Anonymous Archive part 1 of 2

 A few weeks ago I was the recipient of a hit and run dump: the doorbell rang and no one was there but a large, filthy cardboard folder full of really old pieces of artwork had been left at the door. About a third of it was mine, and I knew an estranged sibling was doing a deep clean of their attic.

So, from the "anonymous archive" this is a very early - from grade 11 in high school, 1977 - oil pastel. I actually remember doing it; I was working from a rectangular landscape picture and decided to draw it in a circle, making everything curvy.

I think I must have liked using oil pastels (now I prefer materials more extreme - either chalk pastels or oilsticks - which are on opposite sides of the spectrum). I think this oil pastel still life is from grade 12, late 1977 or early 1978.

When I was in grade 12 I received a scholarship to the Art Gallery of Ontario's Gallery School, which meant I had unlimited access to the gallery, and art classes on Saturday mornings. I was totally thrilled with the arrangement. The artist/teachers divided the classes into rotating groups to do life drawing, plaster mould-making (around clay sculpture) and printmaking. The printmaking module consisted of an introduction to lithography using paper plates rather than stone. I don't know what inspired this preparation sketch, perhaps my ideal landscape?

I was really surprised to see this print again, I had completely forgotten about it - I remembered learning about the principles of lithography and I remembered using a paper plate rather than stone, but I did not remember the image at all. Printmaking was my last module at the Gallery School, so it would have been created during the spring of 1978.

I started art school in September 1978 at Central Technical School's 3-Year Special Adult Art Programme, which was a free post-secondary art programme run out of a high school (though in a separate art building) by the Toronto Board of Education. The programme had a long history as it was founded to train returning veterans of WW1 into commercial art. The programme had a very good reputation for training would-be artists in both commercial and fine art as well as craft, with extensive facilities for sculpture, illustration, ceramics, photography, printmaking, life drawing, etc. In my first year I loved having both life drawing and life painting classes (3 hours each weekly). I still remember this model, Fred, was always very stately when clothed, and totally professional when not. This drawing and watercolour would have been done in early 1978 as we didn't actually "paint" in life painting during the first part of the school year.

Lithography workshop

It is probably becoming fairly obvious that my interest in printmaking techniques has become very pronounced over the past two years. When I heard about a weekend lithography workshop at Blackchurch Print Studio in Dublin, about two months ago, I was quick to sign up for it. Lo and behold, the time flew and the workshop, led by Alison Pilkington, took place last weekend. 

There were only four of us taking the workshop, so it was quite intense. I had brought some sketches of things I had been working on, and spent Saturday morning developing these sketches on a larger scale.

I had another look at my branches images, but decided on beachstones for the litho stone.

Saturday afternoon was spent drawing on the litho stone with a variety of litho crayons and then painting on tucshe in specific areas. For the small stones, I applied the tusche by flicking so that their texture would be totally different from the surrounding linework. Unfortunately I was too busy working, and did not have a camera with me anyhow, to take pictures of the stone in progress. On Sunday morning there were a few applications of nitric acid in gum arabic on the tusche areas and in the afternoon I printed up an edition of four on beautiful Fabriano paper. It was an exhausting but invigorating day!