Collograph Faces by 1st Graders

These are collograph faces made by my 1st graders at the Community Partnership School. The kids have been looking at African Masks and talking about the differences between organic and geometric shapes as well as texture and patterns. For this project I gave them foam pieces, lace, yarn, cardboard, and bubble wrap and instructed them to make a collage of a face. They then printed their faces in black block printing ink on different colored sheets of paper. I love how abstract these turned out. The kids had a lot of fun making them too. 

Bubble Wrap and Chine Colle with Middle Schoolers

Today was the last day of the Winter session of my 2D mixed media after school class for 4th-6th graders at the University City Arts League. These are some collograph prints over tissue paper collage.

I've been playing with bubble wrap lately, so I wanted to let them play with bubble wrap too. Who doesn't like bubble wrap?

Nautilus and Ammonite: Sinking Into the Deep

The next finished artwork for the Nautilus and the Ammonite book project. This is the second stanza and also the second double-page spread. 

For each could swim on the ocean's brim,
     And, when wearied, its sail could furl,
And sink to sleep in the great sea-deep,
     In its palace all of pearl.  

"Plesiosaur Swimming In Circles"

Plesiosaur Swimming in Circles
30" x 22"
mixed media (watercolors, collagraph, woodcut)

This is yet another one-off print that branched from work on The Nautilus and the Ammonite. 

I seriously need to get some dedicated time in a professional screen printing studio to further explore these ideas and issues. Eventually... 

"T-Rex Enters"

T-Rex Enters 
30" x 22"
mixed media (watercolors, collagraph, woodcut)

This is another one-off print that branched from work on The Nautilus and the Ammonite. I know the color has something to do with what's happening with these - Tyranosaurus is strongly associated with red and yellow in my mind. I know these associations have some connection to plastic toys and children's book illustrations from both my own childhood and what I've been constantly exposed to as a teacher of kids and primary caretaker of my own kids. I'm not sure where this is going, but I really hope I manage to find the time and space to explore dinos further.  

"Wandering Stegosaurus"

Wandering Stegosaurus
30" x 22"
mixed media (watercolors, collagraph, woodcut)

I'd been wanting to take the woodcuts I've made for The Nautilus and the Ammonite and use them in other works of art. This is one finished piece. I'm working very intuitively on these, and even though I was consciously trying to make it more asymmetrical, that wasn't working so I ended up with this instead.

Inspired by Topographical Maps

This is my fourth year teaching 3rd-6th graders at the Community Art Center's Summer Spree camp. This year's theme is "Earth Forms", so this week after having my 4th graders complete a collograph printmaking series, we took their "mandala" collographs, some construction paper, and turned them into collages inspired by topographical maps.

Student Collographs with Cubes

These are a couple collographs made by two students enrolled in my 2D Mixed Media after school class for 3rd-6th graders at the University City Arts League. They used cardboard, craft foam, bubble wrap, yarn, Popsicle sticks and toothpicks.

One of the kids in the class has included cubes in almost every work of art he makes and he's apparently influenced the others. Ironically, for this project that kid didn't feature any cubes in his print.

"Ammonite (Saxifrage)"

Collograph, paint, collage 
24" x 30"
Oil-based ink, acrylic paint, India ink, and yarn on Stonehenge paper
Artist's Proof

If I ever had a son, my husband and I were planning to name him "Saxifrage" after the character Saxifrage "Sax" Russel in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. Sax Russel is a physicist who leads the development of technologies used to terraform the planet Mars and make it habitable for humans. His character is pitted against the geologist Ann Clayborne, who seeks to preserve Mars's natural state. 

Saxifrage is also a plant that grows on rocks in cold climates. As it grows, it breaks the rocks apart, and the Latin word saxifraga means literally "stone-breaker", from Latin saxum ("rock" or "stone") + frangere ("to break"). 

"Ammonite (His Heart Unraveling)"

Collograph
24" x 30"
Oil-based ink on Stonehenge paper
Artist's Proof

As with my last collograph, this is dedicated to Kenneth Grahame. The text is taken from his beloved children's book The Wind in the Willows:

On either side of them, as they glided onwards, the rich meadow-grass seemed that morning of a freshness and a greenness unsurpassable. Never had they noticed the roses so vivid, the willow-herb so riotous, the meadow-sweet so odorous and pervading. Then the murmur of the approaching weir began to hold the air, and they felt a consciousness that they were nearing the end, whatever it might be, that surely awaited their expedition.

My aunt looked at this print and immediately the words reminded her of refrigerator magnets. I like that association very much. With these ammonite collographs I am grasping at scraps of materials common to my everyday experience - cardboard, bubble wrap, string - and then constructing an image of ancient creatures never seen alive by human eyes, incomplete and unearthed. With those magnets, we can never find all the words to say what we originally intended. We end up with fragmented statements, that in their incomplete state are more mysterious and poetic, and they seem to be ever more meaningful because we are forced to fill in the empty spaces. 

"Ammonite (Traveler's Return)"

Collograph
24" x 30"
Oil-based ink on Stonehenge paper
Artist's Proof

This is dedicated to Kenneth Grahame. The text is taken from his beloved children's book The Wind in the Willows:

Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches wafted through the air, those invisible little hands tugging all one way.

