I don’t think she ever realized her cup was near to empty

Acrylic and mixed media on cradled wood panel, 24×12 inches, Available

I’m starting with a piece that pokes me (and I’m guessing quite a few women) in some uncomfortable places. It is a story in paint about over-extension, exhaustion and persistence. It’s about being a woman.

Let’s talk tangibles first – It’s beautiful and honestly, I don’t know how I captured the colors in it. It happens sometimes that the layers collect over one another in a way that stuns even the hand that made it. It’s glorious and it glows like few paintings I have ever made. The painting is on a long horizontal panel. This is a nod to the passage of time, reminiscent of a timeline without drawing a line. Embedded in the lower layers are screen printed tea cups, etched grids and tissue printed with dollies. They are beneath the surface layers though they rise and fall with the changing of the colors. It’s a deep cradled panel finished in white so no frame is needed to encased the piece.

Moving on to the conceptual elements of the painting. It is a small documentation of simply trying to be everything society asks of a woman. So many of the women I know are multitaskers to the nth degree; trying to balance work, parenthood, identity, fulfillment, relationships and emotional sanity, all while keeping everyone fed, the house clean(ish) and the bills up to date. Not to mention being bombarded by ridiculous standards of how we should look, what we wear and who we should be aspiring to be at the same time. It’s close to impossible. There are times I look back on in my life where I can’t even fathom how I did everything I did. Sometimes we are close to empty, running on fumes and just trying to hold it together. This painting developed from a moment of seeing this clearly in the form of a nearly empty teacup. I don’t know why that triggered it, but it did. The piece swirls concrete images of romanticized domestic life – tea cups and doilies, with jarring grids (I often use grids in my work as symbols of societal norms and expectations.) and marks which catch them in a net of color. The rich blues and greens are like a deep body of water surrounding and drowning the images as they rise and fall to and from the surface. A visual representation of all the complexity that exists in each of us as we move through each day and our various roles in the society.

Now the title – I don’t think she ever knew her cup was near to empty. You all know I wrap up a lot into my titles. I could probably write a book about the relationship of painting and title. But I will spare us all and mention just two things I’d like to point out. One: the cup is not empty. ‘She’ is still striving and working and continuing to put one foot in front of the other. She is not broken. Her head is still above the water in those seas of societal expectation. 

And the second point: there are two people in the title – “I” and “she”. It is relational. We are relational. All of my work is fundamentally about relationships. It is an acknowledgment that we all need others to come beside us once in a while to remind us when we might be spreading us a bit too thin and maybe even fill up our cups a little. We all keep on, doing so much and being so many different things at different times. We all drain our cups on a regular basis.  But hopefully, we also fill one anothers in turn.

My current prints are original, they are the work of art itself made by inking up wood plates and printing them on paper. They are also monoprints, meaning that they are one of a kind, not an edition. The combination of colors, plates and composition on any given print is unique to that print only. I have a library of plates I’ve created from different types of wood. Each type of wood is unique with different grains and printing properties. I also vary the viscosity of the inks which means that they stick to the plates differently allowing for varying coverage and transparency. After a collection of plates are inked up I then print them one or two at a time on printmaking paper (my favorites are Arches and mulberry). Strictly speaking woodblock printing is done on thinner paper and barrened by hand. However I’m really liking the effects I get by running the plates through my press on a thicker paper. I suppose that gets to the heart of what I love most about printmaking. It’s a highly process orientated art form yet so full of opportunities to experiment. My current prints developed out of me experimenting with bits of left over wood floating around my studio. I needed a break from painting one day and on a whim inked up a random piece of the wood and ran it through the press. I had forgotten the quiet and deliberate nature of printing and just how soothing it can be. The act of inking and printing and reprinting was meditative, becoming a recurring source of peace and inspiration for me. Each print is printed several times, with the plates overlapping and interacting as if in its own little conversation. And they don’t always magically work; for every one or my print you see online there are several more that you don’t see. Ones that weren’t successful with a bad overlap, a plate slippage, or simply a bad composition. The challenge and anticipation of building the perfect print is what keeps me coming back to the press over and over again.

So that’s my tiny printmaking introduction. I’m planning of doing a few more posts on different aspects of printing (starting with inks!) but if there’s something you’d like to hear more about comment below and I’ll see what I can do. Thanks for tuning in and happy printing!