Do Some Breakdown Printing, Even When You Are of Sound Mind

Here is a simply fabulous idea. I’m sure you have all heard of Breakdown Printing with Leslie Morgan and Claire Benn of Committed to Cloth. And then, of course, there is the amazing  Kerr Grabowski, who calls her way of loading a screen with thickened dyes Deconstructed Screen Printing.

Dijanne Cevaal was “cruising blogs” and “saw mention of using water color pencils and breakdown printing.” A light bulb went off and she used watercolor crayons on the screen in place of dyes. Read her description of the process:

I found an old silk screen I had in the shed ( which isn’t terribly useful for breakdown printing as it has holes in the bottom- I need to buy some new mesh)I put my village linocut underneath the screen mesh and rubbed it with a black water colour crayon. I then coloured in the bits that weren’t black with the other crayons. I have to say the space where I printed was far from ideal- there were bumps in the surface ( which you can see on the resulting print) and I only had a tiny amount of Extender print base ( the emulsion that printing ink pigments are suspended in).

I was really blown away by the resulting colour and neatness of the print- and even the greyed second print has a certain amount of charm- I couldn’t do any more prints because I ran out of the extender base (will have to buy some more now that Kraftkolour is up and running again). The greying of the print could have been avoided by using fresh extender base with each pass of the squeegy ( and I seem to have lost my larger squeegy- so much of my stuff is all over the place because I have no set base to work).

In spite of all her setbacks, Dijanne came up with some pretty spectacular results.

Breakdown Print ~ by Dijanne Cevaal

Ghost print for Dijanne Cevaal's image

Dijanne comments that she can see herself doing more of these. I should hope so! I can see myself doing these, and I am sure your wheels are also turning.

A piece of cloth stapled onto a frame has proven to be a tool of endless possibilities. Jane Dunnewold, author of  Improvisational Screen Printing (and so much more, including collaborations with Morgan and Benn), also utilises the screen print in innovative ways (some of which involve interfacing). When she makes a collage, for instance:

Jane starts by screen printing patterns in clear gel medium onto heavy weight watercolor paper. When the gel dries it is permanent and creates a “resist” – that is, an area where paint cannot pass through to the paper because the clear, dried gel blocks it from being absorbed.

The next step is to brush India ink, paint or dye over the surface. While the ink is wet, the paper is passed under running water and the ink or dye washes off of the places where the gel was printed. This is how the first layer of patterning is created.

By the way: Dijanne is the author of  Lovely Lutradur and 72 More Ways Not To Stipple or Meander. Both are availaible on her blog ~ Musings of a Textile Intinerant, along with a myriad of informative and inspiring posts. Do not miss her gallery (e.g. If Hundertwasser Had Lived in the Otways or River System) for more evidence of her fascinating art journey.

Invoking Clarity

With the full power of the moon behind her, this woman invokes clarity.

But clarity does not necessarily arrive quickly, in an easily discernible package, hovering just above our gaze before wrapping us in its bright tendrils.

Rather, we piece all the various small revelations together, and begin to fathom a more spacious vision with each shining quilt, painting or poem that we “complete.”

Perhaps “completion” is not the direction we want to move towards, with its suggestion of closure.

What we really seek is a perpetual opening, a ceaseless unfolding, until we become so expansive that everything else is part of us, and we of it.

Invoking Clarity ~ by Carol Wiebe

Side view

Changing How You See the World

Mary Ennes-Davis admits publicly that she doesn’t know how to measure. There is a gentle irony to the fact that many of her works of art feature rulers.

Though she grew up in a family of artists, Ennes-Davis pursued a marketing career, and had “little time to create with [her] hands.”  But a sailing trip to the Soviet Union revised her course of direction:

I saw a country lacking in many of the things that we take for granted. This changed how I saw the world, and rather than throw away used objects, I began to incorporate the forgotten pieces into jewelry designs. Whether a copper washer, an old key or a poker chip, I used the recycled pieces and invested them with a new life in the design process. As my art began to sell I realized I wanted to return to my creative roots and work as an artist.

And return she did! Ennes-Davis created jewelry, collage and sculpture, all utilizing recycled as well as varied cultural elements.

The themes in my work are universal: family, nature, play, celebration, making connections with others. My art work is a vehicle to share laughter, grief, self awareness, our differences and our common threads.

