Camping Block Prints

I did some gentlemanly camping with my brother and some friends this past week in Bear Mountain State park. It was a fantastic time: good people, creatively cooked food, no service, lots of fire, liquor, singing, and for me, drawing. Upon returning home, I took it upon myself to make a series of block prints from a drawing I had made of my brother studying. The memories fresh in my mind, making a wood block print of this drawing took me back to the campsite, a relaxed frame of mind, and the wonderful conversations and times that were had this past week.

Here is the drawing:

I roughly reversed the drawing on tracing paper because I wanted it to be the right way around on the prints. I carved it into a pine board and tried to pay attention to the various directional repetitions in the drawing and vary them in sections. I thought a strength of the drawing was that it divided up well into segments that locked together.

The prints came out fairly quickly. Some came out crisp, some came out thin, some came out bloody, and depending on the sequential colors, some came out either vibrating or piling up on top of each other. The variations and combinations was quite exciting to make.

Below is the set of twelve prints.I used acrylic paint to make them. The last four I made over an abstract ink drawing which I divided up into four pieces and printed on. I thought of the other three as I was printing each one in particular and tried to make them relate. 

Here's the set of the last four stitched together.

Woodblock Playing Cards

I decided to set out on a sort of ambitious project-making a full set of woodblock print playing cards with the woodblock technique I've been experimenting with. I found it to be extremely exciting. The card faces came together nicely and still retained that woodblock, almost medieval feel, full of the imperfections expected when doing something by hand like this. 

I made the number cards with a sort of stamp-pad-esque printing system. I carved suit symbols,  the backwards of the numbers 0-9, and a card frame block into chunks of wood. When the time came to print the cards, I would apply the paint to the wood frame, next stamp the number, and then stamp the appropriate number of suit symbols, all in the suit color. The face cards needed their own blocks, as well as the ace of spades. The other aces got one suit stamp and the "A" stamp. 

The designs for the face cards and the ace of spades were first drawn onto tracing paper, flipped, traced onto the wooden block, and carved out. 

Below is the full deck, scanned and sorted out. 

I think I'm going to take this idea further- Now that I've made a full deck, I think it would be a good idea to think of these as woodcuts-not necessarily a functional deck of cards. I've got a few ideas of how to use them like this-not necessarily restricted to color, suit or numbers, necessarily. Dali did a bunch of surrealist playing cards. We'll see where these ideas head!

Woodblock Printing, Continued

For the next set of woodblock prints, I started with a sketch I had made some time ago of my two little brothers sitting at the table.

I used the reverse side of the board I had used to carve the other block print for this one. I carved out some negative spaces, making texture and depth decisions partly intuitively, partly thinking about how it would look when reversed and printed.

The great thing about this type of printing is the guided loss of control. I have a certain amount control over the carved  image, but not in the same way I have control over a drawing. Then, once I begin printing, I have little control over how exact the image plays out. I have a general control over how thick I put the ink or paint on the block print, but once I pull the paper off the block, I am always pleasantly surprised by how the print turned out. It's a nice dynamic between specific, static marks carved into wood, and a complete dependence on how materials react when mushed together. It's a nice study in letting go, and letting the materials do the work for me. Also I still get to make color decisions, with a similar attitude. Here are the full set of sixteen woodblock prints, all around 5"x7", acrylic or ink on 140lb. watercolor paper:

Dia:Beacon and Minimalism-Andre, Ryman, Serra

Took a trip to Dia:Beacon to see what all the fuss was about. The surprise I had going there was enormous. I had no idea that such a massive vault of minimalism was two stops away from me on the Hudson line. They have huge rooms full of Carl Andre, John Chamberlain, Robert Ryman, Donald Judd, Blinky Palermo, and Richard Serra, to name a few. I found most of these rooms extremely impressive. I encountered some personality differences I didn't know I had with Dan Flavin and Bruce Nauman, and I had trouble adjusting to the Sol Lewitt rooms. But everything there was appropriately curated, I thought. I had a fantastic journey through an extremely important period in art.

There was so much stuff to see that I think I'll stick with my favorites.

