Printing a Forest

This morning I went into the studio primed and enthusiastic about doing some relief printing. I like to work in a series and I’ve been thinking about a series based on a tree.

I was in a park recently and photographed some tees. For now, I wanted to start with a wider one. I like its pattern of branches. It’s interesting with its leaves and Spanish moss. But I thought it would also be interesting simplified. So my challenge would  be to see how different I can make a series of collaged works, all starting with the same image.

Here’s my printing block. I carved it yesterday. This is about 9” x 11”. Because I’m printing by hand, I carved an E-Z Cut. (As the name implies, they are really easy to cut. But, being soft rubber, they would not hold up under the pressure of a printing press.)

I started with some blue and some burnt umber dark. I mixed it just a little. I wanted most of the mixing to occur on the brayer working across the plate.

Brayering the paint onto the plate and mixing the color at same time.

My first impression was onto white tissue paper. It’s perfect for picking up delicate nuances on the block. But oh-so-delicate. It wants to rip just by being looked at! (Note: this is not the carved block of the tree. This is another linoleum block I had, using for experimenting.) Now for some trees.

I printed onto brown kraft paper.

I printed onto cotton muslin and sheer polyester.

I printed onto rice paper.

And I printed onto a sateen fabric.

Printing onto Kraft paper

Printing onto sheer polyester

Printing onto rice paper

Some of the prints I made were onto pieces with some color and image already on them from previous monotypes.  (The picture above – rice paper – is printing onto a previously printed sheet.) Here’s one with the tree printed over a celestial sky that I think is interesting.

Sateen fabric. The celestial sky had alsready been monotype printed when I added the tree. This was a piece I had in my stash of printed fabric

Here’s some of the “forest” on my floor after most of the printing was done.

Next up… gluing!  I’ll be composing these into collages on watercolor paper.

This week’s good news; I’m oh-so-happy to announce that my quilt “This is the Way to Get In” was accepted into Q=A=Q (Quilt = Art = Quilts) at the Schweinfurth Art Center in Auburn, NY. The exhibit will be up from October 15, 2020 till January 9, 2021. It’s a show with an excellent reputation. This year 71 entries were accepted of 364 submitted. A nice affirmation.

“This is the way to Get In” Art Quilt 42” x 42” 2019

Thank you for reading. I always enjoy questions and comments.
--Bobbi
bobbi@bobbibaughstudio.com

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Looking THROUGH – in a coupla ways

Several different studio projects this week are connected by the idea of looking THROUGH.

Looking through a transparent color complement
 I’ve started creating a new set of matted collages using hand-printed fabrics from my bins of quilt leftovers. Recently most of my collages have been based on landscapes. I wanted to play with squares and rectangles – just shapes – in a more quilterly way.

After I got down the squares and rectangles, I realized that these very pleasing shapes were not a finished composition. Rather, they are backgrounds. To make them come alive, I’m painting over the rectangular shapes with thin glazes of acrylic, rounded shapes, and in a complementary color to what’s underneath.

I like the way all the parts now speak to each other in a completely new way.

(I finished two of these collages. There are links to the completed works at the end of this blog post if you’d like to learn more.)

Looking through the history
I’ve worked more on the figures in the historical quilt I posted abut last week. I ended up collaging some of the dried grassy shapes inside the interior of each figure. Again, I was pleased with how this began to unify all the sections. And it’s way more interesting than my first method, which was a simple semi-transparent whitewash within the figure.

I will be submitting this quilt to an upcoming juried exhibition. So, I have to set aside any more pictures for a while. (In a month or so when I know the outcome of jurying I will post the finished quilt.)

Looking through to the Memory

A quilt I completed in 2019  titled “Look Through to the Memory” has been accepted into Quilt Visions 2020 at the Visions Museum in San Diego. The exhibit will run October through January. In preparing some supporting documentation for the exhibit, I created a short video. It shows the quilt in close-up sections and includes a poem I wrote based on the work. This is a dream-and-memory-based work and it is my hope that it evokes thought and stirs the emotions of the viewer.

If you’d enjoy seeing the video (about 2 minutes) you can find it on You Tube HERE.

Here are the links for the new fabric collages I described at the top of this post: 

Matted Collages: Seen in a New Way, Revelations, HERE

Thank you for reading. I always enjoy questions and comments.
--Bobbi

BLOG POSTS: If you would enjoy receiving blog posts by e-mail,  please subscribe here:  I post blogs once a week. BLOGS-BY-EMAIL

NEWSLETTER: If you enjoy more detailed behind-the-scenes stories, as well as FIRST LOOKS at new works and members-only discounts, I hope you’ll become a Studio Insider.  You’ll hear from me about once a month.  NEWSLETTER

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Adding characters to the story

My work-in-progress with the not-so-green-grasses (last week’s post) took a new direction this week.

