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Brian Barry of Cork Printmakers is promoting a three-dayfestival of steam-rollered linocuts in Granada this year (place and date to be announced).

 

 

Irish printmaker, Brian Barry, the member of Cork Printmakers who participated in the organization Ireland’s first giant-prints-pressed-with-a-steamroller event, has arrived in Granada with his portable street-festival giant-linocut show. Having spent the past few weeks contacting and organizing local artists he now has enough participants and has ordered big, 80×190 cm., artist’s linoleums. As soon as they arrive the Granada artists will begin carving their images into the linos, which will then be inked with big paint rollers and laid down under paper or fabric to have the image trasferred by means of a standard road-works steam roller. Here’s a link to the new Impresiones Gigantes website, and a video of a similar event staged in Missoula, Montana last year.

Sounds like a lot of fun. We’ll keep you posted.

What’s a Gallinero? And why would you want to stay there?

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I love this time of year. Yesterday Mike walked down the river road to the village bakery and took his camera with him. Here’s what was happening in the river:

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Wall mural by El Niño de las Pinturas on the Cuesta la Escoriaza in Granada

Granada doesn’t have a contemporary art museum, but it has one of the finest grafitti artists in the world, Raúl Ruiz, El Niño de las Pinturas. (Here’s his web site.)  Raúl started painting on Granada’s walls in the 1990s. Over the past two decades, besides adorning his home town with a distinguished collection of wall art, always while dodging Granada’s municipals,  he’s been invited to take his work to the walls of Portugal, Holland, Italy, Venezuela, Hungary, Belgium, France, among other places. Well-documented followers calculate that Raúl has more than 2,000 murals all over the world.

El Niño de las Pinturas, grafitti in Granada

His work is both idealistic and poetic, and tends to feature brief prose poems done in exquisite calligraphy along with evocative scenes of infancy and adolescence, scenes which sow tenderness and solidarity wherever he works. These human elements are contrasted with the voracious metaphoric gears and train wheels that permeate industrial society.

Grafitti by Raúl Ruiz, El Niño de las Pinturas, on the Cuesta la Escoriaza in Granada
Raúl says:

“Cansado de las mismas respuestas,decidi cambiar mis preguntas”
“¿son números lo que tu alma nutre?”
“¿quizás el materialismo se está apoderando de nuestras almas? ”
“¿Qué hacer con juegos que siempre se pierden?”
“…sólo quien a renunciado a la victoria y a la derrota encuentra su camino… “
“…y haciendo cosas que rompo para arreglarlas y volver a romperlas paso mi tiempo…”
“y el tiempo se acaba…y la vida no espera…”
“el mundo está oscuro…ilumina tu parte…”
“Y donde miro si ojos no tengo…”

Tired of the same old answers, I decided to change my questions
is it numbers that your soul nourishes?
Perhaps materialism is devouring our souls,
What shall we do with games that are always getting lost?
only one who renounces victory and defeat can find his way…
making things that I break, just to mend them, then break them again, I spend my time…
and time runs out… life doesn’t wait…
the world is dark… enlighten your part…
Where do I look if I don’t have eyes?

What’s a Gallinero? And why would you want to stay there?

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"Flyers" print using etching and liquid-metal techniques.It was autumn and the air was full of things flying around. What flies around my garden ends up flying around my head. This was the first print in which I mixed etching and liquid-metal techniques. First I varnished the zinc plate and etched the drawing. Then I added a soft ground and pressed different elements into it to achieve texture and content. Finally I used Nural 21 liquid metal to create the bird, which stands out in relief. There is no aquatint on this plate.

This Voladores print was exhibited at the National Arts Club in New York in 2010, part of an exhibit mounted by tireless printmaking advocate, Stephen Fredericks, and the New York Society of Printmakers.

What’s a Gallinero? And why would you want to stay there?

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Cathy Naro, Maureen Booth in Maureen's printmaking studio in Granada, Spain

Cathy and Maureen review one of Cathy's new prints in Maureen's studio in Granada

In my Liquid Metal Printmaking video I use a two-tube epoxy adhesive (“cold metal solder”) called “Nural 21″ sold by a Spanish firm called Pattex. As it turned out, this product is not available in the U.S.A. and some American artists have been frustrated trying to find a suitable substitute. Now Cathy Naro has found it. I’ll let her tell you about it: (more…)

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City of Light

"City of Light," a liquid-metal print by Maureen Booth

This print, which I made 8-10 years ago, was actually made for a commission, the biggest one I ever got. (Some day I’ll tell you how I got it.) The client was a Parisian real-estate company with 1,000 employees and they wanted Christmas presents for all of them. The only condition was that the images had to be versions of the buildings they were making in La Defense quarter, outside of Paris. They accepted all of the prints except this one. It seemed that the architect had changed the look of the building, and this print was no longer a true representation.

No matter, I editioned it myself and introduced it into my own distribution channels. Over the years it has been an excellent seller, something I never expected from a print of an office building!

This is a liquid-metal print (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E5iZYs52bM) and I think it’s the unique qualities that this technique offers which have made it successful.

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Cat and Canary

The Thrill of a Trip; Paco Was Pleasant

In the summer of 1985 Mike and I did a six-week trip from our home in Granada to Belgrade and back, visiting a few hundred hotels in Greece, Austria and Yugoslavia along the way. Mike was European editor of a hotel guide in those days. We had a new car, which was also an incentive for the trip. This was one of the few times that we rented our house while we were traveling. Paco, the Granada jeweler and his family who rented it seemed competent and pleasant people.

Everything seemed in order. Nevertheless, every single day on that trip I expressed my concern about our canary. Would those nice people feed it and water it regularly? Would they hang the cage in the shade, out of the reach of the cats? It was my constant concern and Mike got frankly bored with me mentioning it every day. (more…)

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These (rather disordered) snapshots should give you an idea of what our village and its environs are like. You might like it here.

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"Tormenta," an etching by Maureen Booth

Soon after arriving in our village–this was 40 years ago–Mike and I took the kids, then eight and ten, on a picnic on the mountainside above the neighboring village of Guéjar Sierra. This was at a period in our lives when everything was new and uncertain. While Mike made a fire to roast some pork chops I got out my sketch pad and began to draw the scene below. There was one isolated stone cottage sitting there.  This used to be very common in the Spanish landscapes at that time. (more…)

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Maureen's best-loved dog, Chichirriqui

Our best-loved dog was a magical toy-terrier bitch, one of the first after our changeover from big breeds (great danes, and Spanish mastiffs) to little ones (pekes, yorkie crosses, shih tsu halfbreeds). I never fully forgave Mike for naming her Chichirriqui. He thought it was a playful name. I thought it was disrespectful for such a serious little person as Chichi, who could sit on a chair with her chin on the table and keep everybody enchanted just by cocking her head, flashing her eyes and flicking her ears first in one direction, then another. She was a delightful little one-dog circus with a wide repertory of such techniques for keeping people’s attention properly centered on her: bundy jumps, pa’ ca pa’ yas, spin arounds and shivers. (more…)

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