Journal and Sketchbook Class, Final Projects

Marlo Koch, handmade marionettes

Yesterday was the final day of the Journal and Sketchbook class for the spring semester, taught by me and Patty in the Columbia College Chicago Fiction Writing department. Last week and this week, the students presented their final projects: reading aloud 4 pages from their final written movement, and showing and talking about a visual project that speaks to the writing in some way. The students in this class ranged from people early in their college careers, to about-to-be-graduates; people from different majors within the college; and people with widely different skill levels in terms of art and also writing.

Patty and I agree that the writing was very strong, and that the quality of all the visual pieces was equally high, and invariably took us by surprise in a positive way. There was lots of 2D work, comprising a variety of media, multiple panels, using text and image. There was a painting on a scroll. There was a canvas that had bits of mirror stuck to the surface. There were a number of three dimensional objects, too - probably the most we've seen for final presentations. Amy Crumbaugh's clay doll inside a cardboard coffin was amazing; Victoria Ross' dream-catcher metal hoop was great; and Marlo Koch made a set of marionettes, which she then used in a film that she made on her Iphone and projected in class. That pretty much brought the house down in class, and made the semester really end with a bang.

Full details of the students' names, and their pieces, are contained in the following slideshow:

If you want to try this combination of writing and drawing, too, you can join us at Shake Rag Alley in Mineral Point, Wisconsin, for a weekend workshop in June.

Additions

A few weeks ago, I was considering breaking this big piece up into smaller units. But now I have decided actually to make it much bigger, by adding the cigar box prints that were left lying around during the last 10 years.  If I am never going to sell this piece, I might as well make it the most impressively unsellable thing that I have ever made.

Journal and Sketchbook Class, Columbia College Chicago, 2013 final days

Below is a slide show of pictures that I took in the Journal and Sketchbook class last week. The students are from Columbia College Chicago, and they include people majoring in fiction writing, art & media management, and art & design. Some of them have next to no art training, and some have quite a lot. All of them showed that in the last 14 weeks, their consideration of text and image close together in their sketch-journals has led to new ways to see their writing (mainly, as this is a writing class) and also their visual work. Thank you to the students who made this class a pleasure: Victoria Ross, Amy Crumbaugh, Lauren de Groot, Danielle Dissette, Aiden Weber, Alex Holly, Marlo Koch, Ashton Ball, John Davis, and Liz Major.

Six of the Best, Part 27

Interviewee number 27 in this series is painter Nancy Charak, who is one of my studio mates in the Cornelia Arts Building, Chicago, to which I moved two months ago. (Previous interviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26). Her work caught my eye because of its force and expressiveness. If you live in Chicago, you can see her work at an upcoming open studio -- after which she is moving out to the western United States. Last chance, Chicagoans!

"Orpheus & Eurydice_12," 8" x 8", watercolor on clayboard

Philip Hartigan: What medium/media do you chiefly use, and why?

Nancy Charak: For the last three years mostly watercolor on paper and on birchwood panels. I have worked in oils and acrylics on paper, panel and canvas and enjoyed the work I produced. But watercolor is my natural medium of late. I prefer to work on paper or panel, and I work much less often on canvas. I like to work into the watercolor while it is both wet and dry with pencils and other marking tools, the paper and panels display more details and sublety than rougher toothier canvas.

Philip Hartigan: What piece are you currently working on?

Nancy Charak: I am actually staring at a 36” x 36” canvas that I had set aside because I couldn’t decide if it was finished or not. Also there is a 30” x 22” watercolor on panel that is waiting to be worked on, but that one is not in the “don’t know if it’s finished” category, it definitely needs more. And, episodically, on sketchbooks.

"Snowmass," 48" x 48", watercolor, graphite, prismacolor on 140# Fabriano Artistico

Philip Hartigan: What creative surprises are happening in the current work?

Nancy Charak: My sketchbooks are a surprise to me. Even more surprising and delightful is how well they’ve been received. For the longest time I shied away from sketchbooks, thinking that each page had to be special and that notion got in the way. Then I saw how Darrell Roberts and Ruyell Ho go at their sketchbooks. They work unselfconsciously with elan and joy. I realized that was the same process I use on my other paintings, so I just eliminated that mental thing about fear of sketchbooks.

