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Kitchen Printmaking

We drove straight from Interlochen last Friday to our weekend house near the Mississippi. There's no TV, phone or wi-fi here (actually, we don't have TV in Chicago, either). All we have to do is tidy up a few dead insects and cobwebs here and there, tidy up after the cats, who have been looked after here while we were gone -- and then we can spend a few days doing a bit of R & R before the rest of a busy summer gets into gear.

For most of the weekend, that just meant sleeping, walking around the tiny downtown area (Mt Carroll, pop. 1500), cooking a meal for some friends on Sunday night. Patty is continuing to work on her novel, while also trying to fix up more readings to tie in with the release of her short story collection in September. I commandeered the kitchen for a day to do another reduction linocut:


It's a commissioned image of the Mallory-Towsley building at Interlochen, home of the Center for the Creative Arts. I did a five colour reduction linocut in four stages:



Here's what the block looked like inked up with the final colour:


This technique works best by hand-printing, so it's easy enough to do this on the kitchen table. The only things to watch out for are: a) the cats, who might jump up and take some inky paws into the rest of the house; b) the kitchen table, which is part of a classic 1950s American kitchen set. Getting ink on that would incur the famous Wrath of Patty -- and believe me, you don't want to see that too often ...


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