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studio day
January 23, 2010
Cutting a new woodblock:
This wood, a cheap Douglas Fir ply, was great for wood intaglio (which is what I bought it for) but is not so hot for carving normally. It’s brittle and splitty and kind of a pain in my arse. And in my wrist, which I may need to wrap up tonight. This could be slow going. And when I pick up the wood for my printmaking students to use, I’ll get them some nice birch instead.
I poked around the shop a bit and had a look at the litho equipment that was donated to the school last year. It’s pretty much a full litho shop’s worth of stuff: press, graining sink, stones, scraper bars, chemicals, lots of tusche and crayons and other supplies. The shop isn’t set up yet and the graining sink can’t be used, but I’m thinking about getting one of the stones out and trying to do some printing without graining first. It’ll all depend on whether I find any lithotine once I get my hands on a key to the locked fire cabinet, but everything else I’d need seems to be there. Everything but a forklift to heave the stone I want to use up onto the press, of course. I think it would take six of the biggest students to lift it, and it’s got to come up from almost floor level. Bonus marks won’t be enough incentive, I’m thinking.
It looks like a pretty good press:
There were also some nice old inks in the cupboard that I don’t think I’ll open, as the older they are the more likely they are to be filled with carcinogens. Many were date stamped January 1989 but these two on the left here, the Ault & Wiborg ones, are dated Oct 27 1964 (red label) and Feb 22 1957. Neither has ever been opened.
![canadian fine color [sic]](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2699/4299501790_847a55dd31_o.jpg)
No, the orange ink is not from 1542.
I don’t think I ever told y’all this story about those other old inks, the ones I got from the shelf marked “oldies” at Green Street, the oldest of which is dated October 1971 (two months older than me!). I received an email from someone who had seen my photos of the inks on flickr, inquiring what I was planning to do with the inks and whether I’d consider selling them. I wrote back and said that I was going to print with them, because I thought it would be kind of funny to use ink that was older than me (in the same way I remember my housemates and I back in 1989 thinking it was so hilarious when one of us, not me, tasted some of that army food in the silver packets that was older than we were and had been sitting around in storage somewhere), and just out of curiosity what did he want the inks for? He wrote back that he was a lawyer working on a case for a group of individuals who had contracted cancer from working with inks in that era and please under no circumstances should I use the inks. Of course I immediately told him that in that case he was welcome to the inks as long as he would deal with the rigmarole of getting them back into the States, as by that time I had finished grad school and brought all of my stuff, including the purloined heirloom inks, back to Canada. I never heard back. Which makes it not much of a story really, except for the whole inks = cancer thing. So now the cans sit untouched up high on a shelf in my studio, looking pretty with their 30 years of label design, and this story is added to my vast arsenal of stories I use to try and scare my students, along with the one starring yours truly who used to cook curried black eyed peas in a pot on the hot plate in the intaglio room at Bealart, right next to people who were cooking asphaltum onto plates. So, curried black eyed peas with added tar, wax and mineral spirits, essentially. That’s some tasty stuff right there.
Posted by jodi on January 23, 2010 at 11.03pm
Categories: in the studio