Art & Soul Stencil & Printing

Here are just a few of the stencil self portraits that came out of the classroom. I was so busy running inside and out that I missed photographing some wonderful work.

After we prepared our collages and sprayed our stencils we finished with a coat of encaustic medium. This kept us pretty busy as you can imagine.

Plus cutting the stencils. So many decisions.

I'm going to try to do some of these techniques with misters instead of the toxic paint in a can. The fumes are really something.

But oh, the beauty of that opaque black paint is hard to beat.

Then I taught a class where we made nature prints with brayers, cut rubber stamps, pulled prints from gelatin, made masks and more. Another busy day with lots of physical movement about the room.

We printed papers to use in our journals and for other projects using feathers, leaves and masks that we made ourselves.

We pulled monoprints.

Made prints in positive and negative from the masks we made.

Tried various water-based inks including Akua, Speedball and Createx.

For the gelatin prints we used acrylic paint. Primary colors plus black.

Here are some of the results.

It was fun.

And exhausting.

After the students left three young men came in who worked for the hotel and showed great interest in what we had been doing all day. They hardly looked older than high school students and my heart went out to them, laboring at mundane jobs just as I had been at their age. The first question they asked was if you had to go to college to be an artist. (My answer was no, just do it.) Then they wanted thorough explanations of how the prints were made and asked to look through my journals. Finally their boss came in and I was afraid I'd gotten them into trouble but he was interested too and had his own litany of questions. Finally he took my hand-out which I offered and made prints for the boys and himself so that they could have the recipe for the gelatin and directions for making the prints.

Once again I reflect on the pull art has on all of us. That these workmen were fascinated by the process and loved the beauty of the colors spread out on the trays before them. Art is innate. Art is a joyful dance. Everyone loves to push around color, to play and make beauty. Sometimes I feel like I am at the intersection between human beings and something transcendent. There is magic in making art. This is the magic I love to share.