Screen Prints!

Screen Prints!

alright these are the three screen prints I did for Ben Moreau's summer screen printing class that he liked so much he said it was better than a visit to the dentist for a root canal.

and what else could possibly be better than dentistry?

alright, these are a bit of a departure from my other stuff. I was just not feeling it during the summer after I made it into the BFA program when it comes to sticking to my "theme" and making art that would be useful for my BFA portfolio in the coming year. it was my first summer in Bellingham, I was mostly crippled all the hell, and sick of being pretentious and sad. So, I made OZ Fanart.

the first one is a reductive screen print of myself as Glinda the Good Witch of the South in her costume as she appears in the first OZ movie. it glitters. it is hard to convey just how much these things glitter in the sunlight like fairy-taffy made of pink and shimmer but they do. I would have to convert it into one of those glitter .gifs to give you an approximation of how nice they look.

this print was made with reductive screenprinting, which I have a pretty hard time controlling because I am like, comprised of 90% sloppy mess. I still love it.

the second one is of Christine as Ozma the rightful Queen of OZ. I was mostly trying out all different kids of techniques with this one, the swirls of the sky, the layers, the bajillion million layers and colors and the fact that it could still use a pattern on her dress. the gold bits also glitter.

this print was made through transparency processes, both using clear plastic and ink/paint/cutouts to expose the screens, and gobs and gobs of transparent base to give the inks character and clarity. (note her head flowers over the building)

third one: A Tribute For The Wizard.

photographic processes and fucking up repeatedly by not saving my progress lead to the end result you see here, this is Ben as the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz being displeased by our offering of One Good Print.

as he said in crit "YOU MUST HAVE AT LEAST FIVE PERFECT PRINTS!!"

everybody in class except for the Asian kid we never really saw posed for this.

first silhouette is Jake, then Brendan, then me holding aloft the golden print, then Allison and Stacey.

this class was good times.

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.

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.

this is one of my prints that I consider to be on the unsettling and weird side of my output.(as opposed to nostalgic and cute which is my other axis)  all I'm going to say about the content is she's not actually asleep (note the one perked ear) and all of my symbolism is always puns.

you'll note that I'm not giving you lot a title to gnaw on either with this one. I hate titles. it's an image. supposed to be enigmatic. and if I spoon fed you all everything with words all the time you'd think you understood what I meant to say. bask in ignorance! that's what I wish to say with this one. antler-chronology applies of course if you wish to puzzle out where it goes.

anyways, I make art out of things I wish to obsess over. I need to grind out my feelings and slash my fingers with my #4 and get embarrassed over everything every once in a while to feel like I'm making authentic art. basically, I need to throw my heart onto the wall. sometimes I need to feel judged both for my art and for my life. I need to confess and to over-share.

the part of me that produces the deer girl images, rather than my old anthro drawings I used to do is about exploring that deer-girl side vs the old were-kate side. my usual way to react to feeling unsafe and unsure is to snarl and lash out be fierce and shouty and I'm learning how to do the other things. to ask for help, be vulnerable, and be open.

I like making art that makes me personally get emotional about it. something that can remind me of how I was feeling. to hammer an emotion or a moment into a block, that is an intensely meaningful thing to me. even if, and ideally if, it conveys nothing to a viewer.

this has always been the case.

Cat of the West,

(part of my guardians of the four corners of the world series)

edition of ~5 linoleum print with handcoloring

showing you all this one today because I have just sold my last physical print of this edition. (whoo hoo for cash! people like cats, what can I say) it is part of a set of four I made out of hotdog-cut halves of the large linoleum blocks I use. they were partly inspired by the houses of Hogwarts, the cat, of course, is a miniature Griffindor lion. this is about as close as I get these days to fan-art and it's pretty well removed.

slavish dedication to a franchise at the expense of your own creative imagination can be just as limiting as insisting on being absolutely original at all times. take your ideas where you can, and try to do them as best you can.

alright, in my last post I talked about how I get different kinds of support from the people around me. my art friends are of the opinion (mostly anyways) that anybody can do anything and that's good art, as long as the artist does that thing with skill and care and can then explain why the choices they made were necessary.

non-art (aka: normal) people can be more of a mixed bag, they can't critique you effectively on technique because they have little idea of how you made what you made, and so there is more of a direct attack on the ideas.

my sister dislikes my deer girl series for a number of reasons, first, because it's really very hipster to have women standing around with either antlers on their heads or branches made to look like antlers. (I can explain that I'm tapping into the collective unconscious mind and the current zeitgeist, but this is dismissed as an excuse for copying an already unoriginal idea)

secondly, because they are self portraits of me showing me as a person who has stupid and vulnerable feelings. Kenz views this as worthless and self indulgent narcissism.

third, at times my work is either trite or visually unappealing and I am derided for being insufficiently appealing and commercial. not that I will ever make enough money at it and why don't I have a job yet?

my life and my work are thus deemed worthless and immature, like Freud who opined that the artistic urge ultimately derived from an infant's fascination with their own feces and the corresponding urge to smear poop on the wall.

haters gon' hate, as they say.

but credit for these two skulls goes to Mackenzie and her critiques of my work, I asked for inspiration because I was in a rut and she said, "I'm bored of your whiny bullshit. draw me some skulls or something and you'd better make it look cool" and lo, an idea did come upon me and I did make it, and it was good.

I consider these two to be a diptych, and the only complete pair is now in private collection. (so HAHA I already found it a good home bitches, ya'll can just be envious) I only printed two of the deer skull on the black before carving it away to make my colored prints, and one of them was destroyed. it's weird for me to have unique art and there is always a printmaker-ey fret that I should always have backups of my art.

the plants are aconite and creeping blackberry. the skulls are from a wolf and a deer.

edit: added some old photos from when I first printed this image to show some of my process