Pawpaw Flower Buds in Late March 2018

About a week ago I took a look at the pawpaw trees and saw that the flower buds on the KSU-Atwood are growing and showing a little green.

For Christmas I got NJ a couple Monkey Jar plants, which we had seen over the summer at the Hortus Botanicus Leiden in the Netherlands. I bought them from Pearl River Exotics.

We've been glad that the plants have grown a bit and have made the "monkey jar" features that we admired in Leiden. They're passively carnivorous or insectivorous I guess, since the "jar" opens and there's water at the bottom and insects get trapped in the water. 

And then the plant digests the insects and uses whatever small nutrients they offer. Good to see it already working.

Linocut: Grosbeak with September Pawpaws

A few years ago I saw a Black-headed Grosbeak flying away out of the corner of the yard where we have our pawpaw trees. This was before the pawpaws were giving fruit, so I know it was after our peaches, and I know it got to some of our peaches, since that year I found several peaches with grosbeak-sized bite marks. Since then I haven't seen the grosbeaks hanging around (not even around the peach tree), but I've wondered: if they hung around, would they try eating a pawpaw?

I wanted to make a speculative print about this question, but the Black-headed Grosbeak doesn't overlap in range all that much with the pawpaw's native range. So I decided to make a print with the Rose-breasted Grosbeak, which is more in keeping with the pawpaw's native range. (I know--to be truly "expatriate pawpaw" I would showcase the pawpaw with the Black-headed Grosbeak, but in this instance I just decided to be unfaithful to the blog's overarching conceit.) 

Because I wanted the red on the chest and the yellow on the broken-open pawpaw to be as intense as possible, I printed these colors first, over the white paper, so no other underlying color could dull their intensity. But because I didn't want the red and the yellow to become underlying colors that would dull the intensity of the blue sky, I used my finger to apply the red and yellow to the linoleum only to the places I wanted them to appear. Then I printed the first yellow/red layer.

On top of the yellow/red layer, I printed blue, so the blue could benefit in intensity from the white paper also.

The blue doesn't quite hide the red and yellow substrate--you can see places where the two overlap.

Then I printed the green, which has an opacity that does a good job covering everything printed to this point: yellow, red, and blue.

The final layer was brown. A rose-breasted grosbeak has black feathers not brown feathers. But we don't have any black ink, so brown was to become the new black.

I did the printing and it turned out that when brown ink is layered on top of blue and green, it becomes functionally black. This is a finished print (albeit with the brown layer still wet and shiny and without signature etc) that has the blue layer at low saturation.

This is a finished print (still shiny brown with no signature) that has the blue layer at high saturation.

Here are the two prints--low saturation and high saturation--side by side, now titled "Rose-breasted Grosbeak with September Pawpaws."

Linocut: Opossum with July Pawpaws, a First Try

We're continuing to experiment with linocut and pawpaws. Lately I've been sketching a design to convert to linocut: a possum hanging in the air while using its teeth to hang onto a cluster of unripe pawpaws. The design is inspired by some pawpaw pickin I did back during the 2007 season in Virginia. I got permission from the landowner (actually the land-renter) to harvest from a patch that was about a half acre. As I walked through and picked in mid-September, I would find ripe pawpaws that had tooth marks in them. But the tooth marks weren't fresh. They had obviously been made before the pawpaws were ripe, since the pawpaws hadn't come off the tree when they were bitten, and since the small puncture wounds had healed and left scars rather than holes in the skin.

I could imagine the scenario well: It's the middle of the night and the impatient possum climbs the tree in July or August and then slides down one of the spindly pawpaw-supporting branches, biting the pawpaws in hopes of getting one to come off. Then, failing that, the possum falls a few feet to the ground.

So I carved out the white and printed the yellow. Then on top of the yellow I printed the green.
(The print above--of the ram skull and the yucca bloom--is one I did last month, in keeping with some other, desert-themed prints we're doing, a theme that grows more organically out of the Utah soil.)

See, here it is with the green. You can see the outline of the possum's tail, before it's printed, since that's the ball-point pen coming off the linoleum.
(I'm still thinking about ways to not have that happen.)

And then I printed the brown. I took this pick while the paint was still wet so you can see the sheen.

Here are a couple prints side by side with the original drawing.

