Bam! East Village has some positive vibes going towards it, making this little corner of downtown is a special place. More paintings to come!

This summer I plan on spending some time in East Village and on the North side of downtown Calgary.  I like to find unique perspectives and to capture the energy of a neighbourhood in my series 'Big City Living'.  I have been riding my bike through the east side of downtown for many years and always admired its 'raw beauty'.  Obviously, I am not the only one who saw the potential where these grounds, streets, rivers and downtown energies all converge.  

Back in 2009 I spent four months exploring Patrick Island with a group of school children.  The children would draw and paint whatever inspired them and this often included the open park and river in front of the downtown landscape.  At the end of the four months I painted a scene from this view and it is obvious how inspired I was childhood adventure and fantasy.  

 The painting is called, 'View from Patrick Island'.

 Last summer I spent some time taking photos of the newly developed East Village area around the river, attended some late night movie events and witnessed some yoga classes happening in the area.  I attended events where the Mayor would speak highly of the promising new East Village - all of these experiences went into my first painting of the area, 'East Village Gathers'.  I tried to capture all of its potential.  All the positive energy that a community centred development can exude.  

I have a lot more ideas for further exploration.  I plan on making my way down to the area again this summer and capturing more activity and energy into some new work.  The research, photos and drawings are an important part of my process.  The painting is a process of slowly layering ink then working on photos for collage and finally a resin coat to bring it all together.  My aim is to have four new paintings of the area completed for the fall. 

The first painting has sold and is hanging in the Calgary Municipal Land Corporation office.  I am sure they would welcome you visit to view. It is hanging in their reception area.  

Calgary Municipal Land Corporation (CMLC)
429 – 8^th Avenue S.E.

Another grouping of my work can be seen at the ATB on McLeod Trail and 13th Avenue. I also do private studio tours to anyone interested in seeing my process and seeing some of my other explorations in textiles, printmaking and woodburning.  Send me an email, let's chat.

Next step for designing 'Wild Spaces' textile prints - cities, poppies and madder dye - Part 2

I decided to add some freehand painting to the image after silkscreening with the three screens - poppies, mushrooms and flowers.  I painted with MORDANTS thickened up with Guar Gum.  I have coloured the Mordants with temporary stain so that they do show a colour when painting, but it is a colour very different from what will be the final result. LEFT IS MORDANT PAINT.  RIGHT IS AFTER BEING IMMERSED IN MADDER NATURAL DYE EXTRACT BATH.

There are about nine different colours achieved with the mordant painting and Madder dyeing application. Why do I need to do anything else? Why do I feel driven to create a multi-screen print? Just because - just because I am finding it challenging.  I like the process of laying down one screen and then another to get a whole bunch of fabric printed - but still by hand.  

Next step is going on to a second screen design.  Back to the drawing board. The mushrooms and flowers didn't cut it.  I have been considering how I take my interest in cities and combine it with my interests in wild and green spaces - which is something I consider when I paint on canvas.  So here is what I have come up with so far.  LEFT 'CITY' INSPIRED IMAGERY + POPPIES = POPPIES IN THE CITY 2screen print.  These are not the best photos and only the most imaginative person could see this coming out to any good - or you have the common sence to see that there is no way in hell it will work.  I am one of those people who have to just keep working it out and seeing it live and then keep working it out until something sticks.  Tomorrow I will print on textiles and I will share the results with you.

My Process For Designing Multi-Colour Silkscreen Images 'Wild Garden Spaces' - Part 1

Supplies used:

Fabric, mushrooms, ink, scanner, Photoshop, 110mesh count silkscreens, immulsion, light table, plastic transparancy, Mylar

Wild Garden Spaces

My aim is to create a number of different screens that I can layer together for banners.  The theme I am working with is 'wild garden spaces'.  I want to have screens that can be layered together much like a painting, with flexibility to change the combination, colour and repeated images with each banner.  I may even add in some had drawing/painting or stitches after as well.  

It generally takes me a long, round about process to get to the images I want to work with.  I end up creating many images that I don't use and I am not sure why I have to go so long down a road with an image before I decide to quit, but that is just how I work.  I will give you an example of how I arrived at a few of the images.

I cut many different little shapes out of cloth and glued them down on to Mylar.  I wanted to work with a graphic look and to keep the images big and chunky.  The images were inspired by a walk through Erlton Natural Park last summer.  I took a few dozen close-up photos of all the different plants growing in the area.  I tried to imitate them with the cloth cut-outs.  

