MM&S Fall 2016

MM&S E Zine

Dedicated to Unique Mark Making

Monoprint Monotype & Strappo Fall 2016

Volume I Issue 4

OUR MISSION Monoprint-Monotype.com understands the importance of providing a venue for this unique form of art. Our matrix is as open as the imaginations of the artists it supports. To that end we will explore the work of emerging, established and surprising artists from around the world. They will be presented here and in on our website Monoprint-Monotype.com.

MM&S Magazine is a submission-based, quarterly digital and ondemand print publication.

Included Artists: Russ Spitkovsky Warren Criswell Kathleen Thoma cALand Sheryl Seltzer Ann Lawtey

Š2016 Monoprint-Monotype Reproduction of this e zine in whole or part is prohibited without permission.

All artwork has been reproduced with the kind permission of the artists.

The easiest way to understand the difference between a Monoprint and a Monotype is to understand the underlying block or matrix.

Monoprint When beginning a Monoprint, permanent marks are produced on the surface.

This creates a common feature on successive works. But there would be an endless variation of images according to the application of medium, (paint, ink, chalk), and whether additional collage elements are added.

Monotype A Monotype on the other hand is created on a smooth surface. Similar to monoprinting, a variety of mediums and elements can be incorporated on the surface. But there are no permanent features that transfer to successive works.

Once the image is transferred, except for the occasional ghost print from excess medium, the surface is freed from the created work of art and the chosen surface now holds the art work.

Strappo

A Strappo is a dry image transfer technique that has been recognized as a specific printmaking monotype procedure by the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a sample Strappo is in the print library collection. A Strappo is a combination of painting and printing. They are a monotype from a reverse painting resulting ia a dry acrylic transfer. developed a smooth surface such as glass.

If you are a Monoprint or Monotype artist, we are interested in what you have to say and what you have to show.

If you are interested contact us for more information at; Donald@monoprint-monotype.com

Kathleen Thoma

Kathleen Thoma is an artist currently working with monotypes, painting and drawing.

From 2004 to 2013, she was a founding member at West Cove Studio and Gallery, an open, working artist studio, printmaking co-operative in West Haven, Connecticut. While at West Cove, she assisted with gallery promotion, printmaking demonstrations, gallery sitting, and open studio events. In 2013, she relocated her studio to Orange County, California, where she continues working in her printmaking studio.

Originally from the Washington D.C. area, Kathleen started her art career at age three by making a giant mess with her mother’s watercolors. During her studies earning a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin, she specialized in stone lithography printmaking and painting. After graduation, she worked as a freelance illustrator in publishing for several years. Relocating to San Diego, CA, she continued in publishing work.

Until moving to Paris where she wandered into every museum possible during the eighteen months she was there. She spent a number of years in Quebec, Canada, where she continued to work in the fine arts as a painter, before returning to printmaking once she joined with West Cove Studio and Gallery.

Creating is a form of meditation that keeps me in a state of active reception to whatever is happening around me and going on inside me as I work. I strive for a balance between the opposing natures of rational thought and the pure colors of emotional insight.

Multiplicity of Sound

I use color to express moods and am influenced by whatever I have seen on my walks or dreamt about the night before. My images often seem like pieces of dreams, which are poppingup in my mind as I work. The shapes are thoughts and the colors are feelings that overlap in a dance of layers through my creative play on the paper.

Aspirations by Night

My workday starts with a loose plan for color and composition, which almost always changes as I go along with my response to what ends up on my plate. I used to paint a great deal, which is why monotype printmaking feels natural to me, color is not a problem, it is my native language for expressing myself.

Ethereal Filigree

Paper Dawn

Kathleen Thoma My primary medium is monotype printmaking; I also make drawings and use chine-colle at times. I cut all of my own stencils, which seem to grow into the shapes that they want to be. The organic, repeated sinuous lines of Art Nouveau have influenced my work, as well as Gustav Klimt, Asian art, and nature itself. I go on a lot of walks while shooting photos which later end up in my sketchbook as color and shape ideas.

