A Cat May Look At A Kinglet.

 A Cat May Look At A Kinglet.

This is an example of the title driving the idea. I wanted to do something interesting with an extra half-block I had laying around and I was in a really pissy mood which was mostly directed at the people around me.

if you couldn't tell by the kitty-gon' cut-a-bitch expression in that cat's face.

anyways, this is another exploration into using color, and another example of why I don't spend a lot of time working with color. I naturally tend to use color like a printmaker, my impulse is to lay down blocks of a single color that may be built up or layered but still exist in blocks. I admit that this is unnecessary in a piece like this, where the color is applied by handcoloring with watercolor paint.

so I'm stuck in a bit of a bind when it comes to critiques, on the one hand I catch crap from painters for not using color like a painter if I'm going to paint at all. "it should be more blended, why do you still need those dark outlines, you need to look at real colors out in the world, blue isn't just a monochromatic blue, you can't just decide you want a color and take it right out if the tube"

valid, but annoying, I like my blocks of color.

and the printers, who don't consider hand coloring to be a legitimate printmaking process, because it is both applied directly by hand to the paper with out an intermediate step, and because it destroys the sanctity of a printed edition by introducing irregularities.

as if my color editions aren't irregular as all heck as it is.

storal of this mory, if you can't please everybody, you gotta please yourself.

submitted this to FuckYeahPrintmaking. but it's also mine and I made it myself with my hands, so I figured I'd put it up here and talk a little about it.

this was the third of the guardians series, the fox being crafty and devious in it's folkloric reputation is associated with the house of Slytherin. it's also, again, a bit more subtle than doing all of the house crests exactly as is.

the ivy that is crawling all over everything I initially thought was not a success, I wanted to carve out the background like that on the cat and rabbit I had made before, and that was unfeasible with the white edges of the decorative breed of ivy I picked. so leaving everything black seemed like a gamble and a lazy one at that, but I was sick and tired of carving those fussy little leaves, so I made little squiggles to fill up space and left it in the hands of the printmaking gods.

of course this turned out to be the strongest aesthetically, and consistently the most popular of the four guardian panels. 

My name is Katie Powell, I have a BFA in printmaking from Western Washington University.  My Tumblr is a bit of a letter to my grandmas, who still I refuse to “friend” on facebook, so they can still easily see what I make.

this is a fox.

alright, so we talked before about how the relief printmaking class I took was an unending anxiety nightmare for both me and my professor/adviser Ben Moreau. this piece here is one of the reasons why.

it is an eight-color suicide block in an edition of somewhere around 15 depending on how many of the messed up ones you count.  it was my first time working with Medium Density Fiberboard (or MDF as I will call it) as a carving media, and my first time working with wood instead of linoleum.

lemmie tell you right now, carving-linoleum cuts like butter in comparison to this compressed weetabix wafer made of sawdust and glue. everything about working with MDF was painful and it did nothing but fight me the entire time. add on top of this, the problem that I absolutely could not come up with an image that I needed to make in color.

voices yelling at me at the time, both real and imagined, were nothing but tormenting whispers of "aren't you so glad you're working with wood now like a real relief printmaker? I mean linoleum is a good student media, for beginners, but wood is so much more professional" and "don't forget everything you do this year has to be focused on things for your BFA show, so this would be a good project to make a nice colorful centerpiece for the whole thing"   with a heaping lump of  "fucking up on this project will mean you don't belong in the program, you didn't deserve to get in anyway, and you're not good enough to stay, you do nothing but create filth for other people to clean up and destroy equipment in the process"

so yeah. whenever I managed to get a little sleep (and mind you this was also when my back was starting to really have problems as well, so it was hard enough to sleep) I would dream the same horrible anxiety nightmare. I would be in the print lab trying desperately to make prints and every time I did anything I destroyed everything around me and also disappointing my friends and angered Ben. I would dream of being screamed at as I pulled print after ruined print, each wrong in a different way, each fucking up the equipment in a different way.

I talked to Ben at some point about this and it turns out he was anxiety having nightmares about me ruining everything too. (and I did end up accidentally printing on the blankets, but they weren't exactly ruined [unlike some other parties who will remain Drew, who accidentally shredded a blanket trying to Chine-collé on the wrong press] so whatever)

for all that though, this is not a bad print.

the idea was a gift from Christine who is much better both at color and catchy titles than I am. the title is "she brings the rain" and is a commentary on my Debbie Downer tendencies.

The most pure nonironic models in life, however, are to be found in nature: animals and plants are exempt from irony, which exists only where the human dwells.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/17/how-to-live-without-irony/

Antler

12" by 15" Linocut print, second of the animals/objects series-thing

three little mice are nibbling on the antler, this is an image I pretty much absolutely had to do. everybody who knows anything about deer also knows that mice will eat antlers. one of the reasons mother can let her animal bones collection sit outside in all weather is that because of the resident cats we don't have enough rodents to eat them and they'll be fine. my grandfather made a left handed knife for himself out of an antler he picked up and it has mice nibble marks on it. also I get questions about "so what happened to that other antler? so here's your answer. eaten by three mice.

this piece also has more roses, I was kinda thinking about mom's bone/antler/tooth collection on the bullet-catcher under the rose bush, and I was thinking about being home. a lot of the time the plants are an environmental symbol. roses for home, ivy for college, grape vines for parties and bars, things like that. I'm quite fond of climbing plants and I consider them to be kind of sinister and aggressive (you would too if you'd ever fought back mom's roses or the unending sea of blackberries) even as they usually just come off as decorative to most people. 

I was also feeling like my ideas for the things that I do were under a lot of criticism. which I can either usually brush off or use constructively to make improvements, but this was the kind of criticism where I was just being told my art was worthless and I was just feeling like I was being ripped up over it. and then I was making this at the end of the year, so I was in a huge hurry to do everything and put together everything anyway, I had no mental-energy-spoons left in the drawer to use for my usual brush-off, so I just made some good art about it.

lot of the time that's all you can do.

The Crows Screamed Overhead.

Iinocut print, 18" by 24" black oil based relief ink on Reives BFK White (just like almost all of my student work)

this was one of the three prints I whipped out at the end of my BFA year. as to what's going on, you remember that Hunter Dude from before? yeah, that's him in a tangle of limbs at the bottom having his intestines eaten by wolves and his arm gnawed on by deergirl. 

one of the first prints I made of her, was of her feeling very trepidations at her first taste of meat, and that was the meat of an animal, and here Deer Girl is complicit in the death and devouring of a human being. but again, it's not that the wolves are bad, they're wolves. they have wolf morals. this carcass is one of many who have encroached on their land and are in conflict with their folk, and they would not consider it to be in any way to be wrong to eat any living being who is not another wolf or honorary other wolf. (and that one has to be earned one way or another, mostly it's a linguistic thing, like many cultures, my wolves will accept anybody who can speak their language and might respect anybody who tries)

wolves have carnivore morals. it's not "evil" just because it's different.

deer girl on the other hand, despite being half beast and half human, is not usually a carnivore, despite her human-ish omnivorous dentition. for the wolves eating meat, and the death of others is a part of what they are, for her it is a choice. she's choosing sides in a conflict with no winners, and no good guys.

the 21 crows are reminiscent of the "evil avians" in the fellowship of the ring who are the eyes of the dark lord, they are a jury casting watchful judgement over the scene and also clamoring for blood themselves.

the culmination of the wild hunt.

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this is also a print I thought would absolutely never ever sell, it makes the rest of my cutesy little forest scenes look edgy and I like how it's composed, but I never expected to sell even one of these. it's not commercial, it's not cute, it's not all that pretty, it's about devouring your muse and betraying what you thought were your principals.

not exactly art for over the kitchen table.

I sold one at modsock to these really nice older couple who were absolutely taken with it. I had to keep myself from blurting out "Really? That one?  the one with all the cannibalism? I only keep it around to distract people from the more overtly psycho-sexual themes in the others. you can't possibly like That one, let me sell you something else" Instead I said "really? and answered their questions.

it is the best thing to have people buy something I made from my own creative soul because they love it so much they have to look at every day. That, o' best beloved,  is the heady wine of professional validation.