Dinosaur Screen Prints

It took over six months, but I finally got back to Maryland to do some more screen printing with my friend and fellow artist C. W. Brooks. Last time I did studies of ammonites. This time, another group of creatures that died out in the K-T Extinction: dinosaurs. 

This is related to what I was working on last time because it is preparatory work for a new book project: The Nautilus and the Ammonite, a picture book based on this anonymously-written poem. It tells the tale of two friends who float, swim, and witness wonders together. Tragically, the ammonite passes away, leaving the nautilus to continue on alone, hoping someday to be reunited. It is a moving narrative that opens many avenues of thought that I long to explore through visual imagery. 

Back in December the idea of making a book was still a mere notion. But I applied for residencies to begin serious work on the project and was accepted to the Sunny Point Artist-In-Residence program through the Arts Center of Yates County.  For ten days in September, I'll be devoting nearly every waking moment to developing the story board and first finished imagery for this new book. Exciting, no? 


Anyway, clearly there must be some dinosaurs in this book, at least in the background, as it is set during the Cretaceous. Plus it will be a picture book and children love dinosaurs. Come to think of it, who doesn't love dinosaurs? 

Roar. 



This last photo is of Brooks cleaning up. The canvas hat keeps hair out of their screenprints.

Screen Print Studies of Nautilus and Ammonite

I spent another weekend with C. W. Brooks in their studio at the University of Maryland. This time they talked me into trying something new: screen printing! The process is so antithetical to what I normally do with woodcuts. No laborious carving, no grain to battle against or yield to, no splinters - bah.

Just to get started, I made two studies comparing one of my beloved, extinct ammonites to one of its living cousins, a nautilus. I want to eventually develop them into characters for a picture book (that's all I'm sharing about that right now.)

If I go back and try more screen printing, I'll probably attempt some landscapes. Those flat fields of color produced by the process just seem so far away. Another thought I had was to look at a lot of prints and wall hangings by Inuit artists because their unique ways of depicting figures in space lends itself well to screen printing.

Brooks was also screen printing. They look good in blue.

Robert Blackburn Retrospective at the David C. Driskell Center

Last week I had the good fortune to see Passages, a retrospective of works by Modernist printmaker Robert Blackburn at the David C. Driskell Center in Maryland. It is on view through December 19. Anyone near that area interested in printmaking, Modern art, or African American art history should definitely check it out. If you can't get there, you can view all the work online here (although the Driskell Center puts a horribly large and distracting watermark across all those images), or you can purchase the show catalog here.

To my delight, the exhibit included 25 woodcuts! Almost all were made in the 1960's-70's. All are abstractions, mostly color, and many using the grain and imperfections in the block's surface or edges to add texture. I had some difficulty deciding which to highlight on this blog post. I decided on these two works, Yellow Flash and Blue Things, because I think they both read well on a computer screen, and I find them both particularly exciting. In person they are also of considerable size for woodcuts: 20" x 26" and 26" x 20".

Although it is easy to see representational imagery in many of these works, it is probably not the artist's intention, given the period and tradition in which Blackburn worked. This is further indicated by the fact that he frequently changed the orientation of his works. For instance, the version of Blue Things exhibited was oriented and signed on the bottom as it is presented here, but I have also found it upsidedown, and signed so as to indicate that orientation.

Enough of my excessive blathering on.


Yellow Flash 

The sea, quartered by fire.
No hand of Zeus, but
More than a lightening bolt.

Blue Things 

Desert or sunset,
Tumbling or at rest,
It matters not. Just look.