way of doing that.  

It was in this series that I first created a woodcut showing the classic image from this holiday, fireworks in the sky.  It actually appears in the first July 4 print (there are two in the series, one at the beginning and one at the end), a bunch of things I associated with the day.  That print may have influenced another one, by a former student from the woodcut classes I taught in Belmar.  In what I think was her second ever woodcut, she did an image of fireworks in the night sky, over a boardwalk, a black and white print.  She was pleased with it, enough so to enter it in a county art show.  Immediately afterwards she told me about it, very nervous.  She had seen other entries to the show, which had a theme of sights from local places, and many of those where photographs.  How could she compete?  I told her not only could she compete, but that she might do very well- a relief print has much more power than a mere photograph, and people often respect what goes into it.  Sure enough, she took second place in the all media competition.  I never saw the show itself, but at least for that moment whoever gave the awards liked her piece a lot and gave her a prize.  Such is the power of woodcut.

Of course, maybe she was influenced by another piece I had done, which was exhibited (and won a prize) in that same space I was teaching, which also showed fireworks exploding over a boardwalk, but that is a color piece, not the black and white she exhibited in that county show.  I showed that color piece in another location a few years ago, and sold two copies, which had to be reprinted and recolored, but I had an original to work from and figured it out.  That piece can be seen here:

Off hand, I can't remember when I first made this print, and when that class was that my student  took, so I really can't verify all this.  It goes back to before this blog was started.  I could dig up the dates of the show that my color piece was in Belmar, but without the other information, it's not worth the work. However, I do remember that she took my woodcut class, decided to enter one of her early efforts from that class, and was surprised that she won an award going against works that she assumed jurors would like better than hers.  

The odd thing about the color image, is that many times over the years, I have have viewers swear to me that they have been to that very boardwalk and remember the sights well.  As the artist I know that it is completely made up, some based on things that are common on boardwalks in New Jersey, with a few things drawn from very different boardwalks. and a lot of it just out of my head.  But I guess if feels real enough.