Recently...

Since my last entry, my life has been quite eventful. The early months of the year are a time that I am able to sink my teeth into working on new images. Some of the etchings have been in progress for a time, but there are others that are just beginning and also those that exist only in my mind. There are also quite a few studies that are done in my sketch book. This is a way of giving the ideas a measure of concrete form. It is also a way of determining if the ideas have a future. Not all of them do.

On the personal front, my mother in law died in January. It was sudden. She was eighty and in great shape. I will miss her. She had always been there, and she treated me like a son.

My brother is an investment banker from the twin cities. He invited me to join him on a business trip to New York. I have never aspired to be a part of that scene. Trips to NYC have always been for enjoyment. This time, however, I tried to set up some appointments to show my work. I did not have much success with the attempts, but I was able to show my work to a gallery called the Old Print Shop, which is located on Lexington and 29th. The gallery has been around for a long time...over 100 years. It is well established. Michael DiCerbo, the curator, liked my etchings. I recently shipped them a package of my work, and they will be representing me in New York. I am enthused about my new relationship with them. I took the subway around the city. I bought 24 hour fun passes so I could ride the subway or the bus all that I wanted. The woman in the ticket booth at the subway station told me how to buy the pass at the automat. She lost me after step 3. I went to the machine and started touching the screen and obeying the prompts. I messed up. Suddenly a booming voice started to instruct me. I thought it was the voice of God. It took me a few seconds to realize that the woman in the booth could see what I was doing, and she started to instruct me over the PA system. You had to be there. I thought it was funny though.

I also sent work to the Miller Art Museum in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. They are having an invitational printmaking invitational and included my work. I have been in one other show at that museum. I have four etchings in this exhibit. It will be hanging in the museum until April 20th.

On Tuesday, I will be traveling to Spring Grove, Minnesota. It is about three hours away. Bluff Country Artists Gallery will have a show of my etchings throughout the month of April. I will deliver the work on Tuesday. On the trip, I will stop in Lansing, Iowa to get together with painter friend, Fred Easker. I will also try to make it to Decorah, Iowa to work on the next stage of the Phelps Park bridge etching that I am doing.

Also...coming up in May will be a show of my work at Paoli House Gallery. It is located in a small town between my studio and Madison. It is a beautiful gallery. It is small, but is the kind of place that I will really enjoy being a part of . Mike and Bev Thom are the owners. I visited the gallery last fall and approached them about my work at that time. The exhibit will open on May 21st.

In February, I was in Milwaukee. My van had suddenly begun losing power, and it is the kind of van that not everyone can work on. I used my AAA membership and had it towed to a garage in Milwaukee for servicing. While there, bemoaning the repair bill that I was going to get, I visited Tory Folliard Gallery. It is my favorite gallery in that city. I can't say for certain, but I think they will be representing me there eventually. I was able to show them my work and they liked it. Their first commitment, though is to work for the artists that they already represent. The possibility is for me exciting. That is my life lately.

Dream house

Since the photos were done, I have been working on the sky for "Dream house". I mentioned that I am using four copper plates. Each plate is inked with a different primary color: red, yellow and blue. The fourth plate is inked with black ink. The challenging part about printmaking like this is the fact that when I am working on the etching, I do not see the results until the image is printed. I am working on copper plates, and that is what I see in front of me. I have to be thinking about the color (and how it will combine with the others) while working on one of the plates. If I want green I have to combine yellow and blue with varying amounts of red and possibly some black. It is possible to achieve an infinite number of color combinations.

People who work in painting become accustomed to painting a color and seeing that color as they apply it to the paper. That is not the case with etching. The color is finally seen after the plates have been etched in the acid, inked and pulled through the press combining colors from all of the plates. The uncertainty is great, but with years of experience, it is possible to anticipate a bit. This is not a medium for control freaks. There are those of us who have learned to take a good amount of delight in the uncertainties of the medium and work within that realm.

Back to the "Dreamhouse" sky. I have been etching the red plate using soft ground and textures. I have also been etching the blue plate using marbling and aquatint and the black plate using marbling and no aquatint. There is no aquatint used on the black plate, because I want to have layers of the dream like marbled shapes, but black (by its nature) can tend to overpower the other colors. With no aquatint, it will tend to be lighter and a little more ambiguous. All of these plates are being lowered slowly into the acid to get a transition of etching depth. The darkest, most intense colors will be at the top and will gradually fade to nothingness as they get closer to the horizon.

At last

Sometimes this profession feels like it works in fits and starts. Momentum is gained and lost. Any artist who is able to have momentum and hang on to it continuously has my highest regard. I convince myself that losing momentum is not necessarily a bad thing. When it is lost, there is the element of feeling frustrated, but there is also the desire to regain that which was lost. It is like a hunger that needs to be satiated. In September, I lost my momentum. I needed to prepare work for my November and December travels (see previous posts). It required that I focus on the printing end of things as well as preparing work for display. Now it is January, my studio has been reorganized, and I am diving into things again. I will not tell you how many etchings I have in progress. They have all been sitting there on shelves, but also in my brain (all twenty of them and of various sizes), and they have been occupying a fair number of my thoughts over the past couple of months.

One of the pieces I am working on, is an etching from the late 1980s. This may suggest to you a certain lack of new ideas on my part, but I insist that it is absolutely not the case. I have always liked the concept for this piece (it was originally called "Waiting"), but I was dissatisfied with how I executed it. It is a color etching (16" x 20"). It was done using four plates. My disappointment with it lies in the fact that I now believe that the execution of the idea requires that I use the colors with much greater intensity. My concept with the first 1980s incarnation of it lead to an anemic print. I am a better artist than I was then. Every aspect of my work has improved. I could go at those weak compositional areas with a scraper and "clean it up", but I think I will work it through as is. I think that with stronger use of color and greater visual interest, any compositional awkwardness or weakness will be minimized. The new title of the work is "Dream house". I will post photos of it as it progresses as well as a shot of the first incarnation. Please forgive my lack of skill as a photographer.

