Art Inspires Art

I am readying my work for a one woman show--my first! after the little coffee shop showing last year. I have new clay monoprints and new fuzed quilts to hang. And thanks to my week at Hemlocks, I have new ways for thinking about how to combine these two mediums. Thank you, Monita.

But the three pieces that I'm blogging this morning are prints that I made in the style of great artists (note to self: where are the women?)
in an attempt to learn more control over this extemporaneous medium.

The first print is After Waterlilies. It is an unsuccessful print underneath with Shiva paintstick scribbles on top. I liked this particular experiment. The Shivas adhere beautifully to the clay and the oily fixative on the surface. With encouragement from my mentor, I moved the dark reds into the lower right quadrant and think that the scribbles and the piece are finished.

The middle piece is Homage to Rothko. I love all the colors under the black and red blocks--they add a shimmering to the piece that is reminiscent of the subtle movements in Rothko's big pieces. The big blocks of color are made by painting colored/tinted clay slip onto newspaper which soaks up extra moisture. Then the paper is flipped onto the clayslab that I work from and I use a rolling pin to impress the paper onto the clay slab. When I peel off the newspaper the colored clay slip has been impressed into the slab; then I print.







Finally, I have Guantanamo: A Little American Prison: Hommage to Motherwell. Robert Motherwell was greatly affected by the Spanish Civil War. He made a series of prints called A Little Spanish Prison. When I saw these I thought, "Fuzed quilts!" and there is a fabric Abbu Grab in the forthcoming show. While at Hemlocks I wanted to see if I could do a similar piece in clay. So here it is. Like the Rothko piece above, I painted each stripe and color separately on paper and pressed them onto the clay. This worked and gives the print a depth not possible in the fabric cousin.