A Day In the Life of... Maren Munoz

It's Friday so it's time to check in with an artist and see what it's like to spend a day in their studio.  This week is unique because I met Maren Munoz because of this project. I am so glad I did because I love her work and am happy to add her to my list of artists whose work I need to definitely keep an eye on!  Today's feature walks you through the step of doing an edition so for those of you who are not super familiar with the print process this may be a bit of an eye opener for you.  Check it out!

My life is in a state of upsidedownness at the moment, so it was really fun to have a studio day in the midst of all the craziness. I just finished grad school in May, and now, I just live in Madison, Wisconsin like a regular person. I was watching all the college kids the other day and thinking about "back to school" stuff, and then I realized that this is the first time in about 20 years that I won't be going back to school! But it's high time, and I am very excited about the change.

Now for my studio day....

7:30 AM

Trying to get back on a normal schedule in the event that I actually get a job. My first move is to make coffee. I'm house sitting, but I brought my own coffee set up. I also have a half of a peanut butter and fluff sandwich for breakfast. Marshmallow fluff is one of my vices, and I'm definitely too old to be eating it. I wasn't allowed to eat it as a kid (rightly so) and now I'm making up for lost time.

I like getting up early because it's really peaceful around the house, and I can get a few things done. Since I'm printing today, I spend my morning time cutting rubylith stencils that I will need early on in my work day.

My boyfriend gets up, and we watch an episode of Project Runway Season 9, which seems like a bad idea as far as productivity goes, but it is actually good because it gives me time to drink 3 cups of coffee. I am a super slow drinker of beverages.

10:30 AM

I'm printing in the UW Madison print shops today. It's Labor Day and school hasn't started so I pretty much have the place to myself. I'm trying to get the whole edition done today because A) it's already late and B) I want to be completely cleared out by the time classes start tomorrow. I was invited by two up-and-coming lady printmakers named Lisette Chavez and Nyla Hurley to participate in a print exchange portfolio called Women of the West (I am a native of Colorado.) It was due on the 1st, so now I'm hustling to get it to them. I actually had a finished edition but decided to scrap it because I hated it and just couldn't have it going out into the world as a representation of my work. I guess my standards are getting higher!

For this print, I'm doing all the colors using screen print with a linocut over the top as the key image.

Burning my rubylith stencils into screens. This part always bends my mind a little bit making sure that everything is facing the right way so that the registration will work correctly. I have to concentrate really hard for a second to make sure it's all right.

All set up and ready to start printing. I have learned the hard way, from many incredibly painful printing sessions, that it pays to really take the time and have everything prepped so that printing goes as smoothly as possible.

It also really REALLY helps if you listen to the 90s R&B station on Pandora while you print. Hit after hit after hit!

First color run. Love this blue so much. It has a hint of shimmer. I love this layer all by itself actually - the shapes are cool.

The edition size for the portfolio is 20, so I think I have about 34 prints total, which gives me some wiggle room if anything gets screwed up, which somewhere along the line, it usually does.

Yellow is the second color run. My colors are very transparent, so they layer up to create another green, which saves me from doing a whole other run.

Light pink is the final color run, and it also layers up to give me a few more colors.

5:00 PM

I need a little pick me up at this point before I go in the relief lab and start printing the final layer.

One of the professors at UW is out of town this week, so I'm covering his first classes, which means making copies of the syllabus. It takes such a long time that I get it going and then run for coffee. I am all about the multi-tasking.

Mixing up my ink - decided to make a dark brown instead of black. I absolutely love black but I've found that sometimes it can be too harsh.

Pulling a proof on newsprint.

Pulling an actual proof... Holding my breath and keeping toes and fingers crossed.

Looks pretty damn good! This part is always very exciting... Assuming that everything lines up. It can also be soul shattering.

Things are starting to go wrong with the printing (filling in, ink weirdness, pressure issues etc) and ordinarily, I would stop for the night but I have to get this done, so for better or for worse, I just keep going. Sometimes that's my philosophy anyways. Just get so sick of working on an image and I'm ready to move on to the next thing.

