It’s been all too long. Many exciting things have happened the past few months, but I’ll get to that in good time.

Meanwhile…

Just got Margaret Kilgallen’s book In the Sweet Bye & Bye. I fell in love with her work after seeing the Beautiful Losers documentary – a fantastic color palette, strong figures and bold typography all remenescent of a folk tradition. See for yourself:

image from flickr user plushgallery, through the Margaret Kilgallen pool

image originally from The Selby

And before I forget, I wanted to tell my small handful of readers to check out Brown Paper Bag, a blog by my friend Sara Barnes. She’s been featuring some fantastic work! Have a good weekend everyone!

“The squeegee is my brush…and the pull is the stroke…”

I first came across Ryan McGinness very early in my art/design studies. I remember liking a lot of the work he did, but for whatever reason, didn’t look too much into it after that. Anyway, now I’m writing a paper about McGinness for my art history class this semester. In my research, I stumbled upon this great video that gives a little insight into his process. We work in a very similar manner, though he, obviously, takes it to a whole other level. It’s very exciting and very challenging at the same time to learn that we work similarly. Makes me want to work harder, actually.

Happy Valentine’s Day and Happy Lunar New Year to everyone!

Not much progress to report on, I’ve been battling a particularly difficult creative block recently. It’s getting better, but I’ve been putting a lot of my efforts into the collaborative class at Tamarind. Will attempt to get some pictures soon!

Check it out, my name’s on the marquee! It was really exciting for me to walk up to that on the night of my opening. I’ve never had my name on a marquee before! Anyway…

I’m back in Albuquerque. We had a very relaxing first week back and are getting ready to start our collaborations. Actually, we meet the grad students that we’ll be working with tomorrow! It’s all very exciting and kind of nerve wracking at the same time. I’ll have to report back when I have a better idea of what’s going on.

Not much to write about at the momemt, otherwise. I started a little painting / mixed media / collage thing for Momentum OKC. I haven’t worked seriously on a painting in a very long time. Hopefully this one will live up to my expectations. I’ll snap a picture of what I’ve got so far tomorrow when there’s actual daylight in my room.

The opening for my show at Dwelling Spaces was tonight and it went really well! Here are the prints that I made for the show, more pictures tomorrow of the exhibition.

Considering I made all of these prints within two weeks (cumulative time), not so shabby, huh? These prints are a departure from the artwork that I typically create. It was almost an exercise in restraint, using a limited amount of colors for each print when I’m used to throwing colors and layers on when I feel they are needed. Like half design, half art (it’s interesting that I still approach art making and designing as separate processes…). There are a lot of things that I think I would change, add to, or approach in a different way for the next round of prints, but I’m very happy with the way everything turned out. For those who are interested in purchasing any of these prints, they are available exclusively at Dwelling Spaces in Tulsa.

My four weeks of winter break have been almost completely used up. I’ve spent most of my time in the studio, working on prints for my show at Dwelling Spaces, which opens this Friday. In addition… the holidays happened, it snowed a ridiculous amount in Tulsa, and my power washer broke again. I got through all of it though, and I have eight new prints! I’m currently waiting for my camera batteries to charge so I can photograph all of them. I’ll likely post all of the photos on Friday, right before the opening.

WARNING, TECHNICAL CONTENT. There were a lot of technical issues that I ran into when printing these and I can’t exactly say that I’ve figured it out yet. All of the prints in this series were made from oiled photocopies and films that were handpainted with ink on acetate. The handpainted ink on acetate/mylar is a gold standard in my repetroire of techniques, so nothing new there. I’ve used oiled photocopies as films before at MICA with great success, but whaddya know, there were a few obstacles when I used them here, in my own studio. First, a lot of the photocopies I used weren’t very dense in toner. Honestly, I have no idea how to correct this on a photocopier, though I imagine there is probably a way. I did my fair share of playing around at Kinkos FedEx Office, with no solution in sight. Yes, I did ask the person working at the FedEx and no, they had no idea and didn’t seem very interested in helping the weirdo who was making a lot of copies of what appearred to be nonsense. If anyone could offer an answer I’d very much appreciate it. Second, when I exposed these photocopy films, I was getting a lot of unwanted paper texture. I know that some paper texture is to be expected, but there was so much that it was obstructing the image and making it look like a misprint instead of an intentional choice. Third, underexposing the screens gave a more crisp image and less paper texture. It even excentuated the high-contrast photocopy look that I like so much. The downside to this, is what I think has been causing all of my troubles with reclaiming (power washer problems aside). I’ve had very persistantly clogged screens all across the board since I’ve started this series. With my strict time restrants and the unchanging cold weather, I haven’t tried terribly hard to remove these stains. Some extra elbow grease here and there, but no serious effort. I’m pretty sure I can get the screens back to pristine condition by using haze remover and being diligent with the power washer. Same thing happened a few years ago when I was still at MICA and that worked pretty well for me. It does, however, take a very long time to get out all of the stains and considering it is barely above freezing and there is still snow on the ground, I’m not going to tackle that right now. Anyway… what I’m really trying to stay is that I’m still working on finding the balance in using photocopies as films.

Listening to the Transference preview on NPR for the second or third time. Oh Spoon, you never fail to impress me.

I have a few papers to write, which in reality means that I’m going to be doing all of the other work that I need to do and haven’t done. Cleaning, organizing, baking (which I do all the time, anyway), making personal art, and of course, writing on this blog. Anyway, I figured I would share the little Photoshop CMYK separation method I figured out the other day.

I was taught to do separations like this:

1. Flatten the image you want to separate, making sure that it is in CMYK mode.
2. In the Channels window, click the little menu button and select Split Channels

3. You will now be able to edit all of our channels separately. This is when you adjust Levels, Curves, and convert your image to bitmap / halftone your image if you’ll be outputting films for print purposes.
4. Before printing, make sure to select the registration marks, labels and any other printing marks that you’ll need.

As we were getting ready to make our films for our photos plates, we realized that the above method does not print the color bars that appear on the side of the image. These bars are necessary for monitoring the ink film when printing a CMYK image. So, being the obsessive problem solver, I played around in Photoshop until I found the following method (which is probably the correct method that I should have been using all along):

1. Flatten your image & make sure it is in CMYK mode.
2. In the Channels window, deselect the channels you do not want to print, leaving only one channel visible.
3. Select Print from the File menu.
4. Click the Screen button. A dialog box will open – plug in your frequency & angles.

5. Select your printing marks and print!
6. Repeat steps 2 & 3 to print the remain channels. If you entered the frequency and angles for all four channels the first time, Photoshop should retain this info. Doesn’t hurt to check though!

This is probably common knowledge to a lot of people out there, but I had no idea there were multiple ways of making CMYK separations and that I had been doing something more complex than I needed to.

I should get to writing my paper, which, ironically, is about technology and printmaking.

This has nothing to do with making art, thinking about art, or looking at art…but I am so excited for this:

I’ve already listened to (the album version of) “Written in Reverse” five times. Otherwise, nothing new on the Western front.

Well, Thanksgiving Break is over and I’ve got class again tomorrow morning. It was nice having some time to sleep and collect my thoughts about other projects that aren’t related to Tamarind, but I’m ready to be back in the shop.

Our next project for class is CMYK printing. I made a quick collage, scanned it in and added a few things digitally. I figure this will be challenging enough to keep me busy for a while.

Since I haven’t posted in months, I haven’t had the opportunity to post the latest screenprint I’ve made. You see, I went home for three days in October (fall break. kind of a joke) and promptly got sick. Somehow, I made time to screenprint and fell short of what I had wanted to print…but I did finish something that I genuinely like.

The photo is not the best but you get the idea. We had been printing solely in black ink at Tamarind so it was really great to go home and give in to the color. A lot of the layers are repeated from my last print…that’s because I didn’t really have a lot of time to make new screens nor did my power washer work. So there you have it.