I have created all the parts and could finally pin them up on my easel for a look at the big picture. I had put together exactly what I planned and what I sketched, but it was lacking.  (Darn Hate it when that happens!) I decided to add some characters.

This piece is inspired by the abandoned warehouse used for years as a packing plant for orange growers. I had already iinserted some small historical photos into the windows and the grassy area.

This is the photo which appears - small - in two places in the quilt

But it just wasn’t enough to evoke the sense of time past that I had hoped for. So, I tried enlarging one of the figures from the historical photo and added an orange picker on a ladder based on more photos I have found from the era

(Just a note: I was happy to see on the historical sites I visited notes that these photos are all in the public domain. They date from the early twentieth century and have no photographer attribution. Very important to check before using photos in artwork.)

I used rough pencil sketches in PhotoShop to move the figures around and decide on a final placement.

Two of the PhotoShop mockups I created to experiment with placement

I like the one on the right. Next, I sketched the figures on gessoed muslin. (I prep it for painting with exterior white house primer, applied with a wet natural sponge.) I want the look of a simplified linear figure. But, stenciling or painting that directly on my quilt surface could be way too tricky. The painted line on a surface that’s already stitched and not completely flat was likely to raise problems.

On my easel - drawing the figures onto muslin.

Painting the figures

The black painted area will be applied in once piece, collaged into place and then machine stitched. The white areas will all be cut away. This morning I started the cutting.

This is a new method for me to depict figures in a fabric work. I’m pretty much making it up as I go. The idea is to have the elements of the historical memory – the dried grass and the deep red-and-oranges of the fruit – to actually be visible through the characters. I want them to be in the history. I think the simplified lines will define the figures, without making them portraits of particular people.

That’s what I hope will happen. I’ll let you know how it turns out.

If you’d like to see more… On the way to thinking through this method for depicting figures in a quilt, I revisited some of my other pieces that include a figure. In each case, I went about it in a different way. If you’d like to see more, you can check out these links on my website.

The Lord Giveth and the Interstate Taketh Away:
Transparent silhouette stenciled with acrylics over a photo transfer HERE

Neither Here Nor There
Drawing with oil pastels + acrylic wash, over and under sheer polyester HERE

Saying the Magic Words
Drawing with oil pastels on muslin, overpainted with matte medium HERE

Thank you for reading. I always enjoy questions and comments.
--Bobbi

bobbi@bobbibaughstudio.com

BLOG POSTS: If you would enjoy receiving blog posts by e-mail,  please subscribe here:  I post blogs once a week. BLOGS-BY-EMAIL

NEWSLETTER: If you enjoy more detailed behind-the-scenes stories, as well as FIRST LOOKS at new works and members-only discounts, I hope you’ll become a Studio Insider.  You’ll hear from me about once a month.  NEWSLETTER

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Grass. Not always greener

A project I have working in the studio has me looking closely at grass. As pattern. As a symbol.

I do a lot of wetlands collages in deeply hued shades of green and blue. So, I’m used to looking at grass forms with a lot of color. This project is asking me to pull way way back on the color so the grass can be a way to depict events that have passed and a sense of loss.

This project began with a bike ride several months ago. We drove to DeLeon Springs and parked the car by the railroad tracks on Lake Winona Road. We rode from there then returned. As I looked around I realized that we were right next to the deserted Strawn Historic Packing House. It’s been closed since a destructive freeze killed the orange crop in 1983 and subject to fire, vandalism and neglect since then.

The deserted warehouse is beautiful. Poignant and filled with memory. I decided it would be interesting subject matter for a history-memory quilt. My goal is to create a strong contrast between a vibrant orange section to represent the once-thriving business and dried grass to represent the past and loss.

Here is the foreground of the photo I shot on that day on the bike ride.

Here is a that image transferred to muslin and on my easel as part of the quilt-in-progress.

I’m happy with the realism and detail of the photo transfer. Now I needed to create some grass-like patterns to enhance the feeling of that overgrown weed and grass area by the warehouse.

This is a section of the quilt that I’ve printed and stitched together. (I am working in sections, quilting-as-I-go.)

(I’ve also incorporated a small historic photo and some text into this section.)

This is monotype printing on rice paper. I bonded the rice paper to muslin (with matte medium) after printing so that I can work with it like any other fabric. The image is a ghost print: Natural grasses were put on my printing plate as a stencil. I printed that image on some other fabric or paper. The image that remained (the ghost) on the plate was beautifully detailed. I pulled these prints from that plate.

