Looking through this series again, I really like it. So here are some more, including some of the white-pencil drawings. The white pencil, due to the fact that it gets blunt, required constant sharpening to maintain the level of detail that could be achieved by the ink pens.
So here is more of Little Apocalypse! From the top down:
Where You Grew Up: This is the second piece of the series, done in pencil. This is where the second protagonist hails from, Where I Grew Up being the first piece. Unfortunately, that one, done in ink pen, is embarrassingly out of focus and its rather charming (if I do say so myself) details can't be seen.
What Happened to the Homestead: I imagined this as a place the protagonists passed by, maybe camped out in, some wholesome home left to decay in the dust, full of photographs of people long dead. Again, something about disintegrating Americana speaks to me.
Then we have Summit City, another of the three cities they pass through. These cities are populous centers of the new country, the one that's struggling back up after whatever apocalyptic event (take your pick) happened. If Valentine City is the hedonistic center, this one is the center of learning and spirituality, built high up and full of aerials and towers, spanning the peaks of mountains, hard to get to. The third is Oil City, which I'm not posting, but that one's an industrial center, sludgy and dirty and ruled by profit. I guess the cities are kind of like city-states, each one with its own set of values, ethics and cultural traditions.
Finally, we have The Road Out, in which the protagonists leave an unnamed settlement for the wilderness. They're done. They are so freakin' done, man. This is the second-to-last piece (there are 10 in total), and immediately proceeds Our House. They've left the problems of society and make off on their own. This would be the view looking backwards.
Anyway, if you're wondering, all of the monotype prints I've posted were achieved the same way. I started by mixing ink(s) and applying it with a brayer, which is like a rubber paint roller, onto a Plexiglas plate. Then I sprayed mineral spirits onto them for the blotched effect. Finally, the inked plate was lain onto a piece of damp paper and rolled through a press (which is quite a nice workout) and hung up to dry. The scenery was drawn on later. I started with the darkest ones, like The Road Out and Where You Grew Up, lots of blacks, browns, greens and some oranges, which evolved into browns, then blues, and then lighter colors. I was kind of just playing around at first, but the pieces slowly evolved into a story, and the pieces sort of fell into order.
When I was in college, an ever-increasing amount of time ago, I took a few (2) printmaking classes. I learned something. I'm a painter, through and through. I'll never have the discipline (some might say neurosis) to be a printmaker. The painter's philosophy is "Eh. I'll paint over it. No big." You don't get that luxury with printmaking, and everything must be planned out from the get-go. Make an error? Start over. No room for improvisation.
Fuck that.
See, the other good thing about painting is that while the equipment ca be expensive, no really special materials are required. Paint, canvas (or fabric) stretchers, media and brushes. You can use wax or freezer paper in place of a palette, and that's about it. No zinc plates, no nitric acid baths, no asphaltum or hard ground, no lightboxes, no photosensitive purple goop requiring darkroom access...you get the idea.
To date, as a result of the classes, I can aquatint, dry-point etch, silkscreen, and monotype. I owned a pretty large silk screen for a while, but ended up selling it--something I partially regret (I would have been able to make so many awesome T-shirts) but can rationalize due to practicality (no darkroom). I have a lot of odd prints stacked away somewhere, and I barely ever look at them. Except for these.
These three monotype prints were created by simply rolling colors across a Plexiglas plate and spraying it with mineral spirits, then printing the results. It ended up being a 10-piece series called "Little Apocalypse," which more or less detailed an indeterminate apocalyptic event in America's heartland and the aftermath. It tells loosely of two unseen travelers wandering through the wasteland until they find a place they can call home. The structures were later drawn on with pen (as seen in these three) or white pencil (on the darker images).
These three, from the top down titled Our House, Valentine City, and Storm Country, are the best photographed of the ten. I'll have to re-shoot the others one day, so that the world can know their glory. Our House is actually the last of the series, and is an underwater biome that the two protagonists share at the end of their journey. The photo is out of focus, but I love it and so had to include it. Valentine City is sort of a debauched urban area, full of advertising and consumption, but also great beauty (and perhaps the beginning of my fascination with lurid pink). Storm Country is sort of an image of bereft Middle America, where prospecting promise has dissolved into dust.
Storm Country, though, lives on. It, and another, poorly photographed print from the series, inspired a triad of oil paintings currently in the works. Something about the fresh-faced optimism of golden America combined with some tragically radioactive future dystopia really spoke to me. Big surprise, eh?
