AIR-ness

Before I was working on the International I was interning at a printshop called AIR, which stands for Artist Image Resource - although its kinda cooler as just AIR, and most people here tend to know it that way. Anyways, AIR is a very rad place; very unique as far as gallery spaces go in that it is both a production shop and a great exhibition space. Lots of incredibly talented people there and great people running the show. I've been semi involved there, with the hopes of being more so in the future, although at the moment the International is keeping me too busy to get over there. The point of all this is AIR gives me a place to work in media other than painting, and since I've been "working" there for more than a year I've had a lot of time to integrate printmaking into my sort of ouvre, if you will. Will you? You will? Sweet.

As some of you who are reading this will know, I've been working on a series of moleskine notebooks that are kind of an exercise in mixed media, all of which include collage, pen and ink, paint marker, stickers, screen prints, mono prints, decollage, image transfer, watercolor, and probably others that I will remember later. I did one of them last summer in Thurmont, MD, the ancestral homestead of the Whelan-McGill clan, while staying with my compadre Robbie, which you can see below. Its kind of hard to tell from these photos, but the book is actually a Japanese-style accordion book. For me this was pretty interesting because I had to think about it both as small compositions (for each set of two pages) and as a larger composition (for the whole book unfolded as one image). These images below give an idea of what several pages look like together. The whole thing unfolded is around nine feet long! There are two more of these that are nearly complete, and a fourth that is in the beginning stages, so at the very least two more of these should be forthcoming soon.

I've recently begun trying to integrate printmaking into the paintings I've been doing using the image transfer/decollage technique that I showed in the past two posts. This is the only one so far, but I kinda like it.