Category: Uncategorized

Silverpoint

This is such a natural, inevitable transition–from my ink and ink wash drawings to SilverPoint. I’m too old, the learning curve is too long, and I’ll never have access to press and facilities, the acid baths … no way, or I’d be into etchings. But SilverPoint opens to the kind of effects I’ve been in love with since I first saw reproductions of Piranesi’s prisons.  Work I’ve done with pen and ink are suggestive in this direction. I especially like the Silverpoint will endure for centuries… when there’s not much hope human life will be around even for another 100 years. Kinda like, Fuck you, capitalist pigs! I’ll just make up the “posterity” you’re working so hard to kill off. #396

 

#399

#335 Sidewalk 2Or from my pavement series
#347 12x9 pavement pen & ink

So I spent my food money for Silverpoint ground and a stylus. I have more than enough excess weight to get me to my next SS check!

 

Silverpoint

In two earlier posts, HERE and HERE.

I wrote about my search for a clay coated paper I used some 40 years ago, and have searched for in vein. I realized at some point that this had probably been made for silverpoint. I still couldn’t find that paper, but have become intrigued with the thought of doing silverpoint.

I found a wonderfully informative web page, SilverPointWeb.com. It seems there is a Japanese made paper, called Karma, but only available through a NYC supplier, and they don’t ship. I’m waiting for a reply to a question I left about using Golden SilverPoint ground (another recent discovery).

Whoops… mildly embarrassing. I diligently scrolled through the FAQ looking for reference to the Golden ground, so I wouldn’t be repeating a question that had already been covered. … then going back to the site, I see this on the Page One:

Golden Artist Colors’ new Silverpoint / Drawing Ground is a recent development and is an excellent acrylic formulation, providing ease of use without the problems associated with other acrylic-based products; I not only highly recommend it but also now supply it, in the Complete Kit and separately.

If you Google, Silverpoint images contemporary artists, this is what you’ll see. Though how Dürer and Du Vinci rate as ‘contemporary,’ I don’t know. But so many rich possibilities. I’m so excited to get started with this… waiting from my silver stylus to show up in my mail box. Read everything I can get hold of while I’m waiting.

#445

#445

View GALLERY HERE.

32×32″ Acrylic on canvas
There were two figures when I began, heads and torsos, one behind the other facing opposite directions. The canvas was reversed from what you see here, top to bottom bottom to top. When I finished, the figures had vanished, and I decided it worked better when I flipped the canvas. I like the predominately upward sweep. I worked very quickly in 4 stages, spending no more than 10 or 15 minutes at each stage, layering, laying in colors–almost all with palate knife, scraping through flat edge to canvas, then with a nail. I thought there would be one more pass, and took it upstairs to my bedroom to look at it, see it in my dreams. This morning I thought–whatever else this needs, what I feel to be missing, I’ll have to find in the next painting. That’s something I learning in writing poetry.

#443

#443

33×19 Acrylic on weathered plywood This posed some problems. It was a paint-over of a piece with built up ridges of street dirt that were going to show up no matter what (see below #181 from 6/13). I had to build on that pattern, which meant layering and impasto, without hiding the the texture of the plywood.

View GALLERY HERE.

#181

Now that we have no future…

#86 When the Morning Stars

We know we will die. The courage and nobility of the human spirit resides in our ability to think beyond our individual lives, or the lives of our generation.

This is a question that first lodged itself in my thoughts during the Cuban missile crisis, standing at the back of the concert hall listening to a teacher from the music school at Wichita State play Bach’s Sonata’s and Partitas for Solo Violin to an almost empty auditorium. The countdown to doomsday had begun.

This is what it comes to… I thought– all the great accomplishments of our species: the art, the music, poetry… nothing. Less than nothing… to those whose only rapture is power and money.

What do we draw on now that we have no future? Now that we know that there will be no posterity to take up the work we have begun?

A question that has become a ghost I cannot exorcise. The ghost that will be all that is left of us. The ghost we have already become.

#86   “…and watered heaven with their tears” 40×20 Acrylic and mixed media

#441 Sky wrigting (sic)

#441 Sky wrigting

32×30″ Acrylic on canvas with roofing paper. This was a paint-over of a piece I no longer liked. I tried to remove the roofing, but the Modpodge had hardened to a point where I could only get a few pieces loose. Almost dividing the canvas in half, it posed a problem… how to include it in a different composition (the piece I’d painted over was a larger version of an ink & watercolor piece, with a central bar of ink… (#327 below)

#327 19.5x15.5cm water color, ink

…though not as successful. I painted it at first with the blue at the bottom, but didn’t want to develop the suggested seascape. I scratched numbers and letters to both halves, then turned it on its side, like a diptych, and added some black brush work graffiti.

View GALLERY HERE.