Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Back to school -

"She's Not There #45"
digital collage by Mick Mather
In tonight's post I hark back to that time when my printmaking was literally hands-on for the 20+ years spent cutting linoleum and erasers using the block-relief method. For those who don't know, this entails drawing on the block and then cutting away the negative spaces, leaving the image in relief. Ink is then rolled onto the block, paper laid atop of it and through hand pressure, using a wooden spoon, a barren or a press, the image is transferred ... but, I digress. While the image seen here tonight is digital, it has that old school, block-relief print look about it and much of my work from those days looked a lot like this.

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posted by Mick at 4:31 PM

9 Comments:

Blogger hpy said...

She looks just like one of my teachers when she was young. (And I too) I met her again some years ago, and she had more than doubled in size. I didn't recognize her anymore. Nor her behavior. That too had changed. For the worse.

12:02 AM  
Blogger Elegia said...

Dark figure. It could be he too. Why I always see both genders in one person?

Sex: how do you say it in plural? Sexs? Hmm, sounds weird.

3:34 AM  
Blogger Mick said...

hpy:
You have stumbled into a certain truth with this series of my work. It originally arose, conceptually, from the lyrics to a very popular song in the mid-1960's (Elegia are you paying attention here?) by The Zombies. Here, a person is self consumed to the point of madness and there's no one real there to deal with. It also refers to someone you once knew, or thought you knew, who has changed and is not there as you remember them or as you want to remember them. At other times, it's someone who resembles a person so much that at a glance you're excited to see them - only to realize that the object of your attention is someone else and not there.

elegia:
LOL, I think you were born too late. There was a movement of style and fashion popular in the 1960's known as unisex ... both sexes of the trendy set dressed in rather similar ways so that it wasn't always easy to tell which was male and which was female. As to why you see it that way, Elegia? I can't say, but I'm glad that you do! :D

5:26 AM  
Blogger SusuPetal said...

"Please don't bother tryin' to find her
She's not there"

Oh, I just love that song!

7:02 AM  
Blogger Trijnie said...

Hi Mick, yesterday travelled to the south to supply work for exhibition very, busy. Linoleumsnede: I have also done, very labour-intensive. The results are frequently splendid beautiful black and white picture, indeed unisex. I also come from that century. As a matter of fact I discovered the Alta Vista translator, I am glad; talk what more easily.
Trijnie

8:07 AM  
Blogger Mary Stebbins Taitt said...

VERY NICE, MICK.

I used to do block prints, too! What fun!

I did them every year for Christmas, for book covers, and for fun.

I've been away--been missing seeing your work--hope to get caught up soon!

8:28 AM  
Blogger Mick said...

susupetal:
I'm delighted to be able to rekindle such memories of old songs. In America we have an expression for this: "You turned on the Wayback Machine!" The reference is from an old cartoon show of that same era, Rocky and Bullwinkle. :)

griesmail:
I suppose I should dig out some examples of that old work to post one of these days. It surely is a labor intensive process but, for me, cutting the block was almost a Zen-like experience and I loved it. :)

mary:
Welcome back. I guess I really need to get to work on the writing I've promised you for SCR IV! :D

9:12 AM  
Blogger Elegia said...

I know unisex eau de toilettes. I don't like them: don't wanna smell like unisex. And don't wanna smell like male! ;-)

Sexes, of course! Momentary lapse of reason, again ;)

9:09 PM  
Blogger Mick said...

elegia:
LOL - not a lapse of reason at all. A lapse of proper pluralization perhaps ... and another dichotomy with uni vs plural! :D

5:24 AM  

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