monoprint – Deborah Santoro

This is Ursula, in Ustrasana, the camel pose.

I’m taking some sessions with printmaker Pam Lawson. It is a joy to have access to a press and the wisdom of an experienced printmaker to go along with it. That night I told my husband the bad news, I’m going to need a press. He says fine, stop fooling around and let’s fix up our house and sell it, and then I can have a press and maybe a space of my own to work. The problem with that is that I’m up against time constraints. When I start fixing up the interior of our house, that’s going to eat up my studio time, at least for a while.

Same pose, Peg Mulqueen this time.

There is so much potential here, I want to work with multiple plates, layering the figures in their yoga poses against Islamic tile patterns. Meanwhile, Ellen Olson-Brown reminded me to get back to daily drawing, and I’ve been doing more or less that for a few weeks now. Here are a few sketches.

After a few sketches the teapot wanted more attention, so I’ve been working on this one for several days:

The handle is a bugger, let me tell you. What’s nagging me about the prints above top is the hands, I’m not drawing them terribly well and they need to be good, so once the teapot is done I’ll practice drawing the yoga poses for a bit, and try to get those hand positions down. The two teapots here are a good illustration of a frustrating drawing phenomenon. Quick sketches often have a life to them, a vibrancy that is hard to maintain in a longer more detailed drawing. You can kill the darn thing so easily, and it becomes lifeless and dull.

There was this beautiful old tree in Shirley Center, healthy and vibrant, a twin trunk White pine tree that was probably not an intended planting. It’s roots were extensive, they were shifting and even engulfing some quite striking 18th/ 19th century gravestones. Despite protests, the selectman cut down the tree.

These prints are part of a new experiment with carving into a Speedball speedy cut plate, a journey which began with making stamps for gelatin printing. Unfortunately, after these prints were made, I washed the “plate” and set it out to dry in my dish rack, but it broke in half when I moved something else and it got knocked around. I would have been more upset but I was already thinking that the negative spaces don’t quite work, and I’d like to do it over. I’ll try again this week.

I’m now using Golden Open acrylics for these prints, and they are delightful, everything the speedball inks weren’t. These are slow drying acrylic paints, suitable for monoprinting. The paper is a lightweight Rives BFK, which is also pretty perfect, although it came with labels right over the watermark that are difficult to peel off without taking some fiber with it.

Tag: monoprint

Teapots and Hands

Elegy