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More life studies from 1983....

Printmaking, eh?: Four Artists Expanding the Boundaries
May 25 - July 20, 2012
Embassy of Canada Prince Takamado Gallery, Tokyo

Four of the artists in the previously announced exhibition are also showing concurrently and for a longer period at the Embassy of Canada Prince Takamado Gallery in Tokyo.

The Exhibition Announcement states in part:

The Embassy of Canada is pleased to present an exhibition in its Prince Takamado Gallery entitled Printmaking, eh?: Four Artists Expanding the Boundaries featuring works by Western Canada based artists who take experimental approaches to printmaking.

Steven Dixon of Alberta together with Wayne Eastcott, Davida Kidd and Michiko Suzuki of British Columbia share the common thread of consideration of the human condition in the 21st century. Dixon explores the consequences of human endeavour via the artefact/archival landscape while Eastcott pursues the interconnection of contemporary technology, humankind and nature. Kidd dwells on the internal - the dreams, guilt and passion of the inhabitants of our culture and Suzuki is concerned with the fragility and future of young women.

All of these artists are or have been associated with the Art Institute, Printmaking at Capilano University, three of them in a teaching capacity. All have been mentioned on this blog in the past regarding some of their exhibitions so if interested in learning more about them, please do a search, located at the bottom of the left bar.

(The above image is not in the exhibition, just a crop from a proof of my own to provide a decoration here.)

Just received this beautiful poster about our Art Institute Printmaking group's exhibition coming up for May 29th to June 14th at the B-Gallery in Tokyo, Japan.

Huge thanks go to one of the artists, Michiko Suzuki originally from Tokyo, for her generous efforts in acquiring the gallery for our exhibition and for carrying all our work with her on her flight to Japan. (She has frequented these pages often, please search if interested.)

I'm hoping we shall see some images of our show on the gallery's site once it is up for the benefit of those (most) of us who will not be there, and for readers. As more information comes in, I will add it here or in another post.

As an exchange, works by several Japanese printmakers will be exhibited in the Studio Art Gallery at Capilano University in North Vancouver during the month of October this year. Exciting times!

UPDATE May 16th: The announcement is now up on B-Gallery's site, in Japanese. One work is shown which I think might be by Davida Kidd.

Most of us remember our mothers, whether they are still with us or have passed on like mine, on the second Sunday of May in many countries, or on other dates in other places. I like to quietly remember an old family friend who was like a grandmother to me, for I did not know my grandmothers in Finland after we emigrated. I also like to extend mother's day wishes to all caregivers. However I just learned that the founder of Mother's Day strongly protested that, feeling it was to recognize only mothers. I do agree with her upset with the commercialism that grew rapidly after the official declaration of that day. Read this fascinating and sad story from National Geographic: Mother's Day Dark History.

Our youngest daughter was born on Mother's Day, such an appropriate gift, wasn't it? We often celebrate them together even if the days don't always fall on the 12th. Today we enjoyed a celebratory lunch and cake which I made. Tomorrow is 'my day' and I am looking forward to an iChat with my family in the UK and with eldest daughter living a few hours away here in BC. And, what a perfectly glorious summery weekend, the first of the year, with so many flowers blooming in the garden. That makes me happy.

I must add that all these thoughts and feelings are certainly not exclusive to Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day to all! Hauskaa Äitienpäivää!

For today, two more extended figure studies from that roll from 1982-83. I think my quicker ones feel livelier and fresher, though of course these figures are not in a lively position. More time sometimes leads to overworked and/or stiff drawings for me. Interesting to look at these with different and more critical eyes.

Speaking of which, I found a watercolour I had done at the age of 17, in grade 11 art class with Miss Hunt. A label on the back indicated it was sent to The Royal Drawing Society's Exhibition-Competition in England. A sticker on the left front corner says 'highly commended'. I think it is awful work!

As regular readers know, we are still adjusting and fine tuning aspects of this new blog redesign. The latest thing, which I have reluctantly agreed to because of the spam volumes, is that now commenters will need to register. I hope it won't be too difficult for anyone (took me a bit to figure out**), but once it is done, you will not need to do it again. Hopefully this will work better for me and block the unfriendly visitors but not the friendly ones, including yours truly who kept being sent to the spam bin! Please let me know if you have any problems.

This gave me the perfect excuse to put up another drawing, this one a loner amongst the human figures and faces. A change of scenery if you will.

I must add my thanks again and always to both my son-in-law J for all the hours of work he does on the technical side behind the blog, and has done from the day he started me blogging, and to daughter Elisa for this beautiful redesign. Both have busy careers, so I am grateful they take such good care of mom's blog!

** A tip for those having trouble registering, do go to "Not a member? Sign Up!". That's what I missed initially, such a dodo with online forms.

It's a slow but enriching process to go through rolls of one's old drawings, long ignored, poorly stored and in need of photo documentation. I am finding many from 1982 and 1983, years in which I attended some excellent life-drawing classes as an audit student at a local college - just because I missed and craved it but didn't need the credit. Above are some 'head studies' as they were called. Below are smaller studies in pencil with a note on each: 'perspective head study'. Can you see the faint diagonal lines on the first one below?

a pretty wild creeper with tiny flowers and leaves that grows up rock walls and in the lawn, name unknown but much loved

the heart of a yellow rhododendron blossom

Yesterday's glorious sunshine, after two dreary wet weeks, beckoned me to leave the studio and go outside. My garden is at its most beautiful this time of year so I took a few photos to share here - of nature's art instead of mine. Then I repotted all my tomato plants to continue to grow in the solarium for a little longer. Today's lovely too so you will find me in the garden....

