Welcome to my blog.

"So, printmaking, that means copies of your original paintings, right?"
"What is printmaking?"
"Oh, how do you do that?"
"Are they prints of photographs?"
"Like screen printing?"

These are probably the most common questions I am asked when I tell people I am a printmaker. The truth is, I am an artist. I have been painting and drawing since I was little. I have always been able to lose myself in a creation. I get focused and everything around me disappears. I literally lose hours. When I first started to see myself as an artist, I decided to work with watercolors on paper. Then, I turned to oils on canvas. My work boardered on realism. Then came college...

The one major I never declared, but wish I had, was fine arts. While in Madison, I experimented with all types of media...acrylics, watercolors, pastels, and even cattle markers (some day I will post more about those), and I created all sorts of abstract images on all different surfaces. Then my junior year I moved to Madrid and then on to Perugia. During my year in Spain, I lived with all Spanish fine art students,a sculptor Simone, a restoration artist Sara, and two painters Natalia and Penelope. What sold me on renting the smallest room I had seen was the fact that they were fine art students, they were all Spaniards, and I was allowed to paint whatever I wanted on the walls of my bedroom. Upon moving in, I promptly painted an alien crawling in through the wooden window shutters (possibly an homage to my sister who at the time was going through her "alien phase?"). While I lived there, I continued to make art, and learn from them as much as I could.

After college, I returned to Europe and, amongst other things, continued my artistic journey. I made it a mission to seek out other artists and to continue to explore new techniques and ideas. During that time I created drawings with oil pastels on large wooden panels, carved wooden clothing hangers in a spanish taller (to help me pay the rent), helped shape windsurf boards, and pleaded my way into a formal art course in Granada tuition-free. I grew tremendously from the experience. I learned a lot about texture and emotion in art. I studied the architectural features of the Alhambra and memorized the view from the apartment I shared overlooking Granada. All of this, as well as my day to day experiences were coming out in my work. By working at a mountain outside of Madrid, teaching english part-time, and concocting fake lift tickets at Sierra Nevada I made enough and saved enough money to travel, write, take pictures, snowboard and do art. But, eventually my money ran out, and I had promises to keep back in the United States. I returned to the U.S. to pursue a PhD in sociology. So instead of dirtying my hands with different media, I was dirtying my mind, as it were, with the readings of folks like Marx, Weber, Foucualt and de Bouvier. But something unexpected happened. While I sought out a doctoral advisor who specialized in social interaction, I came across a sociologist with an artist's soul.

My doctoral advisor is one of the greatest human beings I have ever met. He is brilliant intellectually speaking, but more than that, he is kind, generous, and extraordinarily wise (wisdom trumps intellect every time). Lucky for me, he is also an artist, trained by his wife, who was an art professor at a neighboring college. When they first came to Santa Barbara in the late sixties, my advisor's wife took all of her husband's sociology classes, despite herself having a masters in public health administration. Now approaching the end of his career, my advisor enrolled in all of his wife's art classes, and found a passion for printmaking. One of the great things about my advisor is that he sees his students as people first. He never loses sight of who we are. Because of this, early in my graduate career he encouraged me to find balance (not something that is easy to do when you are teaching to barely earn enough to live while going to school full time), and nudged me to get back into art.

He invited me to attend his wife's introduction to printmaking class and I immediately fell in love. My advisor and I would talk about sociology and the progress of my research during the week. But on Fridays, those conversations were left behind and we spent the entire day in the studio with his wife and the other beginning printmaking students. I was becoming a printmaker who did oil-based monotypes (I will get into what that means in my next post).

At the top of this entry you will see my very first print. It is crude and one-dimensional, but I still see beauty in it. What I love about printmaking is the physicality of it. I love the way it feels when you have a perfect roll. There is an aggression that your brayer leaves behind on the plate that helps you forget everything else that is on your mind. I let out a deep breath everytime a Q-tip soaked with rubbing alcohol cuts through the inks I just rolled onto the plexiglass plate with which I am working. That clean line...it is so gratifying. With printmaking you can work with reckless abandon, adding inks on top of inks, clearing it away, adding in various objects to create relief images or different textures, and smooshing colors together to create something you didn't know was possible. But there is also a part of me, probably the researcher in me, that loves the orderliness of printmaking. It is with precision that we place the plates on the press and calculate the pressure. Prints with multiple drops means that we have to measure and align our edges so that the print will come out technically perfect. It is the blend of carelessness and rigor that brings me back to this medium time and time again.