Category: Process

Sitka Image Transfer Workshop - Student Selections #1

4/26/2015

Below are some long overdue posts of student acrylic transfer work from my workshop at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology last summer. I had a great group for those two days who all brought very unique interests and artistic backgrounds with them to this process (as evidenced below). Most everyone seemed a bit startled at just how labor-intensive the process happened to be, but there is no questioning that the results can be absolutely beautiful in their unpredictability. Each of the images below was transferred onto 12" square birch plywood panels using acrylic gel medium. Some of these panels were leafed with metal leaf (see examples 1 and 2), some were left raw (as in examples 3 and 4) and some painted. As always, the panels were provided by the one-stop shop for artistic substrates in PDX: art-substrates.

As is often the case, so much of the workshop's time was devoted to demystifying the transfer process that there wasn't much time for students to start incorporating other mediums on top of the image. I hope that some day I'll be afforded a week-long workshop so that students can move beyond the basics and really start to explore how to further incorporate drawing and painting onto the transferred images.

The above transfer on "gold" leafed panel is enhanced by a bit of powdered graphite rubbed into the corners to create something akin to a vignette technique. As is evidenced here, it's hard to go wrong when you're working with a great image, but the transfer process and the liveliness of the light across the metal leaf under the image provide an extra level of mystery that is difficult to fully appreciate in the above reproduction.

Jeffrey T. Baker Acrylic Transfer Workshop Student Sample

If memory serves, this photo was taken as a reflection in a door and much of the texture you're seeing here exists in the actual photo. This transfer onto "silver" leaf helps reinforce the sheen and texture of the surface that captured the image in the first place.

This image is a transfer of a copy of original artwork for a children's story. The grain of the plywood panel beneath adds another layer of texture and a soft warm tone to the image.

As a collector of vintage photographs it is impossible for me to not get excited about their application in this process. This picture harkens back to an Oregon Coast of long ago. You can see that there are just a few areas left on this image that still need to have some of the paper pulp removed (any area of fuzzy white) but it promises to be a very clean transfer.

After sharing with the class that I periodically use shellac as a finish, which is oil-based and therefore literally renders stray bits of paper pulp all but transparent and invisible this student brought in a can of Watco to run a few tests. It's effects were similar, although the nutty brown of the Watco will become a tone in the image to the degree that it is applied. Part of the benefit of instructing workshops is getting to learn a few things myself. . .

While I won't be at Sitka this summer there is no shortage of amazing workshops on offer and registration is now open for 2015. If you've got a few days, you'd be hard pressed to find a place more beautiful, with a staff more friendly than Sitka Center for Art and Ecology.

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Inkjet Transfer Samples From Recent Workshop

4/24/2013

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As I think was perfectly clear to the fifteen participants in my recent photo transfer workshop at OCAC, inkjet transfers are far more persnickety than acrylic transfers. The inks have a tendency to bleed into one another and/or slurry about under pressure during the transfer process, and then there's the whole issue of trying to seal them so that future introductions of water (i.e. if you take it in the rain or are suddenly seized with the desire to paint on top of the image) don't reactivate the inks and cause them to move around again. Nevertheless, I sincerely believe that this is a great process for those artists who find inspiration and direction in the random mark-making and peculiar color shifts that can occur when a process is not perfectly predictable. I certainly work that way, and relish in discovering a visual possibility that I could not have preconceived.

Pictured above are two lovely inkjet transfers of the same image. The one on the left resulted from too much water on the paper surface which was then rolled too hard with a small rubber brayer. Personally, I love the irregular edges and dampened (pun intended) color palette. The image on the right is cleaner, but either the paper was too dry in the lower areas or the transfer was not applied fast enough from the carrier sheet to the paper, and the blacks had an opportunity to coalesce which left a blotchy appearance in what should have been the darkest area of the print. If this were my image, I would probably focus my attention on unifying those darkest areas and punching up the blacks of the tree's silhouette. It would be exciting to see how this image ultimately gets finished by the artist. . . it was a lovely photo to begin with, and may need little more than the right frame and a bit of mat board to bring it to completion.

