thelmasmith

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Someday I’ll tell you all about the Lady’s Aide. Today I’m just going to boast about my mechanical prowess.

My macbook now has 2 GB of memory. Thanks mostly to my set of lady’s micro tools that are kept in the bottom of my desk drawer.

Here’s the strangely wonky image from the macbook screen. It shows I got it right the first time.

Mutterings of anger and frustration around here. Sam has spent days looking and looking. At first I didn’t believe him and then I did. Now, I’m helping him search for holes too small to be an escape route. Fat chance! She’s gone exploring again. This has become the pattern for two or three weeks.

Do click on the image. She is quite beautiful. Speak to her, in the ozone, please. Tell her it’s time to come home and stay home.

Gamblin was the color man when the Smithsonian set out to recreate the renaissance, earth, colors of the old masters. He gives a twenty minute tutorial on thinking about color.

I received this DVD as a gift at a recent art’s materials exposition. Check with your supplier of art supplies and see if you can obtain a copy of this.  OOPS,  go to the Gamblin website, linked above.  You can view it online.   It addresses color in several ways including the historic time frame and the colors produced and used.

I was at the University of Arizona Museum of Art today. This is from a new installation by
El Anatsui.

These works are copyright of the artist and are shown here under the doctrine of fair use for educational purposes. The work above uses the rims of screw on caps of cheap liquor that the anglo world has exported to Africa for the last several centuries. It references that societal problem, the problem of garbage, and also the West African textile tradition.

Not to mention that it is lusciously gorgeous and cries out to be carressed.

More societal commentary. Aluminum printing plates used in their most maleable form to comment on waste and waste paper in particular.

If you are traveling or happen to be around Tucson, Arizona, do yourself a favor and go to the University of Arizona. There is the Museum, two galleries, the Center for Creative Photography, the Flanrau Observatory, the Arizona Historical museum and much more.

This is one of the first semi-successful prints from one of the linoleum blocks I’ve carved. My husband stole the print of the cat laying in front of the full moon. The old cedar tree taught me that it is much more sensible to carve the object. Carving away the background even when you leave a border to support the brayer requires much more skill than I have right now. I’ll have to actually get my printing done on good paper instead of just testing on typing sheet sorts of samples.

Last Wednesday I struggled with intaglio wiping the large, multi color, chard collagraph. I failed miserably. Then printed it again after more wiping. It was only a minor failure.

I cleaned the plate. Printed a blind emboss from it Wednesday and it is only a minor failure. The blind emboss, done Thursday, from the bamboo was good with only minor creasing. These are a couple of details from the blind emboss from that plate.

However, the real success on Thursday is a bunch of small square and rectangular offcuts from the big bamboo plate. I did one and then rearranged the modules.

I did five consecutively with increasing pressure. The last one was two half inch foam blankets and then thin, thick, and medium regular blankets. The blind emboss combined with the half sheet (smaller) of paper meant that I could put on gonzo pressure and still not break the paper.

Pretty rewarding to see the progression of the five. I forgot to take the camera with me on Thursday. Now I’ve got my confidence up just a bit I think I will ink each module with a different color, wipe, and print. I’ve also taxed my body mightily even though the gearing on the big press is pretty good. My shoulders and my back are telling me I ran a LOT through that press last week.

I have fallen way behind the pace of the work and the assignments. I don’t know how the kids who are taking twelve to sixteen credits are handling the volume of work.

The big plates are beautiful but a real headache. The press is thirty years old and has experienced all that teen aged students can imagine in it’s life. The bed will take a fifty inch long piece of paper; the roller is about thirty inches long.

I guess I should spend the weekend reading the text books. However, the two women, with great experience, who come in and work on lab days are very kind and teach me a lot. I’ve been delivering pomegranites for rewards.

I like the multi cultural and multi generational aspects of the class a lot. I guess it is time for me to become a bit more social person again.

My dear, Scots friend, Marion, has tagged me with these instructions:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself: some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the end of your post and list their names (linking to them).
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment at their blogs.

So, seven facts about myself.

• Frank Herbert lived in Port Townsend.
  As he aged he worked with a colleague. They picked my maiden name,
  Scudi, out of the phone book. The character, Scudi Wang, in the novel
  The Lazurus Effect so spooked me for years (1983). Many years later I
  went and got the autographed copy he had left at the local bookstore
  for me.
• I was born in Indiana and grew up on a farm.
• I came from a very non standard family.
• I love to drive. I use “doing miles” to air out my mind and my spirit.
• I love the surf of the Pacific Ocean; I miss it very much. Like “doing miles” I miss that help.
• One spring when I was a child we had nineteen kittens; five of them were pure white.

• I’m much more restrained now. I have only six cats.

Now, who shall I tag?

1. lauralyn sciretta
2. rayna gillman
3. pam rubert
4. susie monday
5. sabrina zarco
6. natalia aikens
7. denise aumick

Whew! That was an unexpected amount of work. All those tagged are artists who’s work and thoughts I admire.

I’ve always been a Macintosh person. Smalldog is a macintosh merchant in Vermont. They are an interesting business. They set out to intentionally change all the negative concepts about corporate business. I have no affiliation with them. I do have permission from Don Meyer, the CEO, to reprint his editorial; the hotlinks added are my own and not attributable to Don Meyer.

