blogs.meca.edu

I cannot believe that it is already February, this semester has been going by so fast!
Quick studio update! In one week my studio went from this:

to this!

What I have learned in the past couple of weeks is that, for me, making art comes with a good deal of messiness. In my studio this semester I decided that I wanted to try to make something every day, or at least be in my studio working towards a finished piece each day.

For the beginning of the semester all the juniors were supposed to make a limited edition of 100 double sided trading cards. We plan on compiling the prints and giving them out, as small portfolios, during the printmaking open studio on February 16th. The cards are supposed to be examples of our work. Everyone is printing them differently, some of the juniors have hand printed all 100 and others have printed them digitally.

For my card, I chose to make a woodblock of the phrase OMG-GMO (which stands for Oh My God, Genetically Modified Organism) and print it on one side. On the other side, I made a print by rolling a corn cob in relief ink and then transferring the ink from the cob onto the paper.

Awesome, R. Hoe and Co. press.

Me lifting a print off of the woodblock after I printed it on the press.

These are only a few of the 100 woodblock prints, drying on the rack.

Here is an example of what it looked like when I printed from the corn cob onto the paper!

The corn cob that I printed with!

It’s always wondertful to get back into the swing of things in a new semester. My excitement for class has been met with equally enthusiastic teachers and projects. Everyone has a semester under their belt at this point, so it feels like I have a better handle on how to pace myself and work. I am surprised by the fact that I am now getting to projects that I have marveled at since freshman year. Book projects that I have seen upperclassman do are now landing on my studio desk…

In one project, the “This I Believe” book, we take the writing prompt from the This I Believe Website and with our whole class doing it, we construct a book of our own design from all the stories that are written. We act as the designer, author, editor, and create every aspect of the book. To be able to make something and give it a feeling, a rhythm, and impart a designed idea onto the pages. Although this is something that is very difficult to do, the hard work shows when you have a beautifully designed book in the end. I hope in the upcoming weeks to be able to show you all the wonderful work our class does with these books, and I hope you take a chance to read some of the This I Believe stories on the website (http://thisibelieve.org/). It’s worth taking a peek, there are a multitude of credos that will both move you and inspire you.

As this is my first blog entry I think it would be appropriate for me to introduce myself. I am a printmaking major at MECA, in my junior year, and my current interests are:

1. The romance of food and the beauty of cookbooks.

2. The seed packets that I most recently procured from a super snazzy eBay transaction.

3. Cooking. I just taught myself how to cook poached eggs in simmering water, so I have been poaching eggs left and right.

This was my dinner a couple nights ago: poached eggs, kale, and cheese on some toast. Delicious.

4. CORN! I am fascinated by American Corn, its beautiful and destructive qualities. Last semester a lot of the work I made was centered around the imagery of corn. By the end of the semester I had finished a 72″ x 72″ print. It is a sugar lift etching with hand coloring done in gouache.

Sugar lift is a process in printmaking in which you paint directly onto a copper plate with a water soluble mixture of corn syrup, black india ink, and some soap. After it is dry, you cover the whole plate with an acid resistant coating. You then can dissolve the sugar lift by placing it in hot water and the acid resistant coating will stay intact. After all that is complete you are ready to etch the plate! You put it in a tray of acid and it etches where ever the sugar lift has been dissolved. It creates a beautiful line that is more expressive and like a brush stroke than typical hard ground etchings.

The images below show the plates with the sugar lift drawn on them, before they were coated with the acid resistant coating.

It has been a little while now since I have been back at MECA, and the time spent at home was relaxing. Upon returning to my apartment in the fantastic city of Portland, I found myself getting a little restless and the itch to create and make something was impossible to ignore. Having a month long break is good for recharging the proverbial batteries of your mind and body, but as time goes on while you sit and relax you start to think about all the exciting things that you were doing in your studio…

As soon as I got back to Portland and into my studio space, the mental gears were turning trying to think of something to create. I found myself in the Print studio before classes began. To get the creative juices flowing and start thinking about my own studio practice, I decided to pull a quick edition of posters.

These were a blast to make, and if you’d like to see more about the little project I have it posted on my Flickr account (there are full views and an explanation of the project as well).