This is muslin monotype printed with natural grass forms on the plate to act as a resist. The paint on the plate colored the background, but the grass blocked out the fabric behind it. I mixed these colors by blending cadmium yellow medium with black. The result is a wonderful range of olive green hues. (In some print pulls I added just a tad of white to the mix.)

So far, I love this muted palette and the way the patterns are coming together. I’ll have this memory-in-progress in the studio over the next month.

JUST A REMINDER… GOT POETRY?
I am the volunteer coordinator for a project of SAQA (Studio Art Quilt Associates) Florida Region. It will be a book with textile artworks depicting fish and other underwater life. The fish will be created by SAQA members. To go along with the textile art in the book, we are looking for short poems on the subject of fish (or any other kind of underwater life) in Florida. All poets welcome! If you are a poet I hope you will submit work. If you know poets I hope you will spread the word. You can request a complete prospectus with timeline and details here: SaqaFlapoetryProject@gmail.com.

Thank you for reading. I always enjoy questions and comments.
--Bobbi

bobbi@bobbibaughstudio.com

BLOG POSTS: If you would enjoy receiving blog posts by e-mail,  please subscribe here:  I post blogs once a week. BLOGS-BY-EMAIL

NEWSLETTER: If you enjoy more detailed behind-the-scenes stories, as well as FIRST LOOKS at new works and members-only discounts, I hope you’ll become a Studio Insider.  You’ll hear from me about once a month.  NEWSLETTER

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WORDS -- ART -- WORDS

I’ve been working lately to exercise the other half of my brain.

Words. The beautiful sounds of words. The expressive quality of words. How words are like pictures. How they flow together in musical ways.

I’m not much of a scientist, but somewhere in my world understanding I came to grasp that energy forms are interchangeable: light, electricity, sound are all forms of energy and can be converted from one to another. I think words and images are like that. They form one another. Complete on another. Enrich one another.

I am so grateful that several friends and I have been gathering together since June in a weekly writing group. Already I can tell how much it means to each of us. As with visual artmaking groups, it’s great to have a group of art(writing) buddies for camaraderie and encouragement. And, by its nature, writing encourages deeper sharing and meaningful friendships.

If you have thought you’d like to write – or write more, or dig deeper – but don’t know how to start, I recommend Natalie Goldberg’s book “Writing Down the Bones.” She’s a great motivator and teacher. (I enjoy her poetry very much too.) We use her method. In short, we draw a topic from a bowl and write flat-out for ten minutes. Ding! Time’s up. Read aloud and share. The idea is to let the writing spill, not to worry about punctuation and grammar or constructing a prose piece. Just fill up pages for ten minutes.

This is still a pretty new experience for me. But, already, I am discovering how the journals filled with writing are like sketchbooks filled with idea drawings and compositions. I have relied on visual sketchbooks for years, and sometimes just set aside time to go back through them again. “Oh, I remember that idea.” The writing journals capture raw ideas. Refining into well-crafted prose or poetry can come later.

The artists that I find I admire most are artists who are thoughtful – in the sense of having thoughts. Their art is about something. The something may be social commentary or philosophy, or may be purely aesthetic considerations. But the thought adds to the depth of the visual artwork.

Words deepen thought. I have had the experience of not even knowing that I possessed a given idea or perspective till I wrote it down. The writing actually helps to give order to the thoughts and deepen them.

The Museum of Art DeLand sponsored a poetry project this summer. Writers were asked to respond to one of a number of works from the Museum’s permanent collection. There will be an exhibit later this month of the artworks with the selected poems next to them. I was pleased to have a poem selected. (After the public event has taken place, I’ll share my poem and the artwork here.)

JUST FOR FUN 1 - Another brain exercise… Lately I’ve become obsessed with completing the daily word jumble in the newspaper. I love rearranging letters in words to find new words, and these jumbles are a variation on that.

I wondered yesterday, “How hard is it to come up with those jumbles?” So, just for fun, I created one and put it together. Have fun playing!

JUST FOR FUN 2 – I discovered some printed fabric and rice paper I created some time ago. Purple, mauve and pink. Not my usual palette. But I had created a stencil of a giant bee that I really like. I’ve put together two collages. If you’d like to see the finished works, they are on my website HERE.

These are the bee collages in progress n my worktable.

Thank you for reading.
I always enjoy questions and comments.
--Bobbi
bobbi@bobbibaughstudio.com

BLOG POSTS: If you would enjoy receiving blog posts by e-mail,  please subscribe here:  I post blogs once a week. BLOGS-BY-EMAIL

NEWSLETTER: If you enjoy more detailed behind-the-scenes stories, as well as FIRST LOOKS at new works and members-only discounts, I hope you’ll become a Studio Insider.  You’ll hear from me about once a month.  NEWSLETTER

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