Well.... I guess I have been a bit distracted since my last post. Much has been progressing along in the months. Perhaps the volume of finished work has dropped but the amount of hours I have been putting in has gone up a bit. I am right now in the middle of Japan trip recruiting, working on work for the show next summer, running the print department and managing a few odd and unexpected distractions over the last few months. The above pic is probably the longest and literally biggest piece I have worked on in some time. At the moment it is 7' x 9'. The idea is to create a printed stone garden. Seen above is one of the blocks. These are being printed in relief from woodblock using a reductive approach and ending up with seven colors from each block.
This is a project I considered about two years ago but the initial results of that one were less then... well... crappy. This set is much more interesting in that it is totally modular. Each section is about 11" x 17". The idea is to be able to arrange them into different designs and set up. Each block is printed in an edition of 10 to 14 to create a good variety and to build in a preference for an asymmetrical composition. I am very much the amateur when it comes to creating a stone garden. I have kept one in my own yard fro four years now. It seems to constantly grow, shrink and change. It is nice to be able to move the parts about during the good seasons. I suppose that was the impetus with pursuing this project. I suppose there is an irony in creating a garden out of basically synthetic products. I am also interested in the idea of bringing something for the world of space into 2d and then moving back out into the third.
The interesting idea of printmaking is to create images and reproduce them... as much as possible or needed. Initially I had sought to recreate particular gardens. This very quickly changed though. I do not wish to simply mimic those gardens. I decided that it is more important to use the visual language of the stone gardens is more important. These patterns that are printed come from many temples in Kyoto. Ryoanji, Kenninji and Nazinji temples are the particular gardens these patterns were pulled from. Ideally I would like to allow people to be able to rearrange these as they see fir. At the moment I am not sure how to accomplish this with out being able to be around each day to reassemble it. Perhaps that is just my controlling nature. I still need to decide if I want this to turn into one large garden or to break it down into a few smaller and scattered ones. I am starting to think more about the scattered ones as people would be able to venture around them more easily and interact with them on that level. Oh, decisions.... decisions.
The picture above is one of the newer long projects I have been working on. I have never before made something of this sort. It really came out of a curiosity to see what would happen if I made lanterns. A while back I did a very long set of printed lantern banners. Well here is my attempt at making literal one. I have no real impetus or reasoning behind them yet. These are about two feet tall and 10 inches wide with silkscreen on muslin mounted to lexan; a flexible sheet of plastic which is then illuminated from the inside. These are silkscreened prints from my "Ryokan" series. A scene of trees from a cedar tree forest is the depicted scene.
Please pardon the so so pic above but it does give you the idea of how they look lit up. This set is currently on their way to my fair hometown in Ohio as some gifts. Again I am playing with art as commodity. I won't get into that here as I have gone over this in previous posts. None the less it is lingering in this brain. I do believe though that I will be creating more in the upcoming months in different variations. Well now I think it time to go off and enjoy the holidays.
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