Friday, March 1, 2024

MICAfest Art for Change: The M/others’ View

 "Three Women" and "Sunscreen" have been accepted to MICAfest Art for Change: The M/others’ View, a Visual/Performing/Literary Arts Festival coming to Northampton, MA in May. It will feature performances and visual art displays exploring non-traditional definitions and narratives of "m/otherhood," and will go on throughout the month of May at various venues to be announced.

https://experiencemica.org/

MICAFest will take in place in multiple venues around Northampton. My work will be at the Bombyx Center for Arts & Equity in the Peacock Room
I'll post more details as they become available.

Oil painting of three women on a porch, representing three generations. The daughter looks into the picture, across a valley with an old brick mill town with a Florentine tower. In the distance a thunder cloud looms. The mother is busy hanging a sheet on a clothes line, her gaze directed across the picture. The grandmother looks out of the picture, meeting our eyes with a quizzical expression.

Pastel painting of mother applying sunscreen to little daughter's nose. Behind them, a very large wave is breaking


PCC Memories - etching work in progress

This is the first proof I've gotten that looked decent enough to post. I've been tweaking the variables of the process - prepping the plate, applying the ground, inscribing the drawing, etching, inking, wiping, preparing the paper, and printing. Still pretty far from having a reliable procedure but starting to narrow it down. I'm using non-toxic, or at least less toxic materials - BIG Etching Ground, Akua ink, SoySolve, etc. I started out with a sandpaper aquatint, in which a hard ground is applied before running the plate through the press a few times with a sheet of sandpaper, then etched. I successively stopped out selected areas and re-etched to create a range of values, then did the lines and hatching as several separate states. Those dark black marks are deep holes that crept in during the first etch. I've tried scraping and burning them but that only seems to lighten the surrounding area making them stand out more. I'm wondering if they could be filled in with epoxy or something?

Etching of streetcar interior with pensive man in foreground, mother reading large book wile her daughter looks on, other passengers in background.