Highpoint Center for Printmaking (my place of work) is amazing. This week, I’ve been assisting Paul Mullowney of Mullowney Printing in San Francisco as he teaches a large-scale woodcut class at Highpoint. As his assistant, I got to take the class. Shown are Paul tiling some prints together and pasting them to a backing sheet and in-progress shots of the woodcut I am working on. Not the best print, but I’ve really enjoyed carving and I feel encouraged.

Drypoint with chine collé (as shown). Still has 6-8 layers of screenprint coming and perhaps some metal leaf, we’ll see. State #4 in my “Excavating, Extracting, Manipulating…” series.

Settling into my new job at Highpoint Center for Printmaking (I love it!), getting settled into our new place and getting married has consumed my free time. Finally, after a lengthy period of inactivity, I am getting back into making some things.  This is the key plate for an etching I am working on. An etching! It’s probably been 6 years since I completed one.

Also, the two prints below are the most recent things I have made. The pictures are awful (sorry). Both were made shortly before I left Peoria. Hover over the images to see title and medium.

This is a drypoint with chine collé and serigraphy. It’s continuing along the same lines (literally and figuratively) that I have been following in my intaglio prints. I am continuing to address accretion and excavation in the world, natural and man made. I am basically thinking about the way humans move material around, purposefully and as a corollary by displacing living things. We build-up, and dig-down leaving a lot of hard edges (amongst other things) behind.

This is a serigraph. Each stencil (each separate color run) was created using collected objects. I found the items (organic and human litter) on the ground in the immediate vicinity of the construction site of a new sorority house on Bradley’s campus. I simply collected the materials and arranged them. Because of the way I was working on this print, the amount of control that I had over the composition was limited which I really enjoyed.

I actually made this one before the print above it, Refuse and Debris Collected From a Construction Site in a Neighborhood Where Future Leaders Dwell. This one is simply called Refuse and Debris Collected in a Neighborhood Where Future Leaders Dwell. The idea is the same except that for the stencils of this print, I only collected plastic waste items and organic material like leaves, dirt and sticks from the 1300 Block of Fredonia Avenue on campus. Because litter is so abundant in this one block stretch, I was able to limit my collection to only plastic products. That’s sad. What is more upsetting, the ubiquity of plastic disposables that aren’t properly disposed or their long term effects?

Opening January 7th, 6:30 until 8:30. Hope to see you there!

Welcome to my site, it is going to remain under construction for awhile as I am learning to iron out all of the wrinkles. But for now, have a look and check back periodically. Thanks!