The winter often tends to be the most productive time in my studio. The cold weather lends itself to burrowing, and I have the opportunity to spend many uninterrupted hours on painting.

Lately, I have been experimenting with a light application of watercolor on heavyweight drawing paper. My intention is to develop more of a relationship with movement in my pieces. I no longer have been stretching my paper, opting to work directly with a large brush and seeing where it takes me. When the page starts to buckle a bit, I slip it under a large quartro copy of Toulouse-Lautrec: His Complete Lithographs and Drypoints, and immediately start another piece. Sometimes I take a break from paper altogether and sketch digitally using Procreate. Procreate has been a really useful tool, because I can readily work out ideas without having to navigate materials (or clean up, after).

(2021), Watercolor and Ink [in progress]

I like to change up the stylistic elements of my work (the direction of brush strokes, and colors). Generally, unifying characteristics travel between pieces, but I like to see my work as something that grows and changes with time (like a plant budding many flowers). I’m not sure exactly when my subconscious decided dreamy watercolors, gesturing towards the Fin de siècle, should be the river where I’d find repose. However, I’ve accepted the day I paint my last beribboned hat is too far in the future to matter.

Watercolor is a uniquely unforgiving medium, but I love it for it’s immediacy. I often find myself discarding page after page in forlorn experimentation of a new technique. But these discarded pages can be gems. I walk out of my studio and back, looking at a ‘mistake’, realizing that is not a mistake at all but a breakthrough.

I like to use technique and style to express a narrative. There is an introspection that overtakes the personalities I paint, which I think is further softened and made expressive by the cascading lines moving around the physical spaces of these characters. I love the harmonizing effects of lines. The trick is knowing when to stop, and consider the piece “finished.”

The two pieces shown above are more “finished” sketches that I completed on etching paper. It is significant to mention that there is a lot of texture and depth that gets translated into a piece, depending on the quality of the materials used. Etching paper, I’ve found, is very receptive to mark making and calligraphic effects while using a limited palette (particularly when using ink). However, the colors do tend to get muddy easily if one isn’t careful. I often limit my application to one or two colors. However, I am continually testing new pigments (and even brushes).

Painting is always a learning experience. I am looking forward to providing new updates of where I plan to go next in the coming months as I tackle new materials.

In a technologically advanced world, there is a charming antiquity about prints. They are not quite like drawings, however infinitely more precious than something taken straight out from an inkjet printer. Each print can look like it is was carefully and uniquely made. The effect is delicate and personal.

I was first introduced to the world of printmaking when I took a graphic art class in college. I was impressed by the mechanics involved in a large-scale printmaking operation, from noxious acid baths to centuries-old machinery that could take up a bedroom in my small Queens apartment. There is also a comradery and tenderness within printmaking communities who have to learn to live in harmony with each other through necessity of shared studio equipment and technique.

Printing studios are often organized chaos, with various essential products (like ink) on perpetual backorder. I once overheard an instructor complain that the lithography presses in New York were serviced by a single man, that this man was the only person who could really fix them up properly (irritation in his voice rising)—however this same man simply did not feel like fixing the broken press in the studio this month. I couldn’t tell if it was hyperbole, but I laughed imagining printmaking in New York being brought to a standstill by one dilatory printing press savant in Farmingdale. But that anecdote is reflective of how printmaking and printers are in general: impractical and wonderful.

In 2018, in the years prior to quarantine and other challenges of studio space, I was making lithographs at the Art Students League in Midtown. I chose to work in lithography, as I wanted to make prints with a lighter ‘pencil-like’ effect. In the image above, I have side-by-side comparisons of my crayon sketch on the stone (left) and the final print (right). Depending on what sort of crayon you use, the effect of a lithographic crayon can be similar to pencil or charcoal. The crayons contain a wax that repels etching fluid, turning untreated areas into an ink repellent surface.

Historically, printmaking was a process that was used to replicate art prior to photography. Printmaking has now taken on a second life as an artform living for itself, and I couldn’t be happier. Entering into a printmaking studio, one can feel transported into an older world than one’s own.

Working primarily in paper mediums, printmaking was the instant friend that flew out from the darkness. Hopefully, it is something I will return to in the not-too-distant future.

Lithographs (2018)

January 2021 / Studio Update

Art Process | Printmaking and Lithography