Adria Arch

The image to the left is a view of what my stencils look like on my studio table. The process of monoprinting involves inking a large plexi plate with a thin layer of ink and laying stencils on it where you don't want ink to be transferred. Most people print on paper, but you can also print onto fabric . This is a close up of the fabric I printed. The orginal color was the dark gold. I printed white, but as you can see, the white turned into a cream color on this fabric.

I spent all day yesterday monoprinting fabric for my collaboration with a local designer. I printed 7 pieces of fabric, 27" x 48", which will be cut and sewn into beautiful swing jackets. These will be one of a kind pieces - very labor intensive, but fun to do!

Another permutation of the Constellation series. I like this column format. I am thinking of hanging a number of these columns together when I exhibit this work. Dilemma: how to hang work on paper when you don't want to frame it. If anyone reading this has some suggestions, I'd love to hear from you. The size of this piece is 80" x 30".

Yes, you are looking at more of the work in progress on my Constellation Series. Yes, I have been working on this since the winter. It's been taking me a while to figure out how I want to exhibit this series, but today I hit the studio for the first time in a while and decided to add color to these 30" x 40" sheets. Yes, that is metallic silver paint you are seeing. Today I also visited "Sticky Vinyl Man" to pick up another load of scraps for our summer program at the ACA. I just like calling him "sticky vinyl man", but his real name is Henry. Thanks, Henry! Thanks, too, to all my fellow artist bloggers. If it weren't for you guys, I would be much more of a slacker where this blog is concerned. Such pressure!

My colleague Dean Nimmer has recently published " Art from Intuition - Overcoming Your Fears and Obstacles to Making Art " which I mentioned earlier in this blog. He included an image of my inkblots before they became my Inkblot Series which I began in his week long workshop at the Art New England summer workshops in 2006. If you go to page 70, you'll see the grouping of these babies. He describes the blots as stencils, which they are not. The image above is "Necklace", 8 feet by 8 feet, ink and glitter on paper. This work will be on exhibit at the Bromfield Gallery this summer in a show entitled "Rara Avis".

In my Drawing Skillbuilding class, I assigned my students an exercise to take 50 digital photos of whatever drew their eye, then pick out their favorite 5 or 10 - the purpose was to figure out what is of visual interest to them. When I took my photos on my recent journey, I attempted to do that as well - not to focus entirely on the architectural wonders or scenic views, but instead to snap the views that I found enticing. Hence the graffiti, the peeling painted walls, the ironic and weird rather than the iconic.

This is an image from Istanbul. I don't know what it says, but the whole thing - gray wall, dripping paint, skull, and graffiti, appeared to be a powerful composition. Anybody see a relationship between this and my work?

I usually don't like to take photos on trips because I feel that I miss out on the actual experience of being there. This time, with a digital camera freeing me from the concern of taking photos that I would only find out were awful after spending too much money on the printing, I began to really have fun. Here are a few of the scenes that got me really excited, for political or artistic reasons.

Just returned from a short trip across the Atlantic - London and Istanbul! London was rainy and cold, but full of wonders - highlights for me included seeing the Victoria and Albert Museum ( Blood on Paper , one of the best shows of artist books I've seen), and the British Museum - I saw the famous Rosetta Stone! I had always assumed it was in the shape of a rosetta, thus the name, but not at all. It is a thick chunk of shiny black granite etched with hieroglyphs on one side. My tourist photo is the Big Ben one - you can't resist it! But the photo of the tabloids represents more of my actual experience. You couldn't escape the headlines of the Austrian dad who imprisoned and impregnated his daughter - "Cellar Girl" was everywhere, and if you took the Tube to get around as we did, all you saw were the tabloids; turn the TV on and all you heard about was the Cellar Girl. Where was info on the Iraq war, or other world news? Nothing at all, just like the US.