9:00 PM

Finishing out the day with a little gluttony. I feel like I deserve it though! Pizza, wine, and more Project Runway rounds it all out.

11:00ish PM

Bedtime

Thank you so much, Maren! Be sure to check out Maren's website to see more of her work.  Find her here.

This is the last week I have scheduled for studio features.  As I receive more I will post them. If you are interested in documenting your day please get in touch. You can see past days here. 

Have a great weekend!!

Hannah March Sanders, Master of Fine Art

It's been a while since I have featured a great interview with an artist on here. Today's interview is from someone we all know and love. Hannah March Sanders, who you'll remember as being dreamy and arty with Blake Sanders, recently had her thesis show at Louisiana State University. In her interview Hannah gives great insight on how she came to create such an ambitious show. She also gives great advice. She's like a big sister artist who tells it like it is.

In honor of this southern belle her interview is brought to you in Georgia font. Enjoy!

1. Your thesis show was beautiful! Are you relieved to be finished? What was the process of pulling it all together?

Thanks! It's just been a total whirlwind. I'm definitely NOT happy to be done with school. I'm a total academic. I love being in school. I even love to watch movies and read books about other people in school. I'm really going to miss all this great printmaking equipment and our libraries here at L.S.U., also. I am somewhat relieved to be done with my thesis exhibition just because it was such a mad dash to get everything done while teaching, planning and executing a wedding, and just getting through daily stuff like laundry and dishes.To describe the "process of pulling it all together," I think the key word would be "miracle." I got up early. I stayed up late. Blake helped out with laundry and cooking a lot. My school friends helped out with getting me 8' sheets of plywood from the hardware store in their larger vehicles and donated old clothes and things to me, both to wear and to crochet into floor pieces for the exhibition. After losing feeling in one of my thighs for a few months due to a pinched nerve from carving, I started doing yoga every half hour while working on my blocks to stay limber. I still don't really know how I got it all done except that I'm very stubborn, I don't have cable, and I don't really enjoy sleeping that much. And I love what I do, of course.

2. What is the show about?

It's about my love of literature and my experience with disasters in South Louisiana such as Hurricane Katrina, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the extreme university budget cuts. It's also about playing around with fabric, sewing, crochet and becoming a stronger woodcutter. I love drawing and accentuating wood grain in the drawings through carving, so the show is also about experiencing materials on a grand scale.Below is my artist statement for my most recent work to flesh this out a bit more:

Artist Statement

My most recent body of work, Trials and Tributaries, examines disasters occurring in southern Louisiana, interpreted through the Greek myths The Twelve Labors of Herakles. Mankind’s false sense of control over Louisiana’s resources leaves us vulnerable to nature’s powerful acts of reclamation: hurricanes, floods and the ground sinking beneath our feet. While researching the details and origins of The Twelve Labors, I found a plethora of similarities with local culture, politics and natural disasters. The characters in these narrative prints include hybrid monsters drawn from Greek mythology, which I have then further augmented with various forms of local south Louisiana fauna and contemporary political figures. I explore events ranging from Hurricane Katrina of 2005; the BP oil spill in the Gulf, Summer 2010; and the raging university budget cuts going on during my thesis year, 2010-11.Trials and Tributaries includes woodcut prints on repurposed bed sheet fabrics, appliqué stitched together to form colorful, layered surfaces. Accompanying the prints, I also create collections of crocheted floor pieces called “foot prints,” which incorporate scrap fabric from the printing process as well as clothing donations from family and friends. The pluming shapes of the “foot prints” mirror Doppler images of monstrous weather conditions, encroaching on painfully smaller coastal cities and ecosystems. This powerful image of pluming dangerous substances or weather systems functions as a reoccurring image throughout much of my work about the Gulf Coast.

3. You work on such a large scale and use alternative materials. What drew you to that process?

I feel that it is easier for me to draw from my arm rather than my wrist, so a me-sized or slightly larger scale gives me room to really spread out and loosen up my marks. I've always loved drawing large, especially with a blend of charcoal, gesso, water and soft pencils on board. When I did more painting, I always enjoyed making the underpainting the most with those sorts of materials.

For my thesis I wanted to go as big as possible to really make use of the great large format presses we have at Louisiana State University. I knew I would probably only be able to get one or two colors down for each piece since I wanted to do between eight and ten 4' x 8' images in just two semesters. I choose relief because I love how powerful one color images in this medium can be, and wood is a relatively cheap medium in which to work large.

I started printing on fabric as a way to create cheap proofs (we had a lot of free donated hotel bedsheets around the shop), but I was drawn to their warmth and ability to flow around with the breeze and around other objects. Also, prints on fabric are generally washable and easy to transport. Due to some issues with printing on the fabric that I had in the beginning, I started cutting out pieces of prints from different fabrics and sewing them together to get the best composite image. I loved the new doors this opened up! I went to Goodwill to get lots of different bedsheets to explore pattern and color. I would print each block 5 to 10 times on different fabrics and then collage pieces together. We had some poly-fil around the apartment from a never-completed pillow project Blake started, so I began using that to stuff elements and create a 3-D effect in the final project.

Really, I just kept experimenting and exploring. Usually failures in one area pushed me to try new things to solve problems. I'm really falling in love with sewing and crochet and all the possibilities of these mediums! I just learned to sew last summer when I decided I wanted to make my own wedding dress. This was my first sewing project, and everyone thought I was crazy. But, fortunately, with some help from my grandma and a lot of seam-ripping and starting over, I made the dress of my dreams from a $1 pattern.

My drive to recycle/reuse materials led me to take scrap bits of prints on fabric and start crocheting them into large doppler-radar-projection-like floor pieces I call "foot prints." These also became a bit part of my show, and I continue to make them from scraps I have lying around and old clothes and bedding friends and family donate to me.

4. You got married in your last semester of grad school and I was honored to be part of the event. You were so beautiful and so relaxed! Was there any secret stress going on at all or did it really come together as smoothly as it looked?

You were an awesome flower girl, Ann!

There was a lot of stress leading up because Blake works three jobs, and I was so engrossed in creating my thesis work. We really got it done by not sleeping much and just sticking to it. Blake's a great mastermind of schemes, and the "Blessed Unions" wedding exhibition, performance and panel discussion plan of his blew me away! Basically, we just grit our teeth and did everything we could to make it awesome. Once we got up to Saint Louis, everything seemed to go pretty smoothly. We're a great exhibition-hanging team, and Blake is good at channeling stress into brilliance. We couldn't have done it without all of our friends in the exhibition, wedding, panel discussion and other friends and family members who came out for the events. My bridesmaids helped put me together and lead me in the right direction, and everything else was magical. Galen Gondolfi, the owner of the gallery where we were married, was a total godsend. He figured out the PA, loaned us a bunch of materials and even let us sleep in his bed. We also owe a lot to SGC for helping us meet up with Galen, advertising the events, and donating a small amount of $ towards the reception.

5. What's next for you and Blake post grad schools? Where will the dreamy, artful couple be next?

No idea, really! We'll go anywhere for a good gig. Presently, we plan to stay in Baton Rouge through December. Blake is teaching printmaking at Tulane University in New Orleans and Art Appreciation at Baton Rouge Community College. I'm teaching Design I and Drawing I at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. We'll both be getting something else on the side to help pay bills. I'm crossing my fingers for screen printing jobs we both applied for, but we might end up in the service industry part time for a while longer.As soon as we do move, we plan to invest in some screen printing equipment and get our Orange Barrel Industries business really kicking with a clothing line, visiting artist editions and more!

6. Any advice for students when they are looking for grad schools?

Apply for all the places you think you might want to go for any of the following reasons (or other reasons that are important to you): location, professors there you like, nearby attractions like great art museums, lots of family/friends live near there or go to school there (it's always good to have a community,) etc. Make a list of reasons why you're attracted to various schools. Maybe they have a great press associated with the school or professors whose artwork you really admire…Go and visit and make a decision based on your priorities list of why you want to be there, your gut feeling about the place when you visit, what kind of money they offer you, and what the assistantship program might be like. The biggest factors for me were getting a full teaching assistantship so school would be cheap and so that I'd get a lot of teaching experience since I want to be a professor, and then I also did make the decision in part because my boyfriend-now-husband had a job near the area. Also, I realized the potential at my school-of-choice to work large format in a ton of different mediums, which was really attractive to me. I think one of the things that sold me on LSU is their great collection of litho stones and their two 10 foot presses.Basically, decide what's really most important to you and judge where you want to go based on those priorities--but don't let logic shout out your gut feeling. Talk it through, and don't let any one or any university pressure you into making a decision you're not comfortable with.

7. Any advice for artists who are about to get married (me)?

It's going to be great! I can't wait to see an Ann Flowers wedding. As an artist, you can save a ton of cash by being creative and doing a lot of things yourself. That being said, don't be afraid to ask for help from all your friends and family! When Blake and I were feeling totally overwhelmed, we sat down together and made a big list of all the projects that needed to get done to make our events happen, and then we made lists of friends/family members who might be able/willing to help with each task. It was great to turn over a little thing like renting a PA for the event over to someone else. If you feel bad asking for help, as for it in lieu of a wedding present. Who needs a new whisk, anyway? What you need is someone to pick up the flowers while you are squishing into your dream dress!

See much more from Hannah's show here. Learn more about Orange Barrel Industries here.

Thanks, Hannah, so much for such an interesting interview!

Etsyians Among Us

Since I graduated I have been working a lot at home in my studio. Lately I have had a lot of print exchanges due so it has forced me out of my private space and into the printmaking studio at school. I'm lucky to still be able to use the shop every once in a while when I really need it.

I was nervous at first to start working around people again but once I did I was reminded of why I love printmaking so much in the first place. The need for a shop helps create a community. When I work at home I make all kind of decisions about my work in a bubble. No one is around to give their input. At a shop, there is always someone who is willing to take a look at what you are doing and give an opinion. That's how I met Hesper. We were both working quietly on our own stuff but I was freaking out about potentially making a mistake on my print so I called her over to take a look. She gave me some great input and after that I was much more comfortable about what I was doing.

I complimented her handmade bag and discovered that she has her own Etsy shop where she makes bags out of up-cycled fabrics. I love the different styles that she makes and the materials are beautiful. Check out Subversive Seamstress for much more.

And if you are having trouble with your own work and feel like you're working in a bubble go find someone who is willing to step in and say if a color is wrong or a line is not working. It can make all the difference!

Giveaway to Vote

Remember when I wrote about my friend Eric's Dumbo Press and the Pepsi Refresh Project?? Click on the link to be reminded or watch the video here and see what Eric has made.

(p.s. this is a different video than the last. It features some famed printmakers such as Michael Barnes, Sean Star Wars and Joseph Velasquez. It was made by the infamous Grue)

I just found out that you can vote every day. Every day! Voting ends on June 30th. Eric is currently ranked #218 and he has to be in the top ten to win.

I think this is a very very important project. Eric wants to travel to schools and teach people about art and printmaking while doing it in a fun and new way.

Here's what I'm going to do to help. I am having a giveaway between now and then end of June. All you have to do is go vote here and then leave a comment on my post. You can vote everyday and then comment every day for more chances to win. Let's get Eric's project in the top ten!

And you will win this print:

I will even throw in a frame.

Now go vote!!

Vote!

Once again I have a couple of new things in my shop. Including this fabulous unicorn statue!

