it's been a mixed-bag kind of a week
weaving, gardening, exploring stitch to join paper, trying a sealer coat on the silver leaf, writing Haiku poems, and prepping for some print-making
for years I have wanted to learn print-making... years and years
decades
I've dabbled at it here and there, making stitch-printing plates (a technique from one of Cat Holmes' books), mono-prints, gelli-plate printing, printing with fresh and pressed botanicals and so on
I love the simplicity that can be achieved with the technique
as I was working with the Haiku poetry, reading up on Japanese art and design, kintsugi, and so on I thought I would like to incorporate prints into the work, hence... the side-step
I've had a few ideas that have been brewing for a while and this week I did some of the prep
below are examples of the first step in making a few printing plates, some very small and two quite large
a fragment of a burlap sack I found washed up and mostly buried on the shore of Lake Bennett in the Yukon along with a small plate of a pressed flower, also from there
I also made one from a piece of birchbark that was literally dangling from a tree in Dawson, also in the Yukon
I've had several thoughts on working with the prints, ways of combining them with photographs along with the work I've been doing lately but first I need to see how the plates work, what the prints will look like
can't get too far ahead of myself because sometimes the results are a tad unexpected, and for me, usually in a good way that sends me off with another thought...
in the meanwhile, the poetry writing is going well... I do it every day and am learning a lot about words... the words I choose, the ones I dodge, how wordy 17 syllables can be when you're craving simplicity of expression
I've come to understand that when I want to explain a thought that has great meaning for me I really want to do it in the fewest words I can
I suppose I think it will have more impact in brevity
and on that note, here are are two recent ones:
cloaked in winter's fog
frozen words lay on the ground
still the silenced land
in the yukon, when the temperatures drop below -40 ice fog can appear
I love ice fog...the world is cloaked in silence, it's as if the moment a noise emanates it freezes... you can't see more than half a block and silence prevails
the colder it gets, the more ice fog there is, and the quieter it gets
and this one:
solitary shore
calm water, soft-sighing land
evening quiet dawns
when I was a child we went to the family cabin on a lake not far from Whitehorse
it was invariably windy most weekends, from when we got there, but Sunday evenings around 5:00 pm, when most people had gone, it almost always calmed... the wind would quiet, the lake turned to glass, the seagulls settled down and the whole place seemed to take a deep breath and become quite still
I remember always wanting to eat my dinner on the beach, alone, enjoying the peaceful solitude and I wondered if the lake enjoyed it too
when we all finally left and it could be what it was always supposed to be... not a playground, nor a place for boats, or noisy chattering...
just a lake with wind and birds and blue sky
