Skip to main content

Day in Carson


I drove down to Carson City today on the new road connecting Reno to the capital city. It is only about an hour from my house, yet the landscape quickly changes from city to countryside. I still find the mountains breathlessly spectacular and the sheer hugeness of the valley is incredible.

In Carson, I dropped in on Galen Brown, an artist of many talents. He has one of these incredibly creative minds that can build something from nothing and make crap become an item of beauty. Anyway, Galen had some sheets of museum grade plexiglass used for framing for me to use for drypoint etchings. He cut the sheets into small pieces of around 8 x 12 inches. I then left him to get ready for his upcoming Open Studio tour over at Hunter Point in San Francisco.

While in town, I drove over to meet another artist printmaker called Carol Brown. Carol specializes in Japanese Moku Hanga prints and is currently getting ready for a show in the Fall. I was excited to see her progress on her woodcut blocks as she is my wood carving mentor. Carol has studied under Japanese masters in Japan, as well as many experts in the field here in America. We had lunch and looked over her blocks until it was time for me to leave and pick up the kids from school.




The road to reno



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Encaustic Monoprint Technique

Today I visited a printmaking friend's studio. Amy is experimenting with encaustic monoprints. I have never heard of this before so I was excited to have a demo. Here is the basic process: 1. Heat up the homemade heat box. 2. Rub the beeswax pigment sticks on the metal surface of the heat plate to melt them. Create a design on the plate with one or more colors. Step 3. Lay a piece of rice or rag paper face down on the painted design and cover with newsprint. Burnish. Step 4. Carefully pull the paper away from the heat plate. Steps 5-6. Clean the heat plate with paper towels. Add more color to the heat plate and repeat the process to add patterns or more color to the print. The smell of the wax is yummy and the pigments are really thick and rich to work with. I had a little play to get a feel for what the print is like (image below). Now I want to build a heat box and play!!
5 comments
Read more

A Sort of Artist's Statement

This is a sort of artist's statement, but far more boring and long-winded. My current form of blogging is to limit the text to as little as possible. I am lazy when it comes to writing and the blog tends to trickle off when I feel the pressure of having to add words to the pictures. I hung my exhibition yesterday, so today I will ramble a little about the reasoning behind it (and to help me get over the guilt for hardly writing anything in the last couple of months). Please feel free to skip the words and look at the pictures!   For a long time after moving to America, I found it difficult to process who I had become and the new meaning of home. I was English, yet found the American "English" language a challenge. This culture that in many ways was similar to my own, is in other ways completely opposite and confusing. I still often experience a shock by a sudden feeling of otherness and a perhaps a reminiscence for the past, yet I relish the possibility of ne...
4 comments
Read more

Longest day

I spent the day at the studio sorting out some piles of mess and racing outside to see if the water to the pond was flowing. The sorting was hard to focus on and the water never arrived. The anticlimax was excruciating! Hopefully the water will arrive tomorrow! This is all that is left from last years fill, the fish and I are very miffed!
2 comments
Read more