Off-Loading Paint

Stacked Journaling can produce a lot of material in just a short amount of time, particularly when I monoprint it.

To recap so everyone remembers, when I monoprint Stacked Journaling, I write with paint squeezed directly from the bottle onto a wide strip of parchment paper. Then I turn the parchment over onto my substrate- usually fabric, canvas or paper- and gently burnish the back to transfer the paint.

Once I've done this, though, despite it being called a "mono" print, there is still a lot of paint left on the parchment that I refuse to waste. Instead of wiping that paint away, I off-load it by spritzing it lightly with water and burnishing deli papers or 60# copy paper onto the parchment.

The result is a lot of fun, lightweight collage papers, which I go back into later with glazes of paint.

All of these collage papers were created in this way, a treasure trove of source material, all of which relate to each other and to the original piece (in this case, the first photo of this post!)

You paid a lot of money for your materials... never feel as if they need to be wasted just so you can experiment with techniques that are new to you!

Happy collaging!

Evolution and The Power of Cutting Tools

This piece...

 

... didn't languish long on the design wall.

I took it down shortly after that photo was taken and began working back into it with layers of glazes in various areas to create more contrast.  I liked the evolution of the piece, but not enough to call it done. 

Stacked Journaling has the tendency, I'm finding, to become very stripe-y, very quickly. I've devised several strategies to combat that, but used none of them in this piece. The stripes began to get on my nerves.

To find my solution, I turned to another one of my favorite design tools.

I cut the piece apart into large chunks, and continued working into each piece with more layers of glazing.

Finally, I began to collage them together.

These three collages, meant to be displayed as a triptych,  measure about 13" x 13" each. The two on the right have already been mounted onto their painted plywood bases and the one on the left will be mounted as soon as hubby has a chance to cut more panels for me. They will hang in this order, as you see them.

Rather than collaging one piece on top of another, which would have been too bulky considering the heavy canvas and multiple layers of acrylics I used, I decided to "inlay" the collage pieces. For example, in the collage on the far right, I cut a shape I liked from the darker canvas and then cut a corresponding shape out of the lighter canvas so that the darker piece would nestle down within it. Then I used heavy gel medium to adhere them both to the plywood. 

The edges all butt seamlessly against one another which enforces the illusion that the collage is one piece of canvas painted in two different color schemes. 

I've not yet decided what substrate on which I want to mount this single, stand-alone collage, but I will use the same "inlay" technique with it, as well.


What I'm really loving about working with cut up pieces of Stacked Journaling is that the text seems to flow from one piece into another. Because it's all written in one hand - mine - and because all of my Journaling and monoprinted Journaling tends to have such similar qualities, different samples can be mixed and matched with each other effortlessly.


Once again, the technique is surprising me by heading off in directions I never imagined!


Happy creating!

Take A Leap!

I've been puttering with some products lately and I wanted to tell you a little bit about them. As usual, I have no affiliation with these companies and I won't make a dime or become famous if you go out and buy stock in them based on this blog post. dangit

Over the last eight months, I've found a couple of ways to get Stacked Journaling onto various substrates including fabric, paper and framed artist canvases. By a couple, of course, I mean 385621093756589290174 Billion. And every time I think I've found and explored the very last method, another method presents itself.

This weekend, while piddling with some of my old hand-dyed fabrics, I pulled out this handy gadget, meant to help brighten your laundry.

Using the narrow end of it, I did some Stacked Journaling with it on this fat quarter.

Not bad. The opening was designed, of course, to deliver thickened bleach to household stains, not for actual writing, so the product comes out accordingly in thick, ropey lines that tend to soak into the fabric and then spread. Handy to know when I want to create large text.

But for the fine, thin lines I usually crave for SJ, I needed a better solution. I turned to a Jacquard product I often use on squeezie paint bottles:

These metal tips come in three diameters, .5mm, .7mm, and .9mm, and are perfect for getting clean, thin lines. (You can usually find them either online or in an art store.) Who knew they'd also fit on the end of a bleach pen?

Ahhhhh, much better! For this bit of text (and I know you can't tell the scale, but the whole text block itself only measures about eight inches long by five inches tall) I created some monoprinted Stacked Jouranling by writing with the bleach pen on parchment paper, turning the paper over onto a piece of hand-dyed fabric, and pressing gently.

I'm feeling like the possibilities are endless for this combination of inexpensive tools. The bleach gel is the perfect consistency for squeezing through even the tiniest metal tip and once the bleach is used up and the pen is empty, I can wash and neutralize the pen so it can be repurposed. It's comfortable to hold, and for writing it's easy on the hands- and believe me, that's becoming a huge issue with me: I don't want to reach the age of 50 with Carpal Tunnel in both hands from years of Stacked Journaling! I can reuse the pen over and over by filling it with paints, adhesives, thickened dyes, or even home-made thickened bleach.

Necessity really is the mother of invention.

Create with a sense of curiosity!

- Judi

More!

Another monoprinted Stacked Journaling painting. Acrylics on stretched canvas.

16" x 20"

I am currently working on a large canvas (30" x 40") and will show it when it's complete. 

Happy journaling!

Cloth, Paper, Scissors

So I had a small bit in the Muse Flash section of this month's Cloth, Paper, Scissors!

I sent them a few photos of work I did using packing materials as stamps, and now that the magazine has his the stands, I can show you the photos they didn't choose for publication!

These are paintings and collages on copy paper and heavy tag. Some of them contain (of course) Stacked Journaling.

Stacked Journaling in a New Way

Well, I sure hope you're all not utterly sick of seeing more Stacked Journaling, because I have been developing it steadily over the months and I love the current direction it's taking in my painting and mixed-media work!

A few weeks ago, I began composing SJ art letters by squeezing paint directly onto my substrate out of a bottle that employs a fine, metal tip screwed to its spout. This gave me tremendous freedom not only to be able to use all of the various paint mediums at my disposal, but also to be able to write in many different scales, from very large to very small. 

One afternoon while composing a Stacked Journaling letter in this manner, I began to get frustrated with the paint I was using: I'd thickened it too much and it was getting blobby and heavy on the canvas. I grabbed a piece of deli paper, carefully placed it on top of the painted SJ, blotted with the lightest pressure, and lifted the paper away. POOF, I'd discovered Monoprinted Stacked Journaling. It was as if someone had hit me with a sledgehammer and my heart started galloping in my chest.

I've been obsessively using monoprinting with my painted SJ ever since.

In this piece, a 16" x 20" stretched canvas, I layered multiple monoprints of SJ in white, lemon yellow and golden yellow Neopaque paint on top of a painted background of soft yellows. A polishing of violet textile paint came next, and finally, one last bold stripe of monoprinted SJ in magenta brings the piece into focus.

To create the monoprints, I Journaled in paint onto strips of parchment paper, turned them over, and carefully pressed them onto the canvas. Using parchment allows me to wrap the SJ around the edges of the canvas, giving it an even more finished look. Here are those lovely, leftover parchment strips hanging on my design wall (I wish I could actually reuse them in my work, but being parchment, the paint will never adhere to the paper.)

In a wonderfully mysterious way, the Stacked Journaling plays hide-and-seek with the eye, fading in and out through the transparent layers of paint. The text, while perfectly obscured for privacy, still nonetheless reads as very deliberate and directed text (which it is), rather than as simple scribbles. 

I think it's about time to take this technique to something larger, like a gallery-sized canvas or a couple of yards of fabric!

Happy creating!

Bold and Graphic

For the last couple of weeks. I've really been trying to focus-to the exclusion of almost everything else- on the voice inside me that asks me (and not usually politely) to make art. I find that the the more attention I pay to that voice, the less I struggle to interpret what it wants to tell me.

And now, suddenly, bold and retro graphics are flowing out onto my paper and canvases! While I'm baffled by that trend (I've never considered myself a graphic artist), I'm going with it and enjoying watching the show unfold.

