SCHOOLS OUT! Goodbeye Spring Sememster 2009!

Hurrah! I am now completely done with the Spring Semester at PAFA, my last crit was yesterday morning in my Intaglio class. I haven't posted much of what I did in the class this semester due to the fact I had to do all the work in school. Lisa Hamilton my teacher was really great, she had a great knowledge and love of this medium, which as a painter I found to be at times exceedingly tedious and frustrating.Don't get me wrong, you can do amazing pieces with this medium, but te process means that so often you have no idea of what result you will have from some step or process for a while due to the way this medium works. You have to do something to the plate, then drop it in the acid, clean it, ink it and then print, only then will you see if what you just did yielded the result you desired or had in mind. it can be to dark, not dark enough or any number of thing as this isn't a direct medium like painting. It really requires lots of time and lots of patience with learning how these techniques work and how to manipulate them and yourself to get something you want on the plate. Even simply wiping the plate the same way each time to do your edition of prints is very demanding depending on the image you have.

I decided that the last image i would do in class would be a totally abstract one to just throw caution to the wind and explore the medium in a different way: mark making,non-figurative, letting a randomness happen and then to try and react to what I just did in another random way in a layering of textures, paint blobs, soft ground, etc.

This is a print I did over a dozen proofs of as I developed it, it's based on a picture I snapped in Dali China. I used lots of aquatint, open bite, tape, tush, etching, in short, everything but the kitchen sink on this one.
This is one of my monoprints based on a recurring nightmare I would have as a kid when I was sick.
Our class crit.
I'll miss some of my classmates like Jeff who's returning to Chicago for family reasons and won't be back next fall, and I do want when time allows to try some more prints in this medium, but for now I really just want to be lazy for a few days and sleep more...