Continued work on basement collagraph: 5 hours
Printing plate: 2 hours
Drawing: 5 hours
In the basement, there is a blue wooden door. It has two old metal locks, and I have to hit them with a hammer to knock it open. The steps are concrete, 3 of them, leading up to the storm door at the back of the house. There are spiders in the corners, and Dad kept beer on the bottom step, before we had a fridge in the garage. I tasted it once, on his lap at the kitchen table, I don't know how many years ago. He was playing cards with Mr. Jim, but the room was dark. It tasted gross, I thought so for a long time. But late at night, sometimes I come home and he's still awake, sitting at the kitchen table, a beer in his hand, an empty on the counter, and he'll ask if I want one. I'll say yes, and he'll pour it into a mug and tell me stories that I've never heard before. He'll tell me about the morning in May, that Grandpa died, how they carried his body out into the rain, let the sky pour onto him because that's what he would have wanted. He'll tell me about the drive down to Texas, when he was 19, pulling the trailer behind the rusty bronco, how Uncle Dominic flipped it going down a hill and wouldn't drive the rest of the trip. And there is still so much that I don't know, maybe never will, but I think the stories are still there, in corners and closets, in the cracks between floorboards, in the house that still stands above the blue door in the basement.
At the end of last week, I began working on this collagraph plate. While I was working on the plate, I did some free-writing about the memories that were surfacing in response to the image. To experiment with text, I carved my writing into the plate. Although it is not totally legible in the prints, the text does add an element of story. It makes the image seem a little creepy and unknown. I do enjoy the look of the text, but I'm not sure if it's fair to the viewer that it isn't fully legible. I think I need to keep playing with how to incorporate text with prints because I like how they work with one another.
I've also continued to draw images from my house, remembering the places I liked to be. I've been thinking about the spaces, kind of walking through my childhood home as if it were a dream. I'm amazed at how much these drawings have helped me remember my house the way I experienced it as a child, and I want to continue moving forward with them. My favorite image is the last drawing, of the bedroom I shared with my sister when I was young. This drawing feels completely right to me, the way I used to feel when I lived in that room. So I'm planning to make a print based on that drawing. I also want to look at some artists' books to help me think of ways to incorporate text.
Chrissy,
ReplyDeleteThe drawings have a haunting quality to them that evokes memory and dream because you have eliminated everything but the structures of the house. An important feature in these is the vantage point of the viewer. I particularly like, for example, the sixth drawing with the banister and the opening into the room because that experience of rounding the stairs and going into a room is so familiar, or of coming into the bathroom and seeing the bathtub, or of being between the two beds. I also like the close up perspective of the eighth one and think you should try more from that perspective. You might also try these as monoprints in black ink, working very much like the drawings, but in a subtractive method. Have you done that?You would retain the dark darks which are so important in the drawings. I’m not sure about the text. I tend to like the images by themselves, but that’s not to say that you couldn’t bring text into the work. For now, look at artist’s books and portfolios, keep drawing, writing and making prints. Then lets see what sparks go off when you connect what you’re doing to what you’re seeing in the books.
Janie