My work can be seen at: www.kathleenthomaart.com

Tropical Desires

Shadow Waves

Gypsy Bob

Additional work and information about Kathleen can be found at; www.kathleenthomaart.com contact@kathleenthomaart.com

Monoprint-monotype.com

Dreaming Blue

Feature Interview

Russ Spitkovsky

Russ Spitkovsky is a Ukrainian born artist that currently lives in New Jersey. He has trouble focusing so he spreads himself thin through illustration, personal artwork, death metal, studio directing, writing and publishing. He has a 15 year old dog named Stitches and mainly practices monoprinting and etching, although he’s done other stuff too.

Russ Spitkovsky’s artwork has been included in numerous national and international publications and exhibitions. He is one of the founders of CARRIER PIGEON and is currently editor in chief and contributor of the quarterly publication. In 2014, Russ helped create Guttenberg Arts, a multidisciplinary artist residency program.

I’m interested in motion, story telling and the sincerity of mark making.

MM&S: Tell us a bit about who you are and your career as a printmaker and illustrator.

Russ: I love to draw and I’m not great with people. The most amazing feeling is when the image is working and your thoughts unravel in to dialogue and story arcs and the world that you’re creating is the only one there is. It’s been impossible for me to replicate in the conscious state and I’m constantly drawn to that moment.

I was born in Kiev Ukraine and immigrated to the US with my family in 1992. I learned printmaking from the mighty Bruce Waldman at the school of visual arts and later picked up some more techniques at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop.

horse

carrier pigeon

Russ: RBPMW had an enormous impact on me as far as seeing how different people approach image making and deal with an incredibly intimidating art world outside of the studio. I was also fortunate to meet some amazing likeminded artists both at the print shop and at SVA that cared more about the sincerity of their artwork than it’s commercial appeal. Together we founded Carrier Pigeon, a magazine of illustrated writing and fine art so we could have an outlet for that work. A few years later we founded Guttenberg Arts, a multidisciplinary artist residency so more artists could have the chance to create what they feel is important with out any guiding hands.

Both haven’t been commercial successes but I like them, I think everyone involved does too, but I’m not really sure since I’m not great with people.

MM&S: I love the idea of putting “creative control into the hands of the contributing writers, illustrators, fine artists and designers in order to promote respectful interdisciplinary collaboration”.

How did this come into your head? How was this born?

Russ: Carrier Pigeon is an attempt to start clean without a hierarchy of opinions. Kind of like creating a pocket universe where people are treated the way you’d like to be. The idea of giving full control to the artists involved in the publication was always in our heads and just seemed obvious when we began talking about the format. We wanted a place where we could not just publish our work but try out any ideas we wanted without the fear of having them stomped out by a comity.

dreams

facilities

MM&S: While the magazine was created with the ideal of challenging the concept of a hierarchy among artistic disciplines, how have those goals grown or changed over time?

Russ: I don’t think we ever wanted to challenge, we’re not a competitive bunch.

That concept will always exist and I like to think of it and us as two ships passing in the ocean having nothing to do with each other. I think we wanted to see if it could be done and how far it could go and I’m always amazed by the results.

MM&S: What sacrifices and trade-offs do you make in order to produce the publication and how do you balance your time with its creation with your continued fine art career?

Russ: I see it all as my work. I think if you approach anything that you do with an artistic intent it’s easy to lose yourself in the moment and become part of the picture. I think it’s all art.

life

MM&S: Have you seen a growth in your own art from the association with such a wide variety of artists or do you feel that you have a clear creative road that you follow?

Russ: The more artists that I work with the more unclear the road becomes, but it’s in a good way. It’s nice to be reminded that there is an infinite amount possibilities for a person to develop their creative voice and that I have absolutely no idea about what is good or worthwhile.

MM&S: What do you think is the major shifting trend in commercial publication and how will it affect artist such as yourself?

Russ: I’m hopping that it will be original and sincere content.

It will be interesting to see what ends up on paper in the future. Off set and laser printing will never beat out the bottom line of a strictly online publication and it seems like the printed word and image is slowly reverting back to a rare or handmade object.

