I'm OFF!!!

In just a few hours, I'll be leaving for the airport. Above is a map of where I'm going. Tralee in the lower left, in red, is where I'll be. It's nestled right in the bay, so it is sure to be very cold there. The blue dots are all the printshops that I know of in Ireland. I might find out that there are more.

I'll be gone for a month, and I'm not sure what kind of access I will have for the internet. The internet cafe's are very expensive, but maybe I'll sneak into the library every now and then.

I'm taking a lot of books with me, and a sketch book too, so I'm hoping something will come to me while I'm there. I watched the Magdalene Sisters for the first time the other night, and it just ignited a rushing river of images in my head. It seems that I should tap into this subject matter more since it had such an impact on me.

So Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, to you all!!!

Cork Printmakers

So, this guy in the foreground is someone I have to meet. Anyone with crazy-cool hair is an automatic atraction magnet for me. Cork is about two hours away from where I'll be in Ireland, so I must also check out this print shop. My brother is applying to UC-Cork, so we'll have to spend a few days together checking out this city. I'm interested in how this printshop integrates classes into the community.

Cork Printmakers are committed to promoting print as a public art form. We provide a professional, open access, fine art print workshop so as to facilitate printmakers and visual artists working through the medium of print. A range of presses, tools, equipment and materials, required to produce a body of work, are available to members.

As well as supporting artists, Cork Printmakers has a substantial role to play in the community. Public engagement is very important and so the workshop is very active in the exhibition of print in public and private spaces and embraces critical response. In addition, we offer the most comprehensive range of printmaking courses for adults in the country and through our artists in schools programme, which won an AIB Better Ireland Award, we bring the art of printmaking to children between the ages of six and eighteen, across all social backgrounds.

Crown Point Press

Last week I visited the Crown Point PressWinter exhibit. I didn't realize that the printshop was just around the corner from the SFMOMA, so I stopped by to take a peek. I was so ecxited because Crown Point Press has such a great reputatioin. A lot of famous artists go to crown point press to turn their work into intaglio prints. I wasn't particularily drawn to anything I saw, but It was pretty exciting being there. There were tons and tons of drawers with past porfolios in them. If you ask them to look at the prints, they give you pretty white gloves to flip through the prints. I asked to get a tour of the printshop, but the tour guide was busy. The woman told me to come back during the week when I can actually see people pulling prints off the press. That's extremely exciting. I kind of sneeked into the printshop anyways, and it seemed so huge. I'll have to go back after I get back from Ireland, and get a better view.

Crown Point began in 1962 as a print workshop, but started publishing prints in 1965 with etching porfolios by Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud. It functioned as both workshop and publisher until 1971 when Brown formed an alliance with the New York publisher, Parasol Press. In that year Crown Point Press moved from Brown's Berkeley basement to a loft space in downtown Oakland, and --through Parasol Press-- began working with New York artists Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden, and others who would later be seen as key members of the Minimal art movement.In 1977 Crown Point Press shifted its emphasis back to its own publishing program, and began working with a group of mainly Conceptual artists including Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Tom Marioni, John Cage, and Pat Steir. Artists published by Crown Point since that time represent a wide variety of contemporary art approaches, and many of them live in countries other than the United States. Art historian Susan Tallman in her 1996 book, The Contemporary Print, describes Crown Point as "the most instrumental American printshop in the revival of etching as a medium of serious art." From 1982 through 1994 Crown Point added Asian woodcut techniques to its etching program, taking artists to Japan, and later China, to work with craftsmen in those countries. ince 1986 Crown Point Press has been located in San Francisco, where it has a gallery open to the public and two large etching studios. With a staff of twelve, the press currently publishes etchings by five or six invited artists a year. It also holds summer workshops open to all artists.

I'll really want to take a summer workshop next summer, so hopefully the classes will not be full.

My friends

Here are a couple links to my friends at CCA. Both Weston and Michelle were in my class. I'm kind of sad that I don't get to see them much. Michelle is in the printmaking program and we had studios next to each other. We shared a bathroom and kept booze in the shower. It's amazing to see how their work has progressed in the past semester. I really need to crack the whip on myself. As soon as I get back from Ireland, I'm going to have to fully submerge myself into producing art. I've spend the last few months researching, sketching, thinking, but I now need to take all that is within myself and explode onto paper. I really need to get stuff done, and push myself more. I was looking back on my sketch books from the beginning of my grad experience and have realized how much my mind has grown, and my artistic sense has grown. I feel a lot more confident about contemporary art. I feel like I understand things a lot more now, and wont feel like an ousider. I'll be ready to go back as long as I make work!

WestonTeruya


Michelle Carlson

Wangechi Mutu

Another one of my favorite artists is coming to the San francisco MOMA. I am absolutley curious to see her work in person. I've been told that I should encorporate collage into my printmaking, but I'm never satisfied with the way it looks. Wangechi Mutu uses a lot of collage in her work succesfully. Her work is jewels for my eyes, and curiosity for my brain.





Friday, December 16, 2005 - Sunday, April 02, 2006

Wangechi Mutu, a Kenyan-born artist based in New York, makes luscious yet unsettling pictures of female figures. Her painted and collaged works on Mylar function as potent social critique while simultaneously exploring more poetic strains of mythology and allegory as well as the sensuousness of form, color, and pattern. Particularly interested in myths about gender and ethnicity that have long circulated in Africa and the West, Mutu has adopted the medium of collage — which by its nature evokes rupture and collision — to depict the monstrous, the exotic, and the feminine. Her exhibition at SFMOMA combines works on paper and a site-specific installation.