Critique #1 (Nicole & Jenna)

I just got back from a lovely dinner with my Tamarind friends (minus Yuli who has been besieged with dental problems). It always amazes me that I can spend 60 hours a week in the studio with these kids and still want to hang out with them afterward. But as Valpuri put it, "It's not like we have any other friends here."

Everyone else (again, minus Yuli), unwound after a long and stressful first project by going together to Bikram Yoga. While I don't mind occasionally doing yoga in the privacy of my own home, I'm not that interested in going with the others. I argue that my recent kidney donation prevents me from doing crazy hot yoga. But after a year and a half, that excuse is starting to wear thin.

Yoga or not, it did feel good to finally be done with these first projects. We had our critique this afternoon and it was nice to finally have all the artists and printers together so that we could see (and hear) what happened with the collaborations.

Nicole
My print with Nicole ended up being a CMYK print, but it was still quite a challenge. We did CMYK prints last semester, but I don't think I ever actually wrote in detail about them. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about... CMYK printing is what is usually used for newspapers and magazines and pretty much any other printed items. If you've ever looked on the bottom of a cereal box, you'll notice a calibration bar with four colors: Cyan (bluish), Magenta (hot pink), Yellow, and Black.

Below is an image I found on the fancy interwebs that illustrate this concept. On the left you see the different color separations. On the right you see how the image changes as the colors are printed on top of each other.



So Nicole had this image of a building that she wanted to use. It was very important to her to capture all of the different variations in the brick. She wasn't interested in hand drawing or working on the plates or stones directly. I suggested some different ways we could get where she wanted, but in the end she pushed for CMYK and that's what we did. Even though it seems like more of a commercial and maybe more of an easy way of printing, it was still pretty hard. My first problem was that the colors were too lean or transparent. The colors were mixing, but I wasn't achieving the right levels. Nicole was pretty disappointed with the first proof so I spent the next day making another one.

Here is Celina contemplating the prints. The one on the left is the second (darker) version of the print. The one in the middle is the first (lighter version) and the one on the end is just a mess-up where I printed the wrong ink on the wrong plate.



After discussing it with Rodney and Bill, I decided to leave all the transparent base out of the inks and just use opaque colors mixed straight out of the can. They were still printed pretty lean, but I was able to match the colors much more closely this way. We printed half of the edition on gray Rives BFK and half on white German Etching paper. I like the effect of the gray under the inks. Here is a closer look:



I was pretty happy when the edition was done:



Jenna
Jenna and I got off to kind of a late start. She was also working with Ana and they met before we did, so she kind of already had an idea of what she wanted to do. For me, she tried working with the tusche on the stone. This was the first version of her print (as it looked on the stone before etching):



After seeing the proof, she decided that she wanted to work into it a little bit more. So I counteretched the stone and she went back at it with more tusche, some litho crayon and some rubbing crayon. Which resulted in this (in ink on the stone):



This turned out to be just one run on gray Rives BFK paper in a blue-black ink. Jenna expressed some interest in maybe watercoloring over the print, but has yet to do so.

Otherwise...
Things are going well. Patrick and I spent about 20 hours in the studio this past weekend, and my little guest house was in shambles. I finally did my laundry, picked up my messes, went grocery shopping and found time to update this blog. It's nice to actually have some breathing room again. For the next collaborations, I have Nicole again, and then Karl. We have four weeks to complete the prints this time, which is nice. But I'm planning on going to the College Art Association conference in Dallas next week. So that will cut into the planning stages a little bit. Hopefully by the time I come back, my artists will have their ideas completely ironed out so that I can get cracking on the proofing.

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The (other) Mile High City

For most of the first semester, Patrick and I spent our Sundays watching the Packers on the big TV's at Howie's Sports Page in NE Albuquerque. However, there were a couple of weekends when Patrick abandoned me to spend time with his girlfriend Chelsey in Denver. Apparently, Denver has a Packer bar that puts Howie's to shame. According to Patrick, hundreds of Packer fans show up, Green Bay is the only team on the TV's, and the drunken bar owner sits up in a crows nest and leads the fans in Packer chants during commercials.

It seemed like a pretty exciting place, and I've never been to Denver, so when Patrick suggested that we should go up to Denver together sometime to visit Chelsey and watch a Packer game at the Best-Packer-Bar-Ever, I was all for it. Little did I know that Patrick and Chelsey were scheming to surprise me with a roundtrip airline ticket to Denver for Super Bowl Sunday! 

