Kangaroo Press

Check out my buddy Ryan Nole's website for kangaroo press (www.kangaroopress.com)-- cool stuff to buy. Ryan Nole makes hand printed screenprint posters for awesome bands like my morning jacket, built to spill, magnolia electric co, bright eyes et. als. In addition to great hand printed posters he also has t-shirts and artist's books for sale. Great Stuff. I ordered the built to spill poster and a kangaroo press t-shirt. Kangaroo Press is proof of a talented artist putting his skills and interests to commercial use, you gotta love the slogan "we love to make happy". Ryan is making a move soon to Nashville Tennessee and will be working with a letterpress/ design company (iseleof printing.com)best of luck Ryan. Thanks for all the goodies-- Keep me updated.

Georgia Russell-- Cut up Book art

The Scotish artist Georgia Russell manipulates found books through cutting them up. Love the idea of killing an object in order to give it new life as an art object. Beautiful work, interesting ideas. She works with a scapel to cut into a book in order to transform the physicality-- like the connection with literature and symbolism.

Recent Etchings

I will soon post a few works from my etching class just as soon as we have the first crit of the semester (next week). Until then I thought I would post a few of my recent etchings. These prints come from a series of images I am working on in color etching. I have a number of plates that I can interchange-- half have vertical lines etched into them and half have horizontal lines etched and when layered combine to create a pattern similar to (yes) plaid. I love the experimental possibilities in layering different plates and color combinations. I use a more acidic palette and look to create a sort of history in mark-making similar to reclamation (reusing/ recycling).

Also, I posted to the (L/D/L/S) blog dedicated to the group project I am working collaboratively on. The project themed "Love Death Life Soul" Involves 7 International members who will be participating in a three week printmaking residency in August 2008 in Belgium at the Frans Masereel Centrum. It is a great group of artists and I feel lucky (and perhaps out of my league) to be among them. You can click on the links at left to find out more or go to the blog at: http://lovedeathlifesoul.wordpress.com/

Phantom

Check out Richard Dupont's etching "Untitled (phantom)". An impressively large, haunting, and achingly beautiful etching from a copperplate. The tight system of tiny hatching of lines creates and intense "ghost-like" presence and absence simlultaneously. This intricate sprawling work is a monumental achievement at 40"x64"! According to the Jan 2008 issue of Art in America the biggest of its kind. Ironically, the "DuPont Phantom" is a state of the art mammography machine used to show variation through line contrasts on x-ray film.

Photographer Lecture

Last night, the photographer Todd Hido spoke at the UT: CVA as the juror for the Toledo Friends of Photography's National Annual Juried Photography Exhibition. The show is up now at the CVA gallery and is a top-notch selection of contemporary practices and trends in digital and traditional photographs. As a juror he had the daunting task of editing down from 1650 entries to 83 images--- it is a wonder that as artists we ever get into juried exhibitions. Hido is best known for his house images-- haunting exterior views of anonymous yet personal homes-- minimal compositions with odd acidic colors. He talked (at length) about his images, his background, subject matter, process, and his influences including photographers Robert Adams, Stephen Shore, Becher, and Walker Evans and painters like Edward Hopper, Gerhard Richter, and Mark Rothko. His work has a minimalist feel and a definite painterly quality. It is refreshing to see an artist take on admittedly "cliched" subject matters like interior lit houses, landscapes, and seedy portraits but do it in a daring and convincingly bold manner. He talked about being consistent but not repetitive, which he felt was a fine line to walk. He indirectly knocked photographers like Gregory Crewdson, by mentioning he does not create his work with a crew of sixty or stage his photographs in any way, amazing (he said that word quite a bit) as his photographs are formally similar to Crewdson's. It was a good presentation of his ideas and a range of his works-- check out his website for examples: http://www.toddhido.com/ and seesaw online photo mag for an interview:http://seesawmagazine.com/roaming_pages/roaming_interview.html. Inspiring and good stuff. As always I daydreamed about making new work.

the mark of the beast

I am inaugurating the enacting of my personal blog blog bloggity blog. What a way to start. An introduction: I teach full time as a Lecturer at the University of Toledo: Center for the Visual Arts (Toledo, OH) in Foundations and in Printmaking (hence the name). The purpose of this blog will be to keep interested people interested in my doings in art and to post happenings from my classes at UT. First off "beast of print" (the title of this blog) came from a suggestion from a University of Toledo BFA printmaking student-- thanks Helen Grubb. Either she mumbled "vista print" or my bad hearing picked it up wrong as "beast of print". Either way we agreed the inadvertent title was gold and I decided to sign up ASAP to use it as a blog so nobody else could claim it.

I plan on using this blog to document my Etching class this semester and the amazing printmaking work that they will do. We are planning on having two special events this semester in our course. First, an all day "Print O Rama" where students alternate from artist to artist's assistant/ print technician in shifts at the press, with the expectation of a high print quota. Watch out! Secondly, I am requiring all Etching students to enter into a juried show. So we will use this as a venue for our research and the results.

I also will include related links and postings on art projects I am working on.