So Many Things...

So much time and so little to say.

STRIKE THAT! REVERSE IT!

We'll begin at the beginning... or at least where we last left off.

Thursday

Our first real class with Marge... or at least a class where we weren't watching videos or being babysat by someone else. The Tamarind book manuscript is finished and now Marge can move on to other things... like raising 5 million dollars for the new building. Crazy crazy.

I didn't feel good that morning and was having trouble paying attention in class. Also, I'm not good with names and hate it when people ask things like, "What artists were working in lithography in the United States in the early 1900's?" Even if I know that stuff most likely it would never make it from the recesses of my brain to my mouth in time to give an answer. Then I just look extra stupid... so instead I tried to just sit there and look cute. Did I mention my new headband? It takes me back to the old days when I wore a stocking cap nearly year round. This gives kind of the same feeling... the warm pressure on the ears. but without the bad hat hair. It's perfect.



Thursday afternoon we had demos in how to etch our Tusche Wash Tests. After the demo, I worked on putting the first etch on my stone. I think I may have gone back later in the evening and put the first etch on my plate as well. At some point during the day, the Cardinals trounced the Pittsburgh Pirates 16-4! And I didn't even get to watch it because I was in class. *sigh*

Friday

Fridays are work days but I didn't really get going until around 11:30am. I was there. I just wasn't doing much. I guess I still had residual feelings of yuckiness from the day before. I started getting ready to put the second etch on my stone right before lunch. Of course, we all managed to screw ours up (except for the lucky person who volunteered their stone for the demo). My pretty pretty tusche washes almost completely went bye-bye. It's so frustrating. I knew that I was probably going to screw it up but I was hoping by some miracle it would actually look good. Oh well. I spent more than TWO HOURS carefully rolling up my stone with ink, to try to get back the information on the stone. But it didn't help much.

I know this probably makes no sense, but I'm too tired to properly explain it. You'll just have to trust me that it was a pain.

Since I worked through lunch I went home around 3pm and then came back later in the day to finish the second etch on my plate. It wasn't quite as bad as the stone, but it still didn't look super.

Friday night Patrick and Alex came and got me and took me with them to Valpuri's house. There ended up being six of us there and we sat out on the roof and had beers and wine and enjoyed the evening air and conversation and Valpuri's ability to stick things in her nose and also sing Ace of Base. Here is another video for you. It takes a second but I think it gets more amusing towards the end so stick with it. If you pay attention closely, you can enjoy Valpuri's rendition of "The Sign".

Saturday

I slept in a little this morning and then met up with Alex at the studio around 10am. We worked until 5pm and were able to print both of our first plate editions and then my stone edition. I felt good about what we accomplished today, so we don't have to worry about taking the day off tomorrow.

We stopped at a little produce market near my house after we were done working and I got a cantaloupe, some nectarines and two mangoes. The girl at the register commented that I was eating pretty healthy for someone my age. I told her that I was probably older than she was and she said that she was 26. She felt bad after I told her I was 28 and wouldn't stop apologizing. Like it was really that big of a deal.

This evening Patrick came over and watched the Brewers-Reds game. He recently purchased a bushel of roasted green chiles so he brought a frozen pizza and put green chiles all over the top of it. It was fantastic but a little spicy. Here is Patrick skinning the green chiles:



Normally, I would've watched the Cardinals game this evening. But they are playing in Arizona and it is blacked out since I live so close to that market. It is stupid. Anyway... I missed yesterday's 4-2 loss and today's 9-8 loss. Maybe if I were watching them they wouldn't lose so much.

After the game we went back to Alex's apartment to enjoy some television, including our new favorite show, Flight of the Conchords. Those zany New Zealanders! Such good times.

Read the rest of this story

Polly Apfelbaum

Polly Apfelbaum is in the house for the next two weeks and has started playing around on the Pro-Side.

Here are a few of her recent works from her website:





It's a little weird though because I feel so disconnected from her visit. I'm used to Tandem Press where the students were busy slaving away with tearing paper and mixing inks and doing all sorts of busy-work when the artists came to visit. At Tamarind, we just kind of keep busy with our own stuff and peek in from time to time. I guess technically, whichever student printers are down to help with sponging would be asked to help if needed. But so far, there hasn't been a need. Maybe later once proofing starts.