Despite the fact that both of us were pretty busy with our artist collaborations, Patrick and I set out for Denver on Friday afternoon.



The flight was short, but not so short that Patrick couldn't fall asleep on the way there. Chelsey picked us up at the airport and we dropped our things at her apartment. I was greeted by Chelsey's roommate's dog, Roo, who was very excited to meet me.



She was also excited to see Patrick. So excited, in fact, that she peed on Chelsey's bed. Awesome.

Chelsey lives near the capitol, and not too far from downtown, so we headed down that way to find somewhere for dinner.



It was a bit chilly, but we walked down the sparkly main drag and picked a restaurant randomly. The restaurant was a bit of a letdown, but we went home and saved the evening with a game of Monopoly. Patrick hadn't played since he was a boy, and I ended up winning with nearly $10,000 in my hand!



Roo slept with me on the air mattress which was weird and comforting all at the same time. Saturday morning we went to a City O' City for breakfast and enjoyed english muffins with tasty toppings and various baked items. I also had a hot chocolate which was one of the better hot chocolates I've had in a long long time. I guess I'm just used to Swiss Miss though, so my standards aren't too high.



Somehow it happened that Patrick's cousin and some friends were visiting Colorado from Wisconsin during this same weekend. We drove two hours SW from Denver to a cabin that they were staying in and hung out with them for the afternoon. Patrick and his cousin are like brothers from another mother.



The drive through the mountains was pretty and got even better the higher up we got.



Chelsey brought stuff to make Spring Rolls and after shoveling some snow and trying to heat up the cabin and enjoying the spring rolls, we all headed over to Mount Princeton Hot Springs Resort.



When Patrick talked about going to the hot springs, I was expecting something similar to the "Hepatitis Ponds" that the Tamarind kids frequently go to near Albuquerque. But this place was a lot fancier, with a changing and shower facility, real swimming pools filled with hot spring water, and then hot spring ponds nestled in next to a freezing cold river.





We skipped the pool and headed straight to the river, nearly killing ourselves as we tried to climb down the cold wet rocks and into the hot spots. It took a bit to transition from the cold into the hot water, but once we settled it was pretty great. The best part was when it started snowing on us. It was pretty surreal to be laying in a river in my swimming suit in the mountains with snow all around and snow falling on my face. I loved it. After the hot springs, everyone was pretty tired and relaxed. It was starting to get dark and we had a long drive through the mountains ahead of us, so we decided to take off around 5:30. 

When we got back to Chelsey's, I got right in to my pajamas and we ordered Thai food and played another round of Monopoly.



Patrick is one of the most competitive people I know and he was determined to give me payback for my $10K win the night before. Of course, he won.

Sunday morning we went to a restaurant called Watercourse. Watercourse and City O' City are apparently run by the same people and they were both delicious. We started with a crazy fantastic sampler appetizer and then I had the Buffalo Tofu sandwich, which turned out to be a little too spicy for me. Chelsey had pancakes with homemade granola and fruit and bananas and real maple syrup. It looked pretty phenomenal.

Of course, Sunday was Super Bowl day and we were a bit indecisive about where we wanted to go to watch it. It seemed a little depressing to go to the Packer bar if the Packers weren't in the Super Bowl. Also, we figured it would be crowded. So we ended up watching the game at a tavern down the street from Chelsey.



Despite their beating the Packers in the NFC championship game, Patrick and I were rooting for the Giants to win. Tom Brady and the Patriots just get under my skin a bit and I didn't want them to have a perfect season. Because I'm mean like that. Here I am savoring the Giants victory and Patrick is in a state of shock.



Our flight was early the next morning and then it was back to Tamarind for a week of crazy hard work.



I was a little nervous that I'd gotten behind during my trip to Denver, but I'm glad that I went. I had a great time.

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Inter-NOT

Today was pretty long and frustrating.

I stayed up late last night working on a photo file for Collaborator #1, trying to figure out how the heck was I supposed to make it into a print. We met at 10am and things were a little tense. After all my work trying to figure out how to piece the thing together, she reveals that what she really wanted was a print that looked exactly like the photograph. Now as far as prints go, I'd say that's not very exciting. There are lots of easier and cheaper ways to get that end result (digital printout, color copy, photo enlargement, etc.). But in the end, I agreed that if that's what she really wanted, I'd just do a giant CMYK print. It's still going to be challenging for me to print. It's just not as adventurous as most of the other collaborations going on.

