I'd rather be deal than no deal.

Fall in love and get your heart stabbed real good, ain’t nothing changed since Meister Casper carved this hand-coloured woodcut in 1485. Swiping right on this one.

BHP loves you, unter Vorbehalt.

* rear flyleaf (detail; 90ºccw; inverted; levels 40 .70 255) Wisconsin Geological and Natural History 36 (1916) University of Chicago copy, digitized March 23, 2011  

418 instances of driftless, in this document of loess, 56

sky, seven skies — sky and meadow mingle skyline in every direction

two clouds, but 38 coulds — could not be ascertained could possibly be could possibly do so, unless could not account could not otherwise exist could not do better than to hide among could not escape…

twelve losts — lost rocks lost their horses lost in the waters lost his way in the woods, near where

of meadow again, eleven — muck and meadow meadow land of good quality and meadows away and meadow mingle in the distant horizon

shadow, two which overshadow the grass hills upon deep shadows over the water, and going down

water, much (587 instances of)

and water’s edge, three — water’s edge, the women the water’s edge; higher up the hill slope

1,338 rivers (mostly names)

blue, 75 blues — variations of Blue Mound, mostly, but a blue till a blue wall, and a blue line against the sky

—

all tagged blue all tagged drift all tagged edges

Whistler at his press, 1903. 

This press backdrop theme is timeless, and probably as old as the first printing press (oooh, pose in front of that!) and still going strong today (y'all been on insta). If one did a quantitative analysis of artist portraits a pretty clear pattern would emerge: PRESS IN BACK: Oh, a printmaker. (Price of works drops a little). Wants us to know they get their hands dirty (not bad per se), are in touch with the craft (uhoh, very bad, prices whimper and settle in the low three digits of any denomination). NO PRESS IN BACK: Oh, a real artist. (BUT DO YOU EVEN PRINT yells the true printmaking community) SURE comes the reply, I make prints, but I humbly leave the difficult task of printing them to the amazingly skilled craftsppl I have the honour to work with (SUCH HUMANITARIAN the prices nod in raising approval, clearly an artist who is still in touch with the struggles of the working ppl)

(brb, taking selfie in front of first press I come across, crying)

HONORARY MENTION to all mokuhanga / woodcut printers with your baren / spoons. Couldn’t make up my mind whether y'all just TOO BROKE FOR REAL PRESS (and thus eligible for pity crowdfunding) or on some weird nontoxic zen yoga “art” trip and therefore completely irrelevant. Also: bonus points for everybody who mails me for reals artist portraits with baren visible. I did zero research.

But BHP, what if my pic shows me with printmaking paphernalia other than a press? Like my roller Bessie-Lou or my cool mezzotint knives? - Well, if the mezzotint knife pic isn’t in a TMNT pose a la Raphael about go Renaissance on someone, then you might as well be a car mechanic posing with a monkey wrench (JUST THAT CAR MECHANICS MAKE ACTUAL MONEY, ha!)

Bonus points for spotting the sadness in the eyes of printmaking academics in front of presses “I used to make my own art, you know? now it takes two lines and half a bottle to forget about the last round of crits, and then you remember about the mandatory faculty meeting, for which they’ve made me responsible for the minutes, which is just a thinly veiled payback for me voting down that dumb proposal about that…” (incoherent rambling continues)

Ian Burn ‘No object implies the existence of any other’ , 1967

‘Ian Burn began investigating the act of looking in the mid 1960s. In this work, text across a standard framed mirror quotes from the 18th-century Scottish philosopher David Hume. The original quote continues, ‘if we consider these objects in themselves, and never look beyond the ideas which we form of them’.

Mhmmm mhhhmmmm mhhhmm!

8 yummy closer looks at chine-colle prints of older (2013) plates of mine on Italian silk (see full prints minus silk: 33 | No Future, 33 | Black Cats and 33 | Intensity). I love how the ink sits on the fabric.  Pls note that the prints on paper were printed with warm Charbonnel 55981 ink, which I chose to leave a lovely plate tone, and the silk prints were printed with Charbonnel RSR ink, wiped rather hard for a cleaner feel of the overall print. Make what you will of that, I had a great time and discovered those scans today ;)    *orange dots courtesy of the high res scanner, didn’t notice them while working / before posting. Don’t have the prints anymore, so photoshop it is.

‘Red Window’

3 Colour Screenprint on Somerset Velvet

Andrew Magee

‘The Lost Domain’

3 Colour Screenprint on Somerset Velvet