Monthly Archives: September 2012

by victoriadelgadillo

Art Process

September 25, 2012

Here’s how my print process begins. Step 1 -take a picture of what I want to draw.

Bolsa de Mercado

Step 2,  I translate the photo into black & white (using a basic photo editing on computer)—cropping the view to make it interesting.  My friend Leslie Gutierrez took these pictures below for me. She did it with a Nikon, indoors, overhead lighting, no flash.  It’s hard to shoot plastic (as seen in the color version above)–it can have too much shine and blur the details.

Option 1

In Option 1, there is a hint of the bag. In Option 2, you can see the complete bag.

Option 2

Now I can see the vertical and horizontal lines better in the grey-tone version, and can plot out the separations on acetate sheets. I am doing the color separations old school, hand painting the acetates with ink. These days there is a temptation to create the separations on computer. Sure it’s faster, but then the finished print becomes too mechanical, too slick and loses the artist’s personal touch.

I am thinking of color. Not sure if I will use the original bag colors of red, white and green. I like blues and oranges more. We’ll see. Choices, choices and problem solving–that is art.

November 15. Leslie is so clever, I did not have to take another photo, this is actually the red bag version. Les suggested that I photoshop it to change the color and voila I got this look. Love it!  So above is the color scheme I am going for in my print and the final cropping too. I think you can tell what it is, but it is not so obviously figurative–like when you see the whole bag.  I’m going to start my separations next week.

November 17. Met with the Master Printer and talked MORE about color.  I know color only excites a few of us– it’s an art thing. He gave me a sheet of rubylith to cut my background layer. The background (in orange) will be the first pass of color. He suggested that the colors should be printed in this order:  yellow, blue and then the magenta all in transparent inks so that when two colors merge, they will create a third color.  I love transparent paint! Nice to work with someone that does this everyday. Printing in layers is tricky.

Below I adhere the registration targets to the my transparency sheets. The registrations are used to help align each layer.

November 20.  Thanksgiving slowed down my process. The studio was closed for 4 days!  Right before they closed for the holiday, the studio manager said my blown-up poster model was too pixelated.  He said it would be hard to see the lines well enough on the light table to transfer the design onto the separations. Sighhh. It took me forever to get the bad poster versions done too. Staples could not get them right.  It took them a whole day to print it close enough to the size I needed. A waste of $10 and 4 bad posters. Urgh.

November 27. After a nice Thanksgiving weekend with family and friends—I got back to my image. I was frustrated about it from Saturday to this morning (3 days!) Lots of thinking about my plan of attack. I am not sure if this works for everyone, but when I sleep on matters the very next day I have figured out a plan. I woke up at 4:30am this morning and logically figured out what I needed to do. I have always believed that thinking logically can resolve anything in life, because in the world nothing is 100% one way or another.  I am sure it was something I did, not Staples. After searching for the right terminology, I knew how to ask for what I needed help with. I watched a YouTube videos on the subject and got some good tutoring.  I needed to raise the resolution, lock it in and resize the image to what poster dimensions I wanted.  Que pendeja! So simple. The answers are out there! Actually I do not work on graphics that much, I don’t know what buttons to push. Visual tutorials are my best friends. Finally I got my print model sized into a 30 X 22 poster and printed it at Office Depot. Cost $14. Tax deduction for sure. To make it fit into the correct proportions, I had to change the image a bit from Option 1. Ah ha–but now that task is done and I am REALLY ready to hit the light table and create my hand made transparencies. Exciting!

This is my final design model for my print.

December 5. I have put in at least 6 hours on hand inking my separation for magenta and I am not even done (see what I mean in my image below). Everything that will have magenta in it for my print (including orange and purple) require ink blocking.  Below, my photocopied image has a sheet of acetate over it and I am blocking out the magenta areas with my rapidograph pen. I use a small color image for reference, as I count the lines over and over to be sure I am blocking the right areas. I’ve been going into the studio at 6am in the morning, because I am fresher at that time. I rock the jazz station alone and get into an inking meditation. I guess I could have made it as a comic book inker. In truth, I could have drawn the original image myself, it is a simple rectangle. But I wanted it to have the accuracy of realistic woven fabric and accomplishing that is tedious. Inking all that woven fabric was tedious enough. Usually hand drawn silk screen images are less complicated and “complicated” is my middle name–sometimes.

