Background: Check!

I am in the midst of my two giant projects: 50 prints for the 50-50 show at the Sanchez Art Center in Pacifica, and a set of framed prints for an August solo show at Michaelangelo Gallery here in Santa Cruz. All told, that probably adds up to some 100 prints, allowing for a few ‘oopsies’ along the way.

The good news is that I’m playing with the same set of images for both shows –prints based on my journey through Spain on the Via de la Plata last year– and playing is the right word.

Like my Explorations prints, these are all layered. The bottom layers, or backgrounds, are monoprints, and that is what I’ve been concentrating on lately.

Here is a giant pile of backgrounds, only part of what I have on hand. (And there are more to come, as well.)

Here are some of the individual background images, with my thoughts behind them.

A trail, trying to show a clear hot day; a yellow fading to white, also trying to impart heat.

Two different shades and level of detail of grass, one with a saint’s procession made with a stencil.

A shadowy romería with contour lines; a rich brown background, like cured leather.

Some more rich multilevel solids. The one on the left is the first pass over the plate, while the one on the right is the second print from the same ink, otherwise known as a ghost.

A stone wall made by layering color over a photo-based chine colle; the same thing again, but with a photo of the cisterns under Cáceres.

Then I thought, but wouldn’t it be fun to draw the lovely bumpy roughness of stone by hand? So I did.

And a first attempt to see what would happen if I added iron filings to damp paper. These are just spotty, but at some point I want to use magnets or vibration to get the filings to align into a pattern.

And a mystery item: what in the world will I do with little “VOTE” prints???