Today was the second day of school for the semester! I spent an hour or so at home with a glass of OJ and the world wide web. I was researching contemporary book artists and printmakers. I was also looking up some general information on some of my most recent interests. Last night I created a general outline for my semester to get my brain flowing toward my proposal for both printmaking and ceramics. The lovely Brian Harper, my ceramics professor, has many links on claybucket.com to help get the electromagnetism of the brain firing. I chose five of his projects to complete this semester: mixed media, no base, one source, duality, and bifurcate. These will be explained more as I progress through the semester. As for printmaking, I have a lot of ideas, and I am still sorting through all of these. My main focus is circles and/or spheres.
Today at school I mapped out a loose plan for a color separation monotype. I started a collagraph, using gesso on a canvas board that I will use as a print matrix. I also revisited the paper nests that I was making last spring, except this time I made a sphere. I mostly did it for fun just to see if it would work the same way, and in fact it did. they are surprisingly stable and they are fun to play with. They almost remind me of maps of communication or flight patterns; connections from one point to another.
I also started to bind a journal that I am calling my "feelings" journal. this is a personal project that has nothing to do with school. There are no rules with what I can put into this journal. The basic idea is to ALWAYS have it handy, so whenever I am feeling some kind of strong emotion that I can just pull it out and make marks in it that correlate with my current emotion. I can put any thing from words, to color, to lines, shapes, general mark making, anything that helps me express the emotion I am feeling. I am showing the lower level printmaking students how to start binding a journal tomorrow morning, so this will be a good example of a journal "in process." Pictures coming soon, stay tuned.
