In the Middle of the Beginnings of Things

This post does a little catching up with multiple ongoing projects, beginning with the experimental kite I made the week before last.

I made two kites, but this one called Two Squares flew successfully.

There are new kites in the planning stages.

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I have been toying with the idea of gel plate printing for a while now. I made my own plate from a recipe off the Internet, but never tried it out as other things took precedence. Recently I treated my self to a genuine Gelli plate.

I have spent a lot of my evening time simultaneously watching television and looking at instruction videos on Youtube. (There is a remarkable amount of truly ugly stuff being made with Gelli plates. The conflicting instructions came as no surprise.)

Last week I purchased some Open matte medium in the hope that I can use the acrylic paint I already own and extend its drying time with the medium. I live in a very low humidity environment (most of the time) so I expect that a slower drying time will not just be useful, but critical to the success of the process.

Now I just have to clear my workbench to make space to play.

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Walking on Wednesdays continues. We are up to Week 30. This was the prompt.

I started at the nominal centre of our property.

I included the land location in the shared text, and looked for evidence of technology. Our neighbour had mowed the pasture so the new grass is more evident.

A recent property survey by that neighbour revealed that the fence between our lots diverges from the actual division line. When the fence was put in the land all belonged to one owner so they probably didn’t worry about the actual boundary.

David has been clearing a new fence-line footpath with a chainsaw. (The post at the lower left of the image above shows where the new fence will be. Our neighbours were not put out by our having had some of their land for decades as they have been pasturing horses here for free all that time.)

The removal of trees and undergrowth revealed a lovely red osier dogwood.

That was the second example of “revelation” that I photographed. (The first was the green grass in the newly-mowed pasture.) The third was David’s new woodpile. Splitting the wood from the new footpath has revealed the wood inside.

My other ‘revelations’ were the early signs of spring.

The walk would have looked quite different on Thursday, as the forecast was correct and we did get snow, though it melted quickly.

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It was also a week for visiting galleries.

The Art Placement exhibition of egg tempera works by Lorenzo Dupuis has been open for a while. There was an accompanying selection of small works by gallery artists, chosen by Dupuis, which made a lovely complement to their show.

We went to the official opening of Monique Martin’s exhibition at the Eye Gallery where I recently had my own show, Forty Days, with works selected from my #99 Day Project.

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In book arts news:

If you are interested in the history of ink production, you might enjoy this hour-long lecture —Panorama of Black Writing Inks: From Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages— by Dr. Ira Rabin, “a leading academic in the material scientific analysis of written artifacts”.

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I love colour charts. If you do too, you might enjoy Steven Heller’s recent article, Colorful Swatches (Not Watches!).