News: Grant Awards | Upcoming Reading

Saturday, May 6 - Flying Adventures Reading at the International Women's Air & Space Museum

As part of the International Women's Air & Space Museum's Family Day celebration, they'll be rolling out the red carpet for a Flying Adventures reading from 10:30-11am.  The community event, themed "Soaring into the Future," begins at 10am and continues until 2pm, with exhibits, activities, and entertainment.  Admission is FREE. If the weather's nice, John & I will be flying up in the Starfighter so that folks can climb all over it :-)

On the wing at Mad River airfield in Ohio

 The IWASM is located at Burke Lakefront Airport in Cleveland.  I only just discovered the museum last year... read my blog post about it if you'd like to know more.

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Announcing two Awards from the GCAC!

I am honored once again to be the recipient of two Greater Columbus Arts Council Artist in the Community grants. The first is a supply grant which will help me purchase frames for the Flying Adventures exhibit. The second is a generous professional development grant which will fund a private bookbinding workshop with Jace Graf of Cloverleaf Studios in Austin, Texas. I look forward to honing my skills!

... and, well, eating lunches around the corner at Il Chilito. Gosh that place is sooo good!

I've been to Cloverleaf a couple times already, one to help finish & send off a group portfolio project to which I'd been a contributor, and another to participate in an intro-to-basic-bookbinding class.  I definitely needed something more involved, and when I asked Jace if he'd take me on as a private student for a weekend, I was so happy he said yes.  I am thinking of using an exposed-tape binding for my new edition of Flying Adventures. No glue means my images won't peel off the inkjet coating in between signatures.  Plus I could really have fun with color combinations for the covers and thread. The photo below is one of Jace's examples of that binding style.

I can’t thank the GCAC enough for their continued support of this project and all that they do to support the arts in our city!

Hello Again, Printmaking!

Two summers ago I spent a magical week learning the art of photogravure at Renaissance Press in New Hampshire.   Set on a riverbank next to a covered bridge, the studio is basically a renovated barn complete with original wood beam ceilings and 12-inch pine floorboards. The weather was perfect the whole time, and it was the kind of workshop where we students raided owner/instructor Paul Taylor’s garden for lunchtime salads and took our breaks on the deck overlooking the water.  Bliss!

I hadn’t printed any black and white photographs in many years.  It’s taken me a while to figure out why, as I used to be a prolific silver gelatin printer.  I think it’s a combination of adding digital cameras to my bag and also wanting to move away from silver gelatin, but not knowing where to go next.  I’m an old-school girl too: I love the physical act of creating artwork, not just watching prints roll out of an Epson.  I have always loooved paper and ink, getting my hands dirty.  Making.

When I learned about gravure, I was so intrigued.  The process involves exposing a sensitized metal plate to light, which etches the image into the surface.  The plate is then worked with ink and run through a press, transferring the image to paper.  In its original form, gravure involves several chemical baths to sensitize copper plates. It's kinda finicky, expensive, and not very environmentally friendly. Buuuut... there are now aluminum plates that are pre-sensitized with an environmentally friendly coating that greatly simplifies the process.  It’s interesting because while technically it is a gravure process, there’s a bit of a back-and-forth about what the “new” version is called.  Photopolymer gravure?  Solar plate etching?  Polymer plate etching?

At Renaissance, we learned some pretty technical stuff to get a good plate (including photoshopping, dedicated black & white transparency printing, step tablet tests, etc.).

It was hard-core, but the results were consistent and beautiful.

My problem was what to do when I got back home and didn’t have all this equipment.  I wound up letting the whole idea go as I was working on the Flying Adventures book again.

Last month, though, Anne Cushman of Phoenix Rising, Columbus’s printmaking co-op, was offering a solarplate etching workshop and I thought it would be a good re-introduction to the basics of the process.  I loved it!  Such a great location too: a bright, big-windowed loft space downtown.

 AND there’s a great cafe in the building!  Hello! 

The whole place smelled like inks and art, which was inspiring in and of itself.  They even kept the sign from their old location.  Nice.

