My latest Paleozoic print once again takes advantage of a segmented fossil body to add colour and pattern with collaged Japanese washi papers. This member of the ubiquitous and wildly successful trilobites, prehistoric creatures which lived for hundreds of millions of years, was a Cheirurus ingricus which lived during the Late Cambrian through the Early Devonian era.
Cheirurus lived from about 500 million years ago to 390 million years ago. Trilobites were arthropods (as are modern day insects, lobsters, shrimp and more) which left fossils of their exoskeletons worldwide. There are many thousands of different species and their fossils have been important to biostratigraphy, paleontology, evolutionary biology, and plate tectonics. It was hard to choose which one to portray as there are tens of thousands of different species of these critters, but I thought they were well suited to collaged segments.
Free/PWYC On Bandcamp now via Second Harvest⠀ “Artists & Second Harvest have come together to support Canadians impacted by COVID-19! “
Delicacies in the Garden of Plenty” (Peebles, Brenders,
Perera) is a new album supporting Second Harvest, Canada’s largest food
rescue charity with a dual mission of environmental protection and
hunger relief. Creative music & sound art with gorgeous
cover art! Listen to these beautiful tracks and Donate what you can at :
https://secondharvestca.bandcamp.com/releases. All proceeds go straight to Second Harvest. " #BandAgainstHunger
Cover: lino-cut collage by Ele Willoughby / @the.minouette⠀
Unicorn amongst umbrellas detail, one of my linocuts on washi
and other papers
This Wednesday, July 26 from 1:00 pm to 5:00, I will be demonstrating my process of making linocuts with hand-printed, collaged Japanese washi papers at the Japanese Paper Place. This 'Washi Wenesday' is a free demo - one held the last Wednesday of every month - and you can drop in and see me work, see examples from portfolio and chat about printmaking and paper! Stop in (103 The East Mall Unit 1, Etobicoke, M8Z 5X9) and say hello!
The Japanese Paper Place has the most amazing warehouse of Japanese papers, both handmade and machine made. They supply the Paper Place on Queen West, as well as working directly with artists and selling papers online. I'm looking forward to doing a demo because I find teaching in any way is always instructive, and allows me to think about my own process. Also, it's a chance to seek the perfect paper for ideas in my head!
For this series, I'm designing the typography to match the subjects. The word 'kaleidoscope' has clean, simple, and where possible circular or linear lines, like images in the toy itself. The word 'Butterflies' starts with a butterfly 'B', and encorporates one butterfly in its midst and wing shapes in the 'f' and 'l' and even a tiny butterfly in the dot on the 'i'.
As you might imagine, I do love butterflies, and, like moths, they have figured previously in my prints. Butterflies are quite amazing creatures and its not surprising that they are an important symbol to many cultures. I think they are growing in popularity, and like to say, "Butterflies are the new pirates," but I'm not sure anyone believes me. This print was rather complex to design, carve and print, but I think it's worth it.
There is a butterfly in the middle of the word 'Butterflies' because butterflies tend to land in the middle of things. That's my story... it's definetly not a clever fix. It's not like I started thinking to myself I could make butterfly shapes for the 'B' and the calligraphic 'f', but then thought butterflies have two sets of wings, requiring 4 loops, so subconciously decided that there needed to be a second 'f'... because that would be illogical, and my spelling can't possibly be that bad... no, that never happened.
I haven't posted much by way of new creations lately. That's because I've been working on some larger projects (including the Space Jellyfish Fractal Triangle Quilt). I've been developping a prototype of a planned Bioluminescent Comb Jelly Light Box. What's a comb jelly? Well, they are these marvellous jellyfish-like marine creatures, the Ctenophora. The combs are the celia (the hairy bits) which they oscillate to swim. They are also voracious, invisible to prey, hermaphrodictic, and bioluminescent. Sometimes, I think that our science fiction depictions of space aliens are too tame; there are stranger creatures here on earth.
Compare, for instance with this:
The flashing is actually quite rapid. I took some artistic license here. Though it would be easy to use rapidly flashing LEDs to imitate the natural rythms of the bioluminescent comb jelly, I was concerned about the irriations/potential for inducing seizures of rapidly flashing lights.
