Praeterita

Kristine Harvey , teacher at Frankfort High School in Michigan, sent me a new batch of monoprints from her class of high school art students, and they're just as good as the first. I've pulled out a few to show in this post, again not to single them out as better than the ones I didn't select, but this time just to highlight the different kinds of monoprint techniques that these young people were trying. First, we have what I think are contact monoprints (where you roll out a thin layer of ink, place a sheet of paper on top, and draw through the back of the paper, the marks being made wherever the paper makes contact with the ink): The next one looks like it was created using a combination of mask and stencil: Then a multilayered print, where it looks like the artist reapplied the same sheet of paper to a surface that had been worked on more than once: Finally, another additive monoprint that has some notably free, loose, expressive mark making: Congrat...

Five months ago, an educator called Kristine Harvey took my week-long monoprinting class at the Interlochen College of Creative Arts. She really enjoyed the class and made some great personal artistic breakthroughs in this medium, as you can see by this print she made: Kristine contacted me recently to say that she had been working with her students at Frankfort High School, Michigan, on making monoprints. With their permission, I am posting images of some of the prints they made. First we have some abstract shapes: What impresses me about those is how comfortable the students are with abstract shapes, how well they organised them around the frame of the rectangle, and how eye-catching is the combination of colours and design. Next we have works in progress: As you can see, there's sensitive art-making happening here, which is why I don't want to single any one image out over any other. In my opinion, everything I've seen so far suggest...

Another person who took my introduction to blogging and blogging content classes in the summer has contacted me to say that her new blog is up and running. (Previous posts about this here and here .) This time it's an artist, Linda Gardiner, whose blog is devoted to her practice of textile art. The blog has a great name, too: Pulp, Paper, and Pigment . She's a good writer, and her blog is full of beautiful images, so I recommend that you go ahead and check it out some time.

Landscape is both a physical space and an aesthetic construction. It is the land that surrounds us and upon which we live, and it is the organization of that exterior space within a genre of the visual arts. Any artist whose practice connects with land, earth, or terrain, is dealing from the beginning with that twin focus, looking both outwards to the world and then back into the interior world. The land outside, and the land within. In this group show at a recently opened space at Chicago’s Hubbard Street Lofts, three artists showed work inspired by the land beneath our feet, the inner reflection of the outer world, and the land seen from afar. Marzena Ziejka, A small landscape without vegetables , found dropcloth, monofilament, acrylic polymer Marzena Ziejka‘s work includes pieces that she made by scooping up soil and glueing it to large panels. They have an interesting tactility reminiscent of her large works in fibre, her customary medium, though I think they lack the visual c...

The Barefoot Norwegian, by Connie Geissel As I have discussed in previous blog posts on the subject, for the last few years I have taught classes in setting up a blog, and in creating and crafting content for existing blogs. One of the participants in a workshop I ran earlier this year just emailed me to say that she's pressing on full steam ahead with her blog. It's called The Barefoot Norwegian (a great, great title), and here is the link to the blog: http://thebarefootnorwegian.blogspot.com/

Over on my studio blog , a post about a new series of etchings produced using acrylic resist methods:

Part 35 of an interview series in which I pose the same six questions to different artists. Today's interviewee is Aine Scannell , an artist and printmaker who lives in Scotland.  Shaman's Secret , trace monotype and pastel, 20" x 28" Philip Hartigan : What medium do you chiefly use, and why? Aine Scannell : Printmaking is the means or process I go through to create my art. I started out in ‘painting’ because I had the rather naïve idea that, that was what ‘artists’ did. I didn’t have any awareness of printmaking as a specialist discipline in my earlier years. In the beautiful city of Barcelona, Spain, I completed a Masters in European Fine Art (that’s what it was officially called) but on the course we were identified as being either on the painting or the print pathway.  It was over that time period that I began to realize that I loved the possibilities inherent within printmaking. I was just so excited by it and I could see that it was for me. Unfortun...