Lino3

Yeah sure go ahead experiment... that's how you learn. But it's likely that you'll run into problems if your first layer isn't dry... with the ink coming off the image and causing the second layer not to sit properly. Be patient and wait for at least a week with oils, three weeks to be certain, and then you'll waste less paper ink and effort. I know this because I just went in and printed on a proof to test the design of my new cut.... blurggh! BUT! The design isn't so bad! Except I wish I'd printed different colours to start with instead of just yellow.

Lesson. Lesson is more.

It's early, it's not half past seven yet,and I'm getting ready to go in for the fourth day printing...

Quite proud of my work so far, but last night I was tired and made some fatal mistakes. With the second cut of my boypointingup picture I lost all sense of shading and now I'm afraid he'll look a bit strange.. I didn't think it would be so hard to imagine the colour arrangement.

Just entering the world of colour and realizing how vast it all is..

  What I'm interested i too is how poisinous it all is and is one colour more poisonous than the other or are they nothing to worry about compared to the grea amount of turpentine thats unavoidably everywhere...?

Happily I found a big round piece of glass in a falling down cupboard that we had to rebuild... It's hard to imagine that it was used for anything else. Maybe my house was inhabited by a printmaker in the past Could explain this unbending urge to cut -ink -roll -press that I have...

  And what happened to this phantom print-maker?

Lino 2.

No one has read this blog because I haven't told anyone about it.  No worries. 

 I'm here to upload images of my daily produce here in lino-land.  I did a mono print. Why..  ? there's that little question again.  It's got nothing to do with my book.  Ynot.

  What a day it's been.

  

Lino One!!

  I didn't remember that I loved lino until just recently.

  Suddenly I'm on a steep learning curve, and instead of hassling the arts forum with my entire proud progress I thought I'd post here.  

  Here are a few bits and pieces before I go and continue working..    

I'm on day 3 now of printing.  and I still have quite a lot of cutting to do!  

Less blogging would help probly, but I wanted to make a diary of this because I'm learning a lot as I go.

My printer is an old victorian book press, and I put an old fashioned linen nappy under the print to bestow a more even pressure.  Also I've just picked up a japanese style baren to smooth things over as I go.  What a great thing that is, we should all have one.

I'm dicovering that there are issues with the ink spread according to 

1. pressure... thus the nappy

2. application   ... I'm learning to roll on and not roll off again, when to clean and when to wipe

3. time... the length of time in the press is quite a specific thing too.

4. paper...   I did one print for too long with some thick hahn and the surface of the paper lifted  up. So now I have some thinner paper which is a lot easier to manage anyway in terms of ripping it to size .

5. ink...   well I'm only discovering there are greater worlds than I knew in those engaging little tubes.  I'm definitely going to read my "Ink my love Ink was my ruin"  poem for Montana day.

These prints are a series for a childrens' book that accompanies a display of lamps for the Matariki festival out at the Corban's estate in Henderson on June 26th.  The artists of the Lamps are Ronald Andreassand and Anita Glucina, and each of seven lamps will have a local writer's work with it.

Right now I'm pulling blue.  Soon I'm going to be pastelizing an opaque apricot I hope, for the cat.

Ok so I'm a bit slow with the old blog business.  To do upkeep on a blog means I need to organize weekly childcare even more, or perhaps get up at 4 each morning, to get an hour in...

    But I'm busy.  So I have to talk about it in a public diary format to make sure I am vital.  Oh why do you blog then?  

       What am I busy doing? Blogging.  No only joking..  right now I'm planning for some poetry gigs, making some poetry chapbooks and Talking about the collaborative work I put in with fellow artist Anita Glucina for the Metonymy exhibition.. that's the moon medallions I mean, prepping for a prop, what's new, this is a poetry doco, and rediscovering an ancient affection that I hold for linoleum.

        The medallions are available to be purchased, and I will tell you all about those soon.  Can I put pictures up on here what is this blog? Is it a good blog?  Is it it a blog blag.