It was amazing how much I’d forgotten, but also how much I remembered, and what I learned at Phoenix was a simplified version of what I learned in New Hampshire.  We had our transparencies made at Staples (doesn't get any simpler than that!) and exposed them in a homemade UV lightbox.  Anne said you could even just expose the plates in the sun if you wanted.  I really liked that idea... something so elemental about it:  The sun made this!  Unfortunately it was cold and cloudy.  No matter. 

I brought one of my winter images to work with, as it’s from the series I am hoping to print as gravures.  Something about the hand-worked quality that seems to fit the moodiness of my winter scenes. Like you’re brushing snow off a window to reveal a landscape.  Only it's ink.  I think gravure is the perfect medium for that aesthetic.

I was happy with my finished prints.  They were less “perfect” than the ones I made at Renaissance, but I think that’s what I liked about them.  They looked less like photographs and more like sketches..  I don’t know how that quality will manifest in the other, more tonal, prints of my series, but I am looking forward to finding out.  I can't wait to try different inks and papers, and to experiment with printing my own transparencies using some of the techniques I learned at Renaissance.

Most of all, I am happy to have found a place that will give me an art-home.  I have a studio at my house which I love, but every now and then it would be nice to go OUT and work in a communal space.  Have conversations with other artists working on their own projects. 

I don’t want to lose my black and white work in all the effort I’ve been putting into the Flying Adventures book, and I think that joining the community at Phoenix will be the perfect way to keep it up, try some new things, and meet wonderful people along the way.  Thank you, Anne & Phoenix Rising...  Hello again, printmaking!

New Flying Adventures Website

I’m sooo excited to announce a new page on my website for my Flying Adventures project.  I’ve been working hard all winter to fit what feels like a million puzzle pieces together.

First off, last year the Greater Columbus Arts Council awarded me a grant which helped fund the purchase of my new printer --- yes!!  I now have a lot of paper samples to test out both for the new edition of the book and also the framed exhibit.  I was worried that there’d be a huge learning curve, but for the most part it's gone pretty smoothly.  Thank you, GCAC & the Epson p800!

Flying Adventures has grown into what feels like an octopus of a project that now exists in several formats. It’s been difficult sometimes trying to prioritize what next step I need to take to move it forward.  In the fall I was able to get my illustrated reading & art talk together, and while I thought that working on a new edition of the book would be next on my studio list, what I really needed to do was start thinking about how I wanted to print and frame the exhibit so that I can start sending out proposals.  It was also time to put together a proper page for Flying Adventures on my website.  So, off to work!

I thought at first that printing would be easy.  What I didn’t realize was that while the printing itself wasn’t difficult, it had been six years since I first edited images for the book, and now I was seeing them in a different way.  I wanted less contrast, more shadow detail.  A warmer tone.  Then I thought, will I see this imagery differently every time I print a new edition?  Maybe so.

I was also wondering if I’d need to use a different pen to write the text.  I looove my Pilot V-Ball extra fine (I use it for everything!) but with the exhibition prints being a little bit larger than the original book, I wasn’t sure if I needed a thicker line.  Thankfully I didn’t!

Everyone always asks how I manage not to stress out about hand lettering the text without any using any guide lines.  I’ve been writing in journals since I was 12… I think I'm just used to it.  There’s a little bit of planning involved in that I pencil the text on scrap paper just to see where things might generally line up.  But then I just go for it.

To recreate the feeling of a three-dimensional, "open book," I create a signature of sorts by scoring, folding, and then sewing two blank pages to the finished print. I then hand tear the paper edges and bend the pages just a little bit so that the paper doesn’t lie completely flat.  After that I sew the whole signature to the mounting board.

I found THE perfect frames - a 14x20 size, inch-deep shadowbox frames that aren’t too expensive.  What is it about seeing finished work IN a frame?  I got goosebumps when I held it up... it really does look like an open book!

This is what they’ll look like on the wall...

What’s next?  Finding places to exhibit, give readings and artist talks, and teach workshops.  If you know of a venue that might be a good fit, let me know!  Whether it's an aviation-related organization, an art center, school, or community program, I would love to bring Flying Adventures and its related programming to your neighborhood.  Visit the new Flying Adventures project page to find out more.