Over the last five years I’ve seen an incredible amount of creative approaches to the printed book. The book arts discipline seemed to have been rejuvenated by the death of commercial print. The book is once again becoming thought of as a fine art and I think that idea will drive commercial print as well. We’re already seeing limited edition prints come with albums and special edition product labels much more often.

central booking

Russ Spitkovsky Russ: Until recently every generation has thought of the book as a timeless object that’s always imbedded in our expectations from our surroundings. Kind of like a chair, or a cooking pot.

For those of us that grew up around dusty volumes stacked in make shift closet libraries, the memory of the tactile experience of the book will always be special. As books become less standard objects the future generations might never know the feeling and the book itself is going to have to become more tactile and original inside and out in order to survive.

CPR

It’s both exciting and frightening, but most of all it’s a fun problem to solve. I don’t think anyone will miss the tabloids (weekly world news excluded) and it will be nice to see content that is thought and worked out, that’s meant for an experience and a reaction, rather than pumped out to fill shelves.

neighbor

meth heads

Thank you for an insightful interview.

Additional work and contact at : www.carrierpigeonmag.com www.guttenbergarts.org www.spitatart.com https://www.freelanced.com/russspitkovsky http://www.papercrown.press

Monoprint-Monotype.com

Warren Criswell

Warren Criswell was born in West Palm Beach, Florida in 1936 and has lived in Arkansas since his bus broke down there in 1978. Primarily a self-taught painter, Criswell is also a printmaker, sculptor and animator. He has had 41 solo exhibitions in the United States and one in Taiwan. His work has been included in 72 group exhibitions in New York, Atlanta, Washington DC, Arkansas, Virginia, North Carolina, Germany and Taiwan, and is represented in the permanent collections of many institutions, including: The Arkansas Arts Center; the McKissick Museum of the University of South Carolina; The Morris Museum of Art, Augusta, GA; Historic Arkansas Museum, Little Rock, AR; the University of Arkansas at Little Rock; Capital Arts Center, Taipei, China; the University of Central Arkansas; Hendrix College; the Center for Arts & Science of SE Arkansas; and the Central Arkansas Library System, as well as in private and corporate collections in the United States, Europe and Asia.

In 1996 he was awarded a fellowship grant for painting and works on paper by the Mid-America Arts Alliance and the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2003 an Individual Artist Fellowship Grant for painting and drawing by the Arkansas Arts Council. Warren Criswell is currently represented by Cantrell Gallery in Little Rock.

CONTACT INFO warrencriswell@yahoo.com http://www.warrencriswell.com/ Monoprint-Monotype.com

Therapy

Warren Criswell My inspiration for this medium comes from the great monotypes of Giovanni Benedetto Castiglioni (often cited as the inventor of the technique), Degas and William Merrit Chase. Like them, I use a basically subtractive method, meaning that the plate is rolled up with a dark printer's ink (oil based) and the design is wiped and scraped out with rags, sticks, fingers, whatever. I work on linoleum, because I prefer the surface to the usual copper or plexiglass, and print them on my etching press.

Orion

Watchers II

In 2000 I made a few prints that reversed this process. First I printed a solid black, then wiped down the plate and rolled it up with white ink. I then wiped, scraped and drew the design as in the traditional monotype, except now I was creating the positive part of the image instead of the negative, so that when printed over the black proof the black showed through. I then brightened the highlights with a little white oil paint. Two examples of this technique are Black Stockings XII: The Blue Angel and Black Stockings XIII. The bluish or greenish tone is the result of the overprinting. (Around this same time I was developing my white-over-black linocut technique.)

Black stockings XXI

westpathway

Warren Criswell

Vina

Natural Light

Don Giovanni Inpenitente

Jasmine

Tonya Dressing

Janet Watching TV

Man Following a Woman

cALand

Carolyn Land was born in Brooklyn, grew up in the New York City metropolitan area, and was exposed to the creative process at an early age. Her love of nature and the out-of- doors are reflected in her work.

