Artistic Process: the Red Cow Woodcut

Trying something new out on the ol' blog after a long hiatus - I've been more active with my own art projects lately, so I thought I'd try out a few posts on the processes using specific mediums and take the opportunity to show off a few of my own pieces at the same time.

This spring, shortly after my last post, I took a trip to Nicaragua and Costa Rica to visit a dear friend, learn how to surf, and just bum around Central America for a couple of weeks. One of the places we stayed was a little eco-tourism farm on the island of Ometepe in Lake Nicaragua. The farm had a small herd of skinny red cows that roamed about pretty freely - on the first afternoon we stayed there, I saw the entire herd troop down to the beach to drink from the lake - an especially surprising sight given that the lake is the size of a small sea, and the beach had white sand and a large tiki umbrella.

I took a few photos of the cows, and came home thinking they'd make for a great woodcut.

Now, read the rest of this with a word of caution: I am no great wood-cutter. I use linoleum sheets and rudimentary, large tools, and the result is often pretty rustic. But for this particular piece, I really liked that effect.

I generally start with a drawing, and make a few practice runs at how I'm going to do the actual cuts - where highlights and shadows should be, and what types of line I'll use. Lesson #1 of print making: your final product will be the mirror image of the object you use to make the print, which I usually forget completely. If I were more dedicated, I'd use tracing paper to make a reverse image from my original sketch.

Next I move to the linoleum itself - this is by far the most time consuming process for me, because I'm still only making prints with one color. I usually work out a basic outline, then go back and make deeper, wider cuts into places that should be highlighted. Here's how this linoleum turned out.

When I'm near satisfied, I start making practice runs, sometimes just using paint to save my ink. Once I've made all the tweaks and changes I can handle, I use Speedball ink (I have in red and black) and a roller and wooden spoon combo to make the print itself. I use a medium-quality archival print paper.

 

And here's the final! I like a few things about how this turned out: the rustic feel of the lines, as I mentioned, with their uneven quality and literally rough edges, the head-on stare of the cow's face, and the impact of the ears - I tried to emphasize them by increasing the size slightly and widening the lines outlining them.

I made copies in black and red, and framed four of them together.

If you really, really like it, I'll send you a copy. $20 for one cow, $30 for two, $50 for four, unframed. You pay shipping. Leave a comment or send a message via onsugar to request.

always sunny

No, not in Philadelphia. It may be midwinter here, but in SoCal it's always sunny.  I took a little trip south a few weekends back, and my photos of surfers were such a refreshing sight to see on a rainy Seattle day last week that I thought I'd share them. I also obsessively tried to capture the progression of a wave, from swell to crest to crash, unfortunately resulting in far too many mediocre photos of identical waves in mid-cycle. I forced myself to choose one sequence, which you see here - I think these would look lovely hung in oversize prints, next to one another along a long, high wall.

 

 

chasing a wave

Picasso! (numero dos)

Last week, I spent two hours reveling in the world of the Picasso exhibit. Taken on a journey through the artist’s tumultuous life and love affairs, the exhibit (in it’s first stop at the Seattle Art Museum through next week, headed to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts next from February 19 to May 15, followed by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco this summer) really does a standout job of immersing its viewers in Picasso’s “diary”. And as with any good diary, this one was full of sexual exploits and love affairs. I walked away from the exhibit impressed with Picasso, yes, but also with each of various women in his life who so impacted this artist’s incredible work (and incredible ego). Fascinatingly, Picasso recognized this intertwining (or is it dependency?) of art with love of women, by believing sexuality to be equal to creativity.

Picasso is organized into an almost overwhelming 12 galleries, each chock full of drawings, sketches, woodcuts, etchings, and of course, paintings. The exhibit begins early in his life, with an introduction to the Blue period through a painting reacting to a friend’s suicide. That work is done in a style similar to van Gogh’s, and is in stark contrast to the work hung next to it: La Celestina, a portrait of an old woman with a cataract that is in many ways typical of the Blue period.

La Celestina, 1904.

The next gallery shows Olga, Picasso's first wife, and work from his years of happy family life. His first experiments with cubism appear in this gallery, which led to his early masterpiece Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

Olga, 1918.

Sacre-Coure, 1909.

That gallery is followed by a turn towards the weird during the beginning of Picasso’s family troubles and first adulterous affair, with a woman named Marie-Therese Walter in 1927. In a small room filled with bizarre distortions and increasingly sexual references, you see firsthand the turmoil the artist is going through – and putting his family through. The Acrobat provides a beautiful, if jarring, centerpiece to the room, complemented by sculptures and a lively colorful painting with penile imagery.

The Acrobat, 1918.

Moving into a blatantly sexual period, the next gallery is devoted entirely to work inspired by or picturing Marie-Therese. I reacted strongly to these works, each of which is erotic in varying degrees of intensity as well as is, well, round. Picasso obsessed over rounded lines, circles as a motif, and the sexuality inherent in curves of bodies.

The Reading, 1932.

One can only imagine how good Marie-Therese must have been in bed – and indeed the exhibit includes a quote from Picasso: “Marie would do whatever I asked.” This flexibility, utter devotion, constant willingness is evident in what I perceive as an almost perverted contrast between softness, and violent emotion or distortion – an increasingly pastel color palette with rounded lines, yet nudity and strange, shocking body positions augmented in their sexuality by abstraction.

Picasso’s next affair with Dora Maar, represented by work in the next gallery which led up to Guernica, provides a stark contrast to the imagery in the previous work. He emphasizes line even further, but this time with sharp edges and straight lines. His color palette shifts entirely to bright vivid intense colors, and the juxtaposition makes it easy to imagine what type of woman Dora Maar was –intelligent, intense, and always challenging for Picasso.

Dora Maar, 1937.

His final love affairs aren’t given as much weight in the exhibit, but I found most interesting the one woman who left him, and the woman who replaced her and remained with Picasso through his final days: Francoise Gilot (the former), and Jacqueline Roque (the latter). These works remain colorful, and continue to play with line. The portrait of Jacqueline below also shows a stronger sense of shape in throat and body, and of the hand of the artist in his palette knife scrapings in the back- and foreground.

Jacqueline, 1954.

The exhibit quotes Picasso as stating many times, as he looked back through the century of art, that when thinking of true peers, “all things considered, there’s only Matisse.” It closes with late work and some lovely photographs of the artist throughout his life, with his family, lovers, and in his studio. All things considered, this exhibit is a fantastic look at the life of a wonderfully productive artist, but in many ways most interesting for the insights about the women who were such a central influence and inspiration to his masterpieces.