getting back to Max

so to pick up around the place i left off with the project that Max and i did... we ended up covering over some collage work we had done, Max was fed up with it and it wasn't working for him so we dropped it and covered all the panels we had at the apartment with newsprint and some ink drawing. our first day at the school looked something like this at the beginning:

the larger panels are panels that i salvaged when they were going to be thrown out. we decided the first thing we needed to do was cover over what we had at that point and start fresh. so out came the white paint and we cut loose on the whole group (the group being 3 small panels, 3 medium panels, and 2 larger panels)

thankfully, my drawing teacher Judith Geichman was nice enough to let us take up a corner of the room and make a mess, she was also very helpful in facilitating discussion between Max and me when we were stuck.

Max brushing on the white

some glue dripping from the front of a piece of fabric we had used to cover one of the panels.

the whole panel (thanks to Shauna for the fabric, i did the laundry and ruined (shrunk) this shirt so she let me have it, it worked really well as a covering stapled to a panel!!!)

we decided to put patterns on all of them, each doing half of them, then we would trade and do more work in response to what each other had done (that was an awful sentence, hopefully it still conveys what i'm trying to... if not, just look at the pictures, they really tell the story for me)

Max really liked using India ink (we ended up picking some up for him at an art supply store, it was his souvenir), you can see his sketch (on brown paper) of the pattern he was going to put on the panel in his lap.

a larger panel that i put a pattern on, i love to get my hand into the work (thus the smearing in the upper left) and sometimes i get a little too agressive, i ended up peeling some of the skin on my knuckle (sort of felt like nails on a chalkboard to move the charcoal and paint around on the board).

i really like rulers, so this picture had to be taken.

the process of pattern happening

another pattern of mine

after Max finished his pattern, it looked like this

another one that i made

the whole group layed out after we had the patterns on them

another arrangement after we traded panels, reworking them, trying to make em better.

clearing away some of the curly curls

defining a little more clearly the boundry between black and white

covering over somethings

so this is the first studio day... we had a great day... learned much... argued much... smiled much... i'm excited for the next time we can work together, we get better at it every time! i have a few other posts to get all of Max's visit out so those will happen soon!

overview before the details.

i've been adding pictures to our harddrive thinking about all the things that i should be talking about here. it has been so long i don't know if i know how to make a blog any more. i figure it is worth my time to revisit the time when Max was here to show the process we went through, and what kind of things we learned together. i have a second finished book (second of the semester that is) that turned out decent. my printmaking adventure to make a million has changed some but i'm deep in the process, at this point just past the half way mark so that means over 500,000 rectangles printed!!! it is a big number, i am learning as i go how enormous 1,000,000 really is. since the semester ended i have been printing most of the time with a trip to AZ for a week in the middle of it all, and now i'm in the middle of a forced break, the studio that i have been using for my printing was needed for a summer class for three weeks, so i had to stop for now. been reading some good things, a book on conceptual art "Who's Afraid of Conceptual Art?" a more classic kind of look at art in general "What is Art?" by Leo Tolstoy (i'm half way through but needed a break from it (he sort of makes me hate art! GRIN)) and a survey book "Art Movements Since 1945". Shauna and i celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary, decided to not travel but exchanged gifts instead this time (i gave her two Saphire eternity bands, and she gave me a nice watch... both resultant of her working at a jewelry store) and out for a nice steak dinner. suppose that is the overview, i'll be adding the details in the following posts, thanks to all of you who read these posts!

intermission i suppose

just wanted to write and let you all know that we are still alive and well, i'm really busy working on my million project (hoping to finish by the end of June). Shauna is busy with work. and the cats are busy sleeping. sorry for such a long break but i'll be working on some new posts soon.

the beginning of Max...

so Max arrived on a Friday night... i went down to the airport to meet him and we rode the train up to the "loop" where i was planning to get on the bus that stops right by our apartment. after walking around trying to find a bathroom, we finally got started waiting for the bus... i soon realized that the bus we were waiting for wasn't in service any more because it was too late. so we walked to the train station and before getting on i called Shauna and took this picture of the Chicago theater, it seemed to be a good marker of Max's visit.
after a weekend of fun: visiting the art institute, eating, playing games and watching movies we got to work on Monday. it really wasn't as smooth as i just described... we went to school and found out that there weren't any rooms that we could work in, so we had to get some panels to work on and bring them up to the apartment and work with the cats! i learn more and more all the time that being flexible and ready for change is the best thing for mental health. so we set out to make some collages and got started right away after getting back to the apartment (the panels that we worked on were panels that other students left behind after last semester).

two of the panels after we added some collage... that is about all we managed to do before we had a disagreement and debated how to move forward... Max didn't want to do any collage, so we agreed to cover over all we had done with a surface of newsprint and then draw on top of that. so after covering the six panels we had with us at the apartment we did some drawing on them and then called it a day.

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some things in town and some tiny sculptures

this is a clump of balloons that have been on a tree branch near one of our favorite food places (XOCO) since last fall!
blue sky

through a windown into a big big room that looks it should be a studio

some great lines on the road near the bus stop by our apartment

sculpture from canvas thread and three staples

same one just upside down

aluminum foil held together with a screw

aluminum foil bound with canvas thread

roll of paper (from a straw)

latest letterpress thing

i'm working on an instruction manual for making a million prints.... this is what some of the type looks like after i set it getting it ready for lockup (that is what it is called when the type is put into the bed of the press just before printing).

i've set each word seperately so i can easily move them when i'm printing.

these are for the title so they don't need to move so i set them multiple words at a time.

some of the printing (this is just a test of how the words will look on the page)

the title page.

trying to dry the ink more quickly by hanging the print by the fan.

after the print was mostly dry i folded and bound the book.

sorry these were all sideways, for some reason they didn't transfer very well.