As is obvious by now, I don't generally work figuratively. Working figuratively makes me nervous, exposes me and the sorry state of my drawing skills. Somehow, it's always just easier for me to express my emotions and the impulses of my inner creative voice when I can do it in the abstract.

Nevertheless, the piece below is a very deliberate, blunt attempt to express a struggle I see going on in Dad as he reaches back into his past to try and hold onto who he is, today. His constant refrain (and advice) to me is, "Don't get old!" and I find myself nodding in agreement, even as I continue to age a little more every day.

Here, an elderly man reaches out to capture the setting sun as it sinks away from his grasp.

After the painting of sun, sky and gentleman was completed, I masked off the silhouette of the man and wrote a Stacked Journaling letter across him in white paint squeezed directly from the bottle. 

An unexpected result of using Stacked Journaling so often in my work to help me express my frustrations with- and fear of- Alzheimer's, is that I have come to recognize the intimate bond between words and dementia.

For the dementia sufferer, words can eventually stop making sense altogether and the ability to communicate breaks down entirely.  While Dad is thankfully not to that point, it's more obvious all the time that he becomes confused after speaking or listening to only a couple of sentences. Tracking a lively conversation as it moves around a room is impossible for him, so he usually just sits quietly, looking at his lap. The books he's always loved are now most likely just a confusion of words he's unable to navigate in order to enjoy the plot lines, character studies and surprise endings. He hands dog-eared paperbacks off to us, one or two a week, and says he's finished them, but we never ask him anymore what they're about- he simply doesn't know.

I've created a couple of large printing plates that represent to me this confusion of words- letters that head off in every direction, an implication of language that's become too muddied to read, a blizzard of information that can no longer be processed- and have been using them over and over again lately. And again, bold, retro graphics keep emerging.

In the piece below, a confluence of happy accidents: yesterday I asked my dear friend, Lynn Krawczyk, if she thought a handprint would make a good Thermofax screen (she being the Queen and Guru of All Things Thermofax, all hail!) She said she thought it was a great idea, so I took to the studio and created several prints of my left hand using plain white paper and opaque black paint.

The prints that were left over after I'd chosen my favorite one and scanned it for Lynn were too cool to just toss out. In this piece, I masked off the hand with clear contact paper and used my recently-created printing plates to lay text around the hand.


Even though this simple bit of art was created using the emo-laden printing plates, the final product feels bold, young, and empowering to me, as if the hand with its splayed fingers is stopping, by sheer force of will, the flow of confusion. 

Have a great weekend and create boldly,
- Judi

Dear Dementia: You Haven't Won Yet

Another mixed-media art letter titled "Dear Dementia: You Haven't Won, Yet."

This one is a 16" x 20" stretched canvas that contains layers of painted papers, deli papers and acrylic paints and glazes. It is finished off with a Stacked Journaling letter written with gel adhesive squeezed through a nozzle-tipped bottle. When dry, gold foil was ironed to the adhesive.

The Letter Series, and Other Things

I've gone back to my Stacked Journaling Letter Series this week in a letter written to myself titled, "Dear Judi: Tangled"

7 1/2"  x 11"

The substrate for this piece is one of the lovely tag cards I brought home with me from Pennsylvania. I painted multiple washes of Golden fluid acrylics across the glue side of a piece of Pellon double-sided fusable web. When it had dried, I ironed it to the white tag, trimmed the edges, and sealed the whole thing with a layer of matte medium.

I should have taken a photo of it at that point, but I was anxious to dive into journaling, so that didn't happen. However, I used the same technique and mediums on this green piece...

... so you can at least have an idea of what it looked like- in reds and blues- before the letter I was writing took over and covered the surface. I used Sakura opaque white fine-line paint pens to do the Stacked Journaling. The graffiti-esque quality of this technique just never fails to captivate me.

Having these colors out on my desk all weekend meant that a lot of other surfaces got played with, too, in essentially the same color palette (I never work on one piece at a time, I always have multiples going at once!)

Both of these pieces are a little too complex to simply call them "painted" or "collage" papers, but they can't really be considered completed art pieces, either.

