Arrowmont Workshop Week



What a handsome group!

Wow...I don't have a clue where to start.  This past February was my 40th birthday and my dear parents sprang for a week long workshop at Arrowmont in Gatlinburg, TN as my gift.  Zowee!  Even they didn't realize quite what they had purchased for me. 

The workshop was an amazing, intense, inspiring experience.  K Rhynus Cesark was our instructor.  She is one of those people with infinite patience when explaining concepts and procedures.  K was extremely generous with her knowledge and skills, and I will have more on that later.  My fellow classmates were an astonishing blend of skilled artists from varied backgrounds.  An atmosphere of camaraderie, anything-goes creativity, and problem solving quickly developed during the week.



The first thing we learned was to make our own medium and encaustic paint.  In the past, I have felt hampered by the cost of pre-made encaustic paint.  This new skill will help me move toward larger works in the future.  (Thanks to Becky Dickovitch, K's assistant, for keeping the medium cooking all week.)

Oil paint on paper towels.

K gave various demonstrations each day and then we had free time to attempt the ideas that intrigued us the most.  I was happy to have so much room to spread out.  This is the first workshop where I've had an entire table to myself.  The venting of the large room could probably have been a little better.  The air kind of condensed toward the back of the room by the end of the day.  Break taking was a necessity. 

K during one of her demonstrations.

Inspecting the drawing transfer demo pice.



K with a propane torch.



My messy workspace.



My classmates had wonderfully imaginative ideas and were pretty fearless when it came to execution.

 Leah Mayer encasing insects in wax for her bee transfer project.

Leah removing paper from her xerox transfer of a bee.



Above is Lynn Bland showcasing her amazing sense of texture and detail - and guess what?  The painting on the left came home with me as a trade!!!  Happy Dance!!!  I feel a twinge of guilt because I definitely got the better end of that deal.

LeeAnn Love is an art therapist who came to work on her own art.  There were a lot of breakthroughs during the week and it was fun watching LeeAnn arrive at hers.  Oh yeah - LeeAnn's a confirmed pyromaniac now!  Ladies, guard your propane torches...

K demo-ing a batik tool to make marks.

K took pity on me and used my rice paper/image sandwich research idea as a demo.  Below are the pictures of the suprisingly detailed process.





Becky set up a  lasagna pan of melted medium to dip and coat my rice paper image.  K used clothes pins to slowly guide the paper through the wax.



K held up the piece to allow the extra wax to drip and then laid it down on a flat surface covered in wax paper.


Out came K's favorite tool - the razor blade - to remove the extra ridge of wax.

Here's the textured surface picture already glued to it's board and coated with two coats of uneven wax by me.



K painstakingly used a heat gun and her razor blade to smooth my wax job to a glassy surface finish.  That was amazing to watch.  I really worked to be in the smooth surface wax club the rest of the week!



K even moved to the window for better light to remove any possible imperfections.

For the final step, K used wax paper on top of the wax-coated rice paper print to burnish and finally did a very careful fuse.  The rice paper wasn't quite as transparent as I had hoped, but I think the idea has a lot of promise and I will start smaller and continue to work on it.

Inspiration was everywhere on the campus.  These clay tiles lined the entrance to the pottery studio.  Daylilies and gladiolas were planted right outside the window of our painting studio.

How could you do anything but laugh with Leah as your table neighbor?  She kept me grooving with music and even shared her box fan when I thought I was going to melt into a puddle of sweat on the floor next to my griddle.

Finally!  Bubbles!  I have been wondering how to do this technique for months...  All it took was a lot of opaque paint layers and some patience with the torch.  Have I mentioned lately how much I love my torches???  Oh yes!  Burn baby, burn!  I made the discovery this week that different torches have different flames.  My little torch ended up having a laser-like flame tip that was especially good for pinpoint needs.  I preferred fusing with the larger torch since it's flame spread out more.

The message Polly Cross wrote to herself at her desk could have easily applied to me!  Her work certainly did not end up tight but colorful and whimsical.  Polly also conquered her fear of the torch during the week.