At lunchtime I walked my rent check down to the bank to deposit in my landlord's clearing account (because apparently he's too busy to deposit the checks himself and this is supposedly more convenient for me somehow). Afterward, I went back to Tamarind and wandered around in circles for an hour or so... until the UPS guy brought my new shoes.

I don't buy shoes very frequently. I'd say I usually get at least two or three years of regular wear out of a pair of shoes before I find a new favorite. Anyway, Carrie and I are going to spend my Spring Break galavanting all over the Southwest (hitting each of the four corners: New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona). We're going to do a little bit of hiking around and I figured that it probably wouldn't be a good idea to wear my flat-footed-polka-dotted Vans slip-ons. So I ordered the cheapest, least ugly hiking shoes I could find on SierraTradingPost:



It's always strange wearing shoes that actually have support and some traction. I don't really see these working their way into the everyday wear category, but it'll be good to have them for that rare occasion when I do go outside.

After trying on my shoes and scaling my bar stool and breakfast bar in a climbing simulation, I worked on a new print. It's been a while since I made some art for myself. I've been getting so annoyed with not being able to work my collaborations, but I'm not really using all of this free time to get anything done. I had plates ready to go for my winter break but I never got around to using them, so I broke one out and started drawing on it. It was a self portrait... because I love myself. It's going to be a three run print with waxing and maybe a little embossing thrown in at the end. If it turns out good I'll post a picture.

I was so upbeat after finishing my drawing. It was nice to actually accomplish something. I was supposed to meet up with Collaborator #2 this evening, so I hurried to check my email before I left and was disappointed outraged to find that my internet stopped working AGAIN. Arghghghghghghghghhhghrrrghghrrggh. So annoying. I wasn't able to fix it before I left, but when I returned home I fiddled with the settings and got it to come back on.

Things at the studio went good. I got my artist going on her stone finally with some tusche washes. She is pretty mellow and understands that we're taking a gamble with these tusche washes. After a few quick test runs we pulled out her stone and she got to work on her landscape painting. It's kind of a depressing black and white fuzzy sort of thing. The tusche that she put down tonight looked good and I think she's hoping to finish it by the weekend. Meanwhile, Collaborator #1 will be bringing me the CMYK films for her print on Friday, so I'll be able to get busy next week after my return from Denver. Oh... I guess I didn't tell you about my trip yet. Maybe another time....

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One Week Feels Like Three Months

Artists

After our meeting with our artists last Tuesday, everybody was pretty fired up. What we didn't realize then was that most of us wouldn't even get to start working until the weekend. 

I met with my first artist on Thursday. We had a nice long visit at her studio and pinned down some solid ideas for her first print. Nicole does installations based on sites that she finds around Albuquerque. I initially thought we might work on some printed components for her installations. But I guess she would rather just make a print based on the photographs that she takes of her sites. She still needed to make a final decision for the exact image she wanted to work from, so we agreed to meet again on Tuesday, during our assigned class time to get started with things. 

Meanwhile, my other artist was missing in action for the better part of the week. She didn't return my calls or emails until the weekend. We finally managed to have a brief meeting on Sunday and I'm hoping she'll be in the studio tomorrow to get started. She is also working on a small print with Ana, so we have to go easy on her. For me, it looks like she'll be doing a smaller landscape on a stone primarily using tusche washes. That should be a blast to print if I don't completely burn it out while etching it. 

Demos

When we're not waiting around for our artists, we've been doing some demos on the flatbed press. The flatbed press is huge and German and is used mostly for monoprinting at Tamarind. I think we had one of these in the print production room at UW, but nobody really knew what it was for. I never saw anyone use it for anything besides a table.

Originally it was designed as a proofing press for newspapers and such, so that printers could check out their plates before they ran thousands of copies on their big machines. It was pretty cool to finally see the flatbed press in action. But it was a lot like letterpress in that it takes a long time to set up, just a few minutes to print, then an even longer time to clean up. 

Here are all of the rollers on the press. The rollers on the left are the inking rollers (with green ink). I think there around 13 of them. The blue thing in the middle is the big rubber blanket. And the red things on the right are the dampening rollers.

You put a piece of paper and an aluminum plate next to each other on the press. Here you can see Mick pulling a finished print out of the grippers. The printing plate is locked in to the right of it. 