Here are some pictures I snapped of all the pretty shapes and colors floating around.

Read the rest of this story

Spider Trauma-Rama

This morning I nearly had one of those breakdowns where you curl up in a ball and sob things like, "I-JUST-CAN'T-TAKE-IT-ANYMORE!!!"

Except I wasn't referring to Tamarind or being alone here in Albuquerque.

There was a spider...
And it was crawling up my leg.

That's where I draw the line.

I can't recall if I've mentioned my spider woes yet in this blog. But I have so many spiders here. Most of them are quarter-sized brown spiders like this one:



But there are also Black Widows hanging around at Tamarind and I'm pretty sure I killed one that had made a web right by my screen door. (You can imagine how thrilled I am about that.)

It is really starting to drive me nuts. I'm constantly on edge and I'm having trouble sleeping at night because of it.

Last night was the first night in weeks that I actually slept the whole night through and didn't jump out of my bed and throw off all of the covers because I thought there were spiders on my ceiling or in my bed.

I thought that I had made a breakthrough... I was feeling like I'd finally overcome my fear (or at least had made myself tired enough to sleep through it) and then the very next morning I have a spider on me. Seriously... I'm at my wits end.

Okay, okay... so I know that spiders are a very important part of the food chain and that they keep other little housepests in check. And if I had one friendly little spider hanging out somewhere in my house, that would be fine. But in the past few weeks, I've probably killed two spiders a day on average. That's what I call an infestation... and it creeps the heck out of me.

I think the biggest problem is that this guest house was converted from an old garage. While it seems fairly well constructed, I think there are a lot of gaps and holes and other entry points that resulted from the conversion. I probably have nests of spiders living in my walls. The most visible areas are the giant gap at the bottom right corner of my front door...



And the swamp cooler that is installed in my wall by my computer. See the white spot in the middle of the grate? That is light shining through from the outside of the house. As I see most of my little spider friends crawling on the wall by my computer, this seems like a popular spot to get in.



Okay... so what do I do? I tried installing weather stripping on my front door to close that gap, but then the door wouldn't shut. I'm not even really sure what I'd try to do with the swamp cooler besides cover over it. I'd happily spray the house with something if I thought it would actually help, but I know they'll just keep coming in. I welcome any suggestions from you readers. Is there anything that you've had success with? I know that BD probably has some good shampoo/herbal/catnip spider friendly way to get rid of these guys. If you have a thought... leave me a comment!

Read the rest of this story

P-5 and P-6: Tusche Wash Tests

We're nearing the end of the supposedly "easy" P-Projects and yesterday we got instructions for the Tusche Wash Tests.

Okay... so some of you may be wondering what tusche is... besides a term for someone's backside. Lithographic tusche (Usually pronounced TOOOSH), is a greasy drawing material that comes in three different forms: Paste, Stick, and Liquid. Tusche can be dissolved with either water or solvents and can be applied with a brush or a pen. Most people like to use it for more painterly effects.

Here are a few examples of the tusches we are using. The one in the can is the paste, which comes solid. You add small amounts of water (or solvent) in the can and stir it up with the brush until you get the consistency you want. The stick is kind of like a fat crayon. To use it, you rub it on the bottom of a plate and then liquefy it with water.



The purpose of these next projects is for us to get familiar with the different brands and types of tusche and to learn how to process them on the stone and plate. Tusche washes are usually so delicate that it can be hard to etch them and print them without losing the detail.

We are doing two separate sets of tests in these projects. First, we are sampling 10 strengths of five different types of water-based tusche on both a stone and aluminum plate. Next, we will prepare another plate and stone and explore variations in solvent-based tusches.

For each brand or type of tusche, we first mix up a solid concentrated version, then add drops of the concentrate to small beakers with water. We start with just 10 drops to about 20mL of water, then 20 drops, and so on. Here is Valpuri going cross-eyed from counting drops:



Here is Yuli's stone in progress. Each horizontal row is a different type of tusche. You can see how it starts on the left with the concentrate, then the 90 drops, and so on.



Once the water evaporates, the grease particles in the tusche will settle onto the stone. Here is a close-up of my stone:



After the first application dries, we have to go back over a small part of each blob with a second pass. This will give us an idea of how the stone or plate might react with more than one coat of tusche. Here's Celina adding her second coat:



Putting the tusche on the stone or plate is the easy part! Tomorrow we'll get a demo on how to do our first etch.