Winter in Blue Mounds

The holidays and their accompanying demands are over. I am looking forward to sinking my teeth into the creative side of my profession. This week, I have reorganized my work area, going through etchings that have been in progress, but were put on hold in the fall. When I make my trips to galleries, there is much time and energy that goes into the trip preparation, and ongoing projects are stopped. This can be good in that when I return to the pieces, it is like starting over. Works that seemed to have been at an impasse, I see with different eyes, and solutions sometimes seem evident. Jesi, if she is able to make it from Madison to Blue Mounds today (we are having quite a bit of snow as I write this), will assist me with regaining my artistic momentum. Jesi has been with me since early 2009. She is my current apprentice. She has been great at helping me with things around my studio. In exchange for her help, she works on her own etchings. I am eager to give her guidance whenever she wants it.

It began snowing last night. I woke up early this morning to the sound of snow plows outside of my Mount Horeb house. When I arrived at Blue Mounds, five miles down the slippery road from MH, I donned my snow shoes and went for a walk along the Military Ridge Trail. I commute on this trail in the summer on my bicycle. It is the source of many of my etching ideas, and I know it well. I had never snow shoed on it before. I took off in the direction of Barneveld, a town which is five miles further down the road. My instinct told me to stay put in my studio and get to work, but how can one resist anything this beautiful. Art is part of my conscious and my subconscious. I always look at things in terms of compositions. Today was a feast for my eyes. There are areas along the trail that I have noted before from the vantage point of my bicycle in the warmer months. These places were equally beautiful this morning. I will try to go out again tomorrow even though the snow will have passed. I will take my camera and post a photo or two. Even with two layers of gloves, my fingers got cold. I passed the state park entrance and decided to walk an additional half mile to a gate that I had looked at a number of times. I stopped at the gate to look before heading back. I had begun to sweat, and it trickled down my face. The tree branches were covered with snow. A squirrel was traversing the tree tops leaving clouds of disturbed snow behind him. The branches seemed to be impossibly small to carry him. He jumped from tree to tree and before long passed over my head, crossing over the trail. Before long he had disappeared from my sight, the only trace of him being the cloud of snow occasionally falling from the branches that he was disturbing. I have often seen wildlife while walking on this trail. When I am on my bicycle, I come up on them fairly quickly and often surprise them. On snow shoes, however, it is a little more difficult. I move slowly, and the sound of the large surfaces crunching through the snow alert any creature long before I get to where they are. I returned to my studio. The exertion and experience was refreshing. I will write more later. I hope you are warm where you are.

Back in the studio

I drove back from Ohio on Sunday, arriving home in the evening. It was a long drive. I had attempted to set up a couple of appointments while I was in Ohio. None of them worked out, partially due to the winter weather. I felt restless. I like it when my days are full. On Friday morning, I left Alliance and drove to Youngstown and visited the Butler Institute. It was decked out for the holidays. It is a wonderful museum of American art. If you are ever in that area, you must go there. I went back to Akron. Denis Conley hosts a get together at the gallery every Friday afternoon and into the evening. We went to the Diamond Grille again. Instead of going into the dining room, Denis opened a side door that lead into the kitchen. The kitchen staff knows him. Denis sang an excerpt from an Italian opera aria. The staff loved it and applauded enthusiastically as did I.

On Saturday, I sat in my van in front of Denis' house and drew on an etching plate. I frequently travel with a copper plate to work on. I don't like it when my time is empty. I did a portrait of his house and neighborhood (see photograph). There were only a few hours for me to work so I had to work quickly. Looking at the plate, I could see that my lines were alive with energy. I try to draw this way. Will they retain this character when I return to my studio and place the copper plate in the acid bath? Working quickly does not always mean working well. My concentration was pretty complete, and even if it is not a masterpiece, the act of creating can be as important as seeing a result. When I work, I can sense that I am not breathing. I don't pass out so I guess it is okay. As I worked from my subject, I think about how I will proceed after etching the lines. Building up layers of value using soft ground seems to be a good solution. All of this will need to be done back in Wisconsin, however. I will etch the lines deeply, layer softground values over the lines and then use sandpaper to soften those values, hopefully creating subtle gradations in my shading. The darkest areas will be done with drypoint...this would include the darkest shadows as well as some accents.

I went to The Nervous Dog coffee shop and did some correspondence...all of it hand written. I don't have a laptop, and I value writing to people. Email is fine but to a point. It was near the end of the work day when I finally got to Denis' gallery. I had bought tickets to see the Cleveland Orchestra that evening. We saw the Messiah. Linnea Nereim, who plays bass clarinet for the orchestra, met us after the concert at Sergios, a restaurant near the concert hall. Denis and Linnea had not met before and hit it off immediately. Denis is an orchestra subscriber and could remember and discuss concerts from years before. I could tell that Linnea was impressed as was I. I took things in. I can be a good listener. Classical music is a subject that I admit to not knowing a lot about, but I was fascinated by their conversation. I thought about asking them if they ever listened to Duke Ellington, but decided against it.

Sunday morning I cooked breakfast for the two of us and departed for Wisconsin in pouring rain, the temperatures flirting with freezing. The rain had subsided when I reached Indiana. The drive went smoothly. The Midwestern blizzard had come and gone, but the snow that needed to be shoveled waited for me. It was good to be back.