Card Players

I wanted to do another interior, and a lot of table-related things have been on my mind lately. I've been thinking about still lives, paintings about eating, people seated, and the fact is that tables are a great gathering spot for people. When art becomes part of life, tables are just as relevant as any other item to paint, and including models/figures becomes easier than ever. Just tell them to sit down and do something. I told my little brothers to sit down and do stuff. It began with one of them playing a board game, which made me think of all sorts of board-game related things. Checkerboard patterns, how painting becomes like a board game in terms of moves, etc. So I began to paint and when I looked at it again, the composition reminded me of Cezanne's Card Players. This made me think again of my recent adventure with making playing cards out of woodblock prints, and I wondered whether or not my subconscious was linking things together. Either way I told my brother to sit down and play solitaire while I painted him. Then he got bored so I got him on my laptop and he ended up playing Plants vs. Zombies which for all intents and purposes could count as a modern card game. People play solitaire on the computer all the time! Technicalities aside though, I became very absorbed in the levels of space in the room, the floor, the plane of the table, the window in the back and the world outside. Makes me think of how during a card game everything seems to be in this little world of paper and spades and chance, and outside the window the world still exists. People are absorbed in their own little worlds. Card players, painters, writers, athletes, anyone.

The first take is this:

The little guy to the left at this point was playing a board game which turned into solitaire. The fellow at the end of the table is writing something. I tried a more limited palette to begin with.

Take two eliminated the central figure and related some mugs on the table to a certain dual approach to the painting that I began to see creeping out of the way it was set up. I had my eye on the green square at the top left and was measuring the other colors off that from time to time.

What I decided was the final take had something to say about different color dynamics. I thought the red and the yellow had taken a prominent role in the painting thus far, but I thought it needed some other major players in terms of space, so some cobalt blue took over and made some interesting comments on what had been the green square at the top left but that was eventually considered to be too irrelevant. Clarification was also the name of the game. The figure remains, surrounded by cobalt blue and payne's gray, and the mood of the painting seemed to become a slightly brighter nostalgia. A pair of shoes appeared under the table.

24"x30" Card Players, oil on canvas.

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:

Woodblock Printing

I've been doing some woodcarving this summer (on commission), and from that got inspired to carve out a board and do a woodblock on my own time, which I got quite carried away with. So I took the board out to the garden and brought out a drawing of mine to work from as well, and made a woodblock carving. I find there's a great energy in gardens, a lot of vitality, and it's a peaceful place to get in a relaxed state of mind. I find the amount of different patterns among different vegetation a challenge to piece together and sort out or abbreviate in a drawing or painting. I have been reading a book on Matisse and it mentions his affinity for and interest in patterns. So with that in mind, I made a set of twelve woodblock prints on various types of paper with acrylic paint and ink. The colored paper is from a set of grainy charcoal papers, and the bright white paper is 140lb watercolor paper. I experimented with combining the colors, layering them on top of each other, and getting different effects with the amount of medium and the residual medium on top of the different papers. I'm a fairly inexperienced print-maker, but it certainly made me think about color in a different way, laying it down all at once and relinquishing control. Here's a few of the results in no particular order. Enjoy.