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Register Today for 1-Day Photo Transfer Workshop

1/11/2013

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Photo Transfer Techniques for Painters
Instructor: Jeffrey T. Baker
1-Day Spring Workshop at OCAC
Saturday, April 13 | 9am-4pm

There are only a few spots left in the photo transfer workshop I'm teaching in Portland this spring. I'll be demystifying the various approaches to photocopy transfers while distilling ten years of trial-and-error into a selection of handy tips and hands-on activities suitable for painters and photographers alike. Read the full course description and register here.

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Halloween In Progress

10/31/2012

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Another memento mori on its merry way toward an end I can't quite visualize yet. Just a few days ago it looked like this. . .

Right now I'm just allowing this to be a reactive sort of process- with decisions made as they often are in life, in the wake of other decisions, some of which are good and some less so. You can try to whitewash certain elements, or perhaps scrape them away, with the hopes of starting fresh but ultimately some trace of what has come before always remains.

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Memento Mori

10/25/2012

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For those who know me well my inchoate foray into the memento mori genre will come with little surprise on the decline of 2012. It is a theme that somehow seems more relevant now that I'm a bit older-- less saturated with the laughable melodrama that infused so many early works of art when New Wave Goth and Anne Rice novels seemed like fine company any time I was without a girlfriend.

Which might be more candor than you're really seeking here.

So, with regards to the memento pictured above, you are seeing a work that is very much in progress. A diptych created from two reclaimed canvases over a decade old, with the left being leafed in silver and awaiting an image from the hillsides that make up Cascade Head. The skull is derived from a photograph I took in France many years ago. It rests atop a bit of IKEA fabric that has been thoroughly permeated with powdered graphite.

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Inkjet Epiphanies

9/25/2011

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For the past two weekends I've been part of a workshop exploring the new possibilities for printing using large format inkjet printers. At this point I've printed on wood veneer, aluminum flashing, the finest of rice papers, and some exceedingly luxurious clay-coated rag papers.

Like so many people (artists and non-artists alike), I've fought with desktop inkjet printers for years. They constituted a bit of affordable technology that always left me in a perpetual state of disappointment at the muddy prints that resulted. It was hard to even get a bit of text to look crisp, much less a sepia landscape. After this workshop I realize that the days of sub-standard output are gone but, as is true with all things digital, some potential for consternation still remains.

As the instructor pointed out in the workshop, when things go wrong in the "analog" world (the darkroom for instance) the reaction is often a dogged acceptance in conjunction with a methodical effort to rectify the issue. When things go wrong in a digital lab however, the immediate reactions are: frustration, anger, and blame. Something in our expectation about the ease and convenience of technology make us very unwilling to accept any room for error from our machinery.

The irony of this stance being (as any IT person is quick to point out) that the vast majority of the time any error that occurs is user error: the machines don't do anything that they aren't instructed to do by the user. While I've fumed at this observation before it is difficult to refute the logic. Ultimately, despite everyone's sub-conscious hope otherwise, the machine you use, be it computer or printer, cannot read your mind and divine your final intention. Instead, there must be a sort of mediated communication that happens between you, the machine, and all of the people involved with the creation of the hardware and software that seeks to facilitate that communication.

I would hazard to say that as much as any issue in a computer lab may result from user error, an equal amount of responsibility could be given to design error which, ultimately, derives from communication errors between people. A computer programmer may think they know exactly what would be required in the ideal library circulation software (after all, they've used a library before), but this assumption rarely nets an elegant bit of software because it doesn't work with the end-consumer to provide the right tools, structure, and interface. The inability for this fact to be honored and recognized by so many hardware and software companies may speak to some of the inherent arrogance of technological innovation. . . but that is a topic for another time, and the mere fact that this is how today's blog post will end just further supports the observation that, when it comes to difficulties with all things digital the inevitable outcome is blame. That's just human nature.

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