Cricketts Inky Art Blot

As a Nada Dada artist, I was disappointed that I was unable to get enough work together in time for a Nada Dada spin off exhibition called NadaGras later this month. I had worked on a few pieces, but did not have enough for a cohesive show. I had been working with some older raven paintings and relief prints and incorporating Ouija images. Maybe I will continue with the work combined with a performance, to use at the Summer DaDa Show. Here is one of the tradigital prints I had made in consideration for the exhibition:

I have been working on a ton of tradigital pictures over the last 2 or 3 weeks. I had 145 proofs printed over the weekend and excitedly picked them up this morning. I have picked a handful out to be 20 x 30 photos and about 20 to be 8 x 10 photos. Tradigital art is where a computer generated image has been formed from a traditional fine art piece as it's base. I used some of my oil paintings and hand carved fine art prints as my foundation image and digitally altered them to make the final piece of work. I'm really excited about this work and the direction it is taking me in. My influences and inspiration for this work come from art movements from the late 19th Century and early 20th Century. Here are the sneaky peaks: These are going to be 20 x 30 prints:

I'm working on the peacock paintings at the moment and some relief prints. I am slowly filling in the shapes and colors of the paintings, starting from the top and working down with each color. I'm grouping them with my 8 color reduction cut relief print. Also a feather linocut and painting, both in their early stages. The linocuts below are variation experiments based on the imagery above. It still feels like I am a long way to completion, but hopefully they will pull together fast at the detail stage.

Moving on slowly but surely. I am having fun mixing up the paint. There is something very sensual about paint mixing and the smell of linseed oil is simply heaven! It is difficult to see progress, but I am hoping that the paintings will all come together quickly towards the end. In other news, the pond is now full :-) but full of sticks and blossom after the heavy winds last night :-(

I don't know why, but I go back and forth over whether my work will be good enough to show. Maybe this is what every artist feels or maybe it is me being unbalanced. I have always been this way. When I was still a student in art school, I burnt pretty much an entire years work thinking it sucked and smashed the ceramic sculptures I had to hand. Lucky for me, half the sculptures were in storage at the school. I had not documented the paintings and wish to this day that I had. I don't know if it is nostalgia, but I think back to that work and think it was the best I have ever done. Too bad, too sad as my kids say. Next month is NadaDada and I am nowhere near finished. Actually, not one single piece is finished. Why am I so lame at deadlines? I wonder if it is possible to fill 2 rooms of a gallery with just a month to go. I have been thinking of different ways to fill the room, or to paint abstracts that could be knocked out fast... My integrity is better than that I hope, bu...

After the face disaster, I started a new painting. This painting will be a sister to the fish zeppelin and will be a fish submarine! They are both obviously inspired by Jules Verne, but also the collages of Braque and Schwitters. It is still in the first stage, but the composition is pretty much down. The other painting in the series that I worked on today is of Lady Penelope's carpet bag. It also has the same composition treatments of the last few paintings and prints that I am currently working on. I used to paint one oil painting at a time, waiting days between each color before resuming work. This was very boring and I often abandoned work before completion. Now I try to work on two or three paintings at once. Working in oil paint on a number of paintings at once, helps keep the inspiration strong and encourages style similarities between each. This time around, I have 5 on the go, yay!

I got myself out of a rut that was setting in by painting a Monty Pythonesque fish zeppelin. It's coming along nicely and is probably my favorite painting of this series of work so far. I posted a fish snippet onto Milliande to get a little feedback, so it will be interesting to see what the folks there think. I have not finished, but I am certainly done for the night :-) Whilst working on this, I have had a second painting on the go to keep me busy while the paint is drying. Location: Twin Lakes Studio

I had printed this miniature with 5 color layers over the past couple of weeks, yesterday I added an extra layer of white to soften the edges of the feather. In the background you can see some of the second version alarm clock prints. I have also started playing around with images to make these digital prints. The glasses are a reoccurring theme.

Last week I had printed a small print to go with the relief cut series. Part of this was carved with "Softkut", an eraser type of material that is stamped rather than hand rubbed. I had also printed a small white circle made from precut relief carving block, also by stamping. Today I added a clock face to the bottom corner, over the top of the white. I am thinking of exhibiting this for Artown this July. I am helping to organize an exhibition at Wildflower Art Village for the Printmaker's Conspiracy and have quite neglected the fact I need to put some prints of my own into it! The weather is cold this morning, but I see a few signs of Spring from the window.

Due to impatience, I was unable to wait until the prints were truly dry enough to overlay with more ink. I only needed to add white to the hour glass at this point, so I threw caution to the wind and printed. I think they survived the ordeal relatively unsmudged. I am particularly pleased with the slight 3D effect. I hoped that it would work, but results are inconsistent. The pace is pretty intense at the moment and I find myself pretty tired each night from printing by hand. I have considered more than once in the last few days, that it is time to think about buying a press. I usually find the labor quite Zen like, but it is a killer when there is a deadline!

I signed up for Nadadada 2012 at Wildflower Village earlier this week. I have been spending time sketching and playing with the colour wheel, coming up with plans for this exhibition that shows in June. I was originally going to paint a series of temples, starting with Stonehenge and ending with a Burning Man temple. Since playing in the sketchbook, I have changed my mind and will now probably do a mixture of painting and printmaking of a more frivolous nature. The scenery outside the studio window was very drab and grey today. The pond has now fully dried up and snow in on the forcast. Perhaps that will keep me in the studio working as I come up with my plans.

I guess I am pretty useless at keeping up a blog, about the same as I ever was with a diary. Ah well, I am who I am. Last Winter I taught an introduction class to printmaking. It was fun and I made some good friends along the way. My biggest news was to move out of the community art studio and moved into my OWN studio! I am still not organized in there yet, mostly because I moved in and through myself into making a large body of work for an exhibition at NadaDada, Reno. I ended up living in my studio for nearly 3 months painting day and night. Great for the work production, lousy for family relations. NadaDada 2011 was held in June and my venue was in Wildflower Art Village, Reno. Maybe I will write about it sometime and post up a few photos. The project was based upon the disaster in Fukushima, Japan. Straight after I flew out to England where I spent the Summer with my family and saw as much as I could of my old homeland. On my return, I was finishing up my painting pr...

The cat is out of the bag with my naughty Nada painting. Here is the full painting and an interview that is part of a documentary being made for Nada Dada 2010. Untitled, 2010, acrylic on board, 8ft x 4ft. Double Click on the YouTube link to see fullsize video