Woodland Tales

We took the dog to his favourite park today and got a surprise.  Heading along the trail leading into the woods we ran into "Hollywood North" and found, tucked in among the trees, several fairyland style cottages.  

We didn't have the camera so these are cell phone pictures and they didn't all turn out, the exposures were wrong, but you can still get an idea.  Apparently there's going to be a feature film shot there over the next few weeks so this is all in prep and it's clearly still not done. It was actually kind of cool seeing the forest transformed into a set for a little while.  I've got to say too, it's a lot nicer to have the filming going on in the forest than on the street in front of our bedroom windows.  

Several summers ago they filmed some cheezy horror about a demented clown (what else?) on the street in front of our house for three nights.  From midnight until three in the morning.  A couple of weeks before they started, they sent around a tanned, bikini-clad cutie with a winning smile to get consent for the filming from all the people on the street.  Seriously, no one would've been able to say "no" to her once those white teeth flashed.  The guy next door was so charmed he even allowed the crew to set up their giant reflectors in his back yard. 

A few weeks later we were going to sleep under the glare of an artificial sun mounted on a crane in the neighbour's yard and, on the last night, the tear-down kept us up til dawn.  I think the guys who were loading the stuff back on the truck, parked just outside our open bedroom window, were making a game of who could throw all the metal bits into the truck from a greater distance... 

Anyway, finding the little fairy story huts in the forest today was much nicer than the demented clown time. 

Keeping along with the woodland theme, I think I finished my latest print.  I say "I think I finished" because I'm still on the fence about adding in one last bit of dark brown.  But I'll have to see how I feel about it over the next week.  In any case, now that it's done (or almost done), here's the back story.  

A few summers ago we spent a week in a rented cabin on Texeda  Island.  Our stay there already spawned two prints in the past so this latest one is the third.  I've had the photo I used as inspiration sitting on my desk for all these years, waiting for the day it would be a print.  The name, the obvious name, was pretty much settled right from the start. 

The last two colours are here:

 Driftwood Madonna

(Reduction Linocut - 8 X 9.5 inches)

I'm annoyed with myself for not making her recline more in my version; I didn't really notice it until it was too late.  But there's no way to change that now so it'll have to go down as one of those bugs.  And I guess we'll see next week if those are really the last two colours. 

 

Springing Along

Finally, after we’d all had just about enough of waking up to gloom and rain for far too long, Spring arrived in town this past weekend.  Just in time for Easter.  

I had a five day weekend and an ambitious list of stuff I hoped to accomplish but I actually managed to get through almost all of it.  Of course, getting more printmaking time than I normally do was one of my must-do’s and I got three printing sessions in. 

Here are the three new stages in my latest print: 

Two colours left to completion.  Oh boy!

Rub a Dub Dub?

I've made some progress on my latest print over the past few weekends.  My first couple of passes involved an area so small there seemed to be little sense in dragging the press to the kitchen.  Instead, I resorted to my pseudo-baren, a glass flat-bottomed tealight holder from IKEA, and went to work.  The tealight holder works well enough for the area I was printing but I sure wouldn't want to print an full-size print that way.  Even with as little rubbing as I had to do, my arm was tired by the end of it and, once again, I felt more than a little respect to all the printmakers who print by hand.  I'm betting they get very well defined forearm muscles.

It's also been a bit tricky figuring out which order to print the colours in and I ended up getting using a couple of masks to eliminate overprinting in some areas.  At this point though I believe I've got a good idea of what comes next and I'm liking the way the print is evolving quite a bit.  I've been using oil paints mixed together with Georgian printmaking medium because this mixture gives a more translucent result than my usual Daniel Smith ink. (Here's a link back to some tests I ran with different inks). The drawback to the oil paint/printmaking medium is the smell.  

Nora says it smells like pumpkin but that's putting a positive spin on it.  It is a sort of sweet smell and initially seems ok but, in a house the size of ours, eventually there isn't a room it doesn't end up pervading and it becomes cloying.  So for today's printing I still used oil paints but added them to some Graphic Chemical ink extender and the smell issue is resolved.  Whether the translucence I'm after will still be there is an unknown at this point and time will have to tell as I move forward.  

For now, here's how it's been building so far: 

 

Burning Down the House (Almost)

A week ago last Thursday, in the early afternoon, my parents left a pot on the stove and forgot about it.  Their kitchen filled with smoke and then their living room filled with smoke and at some point the smoke detector went off.  Only the night before they burnt a pot of wild rice (my father thought it was tea he was making) and set off the smoke alarm so you'd think they'd connect the shrieking sound to something burning.  But no.  They didn't.  The wild rice incident was already forgotten when they set the smoke alarm off for the second time in less than 24 hours and, because they didn't like the sound of it, my father just pulled it off the wall thinking problem solved.  Except, of course, it wasn't.

Fortunately, Roland was working from home that day.  He heard the alarm and caught a whiff of smoke coming up through the heat vents and he rushed  downstairs to investigate.  He found my parents sitting on the couch, the smoke alarm lying belly up on the cupboard, in a room so full of smoke you couldn't see the wall at the opposite end.  To his question "What's going on?" Roland got a puzzled answer: "Hmmm, I don't know, it's smoky yah?"  And that, of course, is enough to freak anybody out, even if you haven't already lived through a house fire once, as Roland has.  The issue isn't that they forgot a pot on the stove but that their automatic, instinctual reaction to a smoke alarm wasn't "WTF, something's burning" and was, instead, "oh this is an annoying thing, let's silence it".  We were lucky that day.

That night we disconnected my parents' stove.  By that point, while the remnants of smoky air still hovered in the room, neither of them remembered the afternoon incident, were incredulous when we told them about it, and suggested we were exaggerating.  The next day I called my mother's case worker and we arranged for home support.  Now, twice each week day, at lunchtime and dinnertime, a person comes to warm up my parents' meals. In the microwave.  Given that my dad's also become somewhat lax about food hygiene lately (I found some eggs with a "best before 2010" in their fridge), it's probably not a bad idea for someone to monitor what my parents are eating during the times we're not around. Sounds reasonable right?

Well, it hasn't been a smooth transition.  Each lunchtime, my father tells the person who comes around that he doesn't need them, that he can warm up soup in the microwave and make toast to go with it, and he tries to send them away.  My mother, in sharp contrast to my dad's less-than-welcoming approach, greets each person with unfeigned delight and treats them like a long-lost relative.  Then, each night after I get home from work my parents and I have the same conversation we've now had a dozen times, all about how they almost burned the house down, and about how a can of soup and some dry toast isn't all that nutritious and wouldn't it be nice if someone would make then a good salami and cheese sandwich to go with that soup, and how unless they accept the home support they'll have to stop living with us.  My father gives in, grudgingly, and the next day at lunch tells the support person that he doesn't need them and tries to send them away.  Sigh.  The case worker says there's a period of adjustment common to these situations and so that's where we're all at.  Adjusting.

And, in the midst of all this drama, my next relief print is hatching.  There is, among a number of mystical traditions, the belief that to name something is to give it power. So I already named this print and hope it will bring me some Grace.  With a capital G.

 

 

 

Rain Dance

This past weekend we drove over to Seattle to compare the quality of their rain to ours.  Just to see if it had the same dampness and coldness of Vancouver rain and to determine how fast, in relation to local standards, I could get my umbrella dripping soaking wet by just walking around.  Ok that wasn't really the purpose of the trip but it might as well have been because it sure rained over there.  Almost as much as it did when we were there two years ago in April.  I know my memory is embellishing things a bit but I have this image of trogging through the streets, ankle-deep in water on at least one of the nights we were there that time. 

So rain seems to be a recurring theme on our Seattle visits of late and, confronted by such abundant rain, I have to ask myself: was the Seattle romanticized in the old TV show Here Come the Brides some other place?  I mean, c'mon:

The bluest sky you've ever seen, in Seattle,
And the hills the greenest green, in Seattle...

Blue sky? Green hills?  Or maybe we just need to time our visit for later in the year.  Like June or July.


Nonetheless, I really like Seattle rain or no and it was a very fine trip.  We ate at an authentic and colourful Mexican restaurant, drank Prickly Pear martinis (or at least I did), and took a long and energetic walk along the water as the wind and numerous joggers whipped past us. And, in an old-style theatre with red plush reclining seats, we saw, for the second time, Pina.  What a mesmerizing, amazing, and inspiring film! I don't dance...really dance...enough.  I have to work on that for sure.  
 
Anyway.  It was good to get away and not think about all the stuff going on here, if only for a breath.  I don't really want to get into all the details of my dad's health issues so suffice it to say they're prostate related, there is still some cause for concern, but the tests were inconclusive and not even the doctor seems to know how serious things might be.  As he so colourfully put it:  the horse has left the yard and it's not sure if he's gone into the neighbour's field yet but we're going to try and keep the gates shut.  Meaning: my dad'll be going for hormone injections while we play the waiting game to see if that'll bring his PSA counts down.  Fortunately, his memory is so bad these days he's forgotten the doctor's visits, the tests, and all the other stuff and seems to be his normal generally happy self.  And that in itself is a good thing given that "happy" was not one of the words to immediately jump to mind in connection with my dad in the past.  So, he's happy happy and my mother, albeit living life on another planet, is always happy too.  Life goes on, one day at a time.


