AWASH WITH CLAY studio newsletter #140

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Here’s the thing with clay printing – at least for the way I work. You can never print just one piece. It is the nature of the process that demands you pull another print (like eating potato chips, you can’t stop with one.), and then another, and then – oh well, what the hell, and you pull 3 or 4 more.  And that is being conservative.  By the end of the session there can be a dozen or more prints lying about the studio. It is usually necessary to pull at least 2-3 or more prints to “get” the one I’m looking for. And being the pack rat that I am, nothing gets tossed out, so you can imagine the results.

I’ve been working – intermittently – with the clay for about 25 years. It lends itself to decorative and abstract work, but I also use it for more realistic images, either alone or combined with another medium, usually soft pastel. I had not done any significant work with the clay for over a year when the new Holiday Inn hotel in Paducah commissioned me this spring to create 3 prints for their lobby.  Since then I have been working almost exclusively with the clay, and had made arrangements for a show of the new work in September. Unfortunately that gallery has closed and I am left with an inventory of clay prints that threatens to completely overtake the studio and gallery. But is spite of that threat, I CAN’T STOP. There are so many new techniques and approaches I want to explore, and the work is simply too much fun. There is none of the anxiety and stress associated with the other mediums, especially watercolor.

I’m sure I will eventually get back to the watercolors and acrylics, and even the pastels.  But until then I will continue to play in the clay.  I may host a show of the new work in my own studio/gallery later this year.  You can be assured I will let you know.

Here are several of my favorites from the past several weeks.

EVOLVING  14X14

VALOR  11X25

INTERIOR  8X17

CLAY LANDSCAPES

I'm not sure where this latest effort will take me...creating "clay landscapes" and mounting them on panels. I have a tendency to get caught up in new work, thinking, wow, this is the cat's ass...I'm really on to something, only to have it fizzle out and join the pile of discarded bad ideas. But, one never knows, and I think we learn something from all that we do, the good, the bad, and the indifferent. Regardless of where this ends up, I am having some fun, and at this time feel that when I'm done there will be a series worth showing. However before that can happen I have to do some restoration work on my clay slab...it has been sorely abused these past few years. I will keep you posted. In the meantime, here are today's results: and yes, this current series is heavy on the purple.





Sometimes there are too many things banging around in my head...this is one of those times.

FROM CLAY TO PASTELS

In my last post I wrote that working with clay printing moved me into the world of pastels. After years of painting with watercolor, with a special interest in architecture, I was confronted with the problem of not having very good control of the new medium; I could not render some of the details and the hard edges that I wanted. To overcome this, I began enhancing the clay prints with pastels, using pieces of paper to serve as a mask or as stencils for obtaining hard edges.

It was then that I began working with pastel dust. With a stencil in place I scrapped the pastel in small kitchen strainer held over the stencil and covered the area with one or more layers of the pastel, using my fingers or wads of tissue paper to rub it into the print. Following are 3 of these early pastel enhanced clay prints.




The obvious next step was to try working with the pastel only, and because of my experience enhancing the clay prints I chose to continue using the pastel dusting technique. Working on cold press illustration board lying flat and covered with a thin monochromatic wash I applied layers of dust followed by manual blending and occasional applications of workable fixative until I achieved the desired results.
Because of the fixative, I was now able to use paper stencils without disturbing the background. The earliest paintings were...no surprise here...BARNS.




I don’t recall just how much time passed before I worked up enough courage to submit one of my pieces to the Pastel Society of America’s annual juried show. This was the painting...



To my total disbelief it was accepted into the show, won an award for best pastel with mixed media (black india ink was used in the building), and was sold! My feet did not touch ground for weeks. Patience and I went to the opening in NYC for the weekend and ended up in a topless art gallery, but that’s another story.