Studio 546 One Night Art Show

This last weekend (April 26) I was invited to participate in an art exhibit in a newly opened gallery space, Studio 546 in Cedar City Utah. I was 1 of 3 artist featured in this show, the 2 other artists are classmates of mine Zane Anderson and Jordan Green.

I was excited to showcase my work, its been a few years since I have shown my work in a place where the public could see. Most of the time my work is only seen my classmates and teachers, and my mom :D. I am trying to make a presence online through different social media sites like Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, DeviantART, my personal website and Blogger, but like most art its more impressive when you see it up close and in person. So I was really grateful and excited for the opportunity.

Days leading up to the show, I was busy in the studio working on framing and matting my artwork.... man, it almost takes as long preparing your work for a show as it does creating the work itself! If I could offer a tip to any other up and coming artist, make sure you leave yourself plenty of time (a week at least) to matte and frame your work especially if you're going the inexpensive root by making your frames yourself. And it is a money saver! Last weekend I matted and made 5 frames which cost me about $200 for all of the materials, but at the very least it would have cost me $200 per frame if I had gone to a professional matte and frame company! So making your own frames is a big money saver, just FYI, leave yourself plenty of time to get them all done so you're not stressing out right at the end.

The new art space is in an old Pillsbury mill that the gallery owner is renting out. The outside maybe doesnt look that great to some people but he has done some amazing work to the inside! From tile floors, wood trim around the house, solid wood beams and open spaces in many parts of the building. When I first walked through the space I was jealous that I didnt see it first and turn it into my personal studio.

The art exhibit went great! I was really pleased with the turn out we received and the feedback I got from the public. Unfortunately the show was only for one night, so its no longer on display but what I considered the to be the highlight of the night was just seeing people I didnt know come and view my art and make comments about what they liked about it. It was fun to ease-drop on people sometimes and hear them connect with some things in my artwork. I heard a few people say "I feel like that all the time" as they looked at "Distractions" (my relief print with all the different hands holding different items representing different distractions that seem to distract in life like money, due dates, family and work.) It was nice to hear people making connections!

I had 5 pieces in the show (from left to right) "Distractions" "Less Think, Do More" "Self Portrait" "Courage Even in Darkness"  and "Between Life and Death." The popular piece of the night was "Courage Even in Darkness" That is the one people seemed to respond to the most, and I was grateful to hear it, so this summer I am planning on creating a few more Intaglio pieces to put in my portfolio.

My next show will be in July at The Grid, a local coffee house in Cedar City Utah, and it will be up for a month so this was a good preparation for my next show.

4 Color Test Print

These last few days I've been working on a new test print. I mentioned before that I'm enrolled in a few painting classes and for our new assignment we have to do a painting "in the style of an old master." Again I talked with my teacher to see if it would be okay to do a print with oil painting integrated into it. Again she agreed. Yessss! (Painting is okay, but I love printmaking more...) 

So the artist I chose to do my print/painting from is Gustav Klimt. I really like how most of his image is flat and a lot of implied textures with shapes but then the figure's face and arms are rendered more life like. So I wanted to create a piece that was similar to his style but as a print. 

The other thing I wanted to try this time was using multiple matrices (the sintra I carve my image into) and print it in a similar way a inkjet printer would. In simpler terms, an inkjet printer has 4 colors inside it; Yellow, Magenta, Cyan, and Black and when those colors overlap on top of each other you get the other various colors like your greens and purples and oranges. That is what I wanted to do with this text print, but manually. 

I have never done a multiple print like this before so instead of just diving head first into a large piece I decided to do a smaller text print first to try it out. So that's what you're looking at now. 

After carving each matrix (4 in total) for a few days I got ready to test it out. 

Here is the yellow print coming off the press.

When doing a multi-colored print, I always print the lighter color to the darker color.

Then I printed the red ink on top of the yellow. Now you can start to see that the yellow coming threw the red makes it look more like an orange color.

Now for the blue.

Now its really starting to stand out. I planned it so the figure would be more yellow/orange and the back ground would be blue/purple to give it contrast.

Then lastly I added black to accent certain parts. Over all the image looks great (well I think so, it turned out how I wanted it to) and I really like the secondary colors that were created by the overlapping primary colors.

And there is my finished piece. I made an edition of 8. 

You can seen where I ink up my matrices and each of the colored inks.

Like I mentioned this was just a test print to see if I could get this process to work before I tackled a larger print. Now that it has, I will start carving my actual piece to show in my painting class.