Hi everyone! I'd like to apologize for my absence lately. I've been rather busy with life and a little busy with my linocuts, but not in the printing every week kinda way. I was out of town for a couple days in back to back weeks (on the days I'm usually printing) with my wife and spent another two weeks preparing for multiple upcoming shows that I had been accepted into.
I recently had five pieces in a local community show. Of those pieces, only 1 of them was matted and framed, all the others needed to be matted and I had to get frames for all of them. On top of that our roof had a small leak that managed to get onto the mat board that I already had and completely ruined it. Though matting and framing are generally not overly difficult, it does seem to take a good bit of time.
On top of that I have two pieces in a show that opens this Saturday in New York City at the Manhattan Graphics Center, another piece that needs delivered for a Southwestern Pennsylvania Art Show in Ligonier, PA and another piece that also needs delivered in the coming weeks to the Printworks 2018 show at Artist Image Resources in Pittsburgh, PA. I've managed to get myself into 7 juried exhibitions and a single community show this year...that's 3 times more than I usually enter and get accepted into. I hope that that is a sign that I'm getting much better at this art form.
Ice Cream - 20x16" Reduction Linocut
Since my last entry, I've printed two colors to this piece - the darkest yellow (on the image) and the light orange/yellow lattice work of the cone itself. I like my progress on this piece, but I am starting to question how it's going to turn out. This is the difficult part of this artform...I'm somewhere in the middle of colors that I want to print and the transformation of the image is slow, which causes me to question how it's turning out and whether I like how it is turning out. So far the jury is still out on this one....time will tell and hopefully I won't need to do a 3rd version of this piece.
My original version of this subject matter is still being worked on, but the more it's going on the more I feel like I'm just wasting my time with it. During my last printing, I decided to cut back the number of prints being worked on to 5 (down from 10). It takes about an hour and a half to print ten of these pieces, so printing 20 takes almost 3 hours. I don't know how much longer I'll continue on with the original, but so far it's still surviving...though it's on life support.