Read the rest of this story

Labor Day(s)

This was a three day weekend for most people.
But not for the fine folks at Tamarind.
Labor Day Weekend = Three Days of Labor
Here's how it broke down:

Saturday

After my late night of working and Sponge Dancing, I went into the studio around 9am to meet Alex. We were able to complete the editions on our stones, despite the fact that we probably shouldn't have.

I say we probably shouldn't have pulled our editions because after proofing our stones, they both looked pretty crappy. Not super crappy, but not perfect either. And unless the artist intends it to be so, you should never knowingly pull an edition that has something wrong with it. But we were tired... oh so tired of these stones. I personally tried to "fix" mine four times. The problem with my stone was that it didn't really like the way I counter-etched it. Some stones are more accepting than others and can take a stronger counter-etch. But mine kind of rejected it. So when I tried to add back on to stone, in some areas, it started coming off. So in my beautiful black border I had these white spots and lines. It started to break down the more I printed it. It was sad.

Alex had similar problems but we were both able to get our edition to be consistent... even if it was consistently crappy. We finished with those editions around 4pm. Alex had company coming in from Houston and I had a date with the Saint Louis Cardinals so it worked out well. (And the Cardinals won for me 11-3, which made the day even better.)

Sunday

Alex's friend stuck around ABQ until lunchtime on Sunday which meant I was able to get a few things done in the morning. I decided that it would be a good time to do laundry and I carried my stuff down the block and a half to the nearby laundromat. I always enjoy being at places other than home and Tamarind.

I folded my things and got home in time to catch the Cardinals squaring off again versus the Cincinnati Reds. Alex called me to meet up at the studio around 2pm. I didn't have time to finish watching the game but got to see Rick Ankiel hit me another home run. (The Cards ended up winning that one 3-2.) After our morning off, neither Alex nor I were in any mood to print. We had hoped to edition at least one of our plates, but our plates thought otherwise. We started with Alex's plate and were unable to get a good print for some reason. We think it had something to do with the press set-up, but we're not sure. It took us several hours to finally get a good print and by the time we proofed her plate, it was nearly 5pm.

This project is made a bit more difficult by the fact that Rodney wants us to proof these things in three different types of black ink. We're to use a Black Shop Mix (semi-greasy), Daniel Smith Classic Black (sorta-stiff), and Crayon Black (super-stiff) to see which one works best for our stone and plate. It wouldn't be so bad except that in between each type of ink, you have to clean the roller and the ink slab and your plate or stone. It's a lot of extra work... but it is helping us to get familiar with the differences between the inks and what situations it might be good to use them in.

By 6pm, we were ready to get out of there. Patrick invited us back to his place for another barbecue. The food was delicious and again, it was nice to be away from the square blockage of my house and Tamarind. We even got treated to a fireworks show from the nearby minor league baseball field.

Monday

At 9am this morning, we were back at it again in the studio. I got there a few minutes before Alexandra and had my plate on the press and ready to go. Upon arrival, Alex proposed that we only edition my plate. She wanted to wait to do hers until Tuesday (even though it was suggested that we should have these done this weekend). So we got my plate finished around lunchtime with just a few minor issues.

I learned that when you have a solid flat area with a lot of ink (like the black borders), it's good to pull the paper off the stone or plate from a center point on one edge of the paper, rather than from the corner. For the first few prints I was getting a light area on my border and I couldn't figure out why. I tried changing up my rolling methods and adding more ink. But that didn't make a difference. Turns out it was something as simple as they way I was peeling it off. I won't make that mistake again twice.

After cleaning up, I went home and watched yet another Cardinals game. This time it was a 11-0 pounding from the Pittsburgh Pirates. It was very painful to watch. Fortunately, the Brewers and the Cubs also lost their games today, so it's like it didn't even happen.

In the afternoon, Alex took me to Wal-Mart with her so that I could do some grocery shopping. I'd been running out of things to eat, so I'm glad that I went. In addition to items for a half dozen meals, I also got a colander (yay!) and a blender. Now I can drain things and blend things. I'm very happy.

Read the rest of this story