"Pigling Bland and Pig Wig" Take 2

 

"Pigling Bland and Pig Wig" 
12" x 12" 
2 block linocut and woodcut 

This is the first woodcut for a 2024 art calendar, which is part of the Some Pigs project, an AiRM (artist-in-residency-in-motherhood). The project also includes ceramics, an installation, and a zine, all of which will culminate in a solo exhibition at 1040 Creative in November of this year. 

This particular print illustrates the final scene in Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Pigling Bland. While Potter's more famous stories of Peter Rabbit  have been connected to stories of slavery and told by slaves in America, Pigling Bland's tale reads as a direct allegory for it. The title character and his brother are sent to market with papers. When they are stopped by a police officer, his brother is taken back to the farm because he misplaced those papers. After stowing away in a chicken coop, Pigling Bland is held by a farmer who has also "stolen" a little black pig named Pig Wig. The two plot their escape, and they achieve freedom by literally crossing a border. All of this is told in the most matter-of-fact tone, as if the inevitable and profound suffering of the pigs is utterly mundane. The comparisons to chattel slavery, distinctly from a perspective of the era, couldn't be clearer. It's an odd children's book. To me, a bit of a childlike illustration of what Hannah Arendt would decades later call "The banality of evil" in reference to how the Nazis carried out their genocide in the most dispassionate, bureaucratic manner. 

Pigs are, to me, an undeniable symbol of vulnerability. The ones presented in this series of woodcuts are presented as farm animals or at best, pets or animals kept in rescues or shelters. Pigs were domesticated to be food. Those in captivity are destined for slaughter. What's more, references to bacon and other pork products abound. (As the parent of a child who often weeps at the sight or mention of bacon, I am all too aware of this.) 

In these prints, it is important to me to present the pigs in moments of joy. Because even in captivity, even facing doom, pigs and people alike are beings that feel. We connect with our immediate environment and others and we experience living. It is in moments of joy, however brief, that we recognize the value of being alive. 

Sketchbook Sunday: Barred Owl on Handmade Paper

This year I learned to make paper. I learned about and made paper along with campers at the Community Arts Center with Summer Spree Fellow Carol Gannon. I took workshops with Cozy Bendesky at Historic Rittenhouse Town, using seeds, leaves, and flower pedals, and plants, and then did the open vats workshop.

So now I have all this random handmade paper, some of which I have plans to print on, but lots of which I have no plans for yet. And I've been really lazy about doing my Sketchbook Sundays, so the obvious solution is to start drawing on some of this lovely paper. Here's my first attempt: a barred owl in flight.

Sketchbook Sunday: A Weary Squirrel

Despite holiday business I managed to get one more quick sketch in before the New Year holiday, and here it is - a taxidermy squirrel from the Wagner.

Sketchbook Sunday: Rabbits at the Wagner

More Wagner taxidermy. They do manage to be kind of cute, but much like their friend the Longtail Weasel I sketched last month, these guys look like they've been dead a while.

Sketchbook Sunday: Deer Skull

I'm not thrilled with this (proportions are screwed up), but I've been so busy with work and holiday season stuff it is literally the only thing I did in my sketchbook this week. Going back to the Wagner to draw again tomorrow - hopefully do something better. At least I'm keeping my hand moving, which is the point.

Sketchbook Sunday: Eerie Owl

There's this taxidermy owl at the Wagner Free Institute for Science that is so old and distorted in the best possible way. The crooked, downward gaze is utterly ghoulish. This sketch captures a little something of it.

Sketchbook Sunday: Nautilus Shell Collaborations

I often print extra copies of my woodcuts and linocuts for my kids to color. I have a bunch of extra nautilus shell linocuts I've printed to practice drawing the protagonists in my new book project. Here's a couple I let my daughters finish.

Sketchbook Sundays: Thoreau and a Beaver

This week I had my kids finish a couple sketches I started, with interesting results.

