Cyanotype test fabric becomes dishcloths in my Hong Kong Studio, 2008
Spring’s come to Sydney
But artists have no weekend
I pick up my brush.
* Proof I am not a haiku professional
Archive for the ‘Studio’ Category
Artists Haiku*
Friday, July 30th, 2010Old Materials, Modern Tools
Thursday, July 22nd, 2010
My favorite papermaker Supan Promsen with his niece and a woodblock printed on his paper, 1 x 2 meters
Each day I walk into my studio, and as I look over my work-in-progress, the paper I’ve been painting gives me a thrill. This unique paper is custom-made for my artwork by Supan Promsen, the man pictured above.
But while I like to use old-school art materials, everything else about the work is 21st century. Supan and I communicate by email, in English. He keeps me up to date on the progress of my paper as it’s being made, then FedExes it to me in Australia. I photograph myself and others with a digital camera as we model for my paintings, and use Google to translate text into Chinese, Thai, and Japanese for my current series.
Many times I’ve rued all the stuff it takes to make art. Usually when lugging artwork across town, or moving countries again. Easels and stretcher bars and large-format thick papers take up a lot of room. I’ve often wished I could be content with all my work being purely digital; it would make for lighter luggage, but artwork on an iPad wouldn’t give off that subtle mulberry smell that my paper does. Something like cornstarch. It’s an elixir to a materialist like me.
And that’s what keeps me working with all this stuff: the materials are a crucial part of the process: as I mold them with my ideas and hands, I transform them into art. Or [because nobody interesting agrees on a definition of ART anymore] something like it.
References
Friday, June 25th, 2010
My small studio littered with photos after a week of painting
Scattered across my studio tables are reference materials for paintings and my favorite fuel: coffee and a trail mix.
I’ll often use small-edition books with classic photos to get a feel for the characters I paint. Here I’ve opened this copy of Lost & Found: Hong Kong to a colorful photo of coiled incense by Blair Dunton; and Early Hong Kong Brothels by Cheng Po Hung has candid photos of women in early 20th century outfits. They’re reserved and flirtatious at the same time. Irresistible.
Why I Can’t Afford Cheap Art Materials
Thursday, June 10th, 2010
Studio table
I’ve always been preoccupied with the materials I use in my paintings and prints. It’s been such an obsession I’m writing a book about my travels to discover different papers for artwork.
This week I stopped by an art store to replace some painting supplies I’d left in Bangkok. Past the oils and watercolors I found their acrylic paints. Most were Australian brands I didn’t recognize, followed by a rack of your international standard Windsor & Newton; while they’re a high quality brand, I’m always on the lookout for something more interesting.
“What are your best artists’ grade acrylics and gesso?” I asked the clerk, a hipster in his late 20s with floppy hair and a ready smile.
He motioned to the Windsor & Newton and Australian brands and said, “These are all about the same quality. As for the gesso, well, gesso’s gesso. It’s all the same.”
Er, no it’s not. Student-grade or discount gesso has cheap fillers and an uneven texture I wouldn’t let near the custom-made paper I use for my paintings.
When you’re a student, it’s fine to use student-grade or discounted art supplies. But if you’re selling your work, you can’t afford to buy cheap art supplies. The artist Kesha Bruce recently discovered her early acrylic paintings have been cracking on collectors’ walls due to the poor quality materials she’d once used.
A professional artist needs to know chemistry as well as the many other skills you don’t learn in art school, like writing press releases. Who knew?
Printing in the Rain
Saturday, May 1st, 2010
Rinsing Cyanotype prints in monsoon rain
Prints made in a rickety studio.
Every morning I climb wooden stairs to the rooftop and print cyanotypes for a patient collector, and for a series I’m sending around the world. Sweat runs down my neck. Pollution claws at the back of my throat. I bake under the hot tin roof as my prints develop in the sun.
Bangkok was once a swampy maze of canals raging with annual typhoid outbreaks, and in our neighborhood we still have more than our share of mosquitoes. The housekeeper has planted cockroach bait, and instead of skittering away into open drainage pipes as they usually do, fat cockroaches are dying at my feet every time I turn the corner.
Working artists aren’t typical tourists.
I arrived here several months ago with a set budget and specific projects to complete — working here at the hottest time of year is no holiday. I chose to come here in February to be available for projects and meetings that didn’t materialize – but other, more interesting ones did.
The Artists Place – where I’m living and working – ticks all the boxes: it’s a third the price of a studio in Sydney, has bedrooms I use as darkrooms and plenty of sunny space to expose my prints, and best of all, my blue splatters don’t show up in its showers.
But I’m escaping for a week.
I’ve been feeling trapped in this flat town since my return from Mae Salong. It’s not just the sharpened bamboo sticks and tire barricades of the Red Shirt protesters, who have now taken over even more intersections of this city. It’s the neighbors’ gossip that I’m sleeping with an Irishman because he and I had an evening beer, the Australian down the road who insists my husband is having an affair because I’ve left him alone with no children, and the claustrophobia of smelling the toilets down the hall every time I open my door.
I’m sending off documents and prints to estate agents and collectors, then headed south for the week to focus on my book and breathe some fresh air.
Desperate for green.
There is a single patch of green in my neighborhood. Every time I pass it on the way home from the BTS skytrain I pause and stare at it. Hungrily. Ours is a neighborhood of concrete and handmade houses. They’re atmospheric but most tourists wouldn’t dream of staying in a house like The Artists Place. It’s too hot here, and there are too many six-legged neighbors.
The unconventional DIY building methods of the owner Charlee, who prefers the kind of jerry-rigged construction you’ll see in family homes all over Southeast Asia, have resulted in some quirks: exposed blue pipes, dusty plastic skylights, black walls and windows.
Today I felt forlorn as the rain cut short my printing session. The wind was wild and blew off the week’s pollution. I moved my last two prints under the rooftop where they could still get some UV rays, and trudged downstairs to rinse the rest.
Water poured into the house and out of the last shower stall and soaked the floor. It drained into the gutters and I looked up as the skylight shed buckets of monsoon rain. It was fresh and cool and free.
So I placed my prints under it and let the rainwater rinse off my prints, for a very special kind of blue.
How To: Expose your Cyanotype
Friday, January 29th, 2010If you’ve ever wondered how I make the blue cyanotype prints that saturate my website, have a look at the pictures below.
Whether you’re printing on silk, wood, plaster or paper, all you need are:
1. Chemicals and water,
2. a Surface for printing
3. a Design, and
4. Sunlight
1. First, mix these powdered chemicals with 100cc of water each:
* Ammonium iron(III) citrate (‘green’ variety) 25g
* Potassium ferricyanide K3[Fe(CN)6] 10g
The chemical names might sound toxic but they’re not – unless you eat them with your lunch.
Supplies are available from Photo Formulary, or just Google “Cyanotype” to find one near you.
2. Paint the silk – or paper, or wood, or whatever you’ve got – with a brush or roller. Avoid brushes with metal surfaces; they’ll react with the iron-based chemicals.
Dry in a dark room.
3. Set up your image in a semi-dark room. Your design could be leaves like this, or a digital negative printed on acetate for photos, or any objects that block light in an interesting way. Take a look at my portfolio for examples.
4. Expose your image outside in direct sunlight. Developing time will vary depending on climate, strength of chemicals, and the objects you use, anywhere from 10-80 minutes. You know the print is finished when it’s darkened to Prussian blue then lightened again.
Final step: Rinse the print for up to 10 minutes. Add some vinegar/citric acid to the rinse water.
Your final impression is the unique combination of light, water, and chemistry of a particular day. Every printing session has unexpected variables depending on your water acidity, the pollution or cloud cover, and where in the world you are.
And most of all, it depends on your creativity.
Leftovers of an Old Life
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009
Slides of my artwork, old photos and clothes fill the room
This week I’ve been sifting through photos and sorting through my negatives, tossing out old clothes and turning over badly-written pages from the past. Seventeen little boxes from America have arrived. Mom’s moving house and apparently my memories got in the way: After 6+ years of life in Asia and down here at the bottom of the world (Sydney), it’s time to bring past and present together before moving on to the next step.
The clothes I pulled out of the boxes still fit, but I’m giving most of them away. In Asia I’ve had access to high-quality materials and tailors, and won’t settle for synthetics and unflattering lines like I did before. The art books indicate how my tastes have changed: from the northern European/Italian work I grew up with, to the globalization of art in the 21st century, particularly with Chinese/Southeast Asian influences.
We forget more than we can ever remember. And a good thing, too. Much of what was in those boxes I’ve since thrown away, after glancing through pages of badly-written teenage meditations on identity and belonging, superficiality and selfhood. There are some personality traits I struggle with now that were in evidence back then, too: my quick critical tongue, my lack of tolerance for people I respect who can’t pay their rent, my tendency to scheme obsessively for the future.
A professional artists’ adage is: don’t let any of your mediocre work survive. It will dilute your good work. Paint over it, rip it up, burn it, eat it, do whatever you have to do to ensure it doesn’t make it out of the studio and into the hands of detractors or collectors. Destroy all of it that doesn’t match your standards. Since I got those boxes I’ve been purging the past of my most trite journal pages and worst drawings. [I will undoubtedly make more mediocre pieces.]
Reviewing my older artwork and words with a more critical eye I see the foundations of what I’m doing today. I am reminded that this convoluted path I’ve taken has themes to it. And I’m living them now. At the time, all I had to keep me going was belief that my hard work would get me somewhere better than I was, that I could see some of the places I’d read about, like Prague and Montreal and Marrakesh. I wanted to paint in dusty Left Bank studios and walk the Bronte moors. Now I’ve reached goals I thought would be impossible, my dreams have expanded and it’s going to take more work than ever to get to where I want to go next.
I’ve put up some art and travel photos from the Nineties and the Noughties on Flickr here.
Smash Your Name on the Dotted Line
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
Testing square signatures on Thai paper
A friend ordered chops for me from the back streets of Hong Kong Island: two solid stones with my Chinese name hand-carved in antique characters.
He texted me just as I was about to board a plane in Chengdu: “Are you sure you want that pasty red ink stuff for your chops? Or would you rather just have a regular stamp pad?” he asked.
The previous day I’d seen a Chinese painter mash his chop into the red paste, warm it up to a buttery red froth, then smash his signature onto a piece of smooth mulberry paper. It had more integrity than a signed name could ever possess. His combination of strength and control was irresistable. I had to try it.
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Getting Down & Dirty with Art
Wednesday, September 16th, 2009
Taking a break from socializing at my Cyan Studio artspace, Hong Kong 2008
Wanted – Artists Studio: A Clean, Well-Lit Place for Art
Making art is a messy business – even messier than selling it these days in an art market turned upside down. While some art-processes are relatively clean – say, pencil drawing – most aren’t something you’d want to do in your living room. I was reminded of this after looking at the ruined polyester carpet in ours after I made batch of cyanotype photos at home. This just after we’d moved to Sydney, and my need to test negatives outweighed what others call common sense.
Last week I returned to Sydney, with a fistful of art projects to complete before going to Asia for more work next year. I’ve been searching on Gumtree and speaking with artists I’ve met here, and should nail down a short-term studio soon. Over the past 15 years I’ve made art in all sorts of spaces, and have learned a lot about what I need when looking for a studio.
Ventilation:
During university I worked evenings 30 hours/week, but devoted daytime to painting at our campus studios. Any empty classroom in the art building was fair game. Shared turpentine trays spewed fumes in the air as sparrows flitted through rafters overhead. Once I began to explore encaustic painting for a grant program, my wax fumes added to the toxic mix.
Heat:
For two years I shared an unheated/uncooled warehouse space in Minneapolis with other artists: painters, furniture designers, sculptors. We built a gallery surrounded by our studios. The raw space had charm, but it was hard to paint while shivering.
Perspective:
In Korea and New York I squeezed my life and art studio into tiny apartments, and the work I made was terrible: precious and small, with a vision to match. The main problem? Not enough space to get a good look at the work I was making.
Light:
When I lived in Cambodia and made the Bokor in Blue series, I rented a house and had everything an artist could want, especially bright Cambodian sunlight. And the odd uninvited guest: scorpions, mostly.
Guests of all ages & sizes showed up at Cyan Studio openings
Height:
Shortly after I moved to Hong Kong I rented a separate apartment with rooftop next to the sea, and called it The Cyan Studio. Once a month I opened up the studio and featured local artists from the island where I lived. While it was a great way to meet many creative neighbors, the ceilings were low while the one-bedroom layout was small, as was the work I made there. Small size – and scope – is a common criticism of much of the work made in Hong Kong; some of this is dictated by the spaces available to most artists.
Easy-to-clean floors:
During the transition from HK to Sydney, I had a home-based studio for awhile. This was fine as the illustrations I was finishing were small, and cyanotype spills were easy to clean up from our tile floor.
My plan for summertime in Sydney: make messy blue cyanotypes in a separate studio during the day, and write my book/work on the tidier, large-scale Calendar Girls in my home studio at night. No time for afternoons at the beach this year, there’s too much work to be done.
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Mobile Art Studio – Version 2
Saturday, August 22nd, 2009
Bougainvilleas burst just outside my room in this photo.
Last month I wrote about my first Mobile Studio in Lijiang, and that old adage is true: living in a new place gets cheaper every month.
While I was very happy at my last studio here, when I heard about the opportunity to stay in this boutique B&B run by a T’ai Chi fan and part-time antiques dealer, I jumped at it. She’s filled the place with Lijiang and Tibetan antiques, and her personality’s welcoming in lots of languages. Best of all, I’ve gotten an “artist discount” so am paying significantly less than last month, for a much bigger & more beautiful space.
From Chinese T’ai Chi masters to worldwide “visual anthropologists” fresh from a conference in Kunming, to the resident Korean t’ai chi instructor (who’s so dedicated to his art that he’s missing out on his baby son’s colicky first year) to Taiwanese documentary students, fellow visitors have all had extraordinary backgrounds. Then there’s my favorite resident dog named “Yes,” a skittish little thing, all wagging tail & ears.
Another plus is the walk home from my Chinese classes in Lijiang’s old town: rather than crowded streets lined with tourist shops, I pass private homes in a real, working neighborhood, yet most houses still boast the traditional roofs and architecture of the northern Yunnan region.
I’ll let the pictures do the rest of the talking for me. You can see them at Flickr
About Me
I'm an american artist with an Asian focus.
I paint sharp-witted women.
I print blue photos of disappearing places. Sometimes I work in Sydney, sometimes I work in Asia. You can keep up and connect with me on Twitter, and Facebook, and Flickr
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