Her remarkable Guardian sculptures “rose out at the ashes of September 11th.” Mary fashions these beings from cast off items~used brushes, rulers, game pieces, casters, fishing reels, chopsticks~and manages to imbue them with the spirit of  “hope and laughter, honor and friendship, protection and love.”

Memorial Guardian~by Mary Ennes-Davis (used with permission)

The Guardians brought her work to another level:

Selling guardians was very different than putting earrings on somebody. They have a different connection to people. There’s a heart-string emotion with the guardians that’s different from other art.      (Art’s Alive! by Bev Crichfield in The Skagit Valley Herald)

Arts Alive Guardian~by Mary Ennes-Davis (used with permission)

As she testifies in her instructor bio for an Art and Soul Retreat:

I believe that there are common threads that connect us; emotions, experiences, what we do for fun, how and where we live. I try to share those threads in my art. I want to help people pause and consider how we are all connected. I believe that if we find those connections then there is a hope for peace.

I am so pleased to have found this  fervent recyclist, who incorporates the used, cast-off, and forgotten to create something new and unforgettable. Mary Ennes-Davis doesn’t just tell others to walk gently on the earth; she shows amazing ways to achieve this through art.

A Couple of Collage Paintings

I completed two small collage paintings this weekend. They are on 10″ (l) x 8″ (w) birch panels. I find these to be very workable surfaces. I purchase mine from Currys in Toronto.

Birch Solid Wood Panels

Convergence

Break Through

A picture is not thought out and settled beforehand. While it is being done it changes as one’s thoughts change. (Pablo Picasso)

Extreme Art Experimentation

I recently visited my friend Jane, who has fallen in love with creating her own design papers. Her inspiration came from a DVD she watched with me, and several fellow artists, called Mixed Media Collage, by Carrie Burns Brown. Both a preview of this DVD, and a gallery of Carrie Burns Brown’s work, can be perused at Creative Catalyst Productions. Carrie Burns Brown’s work

is nature based, rich in texture and displays luscious color harmonies. Carrie brings collage to the level of fine art. Carrie delights in discovering new combinations of materials. If she cannot find what she is looking for, she makes it herself.

The mainstay of Brown’s collage work are her painted tissue papers, and these are what Jane has been producing in an amazing array of colors and textures.

As I was looking for the Carrie Burns Brown link, I ran across a Flickr site by Mary Buek. You will wish you could touch her Exurban Abstracts and American Gothic collections. Responding to a compliment  about one of her pieces, Mary said:

This is just a bunch of stuff I had around the studio . . . it’s a movable feast. . . I add stuff periodically and switch things around. Nothing is glued down and it’s changed since I took the picture. Experimental in the extreme.

Move over Extreme Sports! Mary is upping the ante with her Extreme Art Experimentation! There is a BIG grin on my face as I imagine a million elements all over Mary’s studio which she is forever repositioning, and snapping photographs of, for her next Flickr post. I would love to be a fly on the wall as she frantically attempts to reconstruct an art piece, made months back, because a buyer has requested it.

Then again, maybe an Extreme Art Experimenter doesn’t get frantic, doesn’t panic. Like any experienced athlete, Mary calmly and deliberately practices her moves of repositioning the myriad of art elements, using all her physical, mental and spiritual muscles as she revels in the challenge of re-creation. It’s just another kind of rush. And I, Mary, am one of your cheerleaders. But forget the pom poms and tiny pleated skirt~that would be a little too extreme!

Kilim, a desig paper by Carol Wiebe

Creating a Map for Your Work to Follow

I have usually approached painting with the idea of using whatever I create in a future collage or paper quilt. I tend to develop design papers rather than paintings. Essentially, I create the “fabric” for my paper quilts. This attitude, or approach, has resulted in paying little conscious attention to composition while I am painting.

Typically, when I do get to the composition stage, where I put all my elements together for a quilt, I proceed intuitively. The work reveals itself to me as I go, step by step. I am governed largely by what “feels right” and “looks good.” Lately, however, I have had the urge to delve deeper into the whys of feeling right and looking good. How do other artists approach composition? What is their thinking process as they work through a piece of art? An artist that I was delighted to find addressing this topic is Katherine Tyrrell. She is marvellously prolific! One of her posts on composition and design states:

Why study composition and design? Well, although I studied art to advanced level at school, my studies seemed to neglect exploring this important topic area in depth. Similarly, I’ve tended to find that it’s common for many painting workshops and courses to err much more towards teaching techniques relating to particular media and to touch upon composition and design only in passing. When was the last time you saw a workshop which was focused wholly on designing your artwork?

