Naked Selfies No. 13-20

 These are the latest "Naked Selfies", numbers 13-20. They are all white line woodcuts printed from blocks that are approximately 3 x 4 inches in size. Read the post that has my artist statement regarding this ongoing series here.

Whose HOO Around the World (Summer Fellowship)

Owls, owls, everywhere! The last week of June I had a wonderful time doing a fellowship for the Community Art Center's Summer Spree camp. 

This year's camp theme was WIDE WORLD. Having created a whole series of linocut prints of owls, I decided to put owls at the center of my project. 

Each group of campers were assigned a list of owls particular to one region of the world. They heard folktales from cultures in that part of the world and then made relief prints of owl species from that region. We printed the owls on cloth banners and hung them all around the children's garden. So much fun! 

This was my 2nd year doing a summer fellowship at CAC. My first was last year: Big Relief! 

"Rainbow Leaf Beetle"

“Rainbow Leaf Beetle”, 3 block woodcut for the Baren Forum for Woodblock Printmaking’s Exchange No. 79, edition of 30. 

I wanted to make a print using process magenta, cyan and yellow because I‘ve been doing color printmaking with some of my students. What better subject for this than a rainbow leaf beetle?

"Naked Selfie No. 12"

3.75" x 4" (block)
White line woodcut
Watercolors on Arches

The latest in the "Naked Selfie" series. I was just tickled when I found the photo of this guy casually waving to the camera in his naked selfie. Check out all of them on this Pinterest album.

Also, I've finally written an artist statement about the Naked Selfie series that I think rightly suits it! Here it is: 

My latest work – a series of “Naked Selfies” of others - explores the translation of visual information from photographs to woodcuts. At the start of this process are people standing naked in front of a mirror, usually in their own bathroom, cell phone in hand, posing in a manner they presumably feel best represents how they wish to be seen. Or maybe they simply want to document the honest appearance of their body at this moment in time. They snap a photo, and at some point the image ends up on the Internet. Maybe the person who took the photograph posted it to an amateur photography or pornography site, or maybe a mistake was made, or someone they sent it to betrayed a trust. One way or another, the image appears on Google searches, which is how I find it.  

At this point in the process there is how I subjectively view the original naked selfie, which is different from the perhaps millions of others who have also seen it. The proliferation of naked selfies on the Internet is simultaneously shocking and banal, depending on who is doing the Google search. My subjective perspective influences how I re-create the image as a white line woodcut. I drop the rectangular border, background, and focus on the isolated figure. Crisp, white lines combined with airy gradations and woodgrain textures emphasize the shape and volume of the body in a way that is more aesthetic than lascivious. I work on small blocks because I want viewers to have an intimate experience with the physical work. Working small scale in woodcut also renders faces abstract enough to give the subjects anonymity. 

At the end of this process there is the print I made as it is received by an audience. The translation into woodcuts recontextualizes this photographic imagery and thereby invite reactions and associations that greatly differ from those typically evoked by the original images. Perhaps some of these woodcuts will be seen by the people who took the original photographs. If so, I wonder, would they recognize themselves?  

"Naked Selfie No. 11"

4" x 4" (block)
White line woodcut
Watercolors on Arches

The latest in the "Naked Selfie" series. Check out all of them on this Pinterest album.

Elizabeth Catlett's "Survivor" and the Distillation of Photographic Imagery

Every year I take several groups of grade school students to La Salle University's Art Museum for field trips, and I was pleased to discover a copy of Elizabeth Catlett's print "Survivor" on view in the current exhibition. The show is Teaching and Learning in the Art Museum: La Salle University Faculty Selections, and is on view through the month of May. This woodcut by Catlett was chosen by a professor who teaches Introduction to Public Health (see label with more info below.)

This image has always been a striking and therefore memorable one for me and I'm sure many others. The print was created from a photograph by Dorothea Lange called Ex-slave with a Long Memory. (Anne Nydam wrote a thoughtful post discussing this on her art blog a few years ago.) Just as Catlett distills Lange's title with her own, shorter one, with her carving she also eliminates details and context, yet intensifies certain aspects of this person depicted in the original photograph.

This sort of distillation is something woodcuts inevitably do to representational imagery. In my recent post featuring The Round Table of King Arthur, I referred to it as a game of whisper down the lane. We think something is being copied, but it is not. It is being transformed. A specific kind of subtle yet profound change happens with images sourced very directly from photographs, such as this one.

This transformation of visual information from photographs to woodcuts is something I'm particularly exploring with my new Naked Selfies series. At the start of it are people standing naked in front of a mirror, cell phone in hand, posing in a manner they feel best represents how they want to be seen. They snap a photo, and later I stumble across it while surfing the Internet. There is how I subjectively view it, which is different from the perhaps millions of others who have also seen it, and my perspective influences how I transfer it to a woodcut. Finally there is the print I made as it received by the audience. Perhaps some of them will be seen by the people who took the original photograph. If so, will they recognize themselves?

When compared side by side, Catlett's woodcut looks like Lange's photograph, but how much does the woman in Catlett's woodcut resemble the flesh and blood woman whose photograph was taken by Lange? Had she never seen the photograph, would she have recognized herself in the woodcut? Would her friends and family recognize her? I feel this transformation, this obliteration and re-creation is some of the power and purpose, yet also the deep sadness of woodcuts.

"Pigs In A Blanket" (Chinese New Year Exchange)

Happy Lunar New Year! This is my Year of the Pig 2019 card for the Baren Forum's Chinese New Year Exchange. It is dedicated to my child Bebe who is currently obsessed with pigs.

This is a 4" x 5" linocut printed with black Caligo safe wash relief ink, hand colored with Prismacolor markers and watercolor paint. I still have 7 more to hand-color, so they will be sent out a little late, but worth the color.