I got to enjoy Gloria McCracken's wonderfully dry sense of humor.  She had to think I was nuts because I kept walking by her table to pet a piece she was making with an orange stencil.  The 3 rectangular pieces she presented at our final critique had a lot of depth.

 



One of my classmates remarked - It's the quiet ones you have to watch.   I enjoyed watching Pam draw and methodically work on her pieces all week, but it turned out that she had a wicked sense of humor!



Unlike any other encaustic workshop I've ever had, this class had a 3D component.  We cast wax as hollow and 3D forms!  What a new way to think about design - fabulous!  I made the face on the left and K made the houses on the right.




A fellow student and amazing sculptor, Denise Buckley, showed me how to prep my plaster mold so that it would release the wax and how to carefully build up enough wax in the mold to make my hollow torso strong.

As the week went by I had to keep visiting Denise's table to spy on what she was doing.  These wonderful clay heads kept popping up.  She works in bronze and with the price of metals skyrocketing was attempting to develop a bronze patina look with encaustics and oil paint.  She certainly succeeded. 

One of my other table neighbors, Pam Hodge, is a realistic watercolor artist but during the course of the week made some lovely, loose encaustic paintings.  I was especially drawn to the yellow collage piece below with the great negative space. 

Pam was my studio buddy most nights.  We seemed to get tired around the same time and kept each other company on the long crawl back to our dorm rooms.

Alicia Voisin was another quiet one to watch.  I saw her doing a lot of scraping but her work had such lovely textured finishes. 

Our hardworking teaching assistant, Becky Dickovitch, had a way with textiles.  Her light and airy pieces had such a beautiful color palette.

Below is one of the stoneware pieces I made to take to this workshop.  I can certainly say that I will continue to play with wax on a bisqueware surface.  This was such a fun thing to try.  It gave me a much more immediate and controlable result compared to fired glazes.

It turned out Kevin Schultz was a fellow photographer in the workshop.  We had some great Photoshop discussions.  She and Trish Korte arrived together and were a hoot!  Under the small world category, Trish and I figured out we are in a show together next month at the Pyro Gallery in Louisville.  Wild huh?



Kevin photographing Denise's work.

On the left is Kevin's in-progress piece with shellac burn and solid cast baby heads as the Queen and the Pirate King.   Kevin's beautiful book on the right also has a red wax cast Asian coin on the cover.

I think Trish has to get the most prolific award from the workshop!  You just can't have much more fun than creepy babydoll heads!  She didn't present the figural piece on the right at the final critique but it caught my eye all week.

I was envious of Peggy Leland's workspace during the workshop.  She was the most organized of the students.  She had taken a workshop with K before so she filled us in on what to expect when we had questions.  I really liked her ferris wheel piece with the ghosted image transfer in the background.

Elizabeth Garlington (below) was the one person who brought even more stuff to the workshop than I did!  Her breakthrough came later in the week and she was moved to tears when she completed the two pieces below.  I told you it was an intense week!

Emily Nickel also came to the class from a clay background.  I was astounded with her fairytale based narrative work.  During the class, she came up with a wonderful way to color her ceramic pieces with watercolor, oil paint, and a little encaustic that made for a surface that wasn't exactly matte but wasn't glossy either. 

I had a few preconceived notions about what I wanted to do while at Arrowmont.  I have had an artist block where collage is concerned for years.  In my mind, I could see combining my photography with many other materials to achieve a seamless end product.  I drug my feet all week but finally attempted a collage piece.  While I don't think this is done, I am really happy with the progress I made and plan on working down this route much more in the future.

This is a combination of one of my photographs, pattern paper, torn book pages, colored mulberry paper "borrowed" from Pam's stash, and a lot of encaustic paint.

I miss you guys.  What a wonderful week! 

Thanks K and Arrowmont for such a wonderful experience.