She has a BA in Art Education and an MA in Education, for which she presented a paper on “Motivation for Learning: Through the Arts�. She is the recipient of many awards and has work in both private and corporate collections She has studied with well-known contemporary artists and authors.

Artists in the field of Pastel: Marla Baggetta Allen Flatman, Richard McKinnley, Elizabeth Mowery, Maggie Price. Artists in the field of Abstraction: Carol Barnes, Mary Todd Beam, Gerald Brommer, Carrie Brown, Pat Dews, Maxine Masterfield.

Print and Ghost Monotype 3

“I believe that the most authentic experience one can have is with nature. I am fascinated by the intricate designs that are created within the small space of one’s vision. The lines, forms, colors, and textures, of the natural elements are what motivate my art. As an artist, I reach deep within myself in order to express an image inspired by nature, or man’s interaction with it, that will touch the viewer as it has me, or cause the viewer to go on and look more closely at the wonders that surround us. “

Beneath the Surface Monoprint 2

Beneath the Surface Monoprint 5

Mark making is a term applied to describe not only lines, but the patterns and textures that are created in a piece of art work.

They are as personal to our creative endeavors as our signature and fingerprints are to us in everyday life. What is fascinating is how the marks we make can be varied by the tools we use to make them.

Inking reductive plate

Print and Ghost Monotype

In my “reductive monoprints” over acrylic series, “Beneath the Surface”, I use a wedge tool to remove the ink which I do not want on my ink plate.

Looking through the plate to white paper beneath, I try and produce a strong format and interesting design, to complement the acrylic print I will be printing over, with the black ink. As sunlight creeps through and into spaces in the earth, and reflects off rock and minerals, many interesting patterns are formed. I hope that these organic compositions reflect that feeling.

Beneath the Surface Monoprint 8

Additional work and information about Carolyn can be found at; www.perceptionsbycaland.com carolynaland@gmail.com Monoprint-monotype.com

Beneath the Surface Monoprint 14

cALand

Beneath the Surface Monoprint 9

Beneath the Surface Monoprint 6

Beneath the Surface Monoprint 4

Sheryl Seltzer

Born in New York, raised in Ohio, Sheryl Smith Seltzer moved to California from Connecticut in 1996. She graduated from Duke University where she studied painting from Vernon Pratt, printmaking from Barbara Thompson. She has studied at Evanston Art Institute in Evanston, Illinois, the Silvermine Institute in Silvermine, Connecticut, and Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, California. Painting in oil and creating etchings and large format woodcuts, she primarily works with a vocabulary of abstracted landscape imagery, emphasizing pattern, rhythm and energy. Her images are infused with themes of memory, inspiration, hope and desire.

She is currently painting, drawing, and printmaking at her studio in Laguna Beach.

I work in conversation with my images.

Blue Moon I Woodcut Monoprint

I lay down a partially formed idea about motion, pattern, control and release. Underlying experience. I usually paint on the plate with India ink, painting freely – gesturally – or I draw with pencil on the plate with rhythm and repetition, freely and impulsively.

Then I cut the wood with patience and precision.

Bait Ball Woodcut Monoprint

Life Start

Lifeboat

I pull the print and the image suggests to me, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes with a shout, that I could modify that idea.

I lay it down again; pull it again, and again the image answers.

Back and forth we discuss the values, the rhythms, the possibilities, the confusion, the emotion.

If I am fortunate and skillful and deeply observant, there comes a point when we, my print and I, agree.

Mother and Child

Untitled ( Rambunctious Intellect ) Woodcut Monoprint

Additional work and information www.sherylsmithseltzer.com sherylsmithseltzer@gmail.com

Monoprint-Monotype.com

Red Coral Woodcut Monoprint

Ann Lawtey

Creating art has been a lifelong activity. In high school, my art teacher persuaded me to pursue art as a career, instead of my first-choice at the time: medicine. (I had been participating in a high school scholarship program in medical research at the time.) As a result, I went on to graduate from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston with a BFA in Painting and Printmaking. Putting a Master's Degree on hold, I entered the business world. Throughout my varied business career, I continued my art studies at various well-regarded art institutes in the Boston, New York and Connecticut areas.