The first was a sketch of Henry David Thoreau. I started it as an example for a student who wanted advice on drawing portraits. Thoreau was particularly on my mind since I recently watched a play about his night spent in prison for civil disobedience, and I've been re-reading passages in Walden. My youngest daughter basically made him up like a clown or perhaps this is a cross between Thoreau and Dr. Frank-N-Furter of Rocky Horror Picture Show fame. Either way it seems a fitting enough way as any to bring the ol' free-thinking Transcendentalist into the contemporary world.

The second sketch was also from something old and deceased - a decades-old taxidermy Beaver found at the Wagner Free Institute of Science. My older daughter seemed inspired by Care Bears, as the Beaver now has a colorful pair of hearts on his tummy.

There is no escape from pop culture. It consumes us.

Sketchbook Sunday: Rodents at the Wagner

Yet even more drawings made from the collection at the Wagner Free Institute for Science where I work. Last time was skulls. 

The second drawing here is the beginnings of an idea for an accordion book. If I develop it further, I would turn these into woodcuts, most likely a color reduction similar to the techniques used for the art in Owl and Cat In Love. 

Sketchbook Sunday: Two Pumpkins

This week I was drawing pumpkins, inspired by a trip to the Brumbaugh Fruit and Fun Farm in Arcanum, Ohio.

During my kids' yoga class this week I decided to play around with adding color to this drawing, and a girl I babysit was sitting next to me decided to draw her own pumpkin. I like her drawing (below) much better. Mine might be a more accurate representation of the shape of the pumpkin in question, but hers more honestly captures its pumpkin bumbiness.

"Fish in Vase" Monotype

9" x 12"
Createx Monotype Colors on 140 lb. watercolor paper

Inspired by the work I had my young students making last week, I made some of my own layered-primary-color monotypes. Not satisfied with any of them, but it still was a useful exercise and I'd like to try again soon. This was the best of the lot.

Sketchbook Sunday: Skulls at the Wagner

More drawings made from the collection at the Wagner Free Institute for Science where I work. Last time was birds, this time skulls. I'll probably go back later this month.

I am turning a couple of my skull drawings into small engravings. I have some Resingrave blocks (a more affordable alternative to end-grain boxwood for wood engraving) that were just waiting to be drawn on and carved.

Sketchbook Sunday: Drawing Sunflowers with Lysi

By now the sunflowers are bending over and all but a few have lost their yellow pedals. So this week Lysi and I decided to go outside and draw from ours before they are completely gone for the season. These are my favorite two drawings we did. Mine is to the left and Lysi's is below. Both are pencil drawings that we then elaborated on with watercolors and oil pastel resist and salt wash.

Tub Toys: "Sneaky Snark"

6" x 6"
Woodcut with watercolors on Stonehenge

Here is the last of 5 tub toy woodcuts I made this week. The others were "Splashy Crab", "Sated Gator", "Sea Star Veneer", and "Gleeful Turtle".

Goodnight, pinky. 

Tub Toys: "Gleeful Turtle"

6" x 6"
Woodcut with watercolors on Stonehenge

Here is the fourth of 5 tub toy woodcuts I'm messing around with this week. The first three were "Splashy Crab", "Sated Gator", and "Sea Star Veneer". I knew I wanted to write some brief text in cursive before I knew what I wanted to write. I decided on "rip and tear" because I imagined the turtle was ripping open the wrapping on a present, and I also liked the contrast of the subtle violence of the words with the overall soft and cheerful tone of the image. 

Tub Toys: "Sea Star Veneer"

6" x 6"
Woodcut with watercolors on Stonehenge

Here is the third of 5 tub toy woodcuts I'm messing around with this week. The first two were "Splashy Crab" and "Sated Gator." Those two and the two that are coming are more cartoonish characters, where this tub toy was more of a flat, abstracted representation of the actual animal, thus I turned it into a sort of glib overlay. 

Tub Toys: "Sated Gator"

6" x 6"
Woodcut with watercolors on Stonehenge

Here the second of 5 tub toy woodcuts I'm messing around with this week. "Splashy Crab" was the first and is posted here. 

Tub Toys: "Splashy Crab"

6" x 6"
Woodcut with watercolors on Stonehenge

I made five small woodcut stamps of tub toys representing some other water-dwelling species that were also alive during the time of the ammonites and dinosaurs. They will ultimately end up in the background in the Nautilus and Ammonite book project, but for this week I'm having some fun adding watercolor to some of the proofs.

Another influencing factor here is that I'm currently teaching a "Chemistry of Watercolor Paints" unit to 8th graders through SNAP, and why should my students have all the fun?

Process (The Nautilus and the Ammonite)

I haven't typically shown much documentation of studio process on this blog in the past. I usually like to keep that to myself because I worry it will color how people view the final work. Generally I also feel that my experience as the maker of the work should be profoundly different from the audience's experience of it.

I'm sharing some process today because I thought it might be interesting to some readers and because I'm still very much in the middle of working something out that I've been at for a while (and then took a very long break from) and it helps me think to either say things out loud to someone else or in this case type them.

This will eventually (possibly) be the first double-page spread of The Nautilus and the Ammonite picture book project. The following text would be included:

The nautilus and the ammonite

     Were launched in friendly strife, 

Each sent to float in its tiny boat

     On the wide, wide sea of life. 

The idea here is that the title characters are somewhat infantile (thus the tub toys and kids' drawings) and perhaps meeting each other for the first time. This is just me working on the backdrop. I'm figuring out the placement of the background figures in the scenery; they are currently printed in black on acetate sheets so I can play around with placement. When I go to actually print them on the paper they'll be printed in a muted, blue hue that pushes them back.

I was originally going to go with this simple blue color backdrop with a sandy blue ground and the handful of figures printed in blue. I was thinking that less is more, and that the monochromic field and empty spaces would be more suggestive of a world that is at this point smaller for the main characters. I still might go that way, but I'm also toying with the idea of more layers. In other words, I'm deliberately attempting to rely more on my intuition. In other, other words, I don't  really know (at least consciously) what I'm doing.

This is not how I made my last picture book, Owl and Cat In Love. For that I first created a whole storyboard that I stuck to with the exception of a few minor details here and there. For this book I have instead some sketches of the characters in a sketchbook where I first started exploring the idea of taking on this project, and last year I made a dummy book with some vague sketches inside that serves as a storyboard, but it is really only the scaffolding. I have screenprinted backdrops and I've printed all the shells of the characters to collage onto those screenprints, and I've begun to make woodcuts for scenery details such as the linocut dinos and bath toys pictured here. But I'm not sure if there will be other collage or painted elements, and I still haven't decided if I'm going to hand write the text, collage it, or leave spaces for it to be added by a graphic designer.

Now I must decide whether or not to publish this post. Well, if you're reading it, I decided to hit "Publish." In which case, now I feel uncomfortably exposed, like the Wizard of Oz when his curtain gets pulled back. But it's good to get out of one's comfort zone. (And most likely only a handful of the few people who see this post will bother reading it.)

Sketchbook Sunday: Birds at the Wagner

I first discovered the Wagner Free Institute for Science in 2005 while in grad school at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. I took an elective Animal Drawing and we went on a field trip to the Wagner to draw from its collection of skeletons, fossils, taxidermy, and other specimens. After graduate school I continued taking trips to the Wagner to draw, but I ceased the practice as my teaching work piled up and then I had my children.

Today I work for the Wagner as an artist/scientist-in-residence with their SNAP (Science Nature and Art in Philadelphia) program, which uses art to enrich the science curriculum of middle schoolers. In between meetings and visiting public school classrooms I have had the time and opportunity to go back to the Wagner and resume drawing from the collection. It's a joy to return to this practice and I hope to make it a habit.