Sunday, July 08, 2007

"Morbid Angel"


The first installment of the prints from Belgium! These 4 prints are all ink-jet with pronto plates (4 - 5 colors). Each is an edition of 10. The scale of the notes has been increased about 4 times to create a final print that measures 12" x 9". The prints have been folded and crumpled to mimic the original notes. I will post the 4 remaining prints soon! Michael

"Heavy Peace"

"Alice"

"1969"

Monday, July 02, 2007

Owl Print hot off the press!

Last Night in Belgium (view of the print studio)


Final Report: Frans Masereel Centrum Residency – Kasterlee, Belgium

Belgium is beautiful! The experience of being in Belgium and working and traveling for three weeks has made a significant impact on my creative work and greatly broadened my scope of the world. I traveled all around Belgium and to Amsterdam in Holland. I visited as many museums as I could, soaked up the culture of these wonderful cities and took over 800 photographs. At the Frans Masereel Centrum for Printmaking there was hopeful and willful exchanges of ideas, techniques and humanity. While in residence there were several other artists working and living at the Centrum. Some of the artists were from the States and others were from Holland, Belgium, Germany, South Africa and Brazil. Each day was filled with working hard in the print facility side by side with these other artists. The Centrum also has two extremely friendly and capable studio managers, Ivan and Wim, who are available during the business hours to answer questions, share prints from the collection and assist in technical procedures. The environment was very welcoming and excellently equipped – nothing short of a dream studio.

I focused my time on creating small edition pronto plate prints in combination with ink-jet printing. The facility does not have a computer lab so I prepared for my visit by generating the ink-jet editions before I arrived. My process was fairly simple, I just drew on the pronto plates and printed the images over the ink-jet prints. Spending most of my evenings drawing and the daytime printing. I worked with simple drawing media such as ballpoint pen, litho crayons and screen filler for a painterly effect. Past experiences with the pronto plates was limited so I was in for a good deal of experimentation. Fortunately several of the other residence had used the plates and were able to offer great insight to the process. Each print ended up having between 4 – 8 color runs. I created 8 new original prints, 4 small prints and 4 large prints in editions of 10 – 5 prints. You can see from the images (I will post more soon.. I haven't had time to scan them yet..) that the prints have an object quality and in the spirit tromp'loei mimic the original source, notes and notebook pages. Basically I scanned my original high school tardy slips and notebook pages and printed them out at a large-than-life scale on the ink-jet printer. I used very high quality papers such as Gampi for the ink-jet printing; these thin papers also mimic the weight and coloration of the original notes.

The imagery is an extension of a project that I have been working on for several years and overlaps with other current bodies of work. I allowed my self to be very influenced by what I did and saw in Belgium and the Netherlands. Since the notebooks that I use for source material are my own I am in a sense appropriating from my past self. The project is, in general terms, about history and memory. In slightly more specific terms it is about personal history, heavy metal culture, and life after the Vietnam War, the culture of war in America and loosely an interest in examining the cultural gap between the 1970’s and the 1980’s.

At some point in the near future I will be giving a presentation in Kansas City about this residency and my project - I will post more information about the presentation later.

All the best,

Michael Krueger