March 2009 Archives

100 Foot-long steamroller print......Great music too !

This video shows the creation of a 104-foot print on October 14, 2006 for Northfield Minnesota's first Day of the Dead Celebration. Over a dozen Latino artists were assisted by a 20,000-pound, 50-year-old "Buffalo Springfield" steamroller. In steamroller printing, a.... relatively recent and infrequent occurrence in the world of visual arts, a design is drawn on a large block of wood (typically a 4'x8' sheet of particle board or press-board). The design is then carved out using routers, chisels, rotary drills, etc. At the printing site,

Here is a clip on Chinese block printing for making book pages. After a bit of a history lesson we see what it takes to carve and print very fine Chinese characters and the special tools and printing setup involved.

Bareners Ray Hudson and Bea Gold are influenced by and practice the Chinese printing technique which differs quite a bit from the Japanese process. Here are a couple of references courtesy Dave Bull.

Chinese printing technique description at barenforum.org

DaZhao Village artists at work - video

Block Printing: Woodblock printing on paper, whereby individual sheets were pressed against wooden blocks with......

After seeing the interesting videos linked by Julio yesterday, I headed down into my storeroom to dig out something that looked familiar ...

I picked up a couple of these blocks some years back, but never got around to exploring what they were, or how they were used. But yesterday's video shows exactly what they are!

Now for something a bit different !

Iqbal demonstrates block printing in the Anokhi Museum in Amber, India. Iqbal is astonishingly skillful and well worth watching.
Watch how he uses a simple piece of newspaper to turn 90 degree angles in the design and also the ease of registration when printing multiple colors. Notice how to save effort the pigment tray is 'pushed' along by the printer as he makes his way down the paper.

Here is an additional video on the art of Hand Printing from Geobeats.com

Here is a short video by the owner of Artelino Galleries that describes the work of one of our baren members. Tom Kristensen, born 1962, resides in Australia and works in the Japanese 'moku hanga' style. The video looks into his methods, tools and materials and his previous series. It also includes the latest designs from the Barack Obama series. - Video produced by http://www.artelino.com where you can find other introductory videos on such artist's as Paul Binnie, Toshi Yoshida, Katsuyuki Nishijima and many others.

Here are links to Tom's prints on the Baren Exchange archives:

'36 Views of Green Island, No 5, Rock Platform' (Exchange #22)
'Green Island Moon 1' (Exchange #25)
'Kaiju, Godzilla vs KFC' (Exchange #27)
'Grable Nude BX29' (Exchange #29)
'M is for Mao' (Exchange #31)
'Sleeping Beauty" (Exchange #35)
'Footprint' (Exchange #37)