I started each piece by first stamping black opaque paint in various designs onto lightweight copy paper. The paper was then torn and reassembled onto deli paper with a little gel medium. Then each piece of deli paper was washed and stamped repeatedly with layers of both transparent and opaque paints.

The fun thing about each piece is that they still maintain a very light weight and hand, so they could easily be torn into still more fragments and reassembled into some other collage work, later on.

In more experimentation with ironing painted fusable web to deli paper, I did some painting and stamping on two more pieces of the web, cut them apart and reassembled them into separate but related collages. Then they got more paint and more texture.

Like the pieces above, these can now either be mounted and called finished, or cut/ripped apart later for a different project.

Hope your weekend was creative!

New Work

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned here that I had dug out two large stretched canvases and Gesso'd them to prepare to make new work with them. One of them is hanging in my living room now, and this one was finished in the studio this morning.

Abstract, 30" x 40", stretched canvas

This is another piece in my exploration of hand prints, almost as an answer to my Dear Dad series. I've been playing with my own hand prints lately, stacking them in the same fashion as the Stacked Journaling featured in the Dear Dad series, and this is another expression of that playfulness.

This piece began with Stacked Journaling applied to the primed canvas with a thick, black Sharpie. The Journaling became almost utterly obscured by subsequent layers which were fashioned by smearing my gloved hands with Golden's fiber paste and pressing them repeatedly onto a primed canvas. After the paste dried, many layers of acrylic paint washes were applied. Buried about halfway in is a second layer of fiber paste hand prints, as well.

While this work may appear to be fairly aggressive because of its color palette and composition, it doesn't feel that way to me. This was a fun, joyful process that felt far more unselfconscious than some of my more recent, genuinely darker stuff.

Happy creating!

Dear You: Thank You

A while back I suggested to a friend that she might want to work a particular design she was developing into a larger format art piece. It took nearly a week for me to click to the fact that while I was extolling her to work larger, I, myself had begun working smaller. Much, much smaller.

I don't regret doing it at all, some deeply intimate and heartfelt art has come from this period, but I feel that I can hardly recommend something that I'm not willing to risk doing, myself. And working large has become a risk to me, more than I would have thought possible- years past, all my work was huge and it never intimidated me. But I have to admit that my confidence has been shaken by events of the past eight to ten months, and working in a large format seemed to me like an excellent opportunity to fail on a grand scale.

Still, pushing myself to work in areas that frighten or intimidate me has become one of my favorite ways of taking myself in surprising directions. I never know exactly what the outcome of a professional or creative risk is going to be, but even if it's a raging disaster, there's a lot of information to be mined from such events.

In that spirit, I recently broke out two large canvases from my very earliest days of experimenting with painting. These old pieces didn't look like art to me and more importantly, they didn't feel like art and never really had. The frugal artist in me won out over the archivist who wants to save everything, and I Gesso'd both pieces within an inch of their lives before starting them over again.

This is what emerged from my studio this afternoon.

"Dear You: Thank You"  

30" x 40" 

India ink, acrylics, Stacked Journaling 

on stretched artist canvas

There are some very special people in my life who have spent a great deal of time and energy in the last few months talking me down from the ceiling, people without whom I would have not have been able to manage. This letter, written with love to each and every one of them, is one of the ways I would like to try and thank them. They make the risk worth everything.

Happy creating!

Dear Mom

Seriously, these Stacked Journaling art letters are out of control!

But some of them, like this piece, are evolving away from angsty journaling and are becoming much more fun to write. This one is to my Mom, in a very 12-year-old-away-at-camp style with a lot of "You're the best Mom ever!" kinds of sentiments.

Thanks for everything, Mom. And you know what I mean- for everything.

 ("Dear Mom: Best Mom Ever!" acrylics, India ink on paper)

Grafitti-esque Stacked Journaling

No heavy emotional context to this piece, just some fun playing with the graffiti-esque quality of Stacked Journaling. This is super white, heavy card stock layered with paints, India ink and Thermofax screens.

