Mixed Feelings #1: Dirt

MIXED FEELINGS #1: DIRT
Japanese-method woodblock (moku hanga) with transfer drawing
Image size: 10.25" x 17" (26 x 43 cm)
Paper size: 12.5" x 19" (63.5 x 98 cm)
Paper: Shikoku White
Edition: 10
__________________________________

This print is the first in a series that examines cliches we have about money that use the same metaphor for both wealth and poverty. Here we have sayings that compare both great wealth and abject poverty to dirt and filth. Does this mean that we see money itself as unclean?

The print was made with two blocks of wood, one uncarved for applying the dirty texture and one carved with the "Filthy Rich" text and printed with brown:



The "dirt poor" handwriting (modeled on my father's handwriting) was done with a technique known as transfer drawing. First I printed out the handwriting on laser paper. Then I inked the back:



I placed the inked handwriting template on top of the woodblock print and used the top of a pen to trace the handwriting, transferring the ink onto the print.



I expect that there will be 8 more prints in this series.

Poor People I Have Known and Loved

Economics is a mental topic. Money, which is just pieces of paper or metal or electronic bits in a computer, is imaginary in some respects. It's valuable because we think it is. It's a tool of the mind, a vehicle for making our dreams and imaginings come true.

I like the mind, and much of my artwork is idea-driven, but I need a good amount heart energy, too, to connect me with the work. So I decided that in order to do these next prints, which examine cliches that use the same imagery for both wealth and poverty, I needed to find an emotional point of entry. And there's nothing like family to pluck the heart strings.

My father, Harry Bissett, came from an impoverished family living in a paper mill town in northern New Hampshire. He was born in 1924, the 9th of 10 children. I remember he used to tell me stories of picking rags or blueberries to earn a little money, and of getting an orange once a year in his Christmas stocking. He barely made it through school (his teachers thought he might have been a little "retarded"), and he was an accident-prone child -- he fell out of a tree and shattered his arm, stepped on a nest of yellow jackets and received hundreds of stings, stepped in a pan of hot grease and scalded his foot. When he joined the army in 1942 and was shipped to North Africa and Europe for WWII, his mother sold all his belongings because she was sure he'd never make it back.

He did make it back, and he never spoke badly of his time in the army. The army gave him his first pair of glasses, which cured his low IQ score as well as his proclivity for accidents. And the army gave him a college education. He became a social worker because he wanted to give back some of what he had received.

My father ended up working with at-risk youth for the state of New York and he used to travel around the state from time to time. I still have the letters he wrote to me from his business trips while I was in college. I scanned a couple of pages of his handwriting and recombined the letters to form the words I'll be using to illustrate the cliches of poverty. My dad died in 2000, but he's very present to me this week as I manipulate his handwriting for these prints.

Money Talks and So Do Words

From a Google Images search of the word “money”

I've decided to take a break from the large scale prints that have made up the “Loaded” series so far and create some smaller works, still on the topic of money. The topic continues to intrigue me, but it also perplexes me and I've found it challenging to work with.

Part of the challenge lies in the fact that money is so deeply embedded in our culture, in our ideas about life, in our daily existence. As we've seen so clearly in the past few years, our global economic system is the strongest driving force on the planet. When it crashes, we all go down. And in many ways, the global economy is now what binds us together as human beings. Economic theories are the most universally held values in the world, business is our common arena, and transactions are our common language. Money is the water we swim in. We love money, we hate money, we want money, we structure our lives around getting money, we make our personal decisions based on how much money we can access at any given time. We need money. None of this is necessarily bad, but because we have internalized these ideas of ownership, property, credit, value, etc. so deeply we take them as true without examination. As I've worked on these prints, I've found it challenging work to uncover and deconstruct my own attitudes and ideas and conflicts about money and use them as grist for the art-making mill.

In my work as a commercial artist, when I'm assigned a new topic to illustrate I often begin with a search on Google Images. What that search will reveal are the cliches about a topic. For example, if you type in the word “idea,” Google will serve you up a page of light bulb drawings. When creating an illustration for a magazine or newspaper, you don't want to illustrate the cliche (unless you want it to look like clip art), but if you reference a cliche and then put a twist on it you often get a successful image that people will immediately recognize and feel connected with. In the same way, I thought it would be interesting to look at our cliches about money, so I started to collect words and phrases that we use in everyday language about money. That study of our language finally came into focus for me when I heard Kristi Nelson speak about money and mindfulness at the Creating a Mindful Society Conference in New York last fall. Kristi pointed out that we express our ambivalence and sometimes our true feelings about money in companion phrases such as “filthy rich; dirt poor,” where we use the same metaphor to describe both ends of the economic spectrum. This spark from Kristi was all I needed to develop this next group of prints.

So that's the scenario. These smaller prints will be 12" x 19" and will portray 8 or 9 of these companion phrases, cliches we have about money that use the same metaphor for both wealth and poverty. I'm looking forward to getting started on them this week.

Flat File Print Show in Maine

A flat file is a system of shallow drawers designed to store artwork. In recent years, flat file has also come to mean a collection of unframed works on paper which are available for viewing by collectors, scholars, curators, or others who might be interested. For a couple of years I've had work housed in the Zea Mays Printmaking flat file in Florence, Massachusetts, where curators recently visited to make selections for a new exhibition in Portland, Maine. I'm happy to say that my woodblock print Borders #3: Israel/Palestine was selected.

The exhibition, called Print/Counter-Print, promises to be a printmaking extravaganza. In addition to work from the Zea Mays flat file, Rose Contemporary gallery in Portland will also be showing works selected from the flat files of the Peregrine Press and the new Maine College of Art Flat File Project featuring work by printmaking students. 

You can see an online preview of the 60 or so works that were selected to be displayed at this link. In addition to the displayed works, Rose Contemporary will have more work by each of the participating artists available for sale and public viewing in a special flat file at the gallery for the duration of the exhibit, so don't forget to ask to see more.

PRINT/COUNTER-PRINT, PORTLAND ME
March 1 - March 31, 2012
Opening reception Friday, March 2, 5:00 - 8:00 pm
Closing reception Saturday, March 31, 3:00 - 5:00 pm
Rose Contemporary Fine Art Gallery
492 Congress Street, Portland, ME

Photos from MI-LAB Mokuhanga Residency

A few days ago I wrote about the new MI-LAB Mokuhanga Residency Program at Lake Kawaguchi in the foothills of Mount Fuji in Japan. The program launched the first Residency for Mid-Career Artists last week, when four invited artists arrived for a 45-day stay.

The artists at this inaugural event are, from the left, Keiko Hara (Japan/USA), Jacqueline Gribbin (Australia), Ralph Kiggell (UK/Thailand), and Hiroki Morinoue (USA).

I just discovered that MI-LAB is posting photos of the residency every day or two, so I wanted to let you know that you can go to the site and see what the artists are doing. To see the photos, go to the home page and in the column on the left, click on the green words that say "photo gallery." It's the next best thing to being there!

More on Paper Flattening

As I mentioned in a recent previous post, I've been happy with the Shikoku White paper I've been using for the Loaded series except for the fact that it's had a tendency to wrinkle and/or become wavy as I work with it. Check out that previous post for some excellent advice from people in the comments section.

 Here's a closeup photo I took of the prints hanging in my studio after being just air dried:



There are four different prints here, each in an edition of 7 or 8, and you can see that each print seems to have a characteristic wave or curl through the edition.

I tried to flatten the prints here in my studio, placing them between boards with weight on top, I got enhanced rippling plus some puckering. (A commenter to the previous post tells me that this is called "cockling" in Britain.) I felt really frustrated, so I decided to seek professional help -- I called Liz Chalfin, owner/director of Zea Mays Printmaking Studio where I teach. Liz recommended that I try their forced-air print dryer.

A forced-air print dryer, first developed at Crown Point Press, uses corrugated cardboard stacked alternately with dense smooth cardboard (Upson Board) that can be interleaved with damp prints. The whole stack is then put under pressure and air is forced through the corrugations to dry the prints. I neglected to take a photo of the Zea Mays dryer, but it looks a lot like this photo of the forced air dryer setup at Crown Point. The dryer at Zea Mays can hold 15 prints at a time. Frankly, I was skeptical, but after running a test with a few prints that didn't make it into an edition I was sold.

So yesterday I brought 14 dampened prints to Zea Mays, and this morning Joyce Silverstone and I unloaded the dryer to see what had happened (it takes two people to load and unload -- see the Crown Point article). I had 12 prints without cockling! I call that a success. Here's a photo for comparison:



The group of prints on the right are the prints that were flattened in the forced-air dryer. An added surprise was how the flattening of the paper enhanced the details of the printing, too. I'm a convert to the forced-air print dryer. Thanks Zea Mays!

New Woodblock Residency Program in Japan

Ms. Keiko Kadota, the founder of the successful Nagasawa Art Park residency program in Awaji, Japan, has just announced a new and expanded program that offers artists at any level of experience an opportunity to come to Japan to study woodblock printmaking. Called the Mokuhanga Innovation Laboratory (MI-LAB), the program "is designed for international artists, print teachers and printmakers who wish to learn Japanese mokuhanga printmaking techniques under Japanese teachers."

The facility is located in Fuji-Kawaguchiko-cho, a lakeside town at the base of Mt. Fuji about a three-hour train ride from Tokyo. There are three basic programs being offered. You can read the descriptions at this link.

Applications are now being taken for a 30-day residency this summer, June 20 - July 20, 2012. You can find application forms, guidelines and more information on the MI-LAB News page.