        Poetry performance coming up with Nigel Gavin and Chris O if we can pin him down up at 121, early next month.  Then the next one after that is Lopdell house for Montana poetry day, with the Lopdell line up:   www.lopdell.org.nz/events/details/montana_poetry_day.html

        On the 26th June is the Matariki festival exhibition at the Corban's estate spot out at Henderson, and One of the seven lamps displayed by Ronald and the afore-mentioned Anita, has a poem and story associated with it by me...  Each lamp has a different poet's work, and I don't know who they all are but one is Miriam Barr.  Mine is a children's rhyme, and I'm making a book now to go with it, why?

       ...because I wanted to use my new book press  to make a book, but now I'm printing lino prints for each page.  Why?  Because I have to create stuff I enjoy it immensely I'm not acting or making films right now, and I've joined an amazing art community forum on line where I can learn a lot about how to work with pigments and so on, and because I fancy myself as an old fashioned craftsperson....    I know I could just grow strawberries and be a valid part community, well actually I'm doing that too.  Got your strawberries in for summer? See this is what happens when actors stop acting, they can't stop talking and they blog!

          Actually speaking of acting!   I did some a while back, on a short called Horses.  It will be screening in the homegrown series in the film festival, hang on link...

    

      www.nzff.co.nz/default.aspx?id=7516&region=2

More about homegrown:

  mic.org.nz/2009/05/homegrown-2009-programme/

Ahhhhh! the film festival!

Medallions

 Light, Sculpture, Poem, Object of Art, Tool for Meditation, Aide for Oracle Consultancy.

 I'll use this one to do medallions.  Metonymy...   is a collaborative arts competition and exhibition that pairs an artist and a writer.  What a ... twister...  

        This is   Metonymy  with all the cool photos: metonymy09.blogspot.com

  It was extraordinary, and I learned a lot about mp3 players.  I worked with Anita Glucina and we made Moon medallions.  If you can guess the name of the moon medallions you can keep them.  Otherwise you can order them from me at a cost of $130 for a set..   Until we package and market them and perfect the design, and then they'll be considerably more expensive.  :)

We've had lots of guesses so far......

Scintillating

round

rumplestiltskin

lady

I've got the list somewhere... 

Second Generation

  It's strange when public roads are cordoned off, to see people still using the zebra crossing, checking the  lights and signal and the whole works.  I enjoyed the appropriation of a roadway for the jazz/ blues festival of course, but not so sure how I felt about fencing off the beach..  There was a line of lumi-jacketed security people suggesting that we all leave before 5, but I think like us, a lot of them like us, called the big bluff and wandered around eating hot dogs while everyone else stayed outside the fence...    Seeing a crowd of people waiting outside a barricade while you wander around managing runaway mustard,  leaves one with a strange sense of awkward guilt, I blame the media, (that's the quickest and most efficient thing to blame).  We have so many images of walls and fences, barricading the one from the other, in the news and in our minds, that it could really go down as the era of apartheid, or if you want to steer clear of those connotations, The time of delineation.  But not fixed. You might think that it would be but it's in no way permanent.  Remembering South Africa's apartheid really has an old fashioned longevity of fences and barricades..  but this modern age has delineations that move about.  Everything is happening more quickly, admittedly there's little vascillation in the delinating boundaries of Gaza, more of a shrinking effect in stops and starts.  Part of me there fore can't help but wonder how adamantly I should feel righteous about standing astride a meridian strip in mission bay with the push chair and still wet from togs on under dress (as the changing rooms had been locked earlier to 'help' people leave the beach.  It was for a brief moment (about twenty minutes), a priviledge of the few that I held, but of course without leave of the governing populace...  oh dear, a trickle down effect from the greater delineations of history.  A quick us and them.  But if I hadn't thought of images I hold in my mind , let's see...  a  middle aged woman being beaten behind the lines in Kosovo; a boy snipered crossing the huge divide of the Berlin walls; a journalist getting too close to the wall on the Palestinian side and his fright as shots echo around his camera, the crushing of fans against the fence at a football stadium in England, the throngs of refugees trying to get a handout from UN aid services...    You'll have your own list too.  So if I have these thoughts this knowledge, how far away am I from one of those other fences?  I think about 500 feet.