Back to the printing press

Closets

Drypoint, edition size of 12, 2012

I'm getting back into etching and drypoints, now that I have access to a press.

Self Portrait Fossil

Here are two versions of a relief, of fossil sculpture, using some of my collection of Laramie objects. Is that a finger bone or a rabbit femur?

The medium is plaster with polychrome. The molds are latex rubber supported by expanding foam insulation. This allows for surprisingly deep undercuts, the bane of any relief-maker.

Most of the objects are cast from toys from the 1950s/60s--a rich era of pop expression. Included are some totemic charms, at that time made in Hong Kong. The cochlea is probably Jurassic, making the next oldest object, the arrowhead, a youthful soapsud of trivia in comparison. The maze, which appears fragmentary, is the youngest artifact, based on Pac Man, the meditative game of the 80s.

Fossil from Laramidia

This is a scan of a recent work of painted plaster, castings of figures, fossilized artifacts from childhood in Laramie, Wyoming. I am pleased to read that Laramidia is now the official name of a vast island continent of North America during the Cretaceous period, when the continent that we know now was split by a sea. It is named after Laramie Wyoming. Though the objects fossilized in this work are recent (even the arrow head, relatively), this region of Wyoming is a fossil-land, offering up objects of such ancientness, my mind is boggled when I try to picture them in relation to time on a human scale (dinosaur bones, for example.)

Dictatorial Morgtage

My recent morgtage:

Source material for a coming toon inspired by Russia and China's veto of the UN Security Council resolution, regarding Syria.

Walt's Wonders

A morgtage for a large painting called Walt's Wonders, to be a large painting. This incorporates 10 different wonders of the world, potentially a messy and chaotic composition. The Great Wall of China helps to give a zig zag, or perspectival path for the viewer to follow.

I am attempting to coin this word, morgtage, which is phonetically pronounced, unlike mortgage; morgtage =morgue + montage, a montage of reference material, filed in what old time illustrators called a morgue, or swipe file. Illustrators, cartoonists and artists have always kept swipe files; appropriating or stealing images has been the stock and trade of the artist, just as much as a secret cavity has been the primordial organ for the smuggler. Perhaps google and photoshop have facilitated visual appropriation, but Picasso and Braque were collaging a century ago. Soon afterward the Soviets made airbrushing a verb, at least to kremlinologists and westerners, discussing political photo manipulation.