I think the great thing about this break is you come back rejuvenated and ready to go in a new set of classes. Even though at the end of the last semester I had found myself drudging along in the last few days of class, I feel excited now expecting what might be on the horizon. I hope that everyone else at MECA who is arriving back had a good break, and are just as excited about their upcoming classes. I know there are a lot of amazing things on the way, whether it be a project or a show, or just some interesting event here in the city. My first class couldn’t come soon enough.

When the last week of the semester finally arrives, its time to be thoughtful and reflect on our work from the semester.

I’m happy to be done with so many big projects, and on the topic of reflection and culmination I have a perfect chance to stand back and look at my body of work as a whole. The department critique for Graphic Design was this past Thursday, and it gave everyone a chance to put up everything and anything that they felt was part of their work and design practice. It is quite a sobering thing to see a huge wall of your work and be able to think about it as a whole. We don’t often see something like this with all projects often split apart by time and due dates, so relishing in some of the connections in your work can be a real treat.


The fantastic thing about these critiques is that you get the chance to hear both opinions of people who have been around your work a lot and people from outside our school setting. We had guest designers and artists come in for some periods of the critique and let them have some input as a totally unbiased opinion, as well as one of experience different from anything else we are exposed to. I for one loved all the things that were said about my own display and everyone else’s. This feedback informs my own work, so hearing everyone’s crit was very valuable.

The holiday seasons are always busy for everyone at MECA. As soon as that coma-enducing Thanksgiving meal is a memory, things kick into high gear for the last few weeks of the semester. The impending winter break adds a sense of finality and I have had a few “all-nighters” in the last few days just to make sure everything is done to the best of my ability.

Another thing that I have been excited about is the two-day Holiday Sale at MECA that everyone has been scrambling around to get ready for. On December 4th and 5th there is a crowd that descends on the Porteous building, all looking for beautiful works of art to buy and take home. It’s quite a bustling scene even during the set-up, and seeing some tables putting out work is making me nervous for not spending my own hard-earned money on everything that I want to hang up on my walls.

One very exciting thing is the GD department’s table this time around for the Holiday Sale. We happened upon a huge collection of sign-letters that were going to be thrown away, and couldn’t pass them up. These were imported from a company in Paris, and we have so many that we don’t know what to do with them (nearly over a million letters. No joke!). We hope to be able to let people who want them to take some home, so we’ve been sorting and setting up a display so they can be looked at and go to a good home if someone wants to buy some.

Since it’s the city wide First Friday event, not just MECA but the whole city, will be full of people enjoying this holiday season and all the wonderful happenings in Portland. It can be overwhelming to find places to go and to see in the city, so I thought just as a little side comment I’d offer up a project I have been working on for a bit. I’ve created a Student MECA Portland Map for people to be able to find interesting/important things around town, and I wanted to share the link with you here.

Click here to jump to the Map!

This past weekend I helped out with an Open House for prospective students. It made me think back to when I was a freshman. It was a fun trip back in time. Everything was so new, so exciting, so… scary. I have to say, being here now after a few years things are happily still exciting and new, and my confidence has gone way up as an artist.

I lead one of the tours for a group of students and parents. I wanted to show people what impressed me when I came here for the first time. I had a sense of pride (and a little nervousness for being able to encompass all the great things at MECA) showing all of our facilities and talking about our classes and faculty. Later, as I walked around and peeked into some of the faculty led workshops, I could think back to when I was kind of intimidated and excited to have my first interaction with some of my possible professors.

I think being on the other side of this whole event was a great way for me to reflect how far I’ve come. I really enjoyed being the person this time to answer questions about what my department had to offer or what I loved about this college. I hope the people who went to this event had as good of an impression of the school as I did. My initial opinion of the place has not changed at all. The faculty and staff are still the helpful, enthusiastic people who were there to meet me almost three years ago and I’m still very happy being here at Maine College of Art.

One thing that is constantly on my mind while I am in my Graphic design class is: “What exactly do I want to do when I get out of school and have my BFA in this field?” With a love for printmaking and the physicality of being in the print shop (there’s nothing like it, I always get so caught up in working in that part of the school), I am always looking for ways to tie printing and printmaking into my design work. In my Type and Typographic Studies class, we recently had a little field trip that renewed my interest in my sort of quest to combine Graphic Design and Print. We had the privilege of going to see the print shop of David Wolfe, a local printer who specializes in the old methods of printing type.