Inspiration has come from a varied group of figurative and landscape masters, historic and modern day. The German Expressionist Kathie Kollwitz particularly influenced my drawing and monotypes; the Impressionists and PostImpressionists have provided lasting lessons; Richard Diebenkorn taught me about vectors and the importance of angles; contemporary painters Stuart Shils and Michael Workman exemplify the balancing of abstraction and realism.

In The Pool

Cove

Eagle

My work has always been a journey for artistic growth. Continuously pushing myself forward, experimenting with ways of looking at subjects, applying media and alternate techniques. I look to translate and interpret what I see through varying perspectives and my own emotional response.

Creating art in different media challenges me and also inspires me, keeping the creative flow moving as each discipline strengthens my skills.

Dancer with Red Accents

Pond with Tree I am drawn to painting varied subjects, figurative, still life and landscape, primarily in oil and monotype, "The Painterly Print", painting and drawing from both life and photographs. Usually my landscape scenes convey a sense of peace sometimes bold in color other times subdued, while my figurative work is generally about movement. I also enjoy the challenge of Plein Air painting, observing nature directly but various living locations and travels also provide me copious photographic images. My early art developed from a captivation with the human figure and a belief that the human anatomy represented the universal landscape. I'm still drawn to its versatility seeking to capture the physical and emotional overtones of my subject without being overly particular to details while remaining a representational painter.

The moniker often used to describe the Monotype is “the Painterly Print�. It is a single, unrepeatable image, in every sense of the word, a painting, only the oil color is transferred to paper under pressure usually by some kind of printing press.

There you have it, a unique image, a painting but also a print.

Push Pull

This medium is very suited to a painter who likes the freedom to wipe, redo, paint back into, remove paint out of, in other words, to stay free and flexible all through the painting process. This freedom leads to creativity. It is a process that allows me, to let my inspiration find its way out in an unhindered manner, inviting impulsive immediate action. To help me with this I use some unconventional painting tools in addition to brushes, such as rollers, steel wool, cotton swabs, Kleenex, my fingers.

I normally paint a thin coat of paint all over a roughed up Plexiglas plate. Then I start drawing and painting using oil paints mixed with wax to keep my paints wet and safflower oil as a medium if I want very soft, flowing passages.

Ann Lawtey

Meet the Sea When my painting is ready for the press, I look at the backside of my Plexiglas plate, since that is what I will see, my painting will be printed in reverse. In addition to my image being printed in reverse, there is a measure of unpredictability in producing monotypes as other factors influence how the paper will emerge from under the rollers of the press. Even though I will have painted exactly the image I want, painted exactly the way I want, there are times when “accidents� manifest themselves when I lift the paper from the plate. These accidents can be caused by passages that have too much paint, or too little paint, or perhaps I calibrated the press with too much pressure. There are times when all those hours of effort will end up in the circular file but other times the surprise will merely add something different.

Lobster Shack II My landscape images are usually about places far from the maddening crowds and confinement of the cities in which I lived most of my adult life. They are the idyllic geographic regions that are places to reflect and enjoy the quiet, that nurture our hurried lives, that hush our harried minds listening to the sounds of the ocean, the gulls or osprey fishing, or the movement of small wildlife darting through the underbrush.

These places are references from photos I have taken over the years, especially the coastal regions of New England and the South.

My compositions are generally diffused shapes and tonal arrangements whether they are figurative or landscape. Most embody the peacefulness of timelessness while others capture the drama of dancers moving to silent chords of music.

The freer and less controlled technique of the Monotype medium has influenced my work in oil giving me a new and growing language of expression.

Additional work and information http://www.annlawteyfineart.com

Monoprint-monotype.com

Water’s Edge #5

Gallery Representation Glenhyrst Art Gallery of Brant 20 Ava Road Brantford, Ontario, Canada Light Space & Time Online Gallery Jupiter, FL

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