Babe you got this

This post is loooong overdue, perhaps as it is about the last two prints I made during my Stone Lithography Fellowship at Leicester Print Workshop which ended in June this year *sniffles. This is quite a long post, so bare with me.

As the end was growing ever closer I realised how much more I wanted to do and experiment with and coming to terms with the limited time was frustrating but also lit a fire under my ass to try something new. I had seen in a small book on Lithography, it’s name I can’t remember, a screen print incorporated into a drawn image on a stone. I knew right away this was something I had to try as I am also a big fan of screen printing. Sure you could argue that adding a screen print layer onto an already printed litho print would be the easiest way, but what’s the fun in that?

When this comes of that

In my series of Wanderers I last wrote about how I added colour layers to the prints but the last print didn’t get the same sort of colour layer as the rest of them. This was purely “accidental” in a way. I always felt that the foot didn’t really fit in with the rest of the series looking at them all together.

There were bits of the drawing I was never happy with and also bits of the water tusche that didn’t print as I had hoped. I was thinking of

Colour me in

… with your blue (nei djók)

I love colour, and I love coloured prints, but doing colour lithographs is definitely a challenge compared to the old faithful black. Especially as I love my tusche as well and to get that printed properly you really need to use a nap roller which unfortunately we can’t use with our coloured inks. So I’ve started doing a lot of coloured prints recently and the way it happened was kind of random as most of the things I do usually are.

I needed a bit of an outlet and so I did a quick stone inspired from my favorite bits from my last series.

Wandering

My way of working is constantly changing. The last few prints I’ve done have been focused so much on drawing that I felt like they had lost their essence, or my essence. To try and bring it back I wanted to put myself into my drawings, so I literally printed myself on some stones as a jumping of point for further drawing.

Hands, ears, foot and nipples were “printed” straight unto the stone using ink. I

Lupine

A mokulito inspired by the all consuming lupine.

Drew the big mokulito plate at my home studio.

Drawing from nature

Maniere Noire – take two!

A long while ago I tried a bit of maniere noire lithography, which is when you start by blacking out your stone with ink and then working away with scratching/etching to make white and grey areas on the black background. Basically the reverse of your regular drawing method. So I have only done this one test stone before and then never came back to it… until now! I wanted to try my hand at it again and create a dark image in contrast with my more usual lighter backgrounds.

I actually started with drawing on the stone with crayon and tusche before rolling out my ink, gumming over those areas first.

Then wiping the stone with turps and

Í gjótu

First of all I’ve got some great news for the Litho fellows: Our programme has been extended until the end of June this year! Woohoo! We’ve got a few more months for creating work and preparing for our final exhibition which will take place in November. The end of the programme seemed to come sooner then I expected, I really wasn’t prepeared to end it in March so I’m very happy about this extension.

I have now wrapped my head around the fact that it will soon be finished though and am starting to focus on my final output from the whole two years and a bit. So far I have pretty much been experimenting with both technique and concepts, so many different ideas have come and gone. I have decided to focus the last few months on creating a body of work that is focused on my drawing and my way of storytelling.

The first print is one I call Í gjótu which literally translates In crevasse, which doesn’t have the same lyricism to it, it isn’t about butt cracks… promise.

2016 Art Chronicle

Another year flown by and a new one just beginning to bloom. The new year always brings me to reflect on the one before as well as looking onward to hopefully an even greater one! So lets get right to it, the 2016 Art Chronicle:

List í Ljósi – Art by Light Festival in Seyðisfjörður, IS

In February I got to travel back home to Iceland to participate in a light art festival in the town of Seyðisfjörður, one of my favorite locations. It was a celebration of light as the sun disappears behind the mountains for the winter months and reappears in the end of February. It snowed heavily almost the entire time, we got about 20 minutes of sunlight a day and even got trapped in the fjord a day longer then expected. Simply put it was amazing!

My work was a luminescent mural inspired by folk legend and nature.

The hand that threads the needle

Ayup mush!

I decided to put my drawing skills to the test for some crazy reason the other week. Unlike my usual drawings which take about 15 minutes to draw I spent a good hour or two on this one! Phew! Well, at least on one of the stones, the other took about 10 minutes.

Try and guess which one: