Two Days Off

It was a bit painful, I’ll admit, to now have two days I couldn’t work in my studio. I had meetings in San Francisco and helping a friend pack to move. All of these were delightful activities, and I yearned to be here working on the press too. I was able to do a little bit in the evenings, mostly thinking about and reading on how to finish up this piece. I am referring myself to Places and Spaces by Gaston Bachelard. Specifically, the final chapter which is on the phenomenology of round/sphere.

My engineering schooling didn’t include classes in philosophy, wherein I might have been more exposed to the meaning of round and it’s relation to our essential being. Reading about this makes my head hurt – a little like when Clinton was parsing “It depends on what the meaning of the word is is,” though this work is entirely different subject matter.

A bit of explanation about the process: It started with a line drawing of two enmeshed gears that I found on-line in 2007. I had just taken the first print class at Aurobora and wanted to learn how to transfer simple line drawings to paper. We never got to it in that class and the written instructions given to me were daunting, so I never went back to it. Then, it was demonstrated in class last weekend using this drawing. Deb made one print onto nice paper, and a second onto the graph paper I brought that had another small print of a sphere on it. I chine colle’d those onto vellum, following the example of Delacroix, who made this beautiful chine colle onto vellum from a drawing he had done in 1828. I thought the vellum would be a nice choice of base papers given the subject matter of gears.

I used the plate I found at Aurobora that has the tape in an arc to lay in turquoise and green opposing arcs that gently formed a circle and then used xerox transfer to put an image of a tank from the refinery that I took a few weeks ago (Tank 302). I added some color to the xerox transfer and reprinted it, then added an overall background color of the reds and pinks.

Here is a detail shot: