--- Go to the Opening Page of the [Baren] web site ---

Message 1
From: Julio.Rodriguez # walgreens.com
Date: Tue, 06 Jul 2010 21:28:56 GMT
Subject: [Baren 41575] Re: Womand Made gallery - LK
Send Message: To this poster

• [Back to message index]

Message 2
From: l k
Date: Tue, 06 Jul 2010 22:17:35 GMT
Subject: [Baren 41576] Re: Womand Made gallery - LK
Send Message: To this poster

• [Back to message index]

Message 3
From: l k
Date: Tue, 06 Jul 2010 22:18:13 GMT
Subject: [Baren 41577] Re: Womand Made gallery - LK
Send Message: To this poster

• [Back to message index]

Message 4
From: Barbara Mason
Date: Wed, 07 Jul 2010 00:43:51 GMT
Subject: [Baren 41578] Re: Woman Made gallery - LK
Send Message: To this poster

• [Back to message index]

Subject: Wampum for PrintZero
Posted by: Annie B

PrintZero Studios is an ever-evolving print studio and print-promoting organization created in 2003 by Brian Lane and Jeremy Cody. Every year since PrintZero's inception the two have organized a print exchange, and I decided to finally participate this year. One of the factors in my decision was that the required size of the print increased from 5" x 7" to 7" x 10" (17.8 cm x 25.4 cm). Perhaps because of my increasing farsightedness or maybe because they feel tight and fussy to make, I dislike making small prints. I decided to go ahead and make a small print I had considered for the Pilgrim series, a print about the native American beads called wampum. The word wampum comes from the language of the Narragansett, a tribe that still lives on a small portion of their ancestral land, land that we now called Rhode Island in the United States. The word means "white shell beads." Wampum beads are made in two colors: white from the Whelk shell and deep purple from the Quahog shell (pictured here). Used by many of the Eastern Woodlands tribes, wampum beads were considered sacred, some say because of the connection of shell with water and its life-giving properties. Wampum beads were woven into belts which were created to commemorate treaties or historical events, as a memory aid in retaining stories from oral traditions, and for exchange in personal social transactions such as marriages. Wampum was traded, exchanged and often worn as a badge of office or ceremonial device. The woven belts often contained pictograms, so in this sense and in its role as a story-telling device it could be thought of as a form of writing. The settler colonists saw wampum a bit differently. They recognized the importance and value of wampum but they interpreted it as a kind of money (one web site I looked at speculated that this is the origin of the slang term "shelling out money") and they began using it as such. In the 17th century, wampum could be used as legal tender for many things, such as paying taxes or tuition at Harvard, and it was often used as partial payment for land purchase from the native peoples. Shortly after their arrival, the colonists opened mills to produce their own wampum more economically. Eventually these mills became the primary source of wampum in colonial America, glutting the market with devalued beads. With all this in mind, I decided to design a "wampum belt" for my print that would address the grave misunderstandings between the settlers and the native peoples about wampum itself and about land and land ownership. According to William Cronin's excellent book, Changes In the Land,  Native peoples viewed land as common to all (much as we today view water and air), and when they "sold" land to the settlers they believed that they were selling various rights to the land (the right to farm, the right to fish), not the land itself. The colonists, of course, viewed land as subject to private ownership and it was this basic misunderstanding that so often led to the loss of tribal lands in exchange for a few so-called "beads and trinkets." I had less than a week to do this print start to finish in time for the PrintZero deadline, so I decided to keep it to three colors. Of course, by the time I was finished it had evolved into four colors. I spent the first three days carving. Here's a closeup my favorite block of the four: [Long item has been trimmed at this point. The full blog entry can be viewed here]

This item is taken from the blog Woodblock Dreams.
'Reply' to Baren about this item.

Subject: Latest Print
Posted by: LAiNE

Hi all... just as my studio closes for a couple months and takes a reprieve from the intense heat of summer in Florence I have finished the first round of printing for my latest mezzotint plate. I present the Fugu Papilio.... To Date this has been my most ambitious print... primarily because of the detail and tonal range in it.  I tried to push myself further with this print in trying to resolve a full set of tones and to create a real sense of shape and dimension.  Sadly, I'm not so sure this scan does justice to the print, but maybe at the end of the day that is what really separated analogue and digital technique. Happily, this print really worked out well in my opinion and with the extra time really trying to tweak the ink consistency as well as taking more time in cleaning the plate before each impression the results started to show. I did make a change of ink for the last 2 prints I pulled to see if there would be some drastic changes in quality.... an experiment really. Sure enough the softness of the overall image started to dissipate into a stronger grainy texture. I think that when I continue the printing in the fall I'll return . . . [Long item has been trimmed at this point. The full blog entry can be viewed here]

This item is taken from the blog In The Studio.
'Reply' to Baren about this item.

Subject: Woodcut T-shirts at Snug Harbor

This item is taken from the blog The Block.
'Reply' to Baren about this item.

• Subscribe/Unsubscribe to [Baren] here
• Switch your Digest subscription between 'Plain Text' and HTML here
• Upload your image to be used in these Digests here
• Send your 'ads' for the monthly Ad Roundup to [ads@barenforum.org], before the 15th of the month.
• Most recent statistics on our website are here
• Contact the group managers here
• [Baren] members: if you have a printmaking blog, or a website with a published ATOM feed, and wish it to be included in our daily checklist, please write to the Baren Blog Manager here. (If your blog also contains material other than woodblock-related items, we can only add you if the woodblock posts will be 'labeled' as such. The Blog Managers can provide details.)
• A list of Blogs/Sites currently being tracked by our feed scraper is here