Plannin' out a route -

"Toast #9"
monotype by Mick Mather

I've begun to hint about my upcoming vacation. From August 11th thru August 22nd I'm going to be doing other things than this blog. Maybe. I'm sure to check in here from time to time, to visit my daily reads and to mess around with an experiment or two without pressure, without expectation and no need to come up with anything spectacular. During that 2-weeks off, there may well be little by way of the usual writing to accompany the work and I'm on a search for short quotes that will serve there instead. We'll see and, for now, here's another monotype from The Toast Series. I have 12 pieces in the series and by the end of my vacation, the other 8 will be posted ... does anyone have a good quote about toast?

NEW from The Toast Series -

"Toast #5"
monotype by Mick Mather

Vacation is a wonderful thing except for the fact that a weeks worth of work is still waiting to be done when you get back. I'm struggling a little getting caught up and tonight I'm going to post something from the files that's been waiting for a day like this when I'm, once again, done in! As you can see, this is Number 5 from The Toast Series and it happens to be the most abstract of the lot. My thanks to Judy Hand and Lisa Sarsfield for assisting me with my thinking about the question-of-the-month. Well, boys and girls, enjoy - or: go do likewise!

The Toast Series -

"Toast #7"
monotype by Mick Mather

As promised, here's one of the monotype prints from The Toast Series. As you may recall, this came about as a direct result of The Telephone Series - another example of which can be seen here at No Mather What Shape - The Archive. Basically, each telephone began as a shape that looked like a piece of bread and, after finishing all 26 telephones, I began to fiddle. Soon the layers began looking more like slices of toasted bread and a series was born! Once again, each image is iconic in nature - the toast posted here being the most stylized. They were fun to do but, since I continued using telephone book pages for the most part, I'm dissatisfied with them. There's another grouping of experimental, trial runs done on a variety of other papers that I was even less satisfied with and I may revisit these somewhere down the road. More to come ... eventually.

You asked for it ... again -

- click to view larger image -

"Telephone # 20"
monotype by Mick Mather

I know that I promised to show at least one of the images from this series of monotypes. I'll likely show a few more since listening to something that my friend, Lisa Sarsfield, had to say in a comment recently. To briefly recap, my thinking was that these were not quite there as regards perspective and, for me, even the composition feels a bit forced. I've since changed my mind a bit because of the iconic nature of this series, The TV Dinner Series and The Toast Series yet to be shown. As before, stay tuned. :)