Silent Messengers: Writing-on-Stone IV
archival inkjet and collagraph
76.2 x 50.6 cm.

Silent Messengers: Writing-on-Stone V
archival inkjet and collagraph
76.2 x 50.6 cm.

Here are two more of the Writing-on-Stone pieces from the Silent Messengers series.
For more information and to view the others, see Writing-on-Stone I and II and Writing-on-Stone III.

All of the Silent Messenger series may of course be accessed at the link on the left under PRINTWORKS.

Dancing Owl-Woman
recycled printmaking elements

Please visit a most wonderful, magical and unique collection of maquettes by a diverse group of artists presented as a five-part online exhibition by Clive Hicks-Jenkins on his Artlog! I am so pleased to be included at almost the last minute in part five. Go see! Do visit part one, part two, part three, part four. Thank you, Clive!

Here's my earlier post about my sudden inspiration to try making a maquette for the first time and the encouraging comments to join the maquette exhibition, especially from Clive.

I like that Clive calls this my 'owl-woman resurrection'. That's because I cut up ('cannibalised' is the word Clive used) prints that were proofs from ARKEO #4 and Silent Messengers: Writing-on-Stone I. Here's also a post about the making of the trial proofs for the latter piece, should you be interested.

Silent Messengers: Writing-on-Stone I
archival inkjet and collagraph
76.2 x 50.6 cm.


As reorganization in the studio continues, I realize I also need to do some here on the blog. With the redesign at the end of January, I lost the "gallery/slide show" (though some stray links to it here and there seem to work and bring it up on the old site). I am eagerly anticipating a replacement whenever my too-busy-with-work family members can manage it. In the meantime, when revisiting some of my Silent Messengers: Writing-on-Stone series here, I noticed only Writing-on-Stone III appears along with the announcement for the "gallery" and the others are only viewable in the latter.

So I am placing them right on the main blog where the links will find them directly. I hope you will enjoy revisiting them or, if new here, viewing them for the first time as they are works from 2007 (seems like almost yesterday!). Above is the first one, and below is the second in the series. Numbers four and five will be posted later.

Here is some background information about Writing on Stone Park in Alberta and our visit there which inspired these works.

Silent Messengers: Writing-on-Stone II
archival inkjet and collagraph
76.2 x 50.6 cm.

You may be interested in this post about the making of the trial proofs for Writing-on-Stone I.

UPDATE: Please view also Writing-on-Stone IV and V

I am continuing to go through some rolls of old life drawings and document a few of them. The one on the top here was rolled next to the first drawing I showed yesterday and seems to be of the same model. The lower two drawings are from a roll which does have a date: September 1983.

The light in my studio is not as bright as I wish with our rainy and cloudy days at present so there are strange shadows here and there, some revealing the curves in the paper from being rolled up for so long, even streaks from light exposure coming in at the end of the roll. Though I tried to fix them as best as I could, I rather like the aged look, even if these are not such professional photos.

I know, I should wait for better light conditions but I'm eager to carry on with the tidying and organizing before I lose interest. There are decisions to be made - which to keep, which to discard, and how to store these more safely. Hmm, I do have some new large tubes with end caps and some acid free liner paper to wrap them in. No room in the flat files, sorry, those are reserved for my prints.

As mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I have been reorganizing and cleaning my small home studio to make room for a very large set of used flat files which I'd finally found after years of searching. What a job! Though not finished, the studio is looking much better and my editions have a clean, flat, accessible home, except for one over-sized edition which is staying in its porfolio for now. Though the file cabinet is too high as a working surface, it provides much-needed space to spread out my papers, such as many print proofs, thus leaving the table top free to work on.

It was interesting to revisit my older work as I was organizing them into the drawers. I have now made a start at some of the many rolls of life-drawings on newsprint, stashed in tall boxes in a former bedroom/storage room. Most of these were done in the 70's and early 80's when I attended various life-drawing workshops. Drawing and especially life drawing was my favourite class back in art school where we had two days a week of it (you don't see that anymore in most art schools). What I've kept of those are probably somewhere in the bowels of the crawlspace under the house. Being newsprint, these are yellowed, fragile, torn and hard to unroll flat, but I am going to try to photo document some of the better ones. Here is the first, a fairly quick though imperfect study:

Inspiration hit me a couple of days ago, from admiring my clean studio, the pile of proofs and from Welsh artist Clive Hicks-Jenkin's blog. Clive frequently makes wonderful maquettes for his various projects which he so generously shows readers. Recently he put out a call for readers to make their own and submit them to him to feature on May 1st. I have never made any and had no plans to start at this time, but the other day, Clive's post on artist Jodi le Bigre's stunning maquette must have left a deep impression on me, for lo! I suddenly started cutting up some of my collagraph proofs to create the figure below. It is not a maquette for the paper is too light and I had no appropriate fastenings, but I had fun! I'm not sure what will happen to this creature, maybe it will become a maquette yet, though of course too late for Clive.

Added May 4th: As I wrote later, my maquette in other poses made it into the five-part online exhibition of maquettry hosted by Clive Hicks-Jenkins on his Artlog!

What an incredible sunset sky on Monday evening, April 23rd, taken from our back deck. Do you see the magnolia tree in the top two images? Here it is again below, taken this afternoon just when the sun came out after a few very dreary rainy days.