Qualities of Line

After a lapse of 30 years I am back in the printmaking studio, wondering why it has taken me so long to return. In the past I worked in etching and engraving, falling in love with the delicate possibilities of dry-point. Now I am working on mono-prints, the first time I have really explored colour in printmaking. I am using fairly new waterbased inks called Akua, and I am still reserving judgement. The cleanup is incredibly easy and they are beautifully workable but I am not sure they will be vibrant enough for me in the end. I am told the manufacturer is always refining the formulas. They technically never dry, are just absorbed into the paper, so they are already softer and more nuanced than when first pulled from the press.

In viscosity printing the control comes with varying the heaviness of the inks, which resist each other more or less depending on how apart they are on the viscosity scale. The thinner or more "jelly" layer will resist blending with the thicker "peanut butter" ink, and inks that are more alike will blend together more. The viscosity is manipulated by adding agents to stiffen or loosen the ink.

I have been thinking for a long time about this project, which parallels my painting interests in exploring line and shape as both solid and fugitive, atmosphere and particle, repelled and connected to each other in various contexts that make up ineffable intellectual and emotional situations. With a little squeeze bottle it is possible to draw on the plate in the thin line I am imagining. Successive printings of the plate build up history that normally takes weeks or months on a canvas. The inks can also be rolled or brushed on, wiped off, masked off with stencils and masks, and the ghosts can be printed on over and over. The huge rollers used to ink the colour that becomes the ground can be in turn be rolled over a fresh plate. In the day that I have to explore this I am just beginning to grasp possibilities for myself.

Printing in reverse shows me clearly the left side bias I have worked so hard to mitigate in my work(I am very left eye dominant, and that subject may be another blog). It was a hard battle for me to accept just how much my brain controlled things organically. I thought for a long time that painting had to be a battle of will.

Vigil In Satan's Kingdom

I am entering that twilight where I work when others sleep. My Hospice case demands that I be a watcher, on guard for the least restless murmur over the monitor, and in tired anxiety I feel I am holding up all that I love in my vigil. Dawn on the mountain in this season of neither winter nor spring is half haze, part ice crystals mixed with snow, and it shimmers and is gone as the sun climbs over the distant ridge, as if it is something secret that cannot bear to be looked at.

The drugs made her sick, but then she slept. I am looking down into a bowl of a valley that is called Satan's Kingdom. I don't know how it got it's name. Turkey flock in the field, 3 toms shaking their fans. Deer in with the horses, looking ragged. Life and death, aching beauty. Time is a snowflake in the air. I will come back to this later. It demands too much from me now.

Hunting The Muse

Vertigo, 1982

I've been thinking about writing a blog for a while now. I used to write daily but fell out of the habit when life got so busy and time so elusive.... after I entered the world decisively, as a wife, step-mother, woman with a steady, emotionally and physically demanding, worldly job. When I lived alone and often went on retreat, my writing seemed a lifeline both to the physical world I did not inhabit comfortably, and a delicate tether to the otherworldly. Finding painting was a turning inward for me, finally with a purpose, though one I could not articulate. Prompted once in critique with a very famous painter to explain what it was I was after I could only say, hopelessly, "to make a better painting". I couldn't blame him for giving up and turning to someone more interesting.

Hedge, 1985

I dropped out of grad school in tears of frustration. I am sorry now that I saw it as a defeat, a retreat from something too difficult for me, a lack of fitness. I was wordless for so long, my journals taking to describing the weather, simple activities of my day, random fleeting thoughts, simply to record something, anything, of the amorphous, shape-shifting inner life I seemed destined to live. Ten years, twenty, now thirty since I started mixing paint, scraping palettes, wrestling with canvas, frustration and hope in equal measures. I felt lost when I could not record, just as I felt lost when I couldn't mess around with paint.

What was I doing? It felt as if I was building something completely from scratch in those days. Yes there were guideposts, other artists, writers that I could look to. But my own voice was as distant and faint to me as a radio signal in the jungle.

So I begin again, without really any idea of where I'm going with this. But I have a lexicon now, of sorts... words and symbols and wide swaths of colour that I hoist up like sails to see what breeze catches on them.

Portent

http://www.nixworks.com/portent.mp3

Everything
Once tidied and put away, beneath
The long flat wait of winter,
Is jumbled up now
All together-
Hope and penance, mud and memories,
Prayers, snowdrops, robin birds.

Domains are being readied
For the season of propagation and increase,
Under the comet's ghostly maneuvers.
Planted in the swing and bang of
The beginning,
Harrowed and divided by the stretch of stars,
Propelled with insistence into Holy Week,
We are yoked with a thousand years of senarios.

So Easter day comes
Hanging heavy and unredeemed.
The Christ is risen
But the shiver is still there-
Heavy breathing war horses groaning across England,
And A10 warthogs shreiking over desert in Nevada and Iraq.

The same night
Choirboys fling joy at the rafters,
Trembling the clerestory with angelic vibration,
We stand in corn stubble and cow field,
Watching the bad star.
Collecting, from rooftop and balcony,
In angled mirror and wide lens,
The dust and spangle of
Our collective imagining, that,
Borne in the comet's fag end,
Is our history and our almanac.

© 1999