Carl Andre

Rooms full of primordial geometry stacked or arranged in ways that reminded me why I found lincoln logs, building blocks and legos so fascinating when I was a kid (not that I don't find them fascinating still). Everything there I found to be real, with the wonderful attitude that accompanies so much minimalist art that seems to say "you're here, this object is here, now look at the simple things in life a little bit closer." You can't fake it with minimalism. Carl Andre's palette is simply materials and geometry. Copper plates, brick, steel, blocks of wood, and stone. Working with what one finds in the world. It's nature, arranged in ways that can't deny the substance or the artist. And the amazing thing is, in these apparently simple pieces, the artist is so remarkably present that at times you can clearly see the way he thinks. It's almost an instinctual paring down of what is necessary into an eloquent phrase. I looked at a stack of cubes and thought "why can't I think of that?". Carl Andre is someone who loves the materials for their weight, their sensation, and their texture that can together evoke an experience in one's plastic consciousness. To me, his work made me want to get back to basics, to love whatever is pure about a square, to contemplate the existence of things in space. It reminded me of why I thought people made things like Stonehenge, and why that is important to do. Why art is important for people to make. His poetry is also fantastic and on display in little cases.

Robert Ryman

It's so easy for people to look at the color white and then look away. White has connotations generally as to the state of a canvas before anything is done to it. Robert Ryman's work is mostly white but if the viewer gives it a chance it is incredibly rewarding. I was never that familiar with Ryman's work but the applause in this case goes (in my humble opinion) to firstly, the way in which the white is articulated. Ryman proves that once you move into pure abstraction the language isn't just the color, it can be the way in which that color is painted. And once you realize that white is a color, his paintings make perfect sense. And then can be looked at and enjoyed tremendously. I also picked up that attitude that framed the minimalist attitude in Dia:Beacon for me: a call to looking and experiencing works of art in a different way, a more ontologically realistic way, where all that's there is the object and you and what you make of all this. But such wonderful things can be made of it. I was struck by a row of white square paintings all hung flat on the wall, which I almost walked past when I entered the room. But as I looked closer, I did the subtlest double-take ever and realized that all the squares were off a shade or two, either warmer or cooler, of white. Also the way each one was hung on the wall was different, and the little black hinges and screws were actually part of the piece. The hangings were having a visual conversation with their paintings, which were relating quietly in hue with each other and the wall behind. How clever.

Richard Serra

I like Richard Serra a lot. Not only because he's possibly the biggest, baddest, most aggressive monster in the room, but because he's right about absolutely everything he does. He knows he doesn't fake it, you know it, and all you can do is let him take over your space and environment and just be confronted by the monolithic reality of his work. There were several gigantic barrow-like, maze-like pieces made up of concentric rings of steel plates about twenty feet high and which could be entered by slits in the sides. They were similar to the one that was on view at the Gagosian gallery earlier this year, but fun size (comparably). These overpowering environments were like a tilting cave of rust-brown steel that wove back and forth, threatening and calming my experience with their strong presence and somehow simultaneously aggressive and meditative beauty. When I tried to question it, it seemed to just be, stoic and there. And Serra seemed to be behind it, saying "Hi, little viewer. I'm Richard Serra. Yes, I am that impressive." All I could hypothetically respond with would be "Yeah...wow." It's like being in the world of someone who controls everything and you don't mind at all. In fact, you'd rather be there than in a lot of other places. What really made sense to me as a Richard Serra piece was this one particular wedge-shaped piece of steel, which just looked like a shallow ramp going about 6 inches high into the wall. But upon closer inspection, I realized that it wasn't the type of wedge I first thought. The entire floor of the room was sloping down those 6 inches, and the wedge of steel was in fact maintaining the level of the floor. Serra's piece had established the reality of "level" in this existence, and I had to agree. The room now bent to Serra's rules and nothing else could be said. I left the room more than a bit amazed.

The rest:

There are many more things I could write about, but maybe later. Hats off to John Chamberlain and his wonderful sculptures made from wrecked cars, and I spent nearly an hour trying to wrap my head around the Blinky Palermo paintings (with much-loved success). I enjoyed the Louise Bourgeois for a few different reasons, and didn't like them for a few others. Fred Sandback, who was another artist with whom I was not previously familiar, was quite incredible, creating incredible planes and intervals with pieces of yarn. He was like the ghost of John McKracken. Donald Judd was good as ever, and there was another guy whose name I can't remember who did a painting every day for a number of years of the text of the date on which it was made (e.g. there are hundreds of paintings of the actual text of the date, such as "Feb.16, 1976", made on that day, so on and so forth). What a pursuit. Overall, it was a day well spent and I have to head back in the near future. Also, I'm looking forward to the Matisse cutouts exhibition at MoMa. I think it opens in November.

Carl Andre