The carriage with the big blue blanket roller passes over and the red dampening rollers wet the plate. The inking rollers drop down and ink the plate after it's wet. Then the carriage stops and goes the other direction. The blue roller drops down on the inked plate and picks up the image, then rolls around and transfers it directly to the paper. This is known as "offset" lithography. Because the plate never touches the paper. The ink is offset onto the blanket and then put on the paper. It's pretty cool. All of these guys seemed to think so:

We did one of the demos using Celina's plate. Here Mick and Celina are checking out one of the first prints we made with it:

Black Eye Update

This picture was taken on Friday. It was still swollen and starting to turn yellow all around my eye.

And this is me right this second. I think the swelling has gone down and it's not as yellow. But I still have a bit of red/purple there and the point of initial impact is still a bit sore. 

Weekend/Drawing

Patrick and Alex and I went to the movies Saturday night. On Sunday I worked on a drawing for Bill. Apparently they are going to the state capitol tomorrow to do demos in the rotunda. They needed a small stone to take with them... something cheesy and New Mexicoey. This is my drawing on the stone. The printed version has a bit more contrast. I'll post that as soon as I get a copy.

It's a roadrunner (the state bird) in front of the state capitol roundhouse with the zia symbol on the side. The zia is on the state flag and is a Native American sun symbol. The shadow under the bird is the Tamarind symbol. (Oh so incredibly awful). I called the print "Beep, Beep!" (after the Road Runner cartoon).  Sharon and Brandon printed up 30 of them this afternoon to give to various Tamarind donors and supporters. They borrowed a table top press from Takach and will be printing more of these tomorrow, I guess. 

Interwebs

The most awful thing happened Saturday night after I returned home from the movies. 

I couldn't connect to the internet!

How seriously awful. I mean, all I do is eat, sleep, go to Tamarind, and stare at my computer. Remove one of those things from the equation and my life becomes significantly more lame.

It was late when I came home so after an hour or so of fiddling with the wireless settings I powered it down and went to bed. I hoped it would fix itself by the time morning rolled around. But on Sunday I got up and it still wasn't working. Normally when something is broken, I just look up on the internet how to fix it. But it's hard to look up internet problems when you can't get online. For a good part of the day Sunday, I was trying to get the stupid thing to work. Apparently my wireless was working just fine. I could get signals from every router within a half mile. But I couldn't get an internet connection. I figured that there was just some minor setting that needed to be changed, or else it would just fix itself. I hardly ever have problems with my Mac which is why it's extra upsetting when things do happen. Anyway, after 36 hours without an internet connection I finally "fixed" it today. After running the various network diagnostics and setup assistants a million times, it just magically started working. Now I'm afraid to stop using it... 

LOST

My favorite show returns Thursday night and I don't have a TV to watch it! I have four options.

1. Buy a TV for LOST watching purposes.
2. Invite myself over to someone's (TV) house on Thursday.
3. Wait and watch LOST when it is posted on ABC.com
4. Not watch it at all.

Most likely I'll end up watching it at someone's house. Which will suck because not many people here share my love of LOST. And I'll probably end up having to explain everything and put up with snide remarks about the show, which is the last thing you want when it's the season premier and you haven't been able to watch the show in a million years anyway.

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Collaboration Station

Black Eye Update: 5:54PM Tuesday

Today started out like any other day at Tamarind. We all met up around 9am in the studio and talked with Rodney for an hour or so about the upcoming semester. Or more accurately, Rodney talked to us about the upcoming semester.

We had our Art History Class (History of Printmaking II) at 11am, so Rodney walked us over to our building. (Once outside Tamarind, we have no idea where we are.) The AH class was okay. Mostly just introductions. I've had a similar class before, so I'm hoping it won't be too taxing. It helps that the instructor is a former Master Printer. So at least she knows what's going on.

We had lunch together as a group and then Patrick accompanied me to the Financial Aid office to take care of my business. I swear, I don't know how many of you read my early early post about my Financial Aid Fiasco, but this semester has almost been worse. We had to wait a while, but somehow managed to get in and see the FinAid officer and run back to Tamarind before our 1:30 meeting with our Collaborative Class. I'm not used to running, much less running in high altitudes... so I was a black-eyed incredibly winded wreck when I arrived back at Tamarind.

It was exciting to finally meet with our collaborators for the semester. All of the collaborative students are in the graduate program at UNM. Some of them are printmakers, but it seemed like most were painters and drawers. There may have been a couple sculptors thrown in.

Rodney handed out a collaboration schedule. It appears that the semester is broken into four 3-4 week periods. During each period, we are assigned to work with one (or sometimes two) of the artists on an edition of prints. In the end, it looks like each printer will have to do six total editions, four of which will be 3-4 color runs and two of which will be 1-2 runs. 

