New News: Updates from January 2012

Recent and fun things include:

* Photos from the excellent London Artifice / ILK reading are up here.

* Some really exciting print and publishing projects are in the works for my return to Chicago this summer.

* I now have two author WorldCat library entries, which is pretty neat.

* A review of mine was published in the newest edition of Art in Print, on Richard Deacon's prints from Paragon Press.

* My 2011 poetry collection, Grow No Moss, was recently accepted into the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection.

* I've been invited to be the juror for the 2012 Mid-America Print Council exhibition, to be held this spring at Spudnik Press. Quite looking forward to seeing lots of new printmedia work!

Paul Cézanne (1839-1906), Madame Cézanne with striped skirt, c.1877, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts (Boston)

I've been researching a bunch for school, and after thinking so much about Picasso's 1912 use of printed paper collage last term, I've become very interested in the use of printed, painted wallpaper in early modernist painting and portraiture. I'm starting to realize just how bizarre it looks. This is especially after seeing the Cézanne et Paris exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg (Paris) a month ago—an excellent show.

Wallpaper: it was everywhere for a long time! And now it is nowhere! I'm headed to the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A Art Library for more explorations later this week. Very exciting.

Art in Print (Issue 5) Review: Richard Deacon at Paragon Press

British sculptor Richard Deacon’s newest prints from Paragon Press are, at first glance, linear and flat in the Greenbergian sense of the word, refusing illusion and emphasizing the frontal surface of the picture plane. Based on a series of drawings Deacon completed in 2008 while on a trip to Mali, these monochrome, fractured polygons in metallic red, blue, silver, and gold reference the African patterns and architecture of the capital Bamako, a city in which maps have little function and buildings serve as the main points of reference. The angular lines of the Bamako prints echo the nesting loops of Deacon’s twisting geodesic sculptures, but set against flat white paper rather than within the spatial context of a surrounding environment. The Bamako prints become cross sections, laser-thin dissections of Deacon’s three-dimensional work. Yet despite this deceptive flatness, without a trace of relief embossing the ink stands heavy, with a velvet surface subtly mottled by the pull of the paper from the block.

The plates have been subtly rotated and layered, forcing depth in the diamond-shapes where color overlaps—the metallic ink forces you to move around the prints, to look from many angles, to consider them spatially, and it is this bodily effect that returns Deacon’s line to sculpture.

—Julia V. Hendrickson, for Art in Print, vol. 1, no. 5

Artifice & ILK in London.

I'll be reading at this tomorrow night, along with James Tadd Adcox, Caroline Crew, Kerri French, Pete Bloxham, and Jack Castle. Probably something related to A Very Short Introduction to the Atlantic Ocean will happen. See you there.

Grow No Moss: Process, Prints, & a Shop!

I recently posted on Printeresting about my time in the Ox-Bow print shop, and there are lots more photos from Ox-Bow on Flickr here. I thought I'd share some of the process behind making the lithograph that was printed as the cover of Grow No Moss. 

Some shots of the book being printed at Spudnik Press are below as well. Everything is being trimmed and bound at Salsedo Press today! 

And! BREAKING NEWS! You can place actual online book orders (pre-sale until August 25th) and check out more prints for purchase on the snazzy new Grow No Moss website.

Original lithograph in black ink on Kitakata paper that serves as the cover artwork for the book.

Lithographic stone (pre-etching) at Ox-Bow. Lots of tusche. Playing around with stamping, painting, and dripping with moss. (Yes, actual moss. Little bits of dirt and moss and sand on the surface of the stone there).

Lithograph on two small sheets of Kitakata paper, about 5" x 7" each, featuring poems from the book. More moss-tusche action on the left.

Lithographic stone (pre-etching) with poetry written backwards, playing around with cover options. This stone was big enough that I was able to print multiple sheets of paper for one roll-up and vary the size of the print.

This is the printed state #2 for one of my original cover ideas. A lithograph in black ink on grey Stonehenge paper. Tusche, moss stamping, pencil. Lots of experimentation in the margins.

State #1 on the stone (pre-etched) of the print shown above.

 State #2 on the stone (pre-second-etch) of the print shown above. The tusche is still drying on the stone.

Offset press-master Aaron Smith at Spudnik Press in the middle of printing my book!

Sheets just offset-printed drying on the rack.

The ethereal offset plate, ready for registration and ink.

In conclusion: little bits.

 Detail of a Van Dyke print on vellum. Printed by John Neff for John Neff Prints Robert Blanchon at Golden Gallery (Chicago).

Bits I've written recently:

Newcity - Nulla Dies Sine Linea / Instituto Cervantes (May 23, 2011)
Printeresting - From Cuba, via Chicago: The Neche Collection (May 24, 2011)
This Public Works - Rebecca Ringquist at Packer Schopf Gallery (June 6, 2011)
Printeresting - Alastair Johnston at Columbia College Chicago (June 15, 2011)
This Public Works - Chicago Art: In and Around the News (June 15, 2011)
Printeresting - John Neff Prints Robert Blanchon at Golden Gallery (June 18, 2011)


In other writing news, I'm trying dreadfully hard to be satisfied with this latest batch of poems so I can send it to the designer and start figuring out how to get the darn thing printed. More to come...