I've been wanting to combine the two sides of my brain my scientific/technical background with my art, or to continue the trend (started with my experiments in thermochromic ink). I thought I would begin encorporating some electronics into my pieces. I am starting small. This is actually, a very very simple circuit.
I've simply combined a 9 Volt battery, with a and on/off switch on the positive rail, and a series/parallel LED array of these nifty, Diffused 5mm Slow Fade Flashing RGB LED. If you aren't used to thinking about electronics, this really is simple - trust me. If you can screw in a lightbulb, you can do this... with a little bit of practice. There are many LED calculators (like this one, for instance) which will tell you how to hook up arrays of LEDs. Basically, you need to make sure you have they with the right polarity (positive end to positive, negative to negative), you limit current (include appropriate resistors), and provide power. That's it. It is posible to get colour changing LEDs which you control with a microcontroller (the guts of a simple computer... basically a chip, which may have some bells and whistles), but since I just wanted the colours to change, these slow fade, self-flashing LEDs make everything simple. They only have the two leads (positive, and negative), so you can treat them like regular LEDs and they automatically fade and change colour. Because they are not manufactured completely uniformly, they do not synch up - which was precisely what I wanted.
I say 'transparent' when I mean 'translucent', but there you are. I plan some better images and video soon.
This is my first artwork of 2012. I wanted to continue the series of prints with collaged papers, like the 'Unicorn amongst umbrellas' and the sailing ships, and I had the idea of hot air balloons. So, I sought out images, paricularly of vintage balloons in the late 18th and early 19th century. Some of the pioneers like the Montgolfier brothers, built the most spectacular and astounding vehicles. I love that they deemed it necessary to produce elaborately decorated balloons. Many of the early ones had sails and baskets shaped like ships, in order to sail the skies.
I inked my lino block in a gradient of colours to produce the 'key' print of he sky at sunset on Japanese kozo (or mulberry paper) approximately 12 inches by 13 inches (30.5 cm by 33 cm). I printed the balloons within the block on variety of Japanese washi paper (kozo, chiyogami and katazome-shi patterned paper) and vintage sheet music, and collaged them. I am making a series of these multimedia; each one is unique. This is first in the series.
I had this idea to combine my extravagant collection of Japanese washi papers and assorted ephemera with block print, like I had done in my Unicorn Amongst Umbrellas series for a while. I based my ship block on a decorative drawing on a sixteenth century Dutch map. The sails are washi, a nautical chart, some vintage sheet music from Lady Redjeep and assorted things.
I need to refine the title, but this is an multimedia piece I've been working on and finally finished. It's been kicking around my head since the fall, and I had some minor ambition to finish it in time for the A Hidden Place show, but decided I preferred to take my time. Like the submerine piece, this piece takes place in some sort of roccoco vessel - this time a space vessel rather than a submersible. Imagine the peacock in front of an elaborate rosette window. The night sky is in multiple layers of acrylic (including glow-in-the-dark stars) and acrylic medium. The silver walls are spray paint (and silver ink) on the tin ceiling tile I found outside 1254Art. The peacock's core is drawn and painted on watercolour paper with acrylic ink and collaged Japanese washi paper, mounted on canvas paper and sewn to the tile. That's right: I sewed it, with my power drill.
I've been working on this for a long time now, and though it's still in progress, I thought I'd share my mediocre photos. It's hard to photograph, because of the reflectivity of the glass, and it's rather heavy, so I can't place it just anywhere. I made this with the group show in mind. She's in a submarine, looking out windows and thinking.
This is my 4 inch by 4 inch (10 cm square) 'chunky page' entry for alteredmommy's collaborative Book of Hope 2010, which she will auction to raise funds for cancer research. The theme this year was birds, which reminded me of the 1000 paper cranes tradition. Folding 1000 paper cranes is supposed to mean that the crane will grant you a wish like longevity or recovery from illness, so I thought it an apt metaphor. I found the chains of cranes very moving at the Toshogu peace shrine, in Tokyo. These small chains of cranes are free to swing.
Good way to begin my new year I think.
The DJ woke me by calling first thing this morning. Apparently, he then proceeded to wake up our brother too. The OB and I suspect the just wanted us to know that he and K are fostering four kittens for the Humane Society. So, my plan for tomorrow is brunch with Mom, the boys and K, followed by kitten-viewing. Then dinner chez Dad&Krys.
