brett lysne – art blog

I just spent Thanksgiving week living and working in Palouse, WA for an artist residency. The print shop of the town’s former newspaper, The Boomerang, is now home to the Roy M. Chatters Newspaper & Printing Museum, and they’ve got a variety of letterpresses,  as well as stacks and stacks of type.

Since language has been an integral part of what I’ve been working on, a letterpress residency was a great time to experiment with words.

"co-," 2011. artist book, ten pages, 7x5" opened.

At the end of the week, I put together two artist books–more images are posted at my website.

I’ve been working with self-portaiture for a number of weeks. It’s a very odd but necessary change of pace.

self-portrait etching in progress. about 4x5".

I’ve amassed a small series of these blind continuous line etchings. Each one is made while I look in the mirror and scribe directly into the copper plate. I draw my silhouette twelve times and then stop. The working title (for all of them) should be Twelve Versions of Myself, All of Which Are Incorrect. We’ll see where this leads me.

Over the summer, I taught FA366–Intaglio. I used the same plate for most of the technical demonstrations, updating it and altering it with each new step: line etching, soft ground, aquatint, and so on. The last day of the class, I used the final version of the plate to pull an edition of thirteen etchings to give to the students as gifts. It had been quite a while since I had editioned an etching, so this was good exercise. These are also printed using Akua inks, which are soy-based as opposed to oil-based.

"McNugget," 2011. Etching printed with relief roll. 4x5".

I spent almost the entire weekend in Gallery 2. Putting the show up was a lot of detail work, but it was also quite a bit of fun since I did no prior planning as to what would go where. I’ve never set up a show this way before–it’s new, and somewhat terrifying. As always, it’s educational.

Matching Game. Installation view.

The three groupings (I call them pods) appear to work pretty well together. There’s clearly a repetition of form and idea that leads the eye from one to the next. Most of the individual products were made in groupings so that they could be spread between the different pods.

Present: Pullman from Matching Game. Mixed media installation.

More images, including detail shots, to follow! My artist lecture on the exhibit is tomorrow night, Tuesday April 19 at 6pm in the Fine Arts Auditorium.

I’ve been buying old cookbooks from thrift stores. They’re incredibly cheap considering how much material they provide. The photographs of food are saturated. A lot of the food looks downright awful: aspics, molds, processed cheese melting over everything imaginable. The captions are cutesy and corny. Sometimes they’re sexist and racist, too. These books clearly came from another era. Some of the photography has amazing social narrative going on:

What exactly is going on here?

More recently, I’ve been simply ripping pages out of these books and altering them as needed. I was first inspired by a page that was completely stained with chocolate, or tea, or coffee, and scribbled with notes and recipe amendments. I started to add my own remarks in the margins. Then I just started to cross everything out.

"them how easy it is"

I like finding social narrative within the text itself.

"mutually self-supporting"

With some of the pages, I have been crossing out the text with thread instead of pencil:

"Brown October Stew"

At the start of the semester, I had six or seven friends over to my house for Sunday brunch. We ate crêpes and fruit and cheese. Before everyone left, I had them fill out a three-part quiz I had prepared. Questions asked them about the quantity of food, where they were sitting, their interactions with the group, and how the food made them feel. The back page of the quiz was a giant matching game; this part wound up being the most interesting because of the visual element. All of those intersecting lines interested me.

A few weeks later, I wrote four different matching game quizzes, and with the help of an art history professor I was able to distribute these quizzes to about a hundred undergraduate students. The results are all over the place, but some trends do pop up.

"Matching Game: Bread," 5.5 x 8.5"

A lot of people, for example, connected French baguette with pretentious.

"Matching Game: Protein," 5.5 x 8.5"

Most people drew more-or-less straight lines connecting the words on the left to the words on the right, but some people did odd things, like circling one random word. Some used arrows, some used wavy lines. Some people scribbled out a line that they wanted to reroute.

"Matching Game: Eggs," 5.5 x 8.5"

And some people left me a note.