I finally finished the last print too, and have begun sketching out my next one although at this point it's anyone's guess when I'll actually get around to printing.  The next couple of weeks are promising to be full of tedious obligations.

For now, here's the finished print:

Four little beetles

Dark as molasses,

Wind their way

Through tall green grasses 

  (Print 4, Nursery Series - Reduction Linocut - 7.5 x 9 inches)

Relearning To Juggle

It's been a week of doctor's and hospital lab visits as I took both my parents to and from a number of tests and appointments.  Roland and I juggled things between us a bit and that helped but I suddenly got a flashback to when Nora was small and we were juggling our working time around caring for her.  Funny how it goes.  And it's always these trips to the doctors that make me realize how vulnerable my parents have become.  How much they rely on us to look out for them.  It's heart-rending though we're definitely far from alone in this; whenever I take my parents for any medical appointments I find myself in waiting rooms with other parent/children couples, all in roughly the same age group as we are and all with the same lines in their faces, worry and exasperation both, as my own.

There was also some not so good news concerning my dad so, while we wait for test results, I'm trying keep the door shut against worst case scenarios...one day at a time as Roland says...and am trying to put my mind elsewhere.  I've recently finished reading Rewire Your Brain and, while parts of it were a bit too too medical-technical for me, there were some things I took away with me and am trying to put into practice.  One of these is that work, or activity, is one of the best ways to chase away the blues (I'm paraphrasing here) and that sounds pretty logical to me.  

So I tried to stay busy and managed to get in two printing sessions over the last week and added the next three colours to the current nursery rhyme print.  First, there was this green:

I spent some time shaping a nice mask for the area with the beetles only to find I didn't even need it and just had to be careful with my inking.

And then I added a lighter green and the next colour for the beetle body, both at the same time:

Now, one colour left to go, it looks like this:

As always, being I'm so close to the end, I guess I'd better start making some decisions on what my next print will be...

Stalling and Stoking the Fire

We actually got some snow a few weeks ago.  It was a mere fragment of the rough winter the weather people had been predicting for us for this year but enough to transform our garden gnome, the David Crosby lookalike we picked up in Le Conner WA some years back, into a masked bandit.  

It seemed like a good time to hole up inside and do some reading so I've been indulging my fascination for history.  It's like a series of endless doors: once I open one, there's always a new one waiting.  It began with the brief snapshot of the Celts in one of the Czech radio broadcasts I now listen to while I carve my blocks.  Really, you can't go anywhere in fledgling European history without stumbling across the Celts so I did too. Totally intrigued by the reverence for (and worship of) nature by these people, I gave several weeks over to studying everything I could find out about them.  

Then I came to the Slavs, similar in many ways and also very much tied to a nature-influenced faith.  Maybe there's some truth to our being influenced by where we're born and maybe all those old folk tales and myths I cut my reading teeth on have left their mark.  Whatever the reason, the idea of natural elements containing something beyond that of the visible world really resonates with me.  Of course, I recognize that the same reverence for nature is also inherent in the myths and legends of the native/indigenous people of North America and in the aboriginal societies in other parts of the world but, because I was born in Europe, it's the European version that has a greater pull on me. 

Alongside with this, I've been dipping my toes into the study of alchemy and of some of the symbolism there.  In some ways, there's a lot of overlap between this and the ancient nature-worship because the natural forces play such a huge role in alchemy as well.  There's really so much more to it beyond the worn-out images of mad scientists in dusty laboratories but, in the most simplistic terms, what it comes down to for me is, again, seeing the hidden essence of something beyond the ordinary and transforming it into something tangible.  

Anyway, this is where my mind's been at.  So much so, that I feel this huge pull to somehow bring some of these concepts into my work.  Except I haven't yet figured out how yet. I started a journal for some of the main Alchemical concepts and am hoping ideas will come from this.  

And I'm waiting.  Feeding ideas into the idea cauldron, waiting for something to bubble up.  That in itself can be likened to an alchemical process but I won't get into that now.  In the meantime, I'm taking the easy way out and the print I'm working on now is number four in the nursery rhyme series.  The first two stages are here:

 
I'll keep my fingers crossed that by the time I finish it, the idea cauldron will deliver....