"Ammonite: Seeker"

New series, spirals and dead things, not sure where this is going yet. This is a collograph made with cardboard, chipboard, and string. Hard to photograph and get the colors right. The paper (the light parts) is actually blue, and the ink was a very dark purple, almost black.

Ammonites are perhaps the most widely known fossil, possessing the typically ribbed spiral-form shell as pictured above. These creatures lived in the seas between 240 - 65 million years ago, when they became extinct along with the dinosaurs. The name 'ammonite' (usually lower-case) originates from the Greek Ram-horned god called Ammon. Ammonites belong to a group of predators known as cephalopods, which includes their living relatives the octopus, squid, cuttlefish and nautilus -Discovering Fossils 

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.

"The Apartment (Office Shirts)” by Stella Ebner

Image posted with the permission of the artist. Stella Ebner's large-scale screen prints are currently on view in Philly at the Print Center in the exhibit Let's Go! G-O! Go!, through November 22nd. You can also find more about Ebner on her website. 

This is one image from a series of woodcuts Ebner did in 2007. You can see others online here. I find the entire series rather compelling, particularly the ones in tones of blue. Quiet, fleeting moments of life indoors. 

I leave the closet door open most of the time. Not intentionally. There is simply no reason to close it after I retrieve what I need, and I never developed that particular habit of tidy people. As a result, when I wake up in the morning and continue lying there in bed, not yet ready to rise, I find myself staring at the shirts on hangers, lined up like deflated and pressed people in line at the DMV. 

Sometimes clothing seems so silly. Sure, in the winter it makes sense to wear all those layers of flannel and fleece, but today I went over to a friend's house at 2 in the afternoon, and her 3 year old was still running around in nothing but her underwear and a loose t-shirt, and I thought, right? 

Clothing somehow feels like a human presence. Yes, maybe that is just because they are shaped to our symmetrical, anthro forms, what with those legs and arm-like sleeves. But I suspect there is even more to it. Nakedness is a secret we forget. We define ourselves and others with our clothing. Even after we take it off, it retains a piece of our souls. I look into that closet every morning, half awake, and I feel as if I'm staring at ghosts of myself, haunting my house before I have even died. 

Two White Line Woodcuts and My Visit to Maryland

This weekend I visited my friend C.W. Brooks and we worked in their studio at the University of Maryland.

I'm in transition at the moment, having finished Cat and Owl In Love and new nudes for Naked In New Hope. I was gearing up to start my next book project, but after spending the weekend immersed in ART, I've decided I need to take some time to play around and see where it gets me.

I have been wanting to make more white line woodcuts. My last attempts were with my single-sheet book Four Cats last November.

This weekend I managed to draw, carve, and make proofs of images from two 4" x 4" blocks. The first is a self portrait, and the second is a spiral. They are a little rough. Instead of doing the traditional inking and immediate printing of each section, I spontaneously inked up the entire blocks first (which I enjoyed a great deal as I used to be a painter and often miss painting), let it dry, then wet the surface of the paper before printing and embossing with the wooden spoon. Unfortunately I failed to achieve even moisture, so the look is more soft than I wanted. I'm thinking I need to get heavier watercolor paper and soak it in a tray of water and then evenly blot it dry next time.

The third photo is the table where I did these works and Brooks doing their thing. (Brooks is not a printmaker per say, but you should really check out their Twitter feed.)

Joe Marshall's Shadow Set

Images posted with the permission of the artist. Find out more about Joe Marhsall's work at Pork Chop Press.

The artist calls these The Shadow Set. On their creation, he writes:

"All three prints are done on found wood that was very hard and had a lot of grain and figure in each block. I cut as little as possible to let the grain show through on the print. At the end I had to get a new set of tools."

I wrote a haikus for each one, using the same titles.

Hungry Shadow

This fur is wretched, but
When we can't find enough to eat
It gets cold.







Wave Shadow

The tide comes in, and
In trails of blood, tears, milk, cum, and spit
We dissolve.








Nameless Shadow 

A black cloud showers her
Bare back. She watches, but
We can't see her eyes.

Two Woodcuts by Bertha Schrader

I read this article about Bertha Schrader earlier this month on The Linosaurus. It says that the artist began making woodcuts in her 60's, "after having already a career as an accomplished and successful painter." The Linosaurus could only find these two examples of Schrader's woodcuts (the two shown here), the first of Der Zwinger and the second depicting a windmill on the Dutch Canal.

I'm most struck by the foggy, atmospheric depth achieved in these images. There is none of the flattening out that often happens with relief prints, and in that sense they are quite painterly. Where these woodcuts do depart from Schrader's paintings is in the limited range of colors used. Here, this simplification of the image required by the medium results in a ghostly impression, such as that of a dream or memory. Edges dissolve. Solid forms melt into ethereal shadows or dancing highlights.


I look back, but it's not the same. A screen has been pulled down, obscuring my view. I am suddenly a stranger in a place where I was once adored. I find myself wondering, is this really how it always looked and smelled? Didn't it used to be bigger? Even now, it seems to shrink before my eyes. So intense is my stare through small windows, which might soon enough be keyholes. I should walk away before there is nothing left to see, and thereby keep only the impression of this place in my mind, however flawed.

"Sitting Nude" Gary Comoglio

Image posted with the permission of the artist. More of Gary Comoglio's prints and paintings can be found at the artist's website.

The presence of an ottoman, and the fact of her nakedness tell me I'm wrong, but I'm still convinced that the subject of this print is waiting at a bus stop. Well, okay, if not a bus stop specifically, at least waiting. And bored, at that.

I am not bored, but I am also waiting. Waiting for this kaleidoscopic vision of her body created by light reflected on planes of flesh to transform with the next sigh, next itch, next shifting of her weight into the next most comfortable position. Waiting for the light to change into something less spectacular and intense, but perhaps more complex and subtle.

It is amazing how bored we can be, even as fireworks go off all around us.