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.

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. 

I am pleased to report that I'll be returning to Portland for the first weekend in November to offer a 1-day workshop at OCAC (Sat, Nov 2) and celebrate the ongoing success of Sitka Center for Art and Ecology by taking part in their annual Art Invitational at the World Forestry Center (Sat-Sun, Nov 2-3). 

If sweeping coastal headlands, herds of wild elk, and the waving grasses of a windswept estuary aren't enough to entice you to the coast this winter, perhaps the opportunity to meet a few artists while touring about the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology will be just the nudge you need.

This coming Monday evening the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology is hosting an open studio event that is free and open to the public. There will be food, drink, and a chance to meet the writers and artists in residence at Sitka this winter. My studio will be open for the duration with a number of completed works and works-in-progress on display. I do hope to see you there!

Learn more about the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology's residents from the 2012/13 winter season.

Amidst the sodden woods, and in the hours I'm left to my own thoughts, ley lines begin to unwind from the seemingly disparate list of experiences past and preoccupations present. I pick up a book to find it explains elements of the paintings I'm working on that I could not articulate. I dally over an article online only to have it lead me back to theosophical ideas that were the essence of my professional career for years. And I stumble upon the following distillation of esoteric thought by French scholar Antoine Faivre on the same morning that I literally see the silver behind reality; just as I so often imagine it in my studio work. 

It is the first three points that interest me most (although I've included the other three as well) as I develop, perhaps for the first time, a more prolonged experience of the natural world. To see the signs in nature may require an act of imagination, or an expression of faith (or some fine amalgam of both), but there is a very long heritage for this that stretches back to man's earliest time when there was no distinction of nature as other or man as more.
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"Theosophy." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 29 Nov 2012. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theosophy>

There are a few studio amenities that, now that I've enjoyed them, I can't imagine going without. 

Perhaps the most notable is having a sink in the studio. For years I had to walk down a winding hall every time I needed to clean a brush, which inevitably led to impromptu conversations with studio mates or waiting by the bathroom for someone to finish their business before I could even access a sink. How luxurious to just take four steps over to a faucet and then turn back around and pick up working again. 

And then there's heat. You can just turn up the heaters in the studio when it gets cold. They won't blow a circuit and the button to their thermostats isn't jealously guarded for nine months out of the year in the interest of cutting energy costs. This means no numb toes and no need for fingerless gloves while trying to mix paint. I can even let go of the fact that one of the baseboard heaters is on a prime working wall which now must simply be used as a prime works in progress storage wall.

These seem like simple things, right? Yet I've never had both in any studio space I've ever occupied. Additionally, the functionality of this studio is greatly enhanced by the fact that it is temporary, and all the items in it (excluding a few tables and chairs) I've had to bring in for the interim. This helps minimize the clutter which so quickly takes hold in a permanent studio space. Work surfaces cannot be monopolized by stacks of vintage frames and one won't spend an hour looking for gum arabic amongst drawers and drawers of drawing supplies. 

As it is so often the artist who renders their own studio sub-standard through a combination of materials hoarding and untidy work habits, having a short-term work space might ultimately prove to be a more productive arrangement as it necessitates a periodic uprooting and subsequent reevaluation of both working practice and materials. This experience has certainly informed some new thinking about how to arrange my permanent studio, which continues to languish in a state of near completion, as it has for months. I doubt I'll be able to plumb in a sink, but heat is within the realm of reason, as is a serious purging of items that do not immediately contribute to the creative work.

There is no shortage of precedent for glorifying death with the luster of gold. Above is one small work in progress that nods to that convention even as humanity is completely removed from the honorific.

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. 

There are so many subtleties to gray and few better places to appreciate this fact than Oregon. This photograph is both homage to Harry Callahan and an excellent candidate to be the sample image I'll use in teaching acrylic transfer techniques this coming spring in Portland.