End of the Year Shout Out

Last month I was asked to design a poster for Pecha Kucha Dayton based upon my presentation in early November. This poster was placed in local businesses to provide the date, time and location for the last Pecha Kucha presentation of the year.

I chose the anthotype of a nightgown with evening gloves that Bridgette affectionately titled “Flapper”. This morning PK Dayton provided a link to a Tumblr of the best PK posters made since 2012 and this poster was included. Here is a link to the Tumblr  and below you can find a jpeg of the poster.

Happy New Year everyone!

-francis

A good studio day

Today, I pulled four prints which, in antho typist’s language, translates to “stopping” an exposure. Most are life-sized but this tiny one is from a Barbie doll. The scale would be perfect for mail art if I could make many of these. The size is about 3 x 5 inches and the anthotype was made using leftover beet root. The exposure took less than a week.

Relatively Easy

It may seem like I only do anthotypes. My studio practice lately seems to confirm this. It is summertime and the anthotypes are easy. Relatively.

I just rediscovered my second stash of spring clamps which means that I can put together a lot of anthos at once. One of the pigments I am working with comes from some old beet root bits like the root and just below the stalk. It is a relatively fast pigment. In the picture below, the new anthotype just went out this morning around 9 am. The bedjacket anthotype on the right has been getting sun off and on since last Friday at 10 am.

There may be quite a few of the square ones this summer. So far I like the shape better than the long rectangle.

I Lost My Heart

What happens to a chard anthotype made by strong sunlight when it is displayed in and around a window that gets a few hours of sunlight most days? It slowly fades away. Come out to the opening to see what ten days of such exposure can accomplish. The anthotype is mounted to one side of an “A” sign. The reverse side has a protected detail of the larger anthotype under a dark cloth.

a sensitive man

Yes. I am a sensitive man. Last month I ran into a lot of trouble trying to ship Iris Peignoir with Hidden Shorts to Arizona in a frame. I packed it so that it would be within UPS’s height and girth restrictions but my avoidance of dealing with the UPS store resulted in a lot of driving around and a lot of packing and unpacking of a large box with a smaller box in the parking lot outside the UPS customer center.

Severely defeated, I called up Gina at Art Intersection who gave me the go-ahead to send the unframed piece in a tube. When considering fourteen dollars vs. 200 plus dollars and all the heartache, my artistic vision is compelled to be OK with hanging a fugitive work on paper on the wall unframed.

Which is how it is being shown at Light Sensitive on view at Art Intersection now until April 19th. The exhibition juried by Tom Persinger of f295 is billed as a celebration of images from the darkroom. There is nothing dark about the grassy area I exposed this piece in during three weeks of Vermont sun. But it is light sensitive.

greetings from the frozen midwest

Staying in today to avoid the wind, the wind-chill and the subzero temperatures. I even emptied my work area in the garage to make a spot for the car. That’s what garages are typically designed for…the sheltering of cars, not the coating of anthotypes or UV exposure dependent printing. 

It’s a good day for late, late portfolio review follow-ups. I think I sent one about four weeks after getting back from Chicago. That would have been early November. I guess now they are New Year’s greetings. 

Next week, the Eight Annual OOVAR (Ohio Online Visual Artist Registry) Exhibition will have a closing reception on Saturday, January 11, 2014 from 2-3:30 p.m. in the Carnegie Gallery which is on the second floor of the Columbus Metropolitan Library’s main branch. Included is a digital print of the (Basic) Red Tulip Sleeping Dress. 

The original was just sold by Loretta Puncer’s Gallery 510. It is my favorite of the anthotypes and am glad to see it go to a good home. The framed anthotypes do take up a bit of room in my studio / slash office. I really do take after my father. His office was unusable except for a small area of a table in a room full of stacks of medical journals and old mail. 

No nightmarish pictures of cluttered office spaces today. Instead just a few snaps of the start of the (Basic) Red Tulip Sleeping Dress and it’s final framed version.

 

 

New Year’s Day Greetings

New Year’s greetings from the pecan groves of south eastern New Mexico!

This year I resolve to be less negligent of this blog. In past years, I actively wrote about my studio practice and exhibitions. There were many things to blog about, portfolio reviews in Chicago, an exhibition in Japan, an exhibition I curated, printing platinum palladium on a brand new washi, and lots of anthotype related exhibitions and creations.

There is more in store for 2014.

To get the New Year ball rolling, here is an image of the onion skin anthotype revealed early last month after almost two months of on again-off again exposure.

 

Take note

Camera phones present a useful way to take notes of work in progress. They are certainly helpful with a complicated photographic experiment like mixing plant pigments on top of each other.

I forgot the order I applied tulip and rose pigments to one of the anthotypes I made in Vermont. I forgot until I discovered this progression of images on the phone.

Iris on top left to right. Red rose on the bottom.

A couple of days later I had settled on creating a four square ground by applying purple iris on top of the red rose (bottom right). The top left is red rose over purple iris. All grids should have received the same number of layers.

The final version.

keeping the door open

Here in Johnson, Vermont I had grand aspirations for a couple of projects. With just a few days left in the residency it seems to have been one project involving Anthotypes. Through it all, whether it was working with and saying good-bye to the July artists in residence to the current August artists, I’ve kept my door open.

There has been a lot of work done, much of it mortar and pestle drudgery. Perhaps that’s one reason for the open studio. It’s so much more interesting to grind plant matter when you have something to listen to or to talk about with visitors.

Here’s a list to that I hope to write about as time frees up:

1. Content of the newest anthotypes: the mix of male and female sleepwear
2. The studio practice: 12 hours a day in Vermont (sometimes)
3. Slow to make fast to expose: contrasty juniper leaves
4. The show in Japan
5. The Ohio State Fair
6. Future ideas for the anthotypes / accelerating the fade
7. Condensation in “tarping up” the anthos

Below is a picture of the favorite antho produced so far in Vermont. “Iris Peignoir with Hidden Boxers”

 

summer ball rolling

The last few weeks have been busy. Printing work for a show in Japan. Discovering that I was going to a residency in Vermont…last minute…due to my teaching schedule and the other Ohio artist being unavailable to take advantage of an Ohio Arts Council funded residency at Vermont Studio Center. Packing the car for less than a month of residency here in northern Vermont.

It was a two day drive and now it’s two days into the residency. I did dive into work once I got here. Anthotype work. Now two are outside and a third will join them tomorrow morning.

In a previous life I was a monk sequestered in a solitary cell. Maybe I was a lonely groundhog. That’s my studio practice. Twelve hour days with breaks for meals and artist talks in between. A walk here. A talk there. Tonight’s lecture was by environmental artist Jackie Brookner who’s work is concerned with the misperception of water as an unlimited resource.

To get the mid-summer ball rolling, here’s a pic from tonight’s walk near Johnson Community College.