Mulberry Paper Love

Step right up ladies and gentlemen!  I have no connection to the Legion Paper Company, but I am here to proclaim my adoration of their traditional washi paper for inkjet printers.  Specifically their Moab Moenkopi Unryu 55 gsm paper.  Before I extol the amazing wonders of said paper, I'll give you the downside.  The cost is not for the faint of heart.  10 sheets of 13x19 ran me $45 dollars on Amazon or you can go big and get the 49 foot by 44 inch wide roll for $255 at B&H.  (If next week's encaustic experiments go well, I might be considering this option.)  I may be telling you all something you already know about this paper but I have been slow to play with different fine art inkjet papers on the market.  So be patient with me.  Up until now, the three Epson papers I usually use have worked fine so why fiddle?  Yeah, I know - duh!  Bad photographer!  Bad!

Okay seriously, I first heard of this paper at a Leah MacDonald workshop.  Thanks Leah!  It's an extremely thin, but surprisingly strong white paper with little white fibers running through it.  I bought it for experimenting with some of my prints and encaustics since it should be a very transparent paper once coated in wax.  (More of that next week.)  It fed into my Epson 2200 just fine but it needed approximately 20% more saturation than a regular print on Epson's premiun matte paper.  Boy howdy was I impressed once this came out of my printer!  It's almost like holding fabric instead of paper and those tiny little fibers show up slightly in the print.  Yum!  It also comes in 110 and 300gsm weights so I may need to take out a small loan and play with Unyru's big brothers Kozo and Bizan.  Please don't ask me how to pronounce a bit of this!

See the white fibers in the photo below?  Don't worry about the banding in the dark areas.  It's not in the ink.  My printer's pizza wheels dented the paper a little bit on the way out. 

Next week I will be in Tennessee at the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts taking a week-long workshop entitled Exploring Encaustic: Painting, Collage, and Sculpture.  It's a good thing I'm driving because if I can see out of the back window of my Jeep once I've packed everything I'm taking, it will be a major miracle. 

This is a texture I will be trying out with the black and white image above.

 Back to the amazing paper.  One of the experiments I have devised is to see if I can do some photo sandwiching using a glued-down regular paper photo on a wood surface then brushing on some encaustic medium and attaching the next image printed on the ultra-translucent mulberry paper.  I did a little combining of photos in Photoshop to try and get a combination that has some possiblity of being interesting together.  One way or the other, next week I should have pictures to show of my epic failure on pricey paper or a new & interesting procedure to perfect.



Clay-mania

I have been taking a handbuilding with clay class at Kentucky Mudworks this month.  (By the way, this is a lovely place to drop some dough and spend some time getting your hands dirty.)  From time to time in the past decade I've dabbled in sculpture, primarily in clay.  The medium is very freeing to my imagination.  Because it is difficult to control, I think I approach it more with a kid's mentality and just play more and plan less.  Anything to stop the inner critic!

Styrofoam heads with faces sawed off...No, I swear I am not a psychopath!

Faces taped down onto cradled birch boards covered in newspaper.

It's kind of funny - I'm taking a workshop to prepare for another workshop.  How's that for overthinking?  In June I'll be at Arrowmont for an encaustic workshop which happens to have a 3D component.  So I was thinking, wouldn't it be fun to have a few bisqueware pieces to take to the Arrowmont workshop?  I haven't really used clay as a surface yet when exploring the encaustic possibilities so this should be fun.

Tonight made week 5 of a 6 week class.  I worked hard this weekend to start finishing up the pieces I had been creating at home.  Unfortunately I had forgotten how difficult eyes are to create!  Practice makes perfect - maybe I need to do a panel covered in eyes...hmmm....

Doing the hair for the long piece caused me to lose track of time.  I may have gotten a little too caught up in the seduction of the clay and sort of forgotten that I was planning on putting encaustic over this...  There is no finished concept in my mind for these pieces yet.  I made some smaller, textured boxes during class nights that I'm currently thinking will lend themselves to the encaustic process better than the boxed faces above, but I won't know for sure until I'm in the thick of the creative process.

2 odd, textured boxes with random bird heads

I made some plain, front-side torsos for the encaustic workshop too.  The more I think about the polymer clay torso as a substrate, the more worried I get about the wax popping off during temperature changes.  With bisqueware this won't be an issue.

On the left is my classmate, Olga and on the right is the instructor, Leann



Some pieces approaching leather hardness



Speaking of needing more practice with eyes, I used a Debra Fritts bust that happened to be in the studio as a model and worked on some more facial features.

