Memorable Memorial Day Weekend Making Art

My own slab and work space. Note the pastels (dried clay) that I grate onto the slab for bursts of color. The red onion bag was rolled into the slab and removed for texture, and the back side of the spoon is used to finish braying the corners of the print where the pizza roller can't reach.

The process for me is immediate, serendipitous. I grab whatever colors I have at hand and dive in working quickly and pulling about one print per hour. I have been wondering why I work like that. Maybe I am so starved for the artmaking and the color; maybe I know how precious little time I have to myself for my art; maybe it's the adrenaline rush and thrill of it all.

Anyway, it was important to me to be working along side a woman who worked in a completely opposite manner. She spent hours dawdling over her slab, enjoing the fussing and carving and playing with it. She only made a few prints, but each was very beautiful too. Her presence helped me calm down, think about how I work as well as how I might work in new ways.
Here are the finished prints hanging after a preservative coating was applied. Can you find where the onion bag was used?

These are monoprints because when you pull a second print from the "plate"(the clay slab), the second print is not a ghost print, but a completely different print. As you print 2, 3, or more times, you actually pull clay from deeper and deeper in the slab, rediscovering the history buried beneath.



I am gaining quite a body of work and must think about what to do with all these prints. A show? A sale? Lots of frames? Let them accumulate in the garage?

What I do know is that it is the making of them that is important to me, not the selling or finding homes for them. That will happen when the time is right. In the mean time, I will make time for myself, my clayprints, and my quilts.