So for the first collaboration, I am working with Nicole on a 3-4 run print (with 3 trial proofs) and I'm simultaneously working with Jenna on a 1-2 run print (with 2 trial proofs). Besides our Art History class, this is the only thing we have to do... so I'm hoping it won't be too hard to get in two projects at once. I mean, last semester we were cranking out more than an edition a week, so this should be manageable.

The hard part is having to coordinate schedules and meetings with your artist(s). From what I understand, there is the potential for a lot of down time. If you get a proof done and are waiting for them to come in and approve it, for example. Also, it's going to take a bit for them to get their ideas together. Some of them know what they want to do. Others are completely clueless. We're supposed to arrange meetings in their studios to discuss their work and get ideas on how to translate that into a print. 

Nicole and I pinned down a time to meet on Thursday morning. I'm still waiting to hear from Jenna. I think she's a little more wary of this whole process. Or maybe she's just wary of my black eye. Who knows. 

Either way, I'm excited to be back and working on things. I have nothing to do tonight except mourn the loss of Heath Ledger, so I might go grain a stone after dinner (before all of this enthusiasm wears off).

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Back In Action

My black eye and I welcomed Patrick back to town with a trip to the old Frontier restaurant. At least I have an excuse for looking rough. I'm not sure what's wrong with Patrick here (except for maybe that Packer-loss-hangover).

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Welcome to Albuquerque (again)

You know how you always try to make a good impression on the first day of classes? Or at least I always have. I think it goes back to when I was little. My mom would always get us dressed up in our nice new clothes and brand new school shoes. We'd have our shiny new lunch box and backpack, and an unbroken, unused box of Crayola Crayons.

In college, a lot of my friends would show up in pajamas for the first day of class. And even though I'm not known as the fanciest dresser, I'd be sure to at least be wearing an ink-free set of clothes to my first day of art classes.

So here I am, 28 years old and about to begin my second semester at Tamarind. I have an Art History class this semester with an actual teacher. Plus, we'll soon be meeting our grad student collaborators for the first time.

And while I have a new pair of jeans and a brand new notebook to take with me to class, I somehow think those things are going to go unnoticed...

BECAUSE I HAVE A F*#$*#*ng BLACK EYE!!!

No seriously.

I. Have. A. Black. Eye.



I'm sure you want to know how this could happen to someone as graceful as me. Click below to continue reading the account of this unbelievable feat.

It all started this afternoon as I boarded my plane in Saint Louis. I thought to myself... "Geez... I've got two bags, one of which weighs 50 pounds. And I'm planning on taking the BUS home? That's going to be annoying. I should just see if I can get a cheap rental car for the night. That way I can go grocery shopping and stuff and not have to worry about the bus or asking for rides."

So as soon as I landed in ABQ (a long boring flight surrounded by three babies and Santa Fe loonies), I called Carrie and asked if she could check on rental car prices for me. She found me a good deal with Enterprise and off I went to the rental car facility.

[SIDENOTE: Not before running into my Tamarind friend Yuli at the baggage claim. Apparently her ride had forgotten about her, so she used my phone and found someone else to come and get her. At this point, I still thought I was taking the bus or else I would have offered her a ride.]

The enterprise folks were nice and professional and walked me out to the KIA Spectra I had waiting for me. After doing a dent-check on the car, the nice gentleman started her up and directed me out of the lot. Now all I had to do was get in the car and drive away. Easy enough, right?

Apparently not.

I start to get in the car, but it's unfamiliar and the door is higher than I'm used to. I swing the door towards me as I lower myself into the car and the next thing I know I've smacked myself under the eye with the car door. I winced and grabbed my eye. There was an agent walking toward the car who may have seen it happen, but I pretended like nothing was wrong and continued into the car. I adjusted the rear view mirror so that I might see out the back window and also see my throbbing eye at the same time. There were two small scratches under my left eye and a small bump starting to form.



I kind of figured returning to Albuquerque would suck, but not this much.

The only cold thing in my fridge was the Mountain Dew I'd left for my arrival home. I "iced" my face until my skin stuck to the can and the pain went away.



I made a grocery list, went to Wal-Mart and just got home... only to discover my newly forming black eye. I bet it's going to look even better in the morning, on my first day of classes.

Running into a car door really isn't the best excuse. If you have any better ones, let me know. I'm thinking I might tell everyone I took a hockey puck to the eye. Or that I got in a fight with a Giants fan during the football game last night.

So many possibilities.

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