CLOCKERY

Three more tick-tocks and a print

Last week the three clocks I posted here and a fourth one (see “Lace Web” below) were taken in by a lovely gift shop in Hartford, CT. I’ll share the name and location of the shop in a future post plus the story of how it happened (HINT: my sister in Hartford played a lead-role).

For now though, I wanted to post these three new clocks. My plan is to make a couple of clocks every week, keeping a record of the designs as I make them. I can repeat a design in a general sense, but at least for a while, I don’t want to make repeats (coz: boring). I’ll try to place them in local shops near me as well.

1 ) LACE WEB (10.25”x 10.25”)

2 ) FIREFLIES (8” diameter)

3 ) COMET (8” diameter)

4 ) FISH FACE (12”x16”, monoprint on paper)

This is a MONOPRINT, using soft-lino blocks and coloured stamp-pad ink. By soft-lino I mean a type of easy-to-carve rubber that’s available in art-supply stores. It’s sold in various sizes ranging from 3”x4” to 12”x6” (maybe larger too), a quarter inch thick and in pale shades of blue, grey and pink.

I make the small blocks myself*. There are chisel-sets similar to wood-carving chisels, that are very effective for gouging into the rubber material. Maybe in a future post I’ll post images of the blocks. The result is very similar to the rubber stamps we are all familiar with, except that in this case, I have made the stamps myself. I don’t have a wooden handle, just the rubber block.

It’s called a MonoPrint because I can make more impressions (ie, “prints”) using the same exact elements, but the results will not be identical to one another. As with all limited edition prints, I will sign and date them, I’ll title them and assign numbers, but there won’t be any two exactly alike.

In fact, I already know that future versions of this one will be quite varied. For instance, I will alter the spacing between the “eyes” and “eyebrows”, the “ears” and especially all the little fishies that make up the hair. Yet they will all be made using the same set of fish-based rubber stamps.

I use stamp-pad ink because it’s available in a range of colours. Not a huge range (maybe 12?) and they have an obvious limitation: a stamp-pad is usually not much larger than a couple of inches long and an inch-and-a-half wide. That limits the size of the blocks I can use. On the other hand, I can cut a block and see the impression it makes right away, by just using a stamp pad. The alternative would be to roll out some printing ink, set up the blocks, align my sheet of paper … etc etc – it’s not difficult, but it’s certainly resource-hungry. Takes up space and time and then a lot of careful clean up because printing ink spreads very easily and is quasi-indelible.

For the moment though, this approach suits me very well. I can get small prints right away then quickly move on to composing the larger composite image that is my ultimate goal. Minimum clean up and fuss.

I plan to make more such prints in the future, with other sets of blocks.

*(yes, “by hand” – I’m always amused by this question because … how else?)(okay, to be fair, perhaps there are other ways of making printable surfaces out of rubber, but making them “by hand” is by far the simplest).