My printmaking family - Katie, Adrian, Beth and Tom
Wecome to Studio 24-7 - 2012! Another year has gotten off to a fast start and I will be sharing my activities and thoughts with you as we move through the next 12 months.
It has been hard to get settled in after a great holiday break. I still have not taken our tree down or put away all the decorative objects I have collected over the past 40+ years but that will happen in it's own time.
Most families have traditions which develop over time out of habits or by design. This year we know we have started a wonderful new family tradition which involves everyone working in the studio together with a single process/medium.
Adrian and Beth demonstrating great concentration.
Our son and his wife, Adrian and Katie, were here for a brief but wonderful visit and on the day before they left we all gathered in the studio for a mono-printing session joined by my sister, Beth. Between the 5 of us we have lots of art education ( Art Institute of Chicago, Pratt, Massachusetts College of Art, Winthrop University, University of Tennessee and Clemson University) as well as work experience (teacher, designer, restoration, special effects artist) so it was sort of a stacked deck - but none of us are primarily printmakers.
Here you can see the print plate and the print as Katie pulls the paper off the plate surface.
This is a sampling of the prints I created. I was working with a plate that was
6" x 30" so many of my prints were done in sections.
The session was self-paced and fast paced. Generally, we used Liquitex Liquid Acrylics on plexiglass panels and printed on a variety of papers. Adrian did use some sort of print medium but I don't recall what it was....it was a little thicker.
Adrian worked only with black and really got involved in interesting textures and value.
Tom is pictured showing off his best Professorial Pointing Technique.
He is standing next to a wall on which
part of the prints we made are displayed.Actually, every wall and table
was covered with prints when we finished!
Most of the prints were done in one step but there were a number of prints that I experimented on with overprinting. Tom was our teacher/assistant and he facilitated every phase of the session from set-up to making sure we had plenty of paper and paint. He started us off with a little demo of what he has been doing and then we just jumped in. It was a blast and we made more than 120 prints in about 2 hours.
Some of the prints will become "stand alone" works and indeed Tom has already matted and made frames for 3 of the pieces. One of them is a collaboration of my work and his, one is a nice piece I did on some very textured paper and one is a print that my sister made. I'll post these later.
Tom has been working with mixed media collages lately with great success and we all agreed to giving him some of our prints for use in future work. Anything he doesn't use will go to the artist of origin ;-)
This was such a wonderful experience and will now be a Christmas Tradition in our family. There was no music (not by design - we just forgot the MP3 player), little chatter, lots of concentration, much encouragement for one another and fabulous success. What a great way to spend time together.
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Thank YOU for spending time at Studio 24-7. I love hearing from you and Remember:
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