You all may have heard of the Pepsi Refresh Project where Pepsi is offering grants to people whose ideas get the most votes. My friend and fellow grad school classmate Eric Fuertes is currently in the running for one of these amazing grants. Eric is a Sculpture grad at NIU and he has been making printing presses. He made a portable Dumbo printing press that debuted at Southern Graphic Council in Philadelphia this year. Eric then made a press with a skateboard that was just as fun. He has great ideas and has really been cranking out the presses. He wants the grant so he can travel to schools and spread the printmaking word while introducing it in a fun and different way. Read his mission statement:

To create art workshops that incorporate hands on sculpture/printmaking techniques and processes. The emphasis will be on instructing students and the public on simple printmaking techniques and introduce them to sculptural "creative machinery" that will allow for the production of woodblock prints. Exploring two dimensional to three dimensional ways of viewing the world, students and onlookers will be introduced to a variety of ways of observing and thinking about art. A primary goal of this project would be to motivate students about the importance of pursuing a higher education and show them the broader range of creative fields that can be pursued in a college enviroment. The purpose of these workshops is to also allow people with all levels of talent and ability the opportunity to experience another aspect of art education that is not widely available. These portable printing press machines provide the public with a creative outlet and the chance to express themselves through art.

Watch a video hear of The Dumbo Printing Press:

Voting is quick and easy. It's even quicker if you have Facebook. Go here and click to vote if you think Eric deserves this grant. Also, please post this on your blog! I think what Eric is doing is fantastic and fun and great for printmakers as well as all other image-makers! Go support Eric!

Wayne Kimball

Last week I had the absolute pleasure of meeting someone who I think of as a celebrity in the printmaking world. Mr. Wayne Kimball came to our school as a visiting artist! If you are not familiar with his work check out his website and be prepared to be amazed at his beautiful and highly technical litho prints. Mr. Kimball had been trained at Tamarind as a master printer and recently retired from teaching at BYU. He was quite a charming visiting artist to have around. He showed us a demo on litho washes and gave an artist talk that was perfect. He showed off his sense of humor and great skill and talent. Overall I'm very pleased and grateful to have had the opportunity to meet Mr. Kimball and see his work in person and hear him talk about it. Look around on his website and pay attention to the titles of the pieces. The humor can sneak up on you, which is always the best kind of humor to have... the sneaky kind. Photo of the artist via Lizzy House.



Artwork photos via Frogman's website.

Friday's Balloons

Okay, so not to be too over-dramatic but my heart just shattered into a million pieces when I saw these faux balloons by Clementine Henrion. At first glance they look like real helium balloons but they are actually sewn fabric with stuffing. Amazing! And all my favorite balloons, too. I first spotted this at Design for Mankind yesterday and have been lusting after them since. The price tag is a little out of my budget but that doesn't mean a girl can dream, right? Until then I'll have to just keep going to the party store weekly for fresh balloons. They are way better than flowers...

This weekend I plan on working on my house. I have plans to paint it and wallpaper it. Plus I have a few different art pieces in the works and would like to have them finished by Sunday. That's the goal at least.

Last night I taught my class and I have to say that I really have great students again this semester. We just had our first critique Tuesday night and they really blew me away with their work. I would love to get some on here to share so I'll talk to the students and see what they think. Right now we are doing drypoint which can be a bit challenging because it's such a new medium but they are coming along. Sometimes I really like this teaching thing...

Have a great weekend everyone!

Fun with Balloons

The other day in the studio I was working with balloons...

and making this.
my fellow classmates got ahold of all my extra balloons and were doing this...

I love the printmakers.

In other news I had my final crit of the semester in printmaking last night and I'm super excited about all the ideas and feedback I got. I finally have a real vision for my thesis show and it's something I can't believe I haven't been doing all along. I think I just needed someone to tell me it was okay to do it. The past three years I've gotten so hung up on worrying what is art. I think sometimes my professors got frustrated with me because I was always second guessing myself. I'd make something but would always say: yes, but is it REAL art? I'm sure I've talked about that here before. I get too hung up worrying about the difference between art and Art. Finally I've accepted that there is no difference. Now I feel free! And ready to get back to the studio. But I woke up with a sore throat and headache. This bums me out because my body feels absolutely out of commission. I'll rest today and get back at it again tomorrow. I have a crit with my print faculty Friday and I'm looking forward to it. Wish me luck and cross your toes!