Some Fun Stuff

Hard life, blahblahblah, sadness, yaddahyaddahyaddah, I'm so over it. Enough with the seriousness for a day! Here are some fun colors splashed around in utterly inappropriate and irreverent ways on paper of all sizes and weights. Just because I like it.

 (Copy Paper, paint, stamping, Thermofax Stacked Journaling)

(Deli paper, paint)

(Copy paper, paint, Thermofax)

(My work surface, when I was done painting)

And because it made me laugh when I was writing it, a Stacked Journaling art letter written to the Universe, asking that our two favorite restaurants pretty-please-with-a-cherry not shut down...

Happy creating!

More Letters and Some Necessary Discomfort

For a while all of the Stacked Journaling art letters I composed were written to my father, who has mostly gone beyond understanding the emotions and sentiments contained within them. In a weird, serendipitous way, his memory loss freed me to write what I needed to, all of the things I needed to say to him, all of the fears and hopes I have for him. I'm proud of those pieces, but as hard as they were to write, they were easy to display here on my blog to all of you because I knew Dad would never see them or wonder what was contained in them.

As I continued to produce various mixed-media art letters to my father, I began to realize that I wanted to write to other people in my life as well; that I have secrets and messages to impart to them, too. Hence the Stacked Journaling canvases I blogged about a couple of weeks ago, which were written not to my father, but to a childhood friend.

That trend continues, and this is where I'm really going to go out on a limb: one of the the art letters I'm blogging about today is written to one of my brothers and it doesn't exactly contain loving, warm feelings. There's some pretty dark stuff buried in this piece, which makes me feel quite vulnerable displaying it. Unlike the letters written to my father, I know there's a chance my brother could see it and understand what it says, if only instinctively. I risk making a bad situation worse.

But risk and pushing myself is something I've come to rely on as a path of growth, and I'm willing to own my responsibilities and choices, so here goes.

("Dear Dave: Remember Me?" 18" x 24" 

300# watercolor paper, acrylic paint, 

quill pen and India ink journaling)

And in the spirit of being totally fair and honest with myself, here's an art letter I wrote to me. 

Like the letter to my brother, it contains some fairly dark material. The good news is that the more of these I do, the better I feel because the emotions are being released into art where they can't do any more damage.

("Dear Judi: Wake Up!" 7" x 10 1/2 "

Heavy tag, thinned India inks and paints,

quill pen and India ink journaling) 
 

While packing my father's belongings for his move to Texas, I came across a stack of lovely white, heavy tag measuring 7" x 10 1/2". He had no idea why he had it or what it was used for but he offered it to me, and being a total paper geek, I pounced on it. I suspect it's backer board for archivaly storing comic books because I not only found clear cellophane envelopes in the same size, I also found comic books he was obviously buying and trying to archive back in the 90's.

Score! As you can see from the photograph, this stuff sucks up pigment in the most lovely way. It also refuses to cockle even when soaked with wet media and because I think it's meant to protect comic books, I'm pretty sure it's got to be acid-free. All the fibers stain differently, which makes blending a breeze and offers a wonderful, mottled appearance. I think I might have to bind this stuff into a sketchbook, it's fabulous.

Move on, create with lightness,

Judi

On My Way Out The Door

My husband and I are on our way to get my father, who lives in Pennsylvania, and bring him to live here in TX near us in an assisted living facility. He doesn't want to come, he doesn't even think there's anything wrong with him, but he's being compliant and I, like a dutiful daughter, have been dismantling his old life and trying to rebuild a new one for him here. It's a dreadful task that no one should ever have to undertake, telling your parent that it's time to let you have the reins of their life.

Art is getting made, though, in almost a frenzy of anger and exhaustion. Here are two Stacked Journaling pieces I will be taking to my childhood best friend in Pennsylvania. She's terribly ill with Diabetes and could use a little brightness in her home. These small canvases in her favorite colors- green and blue- contain stacked messages of love, healing and sisterhood.

And another stacked letter to my father I'm working through in my journal before translating it to a stretched canvas.

(Dear Dad: Confusion)

Hope your weekend is happy and creative.