Climbing out of the Money Pit
By Don, don@smalldog.com

The Pentagon has come to congress with yet another request for an extra $142 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It is really time to think about our priorities again. The president is vetoing legislation that would provide health care to poor children, which would cost the taxpayers about $7 billion a year and provide health care to another 3 million children who do not have it now. In addition, our bridges and infrastructure are badly in need of repair and we cannot afford to make the necessary expenditures.

What is really important to us? Is maintaining a presence in the middle of a civil war in a region where the people don’t really like us more important than making sure our children have access to quality health care? Is this really all about the oil, as Allen Greenspan indicated in his new book? Wouldn’t it be smarter to spend the $177 million A DAY that we spend on being in the middle of a civil war on things like energy conservation and renewable energy sources so that we do not have to send our sons and daughters to fight a war?

As the candidates for President squabble about how long it would take to withdraw our troops from Iraq, the situation just keeps getting worse. No one doubts that if we just panic and withdraw that it would cause some problems, but I think that the jury is out as to whether those problems would be more severe than the problems that are caused by our presence in Iraq. Withdrawal is not enough, however– we also need to reach out to others in the area to help us provide stability for the innocent Iraqis as we take our nose out of their business. Instead of watching silently as Israel bombs a site in Syria and rattling swords against Iran, perhaps we should be relying upon diplomacy, humanitarian aid and our dwindling supply of goodwill to re-establish ourselves as part of the solution, and not the problem.

George Bush has made a mess of our foreign policy and he is leaving a very difficult mess for whomever follows him as President next year. It is a mess that has cost us nearly 4,000 American soldiers, countless civilians and put in place another mercenary army (read: Blackwater) that is beyond the law. We are exacerbating a very difficult situation by remaining in Iraq; we’re not solving any problems and creating a huge new army of terrorists. We are putting our tax money to work against our own interests!

The time for withdrawal from Iraq is now. The time to pay attention to our own priorities of health care, education, transportation and energy is also now. Oil is just going to become a more scarce resource with more demand from more places and it is the country that prepares itself through conservation and development of renewable energy that will have the most prosperous economy and the most secure citizens. We cannot be tentative about this– it is time to admit that we have made a grievous error and bring our troops and mercenaries home now.

Share your opinions at Barkings, the Small Dog Blog: http://blog.smalldog.com.

End Soapbox

Don Mayer
CEO

1673 Main Street                                100 Dorset Street
Waitsfield, VT 05673 USA                   S. Burlington, VT 05403
don@smalldog.com

802-496-7171 ext. 611
802-496-6257 Fax

The good news is that I have finished the Defensive Driving Program on the net. I still need to go in to the NTSI office and take the test.

The better news is that the structure of the net teaching is designed to force you not only to pay attention but to hone your peripheral vision. Verification questions can pop up in red, small print; answer in thirty seconds or less.

The strange news is that this is the only image in the entire course that is completely out of context. The stockings and the shoe are at least fifty years old. I wonder where they found this? I also wonder where they found a car with powdered coral rock on the floor.

I’ve been here and not here. I signed up with Pima College for a Printmaking class and a Museum and Galleries Practices class. So I’m running to town three times a week and trying to shoehorn grocery shopping and errand running into that fuel usage. It’s interesting but fatiguing.

The first printmaking assignment was not intimidating. Thank goodness. I’m rather pleased with myself as I had never done carving before. This is the scan of the proof sheet for Lady Alice. The print block is 4″ x 2″; I was using up someone’s purple ink. Click to enlarge.

The second printmaking assignment was alter ego. I finally asked Karen, my table mate, what she had done about the topic. “I know who I am and I’m happy with my life; I don’t need Wonder Woman. I just did what I wanted to.” This after I had been through four iterations that neither fit the assignment nor was anything boldly graphic. I could not figure out how to carve the things I had drawn.

I had been through my image files on the external hard drive and even dug out the snapshot files from before I owned a digital camera. Nothing made any sense. Finally at one in the morning, after tossing and disturbing every cat in the house I just gave up and got out of bed. I went and pulled a snapshot of a tree I have always loved. The hell with the assignment; I know I can make a good positive/negative out of this one.

This is the unproofed plate. Click to enlarge. I painted the grey battleship linoleum with gesso so that I could see my cuts. My fingers and fingernails tell me that there is some clean up to be done once I see a proof. I can feel the chumbles that will give me trouble.

The textbook prices will make one cringe. However, when I saw the amount of technical detail in this one: A Printshop Handbook: A Technical Manual For Basic Intaglio, Relief, And Lithographic Processes. I did not hesitate. One good text book is worth a dozen, popular press, quilter focused, technique and process books. This one is authored by Beth Grabowski. I wonder if there is any kinship with Kerr Grabowski.

The other textbook, The Complete Printmaker is both historical data and technical information. I think one could work a lifetime with these two books.

So, though I am more than usually silent, I am here and I am working. I have four days a week at home. Day by day I have been working my way through deadlines; real ones and ones I have imposed on myself.

The other fly in the ointment is a speeding ticket. How humiliating to drive a roadster and get caught in a speed trap going so fast: 46mph.