Let me add one another note about sketchbooks. I had a chance to go through a large number of Judith Roth’s sketchbooks, spanning her entire artistic endeavors. Judith, for all that she is totally a figurative artist who cannot work without a live model in front of her, is also unselfconscious with her sketchbooks. She avoids worry about proper fit or composition, she just dives in. Sometimes, there’s a sketch where the foot or some other body part falls off the page, that doesn’t bother her, she just flips and goes to the next page.

The sketchbook lesson or creative surprise is not only about being unselfconscious, but about quantity, about constantly being engaged in making art.

Philip Hartigan: What other artistic medium (or non-artistic activity) feeds your creative process?

Nancy Charak: I read a lot, voraciously. At the age of seven my father taught me how to speed read. I have a passion for big stories, King Arthur going from Star Wars back to Geoffrey of Monmouth, Beowulf battling the monsters from the dark underworld, the new Battlestar Galactica which is quite simply the Aeneid on a giant space borne aircraft carrier, the buddy story in its migration from Gilgamesh and Enkidu through Sam and Frodo to Thelma and Louise. And of course, I’m now totally in thrall to Game of Thrones.

"Realization," 30" x 22", watercolor, graphite, prismacolor on 140# Fabriano Artistico

Philip Hartigan: What's the first ever piece of art you remember making?

Nancy Charak: I honestly can’t answer that. My father was an artist, my mother had an artistic soul, my brothers and I grew up in a house that had music, paintings, photographs in it as a matter of course. No one ever demanded that we color in between the lines. We had paper, pencils, crayons always.

Philip Hartigan: Finally, and you can answer this in any way that's meaningful to you: why are you an artist?

Nancy Charak: I suppose I could answer with one of those philosophical explanations about some sort of feedback loop. It took me a long time to actualize the difference between worrying about being an artist, and just making art. The latter is a much easier posture.

At some level and in some place in an artist’s psyche is the willingness to step into the unknown. This kind of courage is not necessarily a drive to produce something totally unique, but to see if that frontier can be approached. At times it seems like a quest, a search, a journey, and perhaps like Gilgamesh, we don’t find any answers, but just get to ask the questions.

If you liked this interview, and you'd like to keep up to date with the series, why not Subscribe, or sign-up via Google Connect, using one of the options over on the right? Thanks, and keep creating.

From the Studio

I was at the Art Institute of Chicago last Thursday, taking students around a few exhibitions, including the great Picasso show. The centerpiece of the Picasso exhibition, at least for me, is the section devoted to complete sets of his prints from the twenties and thirties -- the Vollard Suite, the etchings based on Ovid's "Metamorphoses," and Balzac's "Le Chef d'Ouevre Inconnu." There's nothing like intaglio printmaking for the variety of lines and marks and the range of tones you can make. So over the weeked I got together some materials in my studio and did something I haven't done in ten years: an etching and aquatint intaglio print.

I started with a steel plate, upon which I painted a 'coal circle' (see previous posts) design using a sugarlift solution. My recipe for sugarlift, by the way: 2 parts corn syrup, 2 parts washing up liquid, one part india ink. The washing up liquid causes the line to smear and break up, and it also captures the brush marks very well:

When the drawing was dry, I covered the whole plate with a thin layer of hard ground. After that was dry, I immersed the plate in a tray of warm water. The sugar lift solution then starts to dissolve, helped along by gently brushing the marks.

 

I drew some smaller shapes into the hardground on the edges of the plate, using a sharp etching needle. And I drew over the circles in oil pastel, another form of resist that will break down in varying stages when it's etched, in order to produce a variety of tones:

For good measure, I aquatinted the entire plate using an acrylic based resist and a spray bottle (normally I would use an airbrush, but this isn't currently available to me). The spray leaves a dot pattern over the exposed areas, which ensures even, dark tones once the plate is etched:

I placed the steel plate in a tray of ferric chloride, a slow-biting mordant (it's not an acid, really), for about thirty minutes. I washed the ferric chloride off under the tap, cleaned off the various resists, and this is how the plate looked:

It's actually not the result I expected, but it's still good. I thought that the circles would print much darker, or that the spaces between the etched and unetched areas might be smaller. I think that it came out like it did for a few reasons: I could have etched it for longer in the ferric chloride; the spray from the bottle produced drops that were a little too big; and despite my fears that the acrylic and oil pastel resists would break down too quickly, they in fact worked too well. All information that a printmaker stores up for future prints.