Me, hand inking

December 14. My artist in residency begins! I have been working on my separations non-stop for over a week now.  I had 3 separations completed–but there are always issues to resolve.  Thinking in print is difficult.  When you are inking the separations, what you ink will be the color, not the clear spaces. Darn! Of course, my first separation was wrong! I did it backwards.  I had to scramble to get my first separation ready on the first day. We could lose a day of printing! The color must be laid down in order. The good thing was that we gained a separation for the color blue, which I had not done yet. Yes, the blocked separation I did for the first day was what I needed for the blue color, with a few tweaks–whew. Glad nothing was wasted.

The master printer burnt the screen with a system very much like photo developing. Since it is done in the dark, I could not take a picture. A green photo sensitive liquid is coated on the silk screen, the ink separation is place below the screen on a transparent glass table.  From beneath, a photographer’s light is lit for a designated amount of time–thereby the separation is transferred onto the screen.

Power washing the burnt screen

Power washing the burnt screen

Above the screen is then power washed to remove the areas that were ink blocked. Exposed are the areas where the ink will be pushed through on the paper with a squeegee. The white areas on the screen are open, the green areas are blocked. Note that the image is upside down. This run will be the first color–a peach shade for the background.

Below, the master printer is blocking any areas that may have been exposed in the wash, to make sure there are no pin holes.

Blocking any pin holes

Blocking any pin holes

Then onto the printing. . . . .

From December 15 to December 21 five colors were applied to the prints in this order: Peach, Light Blue, Transparent Yellow, Transparent Magenta and Dark Blue (see images below).  The prints require a day to dry completely before applying the next color. We started with 70 sheets of silk screen archival poster paper and ended up with 40 prints. The prints are required to have a visual consistency in color, registration and color coverage in order to be considered a series.

Dec 15 Inking the screen

Dec 15 First print

Dec 15 Pulling out first print

Dec 15 First color "peach"

Dec 15 Seventy more to go

Dec 18 (after the weekend) the 2nd color is "blue"

Dec 19 Third color is "yellow"

Dec 20 The 4th color is added "magenta"

December 22. Voila! My print is done and just like I wanted. It was loads of work, but so worth it. Could I improve it? Of course, each new subject is an opportunity to learn and each new attempt is an opportunity to  translate your image into something else. I don’t feel my print is an actual copy of the model, it has my artistic flavor through my hands-on drawing/inking, color choices and the elimination of factory woven details.

After the prints are created, the separations and bad prints are destroyed by the studio. Yes! It keeps dumpster divers and thieves from copying and selling the prints. This is true.

My print is a tribute to the working class people that use these recycling bags for everything from grocery shopping to laundry washing. When my friend Becky Cortez saw it –she said “This image reminds me of you!”  Perfect. These types of bags are a reoccurring theme in my art and even though it is a common still life, it is an overlooked powerful icon of our times.

by victoriadelgadillo

Anarchist Book Fair 2012

The 4th Annual Los Angeles Anarchist Book Festival took place this year at Barnsdall Park (September 8, 2012). For the last 3 years I wanted to attend, but there had been an element of disorganization in the form of no advance publicity or firm location, even poor communication flow which impeded someone like me (an advance planner) from attending. After all, LA is a weekly buffet of important events.

I don’t know the anarchist credo, but ambitious scheduling and event planning do not seem to be a part of it–it is more an organic social-mutualism when a gathering occurs. There does not seem to be a drive for amassing or controlling ‘things’, instead there is simple living, healthy eating, love of books, knowledge sharing and a great deal of do-it-yourself-ism.

In 1927, Aline Barnsdall donated Barnsdall Park and her Frank Lloyd Wright designed home (The Hollyhock House), to the City of Los Angeles. The intention was to maintain an active and long-lasting arts center for the community. It was a beautiful setting for the Anarchist Book Fair, which spilled out of its Metropolitan Gallery doors into the park with tables of information, books, zines, food, educational selections, unique political history and autobiographical books, health related appeals, social justice causes, musicians, slogan patches and buttons, handmade jewelry and art. Everything extremely affordable, if not free.

According to the day’s schedule handed to me upon arriving, there was an early morning community set-up of the space, indigenous dancers, lunch, and a preview performance of “The Ballad of Ricardo Flores Magon: the unearthing of radical LA history”. There was a children’s play area in the park, as well as art and craft projects.

Shopping does not interest me. I passed up all the book tables, went straight to the vegan tamale line and to get a big drink of cold water. I think that’s when I lost my friend. Its been very hot in Los Angeles for a few weeks now. We are so spoiled with the weather, that any day not being 78 degrees, seems intolerable. After eating I entered the air conditioned gallery and took a stroll around the ample space. I imagined when this was Aline Barnsdall’s home and it amused me to think that no anarchist would ever want to live in such grandeur. The building has had such an interesting history. I also wondered if the McCarthyists had ever met there to plot against Hollywood. This sort of dichotomy is very intriguing to me.

