20210730

Fri Jul 30 06:00:01 EDT 2021 ======================================== Slept from ten-thirty to six-thirty. Woke briefly around three. Cooler. Mostly cloudy early in the morning then becoming partly cloudy. Highs in the lower 70s. North winds 5 to 15 mph. Work ---------------------------------------- - follow up on fiber outage, workarounds Done. - GL Details report for Kari Done. Asked Julie again about signing a lease. She'll email Heidi again. I don't hold out much hope at this point that Heidi will ever give us an answer. Shitty to leave everybody hanging. Forty-five-minute walk at lunch. Partly sunny and warm. Saw a dragonfly. Heard cicadas. Saw and heard mourning doves. Home ---------------------------------------- - order groceries? Done. Pick up 6–7 PM tonight. Feeling somewhat better about packing today, like I'm not _too_ far off where I wanted to be at this point. Email from Amazon: > Starting August 30, 2021, delivery orders from Whole Foods Market in your area will include a $9.95 service fee. > One-hour grocery pickup at Whole Foods Market will continue to be free for Prime members in your area. https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/impressions-colors > Among the most widely recognized and highly regarded works by him as an artist are his twelve color-printed drawings, or monoprints, conceived and first executed—in another medium of his own invention—in 1795. The first to point out the excellence and importance of these works was William Michael Rossetti, in his catalogue raisonné of Blake’s works, which forms part of the second volume of Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake (1863). He states: “The color-printed designs are the most complete, solid, and powerful works in color left by Blake.” W. Graham Robertson (1866–1948), a poet, painter, and collector who once owned ten of the designs, agreed, noting that “these curious works, half printed, half painted, represent Blake’s highest achievement in technique, so are they also among the mightiest of his designs.” Blake’s monoprinting process and its relation to relief etching and illuminated books are also poorly understood, its technical and historical contexts remain mostly unexamined, and the sequence and dates of designs, printings, and impressions are mostly mistaken. > The designs were Blake’s largest works at the time. They are in landscape format, measuring between around forty-two by fifty-two and forty-six by sixty-two centimeters. Blake began by drawing a design on a matrix (first metal plates, then millboards) and painting it in with opaque water-miscible colors; he printed the colors before they dried onto large sheets of damp paper, which, after the colors dried, he finished in watercolors, black paint, and pen-and-ink outlining. > Today, the monoprints are referred to as “color-printed drawings” and “large color prints,” which describe them only in part. They are designs printed in colors on paper, the conventional support of drawings and watercolors, but because the colors are opaque and have body, impressions look and feel like paintings. A more accurate description would be “color-printed painting,” a painting made by applying colors to paper (in place of canvas or panel) indirectly and directly, by printing and finishing, using printed colors as the painting’s underdrawing. > They are also referred to as monotypes, a term often used interchangeably with monoprint. In both techniques, images are made on matrices that are printed onto paper. Unlike conventional prints, no two impressions of the same design can look exactly the same because painting matrices and finishing impressions involved a high degree of improvisation, hence the oxymoronic monoprint and monotype—prints that are not exactly repeatable. > The most radical descendants of Blake’s monoprinting experiments are the “decalcomania” paintings of the early 1940s by the Surrealist painter Max Ernst (1891–1976). In decalcomania, a flat matrix is covered in thick oil colors and a prepared canvas or sheet of paper is laid on top of it and rubbed from the verso to transfer colors. What Tatham said of Blake’s monoprints—that they “gave the sort of impression you will get by taking the impression of anything wet”—is also true of Ernst’s decalcomania paintings. Tatham also observed that “there was a look of accident about this mode which [Blake] afterwards availed of, and tinted so as to bring out and favor what was there rather blurred.” In paintings incorporating decalcomania, for example Napoleon in the Wilderness, Ernst used fine brushes and pens “to bring out and favor” forms in the blurred and blotted colors. Such worked-up and “smeared forms” call “to mind mineral life and hybrid creatures”—not unlike the sea anemones and polyps that Blake brought out of the spongy cauldron of transferred paint forming the seabed in his Newton. Trapped and (several miles away) released a second mouse. Fifteen minute walk in the evening. Cooler. Pink and purple sunset. Saw a big rabbit and lots of fireflies. Heard crickets. A moderately productive day, I guess. Minutes spent packing: 50 Servings: grains 4/6, fruit 2/4, vegetables 2/4, dairy 1/2, meat 2/3, nuts 0/0.5 Brunch: orange, fried rice, coffee Lunch: apple Dinner: salami and cheese, cucumber, cheese curls

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