David’s shop has so many amazing pieces of machinery that you never even see anymore. These ways of working used to be standard before the computer came onto the scene, and it’s so fascinating to see them after living in a computer age. We saw everything from Linotype casting machines (Mark Jamra, our professor, is sitting at the keyboard of this machine below)…

…as well as a few other types of casters and printing presses (Mark would probably cringe at my forgetting of the names of some of these machines, but they’re so fantastic fantastic things and I really feel the need to share them with you).

Hit this link to see a quick clip of one of the Hot metal casters in action

Hit this link to see a quick clip of one of the printing presses, the Heidelberg Printing Press, in action

Hit this link to go to David Wolfe’s Flickr page if you want to see some of the work he’s done through his shop

With all of this beautiful printed material, it makes me disappointed that this is not the typical way things are printed anymore. There’s a kind of magic seeing all of this fantastic equipment instead of staring at a printer and watching the 8.5” x 11” sheets of paper be spat out unceremoniously for a quickly created piece of printwork. The kind of time and love that is put into this art is something that I hope to bring into my practice as a designer. Maybe I’ll try and work at David’s print shop sometime in the near future…

There are so many events that I can look forward to during the year here at MECA. Whether its the small stuff like Soup and Bread (a great get-together with a bunch of food) or big things like major gallery shows involving the whole school, I can always find something to brighten my day. One of my favorite events is the BFA show, in which any BFA student can hang up their art to for all to see in MECA’s halls.

I always thoroughly enjoy seeing this show, because I am curious about what people are working on. There is always something amazing to look at every year, whether it is a student’s work I already admire or someone’s work I have never seen before that catches my eye. Unlike last year, I had the foresight to get a spot in the show, so I had the honor of hanging my own work with some other brilliant artist’s pieces. Being around all this beautiful work really makes me feel inspired. It really gets the mind thinking about what you could learn from everyone’s work. Here’s some of the pieces around the school that really caught my eye.

All of this happens every year, so after spending some time with these pieces it always has me even more excited for what else is going to be shown in the future. The show has reached its end around now and sadly will be down soon, but you can be sure with the coming of other shows in the future like the Thesis show and the Merit show that there will be more inspiration from our fellow students.

Things around town, like the weather, are changing rapidly with the season. All the leaves on the trees visible around the city are starting to turn colors and the breeze has become crisp (finally warm jacket weather, my favorite). As well as the leaves and weather shifting, there has been a curious shift in one of the local gallery spaces that I have been watching closely…

The window of Space Gallery has been transforming in front of our eyes over the course of a week, leaving everyone perplexed to what could be behind the doors in this bewildering display forming outside. The image above is the front window before I walked into the space the night of the opening of the exhibit. Even just the window was gorgeous, pasted with little details of cut out paper and textures and patterns that let you stare for what seemed like forever… but when I stepped inside I was greeted with more than I could have imagined ever walking into an art installation.

Check out this video of the space, I feel like it’s the only way to do it justice… stills don’t convey the wonderful energy that was there that night.

I cannot begin to express the kind of energy that was in this space the night of this opening. Coupled along with the amazing transformation of this space, and it was an experience I will not soon forget. The sheer amount of energy from the pumping music, the ridiculous fantastical place that Space gallery had become, and the fact that the artists were all there dancing along with everyone else. The only thing that made this whole installation even better was the lecture the following day by one of the artists in this installation: Swoon.

The way that Swoon talks about her work is very inspiring, and I left this lecture feeling giddy and invigorated and ready to create work and get it out into the public eye like she does. Her interest in how people react and interact with art and how it can change people’s lives is illustrated in such new and exciting ways in her work, she’s worth looking up and looking into what she does.

As for the rest of my week, I know that there is a lot more stuff on the horizon that is equally exciting that I’ll have to talk about. Halloween is around the corner, and the BFA show is going up this weekend at MECA, so there’s going to be a hell of a lot of new artwork to marvel at. As a last little bit, here’s some fantastic pumpkins I went to see downtown recently. I know our school will soon be shimmering with fantastic gems of art, just like this ridiculous wall of pumpkins.