Updates of All Sorts

Print I did for the reduction linocut demo

Spring has sprung in Texas and as the seasons change so does my work in the studio. I have dedicated April to be my printmaking-only month. The beginning of the year has flown by sewing customs and I finally had to say "stop" to all that and reclaim my space back as a printing studio. Now that I have cleaned a mountain of fabric and bits of thread off the tables, I have ink, paper and brayers ready to go.

The rest of the year is dotted with lots of print related events so I am happy to be in the studio to make more work and to share it with others. I am also teaching a good amount, and if you are local to the Bryan/College Station area, see my Facebook page for regular events and updates, or if you are not on FB, ask to be put on my local mailing list for events that goes out about once a month. Here's a quick rundown on whats coming up:

First of all I am teaching an ongoing printmaking class on Thursday nights in Bryan, TX. It's been a lot of fun and is open for everyone to attend. There will be several workshops coming up in May and September at the Forsythe Galleries at Texas A&M and the Arts Council of Brazos Valley.

I just did a demo yesterday for the local art league, about reduction linocuts, and will do another one on engraving for the Forsythe Galleries (TAMU) in July.

Demoing at the art league, photo by Nikki Smith

This week I am working on a wood engraving for the cover of the next Wood Engravers Network publication, Block and Burin. It's a really fun project so far. I don't want to reveal the image too much until after it hits the mailboxes, but here's a *little* sneak peak.

As soon as I'm done printing this one, I have a piece to make for an invitational exhibition at the Forsythe Galleries. Some local artists were selected to make work inspired by pieces in the University's collection. I was given a nice watercolor by Stanley M. Long that features a horse and rider to work off of. More on that later when I get to it.  

In May I teach a workshop on making linocut postcards and then take off with the kids to Finland for a month and a half. I'm going to try really hard to finish the book on Finnish wallhangings while I'm there and have my parents help on babysitting the kids. The project has been going for a long time, and I think I have enough to finally put it all together.

After we get back there will be an art fair in Bryan, TX, that I am looking forwards to participating, some classes, and a solo show at the Sead Gallery (also in Bryan) at the end of the year that I'm really excited to create new work for.

I have so many ideas brewing and already know I won't have time to make even half of what I want. Some ideas are for nice exhibition prints and then some ideas are for small prints that would do well at an art fair and on Etsy. Hmmm, and come to think of it my website needs a revamp too, but looking at all this, it'll probably have to wait until the end of the year!

I have some nice websites to share for resources but wanted to do a separate write-up for that. You can look forwards to a press-maker, image resources and other random things that are out there as soon as I get another chance to sit down and write.

Have a great day!
Mirka

Oma Koti Onneni

Oma koti onneni-thats Finnish and it means "My house is my happiness". The concept of a print with an aphorism with a border and embellishments comes from a Finnish handcraft tradition that was popular in the early 1900's (see small insert on left). We have several of these huoneentaulu's/wall hangings at our house, and I have been fascinated by them for a long time. I started a project to collect as many images of wall hangings as I can find and see what commonalities I can find in them and what they tell of their times. I want to update the old tradition that is about to disappear, and make contemporary prints that people still would hang on their walls today. You can find more information about the project here. For the main project for the letterpress class at SVC, I decided to try out some ideas gathered from the wall hangings I have been sent so far.

I started by setting a large border of type ornaments and type inside of it as seen above. This process took me hours upon hours to complete just to get all the little spaces filled up so that not even one little piece nudged inside the border. I then proofed the block on a small proofing press. That revealed a bunch more problems, with a couple of the ornaments being shorter than others and one that was very high.

You can see the arrow on the right, the ornament too high creates a halo around it, and some areas on the left and middle where the ornaments did not print at all or very faintly. To correct the shorter ornaments, I had to pull them out carefully and add a little piece of tissue paper under it to lift it up. That worked great.

Here you can see a closeup of the ornaments. Everything is bundled up really tight.

After the block was proofed, I was able to figure out how and where to carve my linoblock. Below is a mockup of the finished print dimensions and with the design drawn on the linoblock.

Here is a picture of the ornament border and type locked up front to back and sideways on the Vandercook press. I was able to get this done the previous weekend to printing, because just transferring everything and locking it up, revealed many more pieces that wiggled, so I had to keep working on it before it was ready to print. Below are some pictures from the middle of printing. You can see the finished print with two colors in the back and the front with only the ornament border and type printed on it.

Here is the linoblock locked up on the press with ink rolled and ready to go. The linoblocks are so much easier to lock up!

For the finished piece, I added a little bit of pink watercolor to highlight the flowers. It is really hard to capture a good image. It is printed on a cream colored Stonehenge paper, with fairly light inks- with the pink watercolor. Light colors dont transfer well on a computer screen. It looks so much better in person. The size of the print is about 9"x12" and the paper is a couple of inches all the way around. The original hand embroidered wall hangings are about 2-4 times bigger so I wish I could have printed larger, but the press that I had to work with limited the size to less than 15x18". This is a nice size though, smaller is always easier to frame and is still big enough to make a statement on the wall. I look forwards to working on this project, and eventually putting it all in a book.