I took two proofs from this plate, one of which came out in a very satisfactory way. I might do another round of sugarlift and aquatint on it, and some drypoint. Final note: I forgot how much time this all takes! Including all the drying and waiting time (during which I worked on other things), this plate took ten hours to get to the stage where I could take a print from it. 



At the Chicago Art Institute today

So today I took 10 students to the Art Institute of Chicago as part of the Journal and Sketchbook class. I asked them to look at work in the American art galleries from the nineteenth century to the middle of the last century. The main reason for this is that these pictures are mainly concerned with stories containing narrative content, which are relevant to this class. The following are some of the paintings the students picked to talk about. Two of them, I can't remember the names of the artists, but they include work by Sargent, Cassatt, Whistler, and Ivan Allbright.

Recycling

Today in the studio, I'm starting  by making a 12 page folded book from a single large etching that I made maybe 10 years ago. The actual medium was sugar lift aquatint on a steel plate. Trim, cut, and fold, and voila.

Six of the Best, Part 26

Part 26 of an interview series in which I pose the same six questions to artists of all types, to find out their individual mechanisms of creativity (previous interviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25). This interview is with Seth Friedman, a sculptor living in the Pacific northwestern United States. I first encountered him via Twitter, a sort of throw-away social medium that led me in fact to a website full of work that combines hefty materials like stone with real wit.

"I Like Arabia and Arabia Likes Me," 2011, Persian travertine, 14" x 22" x 17"

PH: What medium/media do you chiefly use, and why? 

SF: I feel like Richard Simmons’ to rocks: pretty much any kind will do. My special affection is saved for marble (Italian Carrara/Iranian red Travertine, if possible) and granite found in rivers, people’s side yards close-to-the-street, and highway rest stops. I occasionally cast the carved forms in brass or bronze to explore the potentials of hollowness and/or raccoon-envy (shininess). There is nothing I’d rather be doing than carving. That said, I have almost no access to where the forms come from, a consideration that leaves me constantly stupefied, grateful, and desirous for more.

PH:What piece are you currently working on?

SF: I just started on an 800lb block of Yule marble (used for the Lincoln Memorial). I am somewhere between easy joy (in hammer swinging I could be mistaken for a smaller, scrawnier, Jewish John Henry) and freakish doubt (at whether it will go anywhere). It is the same story every time.

"Hi Shit Her," 2012, Calcite, 9" x 12" 5"

PH: What creative surprises are happening in the current work?

SF: I have been carving white marble for the last two years. I hate white marble now. This has led me to think a lot about how to deface, or leave defaced (usually the stone has writing/surface markings on it from the quarry/transport) the end-result. 

PH: What other artistic medium (or non-artistic activity) feeds your creative process?

SF: I guess I should confess to being a book polygamist (right now: Thomas Merton, No Man is an Island; Sue Coe, Malcolm X; Mark Strand, Reasons for Moving; Henry Miller, Selected Essays; and J.Crew (only partially kidding)). Dissecting how I read, and trying out new word forms and letter spacing to violate the process, fills many of my quiet moments.

"Oh Charlie Brown Charlie," 2013, Carrara, 10" x 28" x 16"

PH: What's the first ever piece of art you remember making? 

SF: Until I was 38, I never tried making anything that might be called art.  In 2008, thanks to severe malaise and my wife's constant prodding, I carved a rock from our backyard. I am still amazed that (a) the result did not suck, and (b) the waking door to my recurring dream (a house under the house under a house) was accessible. Since then my family/dear neighbors have tolerated the noise, debris, occasional cursing, and my confusion/elation. Blessings.  

PH: Finally, and you can answer this in any way that's meaningful to you: why are you an artist?

SF: When I was a little kid, I sat in the classroom and heard adults talk about their jobs/life. I thought that being a fireman/policeman/doctor/adult would feel like I imagined it, embodied. Then I got to adulthood and wondered where the magic went. I found it again in making art. 

If you liked this interview, and you'd like to keep up to date with the series, why not Subscribe, or sign-up via Google Connect, using one of the options over on the right? Thanks, and keep creating.