Print of the week - "Upon the Light-keeper's House"

 

"Upon the Light-keeper's House"

artist hand-pulled serigraph - © Bruce A. Morrison

(click on image for a larger view)

This week's print is a little different - it is a serigraph.  "Serigraph" is the fine arts term for "screen print" or "silkscreen print".  Silkscreening was a common commercial mode of printing signs and posters back in the early half of the 20th century.  When artists began to adopt this printing method, they didn't want their work confused with commercial sign making so coined the term "Serigraph" to differentiate the two.

Serigraphy was one of my minors in art school; it was a very interesting print making process and I enjoyed it a lot.  It is also, however, a very lengthy and sometimes difficult process too!  If you don't get all the screens registered (aligned) properly - the image becomes blurred looking...kind of like back in the day when the color comics in the Sunday paper would sometimes be out of register, making them harder to look at.

"Upon the Light-keeper's House" is a small 10 color serigraph that I printed myself by hand - one color at a time.  There are actually just 9 screens (colors), but I count the white of the paper as another color.  Can you pick out the other 9 colors? 

This print is of the Light-keeper's house in the harbor at Grand Marais, Minnesota...it now serves as the Cook County Museum.  The Herring and Ring-billed Gulls always seem to like using it as a perch so they had to be included!

This is a limited edition print with only 120 prints made.  The edition is now in very short inventory, having nearly sold out.  The image size itself is only 6.5X10" with a border for the signature and edition number. 

You can contact me for any prints or visit my website at www.morrisons-studio.com.

Have a great last couple days of July and thank you for stopping by! 

 

Night Noise

"Hunting Moon"

limited edition 8 color serigraph (screen print)

© Bruce A. Morrison

The nights are getting shorter and the days are lengthening; it's still uphill to spring but there are many signs on the horizon!  Now, I'm not really ready for spring yet in the studio...sounds a bit off, but I just have too much work ahead here and studio work is much more productive when spring chores don't get in the way.  I need to make the best of winter yet I'm afraid!

But there are signs of spring never-the-less; we have nesting here in the valley now.  I haven't "witnessed" the nesting, but still know it's going on.  Each night for weeks we've been hearing the valley pair of Great Horned Owls vocalizing in the "neighborhood".  But in recent weeks it has accelerated to hours on end of "love talk" right here in the yard around the house.

I really do not know which bird has the deeper voice, but suspect it is the female, which is the larger bird by a good margin in the bird of prey world.  The other night (and morning) both birds sat around the house here really talking it up...sounding even excited.  Both bird's voices were overlapping one another, kind of like when two people are talking excitedly at the same time.  Around 1:30 a.m. I got up to try and get some audio recording of this banter, only to find out my recorder's battery was dead and the adapter and other battery was out in the studio!  Rats!  Oh well, just listening was fun enough...drifting in and out of sleep for the next 5 hours with the deep, wild rooted serenade outside the windows was pleasant to Georgie and I.

Great Horned Owls nest in late January/early February here.  It's still cold here, in fact I believe the last week of January and the first week of February are statistically our coldest time of winter.  Night time temps below zero Fahrenheit don't seem to matter!  These are tough birds!

I've written about these birds before on past blogs, in fact the blog image this time is from a cropped image I posted 3 years back.  There is some mystic about owls for me and many other people...it's likely the secret lives they lead in the dark I suppose.

It's snowing out fairly good right now and we'll be contending with this storm system for the next day or so...we're definitely in the middle of the winter season now.  But somewhere out there the Waterman Creek valley Great Horned Owls are nesting.

Solstice

The Winter Solstice comes tomorrow (Sunday the 21st) and now it definitely looks and feels the part even more than my last post. We've had around 15-16 inches of snow this past week and now the NWesters are bucking up and it's feeling like we're in it for the long haul!

Yesterday after blowing out the drives and paths (3 hours worth) I was walking some mail down to the box and a flock of Canada Geese at least a half mile long (I kid not!) came over the farm at that height you hear the wing beats...it was totally cool! I felt you could hold a conversation with them - they were so low and the air so still. The birds weren't in their characteristic "V" but one long string until near the very end they began to break off into a couple separate formations. I usually think of Canada Geese as autumn birds...but hey it was still autumn yesterday after all.

I've done Canada Geese in my work before but not in winter settings. Most of my winter work, whether photography or artwork, has served as Christmas card material over the past 40 some years. In early years I did pen and ink, transparent wash, or lino cuts for cards, but gradually graduated to serigraphs (silkscreen prints), photographs and paintings.

I should have opted for a photograph this year because my time has been too tied up, but I got this ...well, for a lack of a better word "idea", that I thought would make a nice winter painting so started one about 2 weeks ago. It wasn't till I was about half way through the piece that Georgie said to me something about how close to the "deadline" I was working. I pondered her warning and then realized, good grief - Christmas was somehow sneaking up on me! How did this happen?!

The Black-capped Chickadee header for this blog was a simpler "illustrative" card from 1984. I believe it was a ink/wash drawing. I did many more ink drawings than any other medium early on, in fact my first "sale" in the early 60's was an ink drawing.

The next year's design got a little more involved, it was a 6 color serigraph. One thing about silk screening is the "error factor" when you have miss-registrations, ink "accidents", and mixed colors running out before they were supposed to. On this piece I ran out of the two rabbit colors (the highlight base and the top color) before I wanted, so I had a lot of prints with no rabbit - just tree!

In recent years, I've done a few more color pencil pieces but I think the first one to be done specifically for a Christmas card design was this one done in 2001 (titled "Winter in Iowa"). I really enjoy color pencil work but have not done many recently...it's a time thing...dang time!

Yesterday I finished printing, writing, and sending out the last of my Christmas cards for the year. "Time" really got in my face this year...I'll have to start this process around Halloween next year maybe?

Keep warm out there!