 Not too long after I added the third eye, I decided to scrap this piece and call it a night!

Photo-phylosophizing

I had an odd reaction to one of my own photographs today and that started me pondering.  Last week I bought some new software (Alien Skin Exposure 4) that allows you to emulate a huge number of different film types, plus some darkroom effects like brushed on emulsions, or the edge effects you could achieve by filing down the slot of the negative carrier before printing your picture.  Imagine my squeal of delight as I ran through all the options - B&W, color, vintage films, and even lo-fi options such as light leak.  I pounced on something I'd never gotten to experience in the darkroom - color infrared.  Oh the crazy colors and alien feel given to landscapes!  So I grabbed a photo I took recently of a clematis bloom with some green foliage in the background, applied the Kodak Ektachrome EIR film option, and voila - strange but interesting. 

So my first reaction was oooh pretty!  Then my second reaction was something along the lines of guilt or apprehension.  Even though I've been using Photoshop since version 3, I still have the inate, irrational feeling that I'm cheating when I do something beyond a levels adjustment and a little boost in the saturation department on a photograph.  Just to be clear, I do not feel this sensation when I'm making one of my huge layered digital creations.  That's an entirely different beast to my mind.  

In the beginning, there was film, a photo safe light, and a multitude of chemicals and it was good.  Yes, you got black spots on your clothes and came home reeking of a faint sulphur smell, but it was fulfilling.  When the digital photography revolution began in the 90s, it was fun to sneer at the poor quality of the cameras and crazy idea that you could replicate your darkroom with software.  But as the technology advanced, it became impossible to ignore the lure, ease, and creativity the digital world offered.  Digital photography did not come dressed in red spandex with horns.  It is that kind of thinking that is still in the back of my head though. 

Perhaps I've let nostaglia subconscioiusly rein in my potential for creativity.  I vow to stop feeling guilty for having an easier way to do something that used to be so hard and to embrace the happy accidents that happen when I'm doing something in Photoshop that I couldn't have done in the darkroom. 

I'm glad that's decided...

Inkotype or Fauxgram?

Simple cyanotype on cotton fabric

The few times I have been able to play with cyanotypes out in the sun or photograms in the darkroom, I have fallen in love with their whispy ethereal nature. With summer fast approaching, I have been thinking about playing with cyanotypes again and of course encaustics aren't far from my mind right now either.  I've started to wonder what cyanotypes on very thin paper would look like when coated in wax, which should make the white areas fairly transparent.  Well, I don't have the chemicals yet to try out this idea so I started thinking up ways to fake it with what I have on hand.  I decided to try out using cyan colored ink in a spray bottle to make something that would look a little like a photogram.  I tested mulberry rice paper with little white fibers and lace paper with lots of Swiss cheese holes.  The mulberry rice paper left a crisper impression and soaked up less ink.  The lace paper ended up with a more organic look because it was much more absorbant.  For my purposes, the mulberry paper looks more like a cyanotype.


Cyan ink photogram on mulberry paper

I wanted a very busy background to take advantage of the transparency of the paper, so I used a marker to doodle all over an 8x10 masonite board that I had coated last week with encaustic gesso.  (You can't use acrylic gesso with encaustics.  They don't provide enough tooth.)

Doodle madness

I layered a couple of coats of medium on the doodle board.  Then I collaged down my mulberry paper with more clear medium.  This paper may be thin but it put up a good fight.  I ended up scraping off some excessive hills of medium and smoothed everything out with the iron.  Then I added white encaustic paint to the boarders.  Here's stage 2 of my faux cyanotype experiment:

Now here's the part where I get to learn a little more about patience - sigh.  It needs to cool down quite a bit before I can do anything else to it.  But as you can see the translucent part worked well.  The doodling can be easily seen through the flowers. 

After letting it rest for a bit, I used a metal stamp to add some more lines in the white at the top and bottom of the white border.  Then I came back in and applied some Prussian Blue oil paint as a glaze to knock back the bright white a bit. 



It's at that point where I've looked at it for too long and can't quite decide if I'm done.  This piece will go up on the shelf for some rumination time.