the million print project

i am underway, but waiting for a few things before i start printing... i had planned to have my nephew Max help me print for a week (so he will be arriving in Chicago next Friday)... there is a problem though, the school policy is that i cannot have a guest working in the printmaking studio! so we can't print while he is here. i'm learning more and more that problems just always happen, no matter how much planning i do in advance, there are always new things that come up. though, that is part of the enjoyment of the process. so the week that Max is here we will make a series of 35 pieces instead (probably a combination of collage, drawing, and painting) and that will be a good precursor to printing a million prints! one of the really good things about us not being allowed to print while he is here is that i have realized that doing all of the work myself from beginning to end is really an important part of this project. so many artists throughout history (starting way back in the Reniassance if not earlier) have had many assistants to do their work, this has become even more commonplace now (at least with many of the most well known artists) with artists having large groups workers that they employ to produce their work. there are many things that can be encountered in an art museum that were not touched by the artist whose name is on the wall. i'm not taking sides on this, i have just realized that doing all of this project myself gives it much more credibility as an idea.

this is a large inking roller that i used to print a test plate ten times last week
the ink
the plate on the press bed just starting to get inked

the plate and the press

the plate... i have decided to only print rectangles instead of letters. originally i was going to cut out letters in the middle of the black rectangles but decided that the letters are a project in themselves, so this will be a million prints of a black rectangle... it may sound too simple, but it is actually quite beautiful to see these prints in person, they all have a really wonderful wood grain as well as various scratches and imperfections that give them a great quality. i will show more after i start printing the real edition.

so this is the plate after printing it ten times. if you look at the upper right hand corner there is a problem with the horizontal line that i cut, it is curvy. that is part of the reason behind making a new plate before i start for real.

my first letterpress project

the first assignment that i had in my letterpress class was to make two single word prints, one dealing with symmetry and the other with asymmetry using a font with a serif for the symmetry and a sans serif font for the asymmetry. these are the pictures from that project... i decided to combine the two words on a single sheet that was close to the maximum size that will go through the press. i used wooden type with letters that are around 3 or 4 inches tall. i spose that is all i need to say about this:

the other blog...

hi, i've already posted a few new things today but i wanted to let you all know that i am working on a collaborative blog with my friend Brad and we would love to have you look at it and give us any feedback you want to. the address is:
enfranchisement.blogspot.com
thanks.

the project.................................................!

well, i've been waiting for the right time to mention this project, but it is kind of silly for me to wait. it is especially silly because of how i came to undertake this project. in my painting studio called "Conceptual Approach" taught by Gaylen Gerber, i started the semester by talking about my work up to this point. at a certain point Gaylen asked me what i wanted to do this semester and i wasn't really sure, so he asked what would make me really happy to have accomplished this semester... after a little thought (he had already made it clear to all of us in the class that we better know what we really want because he was going to hold us to it) i said that i would love to have my "million print project" done but i couldn't get it done in one semester. "why not?" he asked and all of my reasons to not do it were not convincing enough. the challenge was laid down and i had a week to decide if i wanted to make a million prints this semester! half way through the week i decided that i had to do it. so now i am well into the process of making this project a reality. it is probably the dumbest project i've ever started but part of its dumbness makes it kind of smart. i'm laughing as i write this because it isn't really based on logic, but much more on romance and the beauty of the "impossible" and i realize how silly what i just wrote sounds. i'm not sure that i really need to say too much more right now (i will be posting more on this as i go) except that "i'm sorry" to Dale and Michael because our collaborative plans are going to change (but only change not go away). okay, i'm guessing that this really convoluted blog post is probably just confusing so i'll stop for now and let some pictures of my planning drawings tell a little bit of the story:

those don't seem that helpful but i'll keep posting as i work.

graduate school

most of the waiting is over, or at least most of the not knowing. i've been accepted to graduate school to earn my MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago! the Ceramics department has accepted me based on a portfolio of 20 images (only ten of them are pictures of clay related things!), two letters of recommendation, and one purpose statement. it is quite a relief in that i don't have to wonder if i am going to get my MFA from SAIC, now i am waiting for one more letter from the Printmedia department and after my interview next Saturday a letter from Painting and Drawing. i would love to be in the Painting and Drawing department but ultimately it doesn't matter too much because SAIC is so interdisciplinary. thanks to all of you who have supported Shauna and me in this adventure, it is shaping up in wonderful and exciting ways!

i'm in love

i suppose that everyone who is reading this blog already knows that i've been married for almost five years now... i was looking through some pictures trying to figure out what i wanted to post here today and this picture of me and my sweet bride just caught my eye. Shauna is an amazing woman and i love her more than anyone! the last 1,743 days have been the best days of my life. she works so hard to make it possible for me to attend school full time (THANK YOU SHAUNA!
). anyway, i am totally in love with Shauna and i want everyone to know!

some pictures from the museum relating to floating objects and just some things that i really like even though i haven't mentioned them before or thou

ght about their relationship to my work or the tethered cinder blocks and floating shapes i really want to make some copies of these in clay probably porcelain

new stuff from drawing class

this is a more in depth study from the drawings i made from the Tiepolo paintings
and another

and a third

this is a drawing made from two sheets of paper taped together, each of them had some work on them when i acquired them, but i have obliterated what was there and added my own flavor to them. the top section is about some drawing that i've been doing for a while now (sort of about floating objects, they kind of harken back to the floating cinder blocks that i talked about a while ago.)

this was a fun process oriented drawing made by pouring ink onto the paper and then moving it around by tipping the page.

this and the following three are all close up photos of a drawing that i'm not very happy with yet, but it looks pretty nice as a landscape sort of thing

this last one really reminds me of the weather here some days, grey and snowy, but wonderful!

valentines in pictures

driven snow with some dirt and decay from the sun. the view from the train station.

some nice fabric folds from sculpture at the Art Institute

Willem DeKooning's "Excavation"

my favorite Barnett Newman painting (the frame was made by Jackson Pollock)

another DeKooning with Shauna's head

Lucio Fontana's painting with holes ripped in the surface (it is supposed to be that way)

a great Franz Klein piece also with Shauna's head

an earlier DeKooning with Shauna

Robert Rauschenberg

and last a piece by Richard Rezac in cast iron and dyed silk