I decided to subscribe to her blog and follow her exploration. I also took out a DVD by Ian Roberts from the local public library, and then purchased his book “Mastering Composition.” Roberts says that to master composition you have to learn to see abstractly, to concentrate on shapes and flow:

Seeing composition in terms of shapes and flow is not an intellectual idea you apply: it’s a perceptual shift . . . It is the foundation that all great representational painting rests on, and it will dramatically improve the way you paint.

He insists that it is important to have design-driven rather than subject-driven compositions:

Shapes make the painting. However, those shapes need to be arranged and adjusted to create a coherent flow. That flow is what I call the armature. It is the backbone of the painting.

Roberts asserts that using his approach to creating compositions will help your artwork to come together with “greater ease and clarity.”

This is my goal for my next works: to create a structure ahead of time, upon which I will then allow myself free intuitive reign. I want the best of both worlds! It is exciting to think about ways that I can create interesting maps for my work to follow.

Shadows and Symmetry

I am drawn to shadows: I often take a picture of an object or a person’s shadow, rather than the source!

I also enjoy symmetry. It is fascinating to see what happens when objects are mirrored; it is my favored way to make art papers for collage. To my way of thinking, every piece of art paper should look like a finished design, even though it will probably be combined with other papers. I get more options that way: I can choose any part of the symmetrical design, put the mirrored sections in different parts of my quilt, or use the design as it is, with other papers. In every choice, it is as if the “wholeness” of each art paper transfers that quality into my finished quilt design, gives it a kind of integrity that would be harder to achieve with bits and pieces that lack a context.

What follows is a simple shadow photo, followed by Photoshop Elements fun where I produced symmetrical designs.

The original shadow photo

Shadow design 1

Shadow design 2

Shadow design 3

Shadow design 4

Shadow design 5

New Paper Quilts Are On Their Way!

I am putting the finishing touches on several new paper quilts, which I’ve been working on all at once for my solo show (coming up October 3!). I will be posting the pics very soon.

In the meantime, I discovered an artist named Mai-Liis Chaska Peacock, and she does mixed media assemblage, collage, and art dolls. I am especially taken with her shrines and icon dolls. I found her when I watched The Promise, a video by the amazing Karen Landey of Indie Arts: the DVD Magazine. As I commented on Landey’s site, the video is haunting and dreamlike, evoking emotions of longing and poignancy in the viewer. So lovely!

A few more ‘Fran Skiles Workshop’ pieces

I played around with this watercolor “base” in Photoshop Elements so that you could see the design. The actual watercolor paper is white stitching on white paper, and doesn’t show up very well. The rest of the pieces I show will just be finished pieces, without the original stitched watercolor. But the basic process, as described in other Fran Skiles posts, was to tear and cut the watercolor paper, then stitch it back together again (rather like piecing for a quilt, but with no seams, or fraying). This became the base for many different techniques, the primary one being collage. We created the collage papers as well.

House

Dress

Turning a doodle into a pattern

I’m going to start out with a less than remarkable doodle. Sometimes doodles really have zing! and you blink, shake your head and say, “Wow! How did this come out of that ho-hum meeting? ” Other times, I simply save them out of habit, or curiosity as to how I can fiddle with them and make something else.

The first pic is my original doodle. Then I fix it up, make it straight, refine a little in Photoshop Elements. I repeat the doodle for a full sheet of pattern.

I can use the pattern just like this, collage it onto my painting or quilt, then paint it whatever color/s I like. Or I can apply it to an appropriate background, placing the background behind my design and ending up with something like this:

The background is a photo I took of rust on a ship.

This process would make a wonderful workshop topic, which I would be happy to teach. Creating marks, doodling, fooling around, whatever you feel comfortable calling it . . . and then transforming the results into art papers that can be used in your work. You could also simply print out the black & white version and paint that, or use paintstiks, ink, whatever! Scan your results, and keep experimenting. It’s a bit like Alice down the rabbit hole: the adventure goes on and on! Time disappears. The wonderful difference is that when you ‘wake up,’ instead of disorientation, you have a bunch of original art papers!