Looking at the schedule of speakers and presentations, I spotted that the rooms in the gallery had been baptized into names like Emma Goldman Room, Ricardo Flores Magon Room, Buenaventura Durruti Room, Enrico Malatesta Room, Lucy Parsons Room, Voltairine de Cleyre Room and the Makhail Bakunin Room. These rooms hosted such topics as “Class War California-style: Riots, Occupations and General Strikes,” “Imperiled Life: Revolution Against Climate Catastrophe,” “Building Autonomous Resistance through Mutual Aid,” “Political Prisoners in North America,” “The Chilean Student Movement,” “Building Power Movements,” “Police Infiltration, Surveillance and Spying,” “Gender Strike,” “Bike Blenders,” “Palestine Solidarity,” “Anaheim Uprising & Cop Watch,” “Igniting the Revolution within a Sex-Positive Approach to Healing,” “Anarchist Parenting,” “Liberation Healing,” “ Now and Then, the Challenges in Anarchism,” and other impromptu topics not listed.

I spied my lost friend in the gallery, where he dwelled the rest of the afternoon in the cool sanctuary. Later, he even took a turn behind one of the book tables, chatting up the books and making sales. I liked the informality.

After being taunted on Facebook with a barrage of announcements about an exhibit called “Look at These Fucking Artists,” I went from word/concept insulted to realizing that this was the art portion of the Anarchist Book Fair. The title took me aback, and in truth I had to warm up to it. I suppose all new art hits one like a slap on the face, or at least it does to me–as it should be.

There was no physical art on the walls at the Anarchist Book Fair, “Look at These Fucking Artists,” were a series of engaging art discussions. I missed the art talks on “Art Labor,” “Mural Moratorium,” and “Text & Action”. As I was standing in the gallery, a young woman came up to me and asked me to join the next art talk on “Beyond LA Xican@isms,” on the balcony. Hmm–a modern version of “Chicano” with a gender inclusive spelling–I’m there! Each discussion of 12 to 15 people started with everyone introducing themselves and the moderator asking a question to the panel about art and anarchism.

In Xican@isms, Fabian Debora, a visual artist who specializes in gang intervention activism and works at Otis College of Art & Design sensitizing students to political correctness in their art work, said that the art world was more political and complicated than being in a gang. That really stuck with me as well as made me smile.

While others attended art discussions on “Institution of Social Practice” and “Propaganda”, I attended “LA Zapatismo”. Presenter Dr. Roberto Flores, had organized a group of community members in the late 90s for a trip to Chiapas called “Encuentro” (Encounter). The Encuentro was a sharing of ideas with the members of EZLN and LA artists. In the end,  art work was created and based on the concepts learned and shared at the Encuentro. After, Dr. Flores established a non-profit meeting/community space in El Sereno and focused the rest of his discussion on LA Zapatismo as it relates to the challenges of being a viable voice in the El Sereno community without being thought of as ‘problematic‘ to the local politicians, by integrating into the community through majority issue support and by being an “under the radar’ physical barrier to community changes/divisions being planned by outsiders.

Next I missed “Pussy Riot” and “Militant Knowledge” to attend “ Narcos”. Jen Hofer, demonstrated a portable radio studio she and her colleague use to provide translation services at community meetings where there are Spanish and English monolingual attendees. Her group has provided this service throughout Mexico and especially on the US and Mexico borders, because they feel communication is crucial to these national communities. Artist Raul Baltazar was there to speak of his work with the art movement in the United States that is creating criticism on Narcotraficantes. The Anarchist Book Fair being so organic, soon Raul passed the presentation to me and I became part of this panel too. I spoke of my work starting with the art campaign in support the disappeared women of Juarez 11 years ago. Something I (and Raul) had discussed was the Youtube films that cartel’s upload, in which they are torturing and killing innocents and other drug cartel members with numbing graphic violence. At the same time one must note that these films are an artistic process, with their editing, sound selection and graphic titles choices. Raul continues to question if he should be sensitive to the victims by censoring his art, or if he should be brutally honest in his cartel art, even if it (yet again) wounds the victims.