Tonight I numbered and signed the set of ten prints, titling them
"Opossum with July Pawpaws, a First Try."

For this one, I didn't get the green layer properly lined up with the yellow layer, and then when I laid down the brown layer I had to choose: should I line it up with the green or yellow? I lined it up with the green, and now the possum has a very yellow mouth.

I'm not very concerned about this since I'm folks, so I'm making folk art.

Here's the print that turned out the least eccentric (so I guess the most centric). Like I say, these are titled "Opossum with July Pawpaws, a First Try." A first try: because it's July rather than September when pawpaws are ripe and the possum is giving it a first try, and because this was my own first try in making this print. I think I'm going to make a similar print in a little while called "Opossum with August Pawpaws, Just Checking."

Linocut: Normal Everyday Pawpaws & Seeing Double

After our experiment at the end of January with linocut prints and pawpaws, we decided to try some more, now with a lot of experience under our belt. Here are the prints--and processes--we've worked on here at the beginning of February.

I started off with a drawing again...

Then I transferred it onto the linoleum and carved it out (this is the plate as it was when I printed the green).

Here's what things looked like after I printed the yellow.

One thing I'm running into is that the ball-point pen that I use to draw on the linoleum tends to transfer to the paper when I print the yellow. But generally I've found that subsequent darker layers cover up the pen.

Getting ready to lay down the green...

Here's the linoleum loaded with green ink with some of the targets in the background.

The yellow and green layers together.

On the same night as I laid down the green, NJ also did some green printing.

Here's her pawpaw design in the foreground. I like it a lot, in its fearful geometry.

At another point during this round, she printed some yellow onto several pieces of paper and then printed brown over the yellow, with a different linoleum block.

Here's the lovely result. The brown here is printed with the same block she used to print the green up above.

Our drying rack, some brown paper bags on top of some low quality Indonesian chests of drawers we bought from the classifieds. (They're low-quality and Indonesian, not low-quality because they're Indonesian. We've got several Indonesian items that are high quality, just not these ones.)

My prints with the yellow and green layers...

And then my prints with the final, brown layer.

A few of the final prints, numbered and titled "Normal Everyday Pawpaws." You can see that even though they came from the same linoleum cuts, they're all a little different in terms of ink saturation.

A few of NJ's final prints, titled "Seeing Double."

An Experiment: Pawpaws and Linocut Prints

For distribution during the 3rd Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival we had wanted to make linoleum cut prints (linocuts), inspired probably by the style of the posters that NJ bought several years ago, from the 2006 and 2007 Ohio Pawpaw Festival (you can see a poster from that festival here). 

But things got crazy before the 3rd Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival and we didn't make any linocut prints. We didn't even buy any materials to make prints.

So for Christmas we got print-making materials and in late January we made our first prints. For NJ it was the first time she had tried linocut. For me it was the first time in awhile. 

We bought three colors: yellow, green, and brown. Plus white, our prints could be up to four colors.

We started by sketching out some designs on paper to see how things would look. Here's the sketch I decided to go with for my first print.

And here's the sketch NJ decided to go with for her first print. (See if you can identify the miscalculation here that would, later, result in our biggest learning experience for the first round.)

We added the yellow and then the green layer.

And then we added the brown. Once I started printing the brown layer onto mine, we decided that we liked mine better without the brown layer, so of the ten prints in my run, I only put brown on half.

Here you can see the print on the top with the brown layer added. And below is a version of the print without the brown layer.

And here's NJ's final print. She only did five prints because once she did her first layer with yellow I realized that I had forgotten (from my halcyon days of print-making) that if you've got writing in your linocut, you need to carve the writing backwards in order to make it print forwards.

While we were letting the prints dry, I made a few additions to this painting, which we bought through the KSL classifieds from a woman who was selling paintings from a repo'ed storage unit in Spanish Fork, formerly owned by a man named Martinez, with several pieces of art with origins in Tombstone, Arizona. This painting is a lot of fun, we think, and it reminds me of the title of Elizabeth Bishop's poem "Large Bad Picture."

Close-up of one with the brown layer, looking forward to the 4th Annual Utah Pawpaw Festival as you can see from the title.

Close-up of one with only yellow and green, as I was still getting my sea legs on the question of how to line up the layers, so this one is a little more off-set than I had meant for it to be.