Then I scanned them all into the computer and played with the images in Photoshop.  I created 'stamps' out of the images so they could easily be transferred into a silkscrren image.  All silkscreen images have to be black and white. Gradients are not transferred, instead you have to create an illusion of gradient with linework.  I spent what felt like a billion hours cleaning all the images up in photoshop.  

In the end these flowers are the only images I used this go around, and I simply just used the images I created on the Mylar. Cut them out of the page and stuck them down on the light table. 

MUSHROOMS

I have a slight facination with the power of mushrooms :-)  There is a huge variety and I have really only just touched the surface in my knowledge of them.  I even attended a Mushroom Symposium, but that is another story.  I decided to start with some Portabello Mushroom Spore Prints.  Easy enough.

I layed another transparancy on top and drew them with ink and was inspired to draw in all sorts of directions. Great thing about using transparency is it can be wiped off really easily, but does not need to be recopied for the light table.

One of the finished screens.

Fibre Fortnight! An amazing display of Fibre and Textile Art at ACAD. March 11-21, 2013

Miniature Show - silent auction on from the 11th to the 21st.  This is some amazing miniature work you can own at a very reasonable price. Students, instructors and alumni participate.  All money raised is for to support the Fibre Department.  

Many of the students have submitted work for the Phyllis Balm Award which is a one time award to someone in the Fibre Department. It is a real honour to win this award and everyone submits the best work they have created thus far.  

COME CHECK OUT THE SHOW AT THE OPENING. March 21st 5:30 to 7pm or any other time the school is open you can wonder through the show. 

Natural Dye Testing with Weld (Reseda Luteola)

I am currently working on a method of using natural dyes to produce reliable and predictable results.

I have been working with natural dyes for the last three years and I came into it without any real understanding of what I was getting myself into.  I found lots of videos, books and even a couple of workshops which taught certain components to natural dying. While at ACAD, I learn some things from my instructors and finally it struck me this last fall - that solutions in my practice need to be found.

I kept coming across the same issues:

Too much water being wasted, too difficult to collect enough dye stuff or local dye stuff, unpredictable results, expensive, and in the end - not always the best ecological choice.  It became important to me to try and solve these issues if I was going to continue with the process of natural dye on fabric.

I have started the journey this year.  My first controlled experiment is with the plant WELD & THE TANNIN GALLNUT.  I choose Weld because it is a plant which can and does grow in Western Canada. I have not yet had the privilege of raising a Weld plant myself, but I hope to this summer.

I believe I have seen Weld while on Vancouver Island.  It looks a lot like this:

my idea of a weldplant

You can google the image yourself, but when I read the description I thought of this pic I took while on the island.

Weld makes a flat rosette 6-10in wide of shiny bright green oblong leaves with wavy or rippled edges. The second year is when this plant may start to send up stalks with smaller leaves and little yellowish flowers. 

I did read in a gardening book that if seeded in early spring Weld can flower the first year - again, I hope to test this theory.

For dying with Weld, pluck leaves from around the base or cut the whole flower stalks when they form.  Use fresh or dried. This is a safe, good dye producing plant. 

  

Weld has been used as a YELLOW dye since the Roman times because of its strong, clear lightfast yellow. A beautiful dye which can produce many colours with the right mordant application. Previous to this testing I had done a Weld Immersion dye (realize I need another entry to explain this process) and this just means I stuck my fabric in a big pot of hot plant dye. You are looking at the results to the right here.

The objective for my current testing is to see how much versatility I can get out of this reliable dye plant.  I wanted to see how many colours I could produce from the same plant using as little resources as currently possible and in a way that will allow me to reproduce the effects.

MORDANTS

I worked with two mordants - Alum and Ferrous and with plant cellulose fabric. Linen, hemp and cotton. 

 I made various combinations of these two mordants plus sodium carbonate and vinegar to create an acetate plus a thickener to help in the printing process.  After applying the mordants, I took care to dry and rinse the fibre before putting the fabric pieces in the dye. Below, my mordants are numbered from 1 to 9 and each mordant has its own brush and block for printing.

mordant mixes for printing

The results were very fascinating.

my weld samples

This one was a quick immersion dye after the careful application, drying and rinsing of 9 different mordant combinations just using Alum and Ferrous.

The brights appear to have little variation, but the sadder (just meaning ferrous mordant) colours have a lot of variety. I am picking out my favorites.

Like this beautiful kaki colour below - my photo hardly does it justice.

Or this lemon yellow and warm brown. This other purple-brown was definitely the hardest colour to capture in my camera.  

KEEP checking back to see more experiments with different plants. 

I AM EXCITED!!!