At the end of the day, I attended “MMOOCCAA”, a critique on Eli Broad’s personal hands-on recreation of the art scene in Los Angeles. By appointing key museum personnel who work against the mission of a Museum–i.e. to educate the community about art, he has declared war on the LA art community. Broad and his operatives want to reinvent the museum system into a money making enterprise by curating rave-like art events and featuring east coast artists. This money/power-fueled philanthropy has been interpreted as a hostile belittling of art created in California and the west coast. There were gallery people from LACE and the Hammer Museum in this talk. Interesting that the subject of government supported art should be desired by some of the attendees in this group, as a salvation from well meaning philanthropists. The idea of government control of art as a resolution is contrary to anarchism. Just goes to show that all opinions were valid at the Book Fair.

Next year’s Anarchist Book Fair promises to be even better. The only thing I would change is to make sure to bring my own sack lunch. It was a long, engaging day coupled with humid weather on that balcony—-it would have been good to have a little extra fuel for sustenance.

by victoriadelgadillo

The Zen of Curating

 

Curating an art exhibit is exciting and some days, stressful.  Merging many artists into one anything is a feat.  You’ve heard of the difficult tortured artist? Well think of 50 to 100 artists, each one with their personal needs, schedules, personalities.  Sometimes the best artists have the biggest diva moments.  Yes, even some of your most beloved, down-to-earth, hommie, street artists, have their ego-melt-downs.

Meanwhile, as the curator, I need to maintain a calm poker face which evokes “Everything is fine.  I know what I am doing.  We are perfectly on schedule. Don’t worry, I got this”, to everyone involved. The curator must stay calm.  I’ve even remained calm when featured artists have shown up half-hour before an opening with wet paintings or hours late  for their presentations.  Stressed gallery staff/owners have said to me, “Call your boy. Where is the artist? What should we do/say to the guests? There’s no art on the walls!” By then, there is nothing that can be done but reorganize the schedule, calm the guests and gallery people with optimistic chatter and more calmness.  The later it gets before the artist arrives, the harder the gallery people look at me, like I am a poor judge of artists.

At a certain point, all my meditation and Zen training informs me that once an idea has been articulated—it has its own life in the universe. It is no longer mine. Like any life-form, one can only tend and facilitate an idea as best one can—and without any known formula, rhyme or reason, an idea (exhibit) is going to be what it is going to be.  Of course, one could try and dictate what every little detail will be and when it is not how one imagined, have a nervous break-down—but in Zen, you let go of control. Learning to let go, has amazing rewards and most times matters turn out better than you had thought.  Note that there is a difference between nurture and control.

A few months ago, I attended a lecture curated by Bill Kelly, Jr. who is the 2012-13 Curator in Residence at 18th Street Art Complex in Santa Monica.   I was so lucky to have a moment alone with him before the lecture room filled up.  I asked him if he ever felt like the referee between exhibit spaces and the artists.  He quickly said, “No”, adding that I probably encourage that familiarity with both entities.

This has made me think carefully about my authority rating as a curator.  In the end, I am okay with relinquishing some of my direction-rights in anything I do for the chance of learning new ways and being surprised by them.

by victoriadelgadillo

Take Note

I suppose everyone has to have a deficit disorder of some sort. Mine is making lists. I have little books, notepads, sketchbooks, pieces of paper, pieces of box cartons, business cards, postcards and receipts with telephone numbers, recipes, books titles, music artists, song titles, drawings, ideas, diagrams, measurements, film script stories, name lists, emails, websites, grant leads, wish lists, shopping lists, to-do lists, written descriptions of various things, street intersections of places that I want to stop and check out someday, color arrangements, DIY project notes, restaurants addresses,  friends’ birth dates, words and philosophies I want to look up, math summations and formulas, Spanish words I don’t know, paint chips, quotes I like, driving directions and printed clippings.

I keep these little books (some decorated) where they are easy to find and write in: 2 in my car console, 1 on my dining/work station, 2 in my desk drawer, 1 to 2 in my purse  and the completely filled up ones in a box on a book shelf.

Funny thing is that I don’t look at them that much.  I am compelled, in an addiction manner to buy more little books whenever, wherever I see them.  I’ve processed this way my whole life, making some of these little books pretty old.  Its as if once I put something down on paper, it’s inscribed in my mind.

I take pride in being very organized in most of my daily tasks and spaces–very logical on how I began every project–but the little books have no rhyme or reason.  Each page has no relation to the next, each entry is in no particular order and the only way to find anything, would be to open each one and flip-read through each page. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I think I will have time to read these again.

I get miffed with myself when I see artists’ sketch books that are dedicated to just art drawings and thumbnail images of a greater art piece to come.   I suppose in a way, my little books are the sketch books of my art and mind.  Perhaps, these notations from all these little daily thoughts, electromagnetic ideas and sequences of matters that pass in front of my eyes represent my art. Maybe this is my religion.