With this image, I started with the idea of juxtaposing an expressive depiction of an ammonite fossil with a sort of love letter to the long-deceased creature. But as I searched for the necessary words, my mind turned to a dramatic performance of Grahame's book I saw with my daughter a year ago. I think I intuitively connected this piece with that story because - as with many children's stories - all the animals in those stories are really people with animal traits being used symbolically. Also, the spiral is  such a simple arrangement that appears over and over again not only in nature, but in human creations, and has a universal appeal. Somehow I connected that with a work of literature that while written for children, is the product of a mature, adult mind, and expresses many sentiments universal to the human experience.

Here is home, and we have been gone for so long, it is exhilarating to see it again with what feel like new eyes, and yet also a strange and ethereal experience. It is not really the home we knew before, not just because it has changed, but because we have changed. In this life, we circle around over and over again, but with each roundabout, we are somehow both returning to a place we knew and arriving at a novel destination. It is a paradox of time.

Turtle Collographs By My 5-Year-Old

 My daughter was hanging out in my studio today while I was printing some proofs. She wanted to do some printing. Usually I just give her one of my old blocks to play around with. But I had a pile of cut up cardboard and I've been doing collographs with middles schoolers lately, so I had her make her own plate to print from.

She drew a turtle on a piece of cardboard, and I cut it out and taped it to another piece of cardboard. I'm pretty impressed with how well proportioned the little guy is - see the head, tail, large claws in the front and two smaller claws in the back? He's obviously some kind of aquatic turtle.



She printed with magenta and black water-based block printing ink. One of the prints turned out all faded (the ink was drying) so she drew all over with pastel pencils and markers to make it look like he was a shadow swimming under the water.

I really like these, and I think I might make the print for my next print trade based on these.

Collographs in Acrylic Paint on Canvas

I did these three studies (each is approximately 12" x 18", acrylic on unmounted canvas) as examples for a project students from Solis Cohen Elementary school are doing with me as a Visiting Artist-In-Residence.

They have already seen examples of my work and done collograph and white line woodcut printmaking in class, and now they are working on their big project, which will be a 21' x 9' wall hanging of a world atlas. The wall hanging is broken up into four equal panels. They are finishing up using the grid transfer method to draw a basic outline of the continents onto the four panels.

Next will be painting in the backgrounds with acrylic paint, making collograph stamps with imagery inspired by patterns found in artwork around the world.

For these three studies, I drew a grid (each square being 3" x 3") and drew the same shape (an ammonite, just because I like ammonites.) Then I painted in the background and foreground areas (the left and middle one I painted in solid colors, the third uses a two-tone checkerboard pattern.) I made four 3" x 3" collograph stamps using chipboard, yarn, and craft foam, and then printed them onto the canvas by painting on the acrylic paint with a brush and pressing the stamp onto the canvas firmly with my hands. To prevent the background and foreground prints from overlapping, I masked off areas by laying down paper before pressing down the stamp.

I also did black outlines for two and no outline for one just to see how it looked. The students' wall hanging should be finished before winter break, and I'll post an image of the final work to this blog at that time.

"Ammonite: Fissure"

Twelth in a new series of collographs. Here's the first. The plate was made with cardboard, burlap, lace, chipboard, and string. 

“What the fissure through which one sees disaster? The circle is unbroken; the harmony complete. Here is the central rhythm; here the common mainspring. I watch it expand, contract; and then expand again. Yet I am not included.” 

“Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more.”  

Both quotes from Virginia Woolf

"Ammonite: Atoms"

Eleventh in a new series of collographs. Here's the first. The plate was made with cardboard, burlap, chipboard, bubble wrap, and string. 

"The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn't there something reassuring about it! -- that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another's eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms -- nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?" -Joyce Carol Oates  

"Ammonite: Process of Elimination"

Tenth in a new series of collographs. Here's the first. The plate was made with cardboard, chipboard, and string. 

"The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed--it is a process of elimination." -Elbert Hubbard 

"Ammonite: Filigree"

Ninth in a new series of collographs. Here's the first. The plate was made with cardboard, lace, and string. 

"Life is a filigree work... What is written clearly is not worth much; it's the transparency that counts." -Louis-Ferdinant Celine 

"Ammonite: Smoke"

Eighth in a new series of collographs. Here's the first. The plate was made with cardboard, bubble wrap, and string. 

"Maybe it's like becoming one with the cigar. You lose yourself in it; everything fades away: your worries, your problems, your thoughts. They fade into the smoke, and the cigar and you are at peace." -Raul Julia

"Ammonite: Incompleteness in Absence"

Seventh in a new series of collographs. Here's the first. The plate was made with cardboard, chipboard, burlap, and string. 

"We are incomplete like a book in two volumes of which the first has been lost. That is what I imagine love to be: incompleteness in absence." -Edmond de Goncourt

"Ammonite: Orange Peel"

Sixth in a new series of collographs. Here's the first. The plate was made with cardboard, chipboard, and string. 



"Some think love can be measured by the amount of butterflies in their tummy. Others think love can be measured in bunches of flowers, or by using the words 'for ever.' But love can only truly be measured by actions. It can be a small thing, such as peeling an orange for a person you love because you know they don't like doing it." -Marian Keyes