FAVO market

The Faith Arts Village Orlando is an old motel that has been renovated by Park Lake Presbyterian Church to be a place for artist studios and art happenings. This Friday they are hosting an open air market full of art and local produce from 5-9pm. I will be there with a few prints to sell, but more importantly with the Richeson Baby Etching Press. I'll have a station set up where everyone can ink and print a little block and take home a piece of art for free! Hopefully some people will catch the printmaking bug so bad that they will be forced to come back for more, and by more I mean the upcoming Not Your Mama's Print Workshop.

Now is the time..

The time is now to sign up for our relief printmaking workshop! Maitland Art Center is offering all summer classes at 10% off if you sign up before May 29th. So while you're out barbecuing this long weekend, don't forget to hop on the computer and sign up here.

Groom/Stick

Today at work in Special Collections I encountered Marbling: a history and a bibliography by Phoebe Jane Easton which had been a victim of a particularly vicious act of book on book violence. It had the extreme misfortune of being shelved next to a deteriorating leather book. As you can see, neither were wrapped in mylar and Marbling sustained extensive red rot staining on its cover.

Fortunately for Easton's book, the Acquisitions Department had just cleaned out a storage area and brought me a cart full of supplies to go through and keep if I wanted. In those supplies were two packages of Groom/Stick.

My first impression of Groom/Stick was that it must be some form of book torture that in one long gone day was thought to work. I did some research and found that instead it was supposed to be a revolutionary new cleaning material:

GROOM/STICK is a novel form of natural rubber with specific properties combining to create a surface dry-cleaner of high efficiency. The rubber's natural structure has been modified to make it permanently soft, kneadable and strongly tacky. Moisture, solvents and chemical additives have been excluded.

As a non-abrasive, non-staining cleaner of paper and other library materials, Groom/stick gently but positively picks up a wide range of foreign matter. Graphite, carbon, charcoal, chalk, crayon, dry powder colours, mould spores, dust, dirt and grease are cleanly lifted off the surface and held in a 'molecular trap' from which there is no escape!

The process is fast and smear-free. It is demonstrated by lightly rolling a Groom/stick 'cigar' across a freshly-printed newspaper. Excess print ink is removed instantly - without blurring the print or soiling adjacent clean areas. Ordinary solid or granular rubber/resin erasers abrade, smudge, crumble or produce clinging debris. Groom/stick sacrifices nothing of itself, leaves no dirty fragments to brush away (or mould spores to regenerate in concealed areas) and is always ready and clean to use.

 I decided to give it a shot and the results were earily exactly what the promotional material said they would be. While I didn't find rolling the material into a cigar a very easy endeavor (my lump looks more like a creepy alien-esque cacoon), I did find that the surface dirt it grabbed would never escape from it's plasticky grave. Here it is covered in red rot powder and none of it is transfering to my hands or any other part of the book. In fact, it was cleaning me. I could see it, while still covered in powder, taking all the oil that I didn't know I had off my fingertips.

Groom/Stick is my miracle item of the week. Enjoy these before and after photos:

Not Your Mama's Print Workshop

We're ba-ack! Molly Chism and I are teaching a new installment of the print class this summer and this time it's in workshop form. There are two sessions to choose from; Sunday, June 24th 1pm - 5pm or Sunday, July 29th 1pm - 5pm. Of course, you can always come to both.

We will be focusing on printing our own greeting cards from linoleum blocks that we will design and carve. If greeting cards aren't your thing, then there's no reason you can't come and make prints for framing instead of prints for mailing.

The tuition is $70 a person for non Maitland Art Center members and $63 for members. There is also a $30 materials fee that covers the ink and paper you'll use during the day plus a speedball carving set, a bench hook (which is a fancy word for something that helps you carve without sending your block flying off the table), and linoleum- all of which you'll be able to take home at the end of the day. It's like a starter printmaking kit for you to continue making prints long after the workshop. All those materials that your fee pays for also means that you don't have to bring any supplies to the workshop. The only thing we ask you bring is your creativity (and an idea for your image won't hurt).

You can sign up for either (or both) workshops on the Maitland Art Center's website HERE. We hope to see you there!