Stiff

I woke up fine but right after sitting meditation, my neck and shoulders went out and now I can't really turn or move my head, so forgive the picture quality. It has to be stress-related, because I am feeling overwhelmed and it's not even February! These two are paper litho tests on joomchi-ed paper, to see how they hold up in the etching press. They hold up JUST FINE.

This one is a shifu base at top, and a cheap hanji base at bottom. It's too bad that the toner lifted away so much, but they're still nice prints. I haven't updated the printmaking section of my website in years because somehow I always think of it as a total side/play aspect of what I do, not worth documenting. But I should probably keep track instead of stashing them in the bottoms of museum boxes.

This is an image from Velma, of her shifu squares. Instead of trying to do intense color mixing and inking, the color comes completely from chine collé, little pieces of colored paper glued and left to dry, and then sent through the press with the base sheet during printing.

The top left image is another exercise in chine collé that almost killed me (as you can see from the cutting mat squares, the bits of paper are VERY small, and they get everywhere, and don't always want to stay where they are laid, because they prefer to stick to your fingers or fall to the floor). The top right is more chine collé but with a big silver sheet cut to cover all areas of the greenhouse (doesn't translate well in this photo but it looks very nice in person). The bottom is just the straight print onto blue hanji-ish.

More of Velma's images and artwork, with various chine collé tests and then one print onto shifu in the bottom right corner.

I went to see Tim speak on Saturday to a huge crowd of book/paper geeks like me about paper through time, mostly about 15th century European paper. It was nice to see new and old friendly faces before running downtown to drop off an artists' book and my hanji book at the Center for Book Arts, which will host my artist talk and workshop in a month. Then, some much needed sister time, shared over errands. I made a delicious soup for dinner and even more scrumptious scones (my first!) for breakfast, trying something new for the latter: following the recipe. I also got to talk with Minah; we haven't caught up for a while, and she talked about writing a review for my book along with our usual hanji geeking out. Yesterday I had another great class with Fumiko and then ran through the "wintry mix" aka nasty weather to meet Woo and hear about the progress of her film.

I think the stress has caught up to my neck, but now I can say that most of the registration for my workshops this year are live. Some options (or, if you are reading through a feed, go to my blog and view the sidebar for "Upcoming"):

Feb: NYC
March: Tacoma
April: Boston and Silver Spring
June: Forest Grove
July: Bennington and Rosendale

Sit tight for a Cleveland summer date, but these are all hosted by wonderful organizations and people. And this list doesn't include all of the talks and demos, just the workshops. I'd go lay down, but I can't.