Interesting times....

Well, first Blogger loses edited versions of posts, and now the login has been broken for a few days. But scanning through their chat board, some - not all - noted that they could login using different browsers. So I tried Chrome (I usually use IE, bad habits die hard), and here I am. The lost posts though have not been restored, although the powers-that-be put up notices that it's all back (when they bother to put up notifications at all). This sort of repeated idiocy usually indicates bad management practice, if I had any Google stock, I'd consider unloading it.

Enough ranting :) It's been a busy time with nothing to post for it, though it certainly has been an educational! I took the same image as the litho, and decided to try doing it intaglio to see if I could make the background more settled while bringing out more liveliness in Hanna's figure. The line etching went well, though I should have feathered it more, and I adjusted some of the perspective lines to bring the image more into focus:



But from there on in, with the aquatint, disaster! C'est la vie. So once I recover (sob), I'll give it another shot with another plate...

Meanwhile, we've started on illustrating another one of Hanna's poems, Parasite Worms. Right now it's in the sketch stage (so it may go out the window altogether), but the idea is to try and incorporate the poem and a dreamlike figure into one large encaustic (36x36). Lettering in encaustic is a bitch, and it's been awhile since I've done figures from imagination. Should be interesting. But like Picasso said, "I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it." Words to live by.

Speaking of poetry, in case there's anyone reading this from the Halifax area, the show Dan O'Neill is curating over at the Dal Arts Center opens tonight. The full blurb is here, scroll down to the "Second Impressions" listing. The show comprises lithos by Motherwell and de Kooning with poetry by Frank O'Hara and Octavio Paz. Which of course allows me to close with one of my favourite O'Hara poems:

Why I Am Not A Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.