Martha Kelly Art

I’ve finally got a full proof of the Shearwater Diptych hanging in my work room. After several weeks it feels great to see it together, even if I’m still working on cleaning it up and considering a few smaller foreground additions. In the evenings I’ve continued to do some sketches of Mr. Darcy, so here are a couple of recent ones. I’m considering one or two for prints, so watch this space. Sometimes it’s nice to have a smaller print or two in progress to switch to when the big ones get a little overwhelming.

I’ve had quite a week. I’m a member of a letterpress sale group on facebook, basically a worldwide classifieds site for letterpress equipment. Which means that usually when I see something interesting, it’s in Belgium. Or Brazil. Or somewhere enough remote from me to make it impractical.

I was beautifully lucky years ago to stumble into a Line-o-scribe proof press when a friend of mine was upgrading. It’s expanded my range and ability exponentially from what I was willing to do rubbing on the back of blocks with a flat wooden spoon. But the press bed is limited to 14x21”, which means if I want any margin at all, I end up cutting the 18x24” blocks I buy down to at least 12x20” and maybe smaller. I just rededicated myself to prints over the new year after spending more of the last year and a half painting. I’ll always likely move between the two, but I do think my most original voice is in prints. And I’ve been longing to do bigger prints. Just before this press floated across my fb feed, I had started a diptych on the old one, to be able to have a larger image and impact, even if it was in two parts.

Then this beauty showed up. It’s a Reynolds Printasign model 40 with a 22x30” bed, a huge upgrade. And it was in Oklahoma City, just a 7 hour drive. So perfect. It also has a self inking system and a custom table with a foot pedal to release the paper gripper. So I drove over Thursday to get it. I’m feeling ridiculously lucky this week.

There’s going to be another learning curve. My brain is really not skilled at mechanical things, and this has a couple of serious differences from the press I’m used to. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get the inking coverage I really want for my velvety black prints. I may keep hand inking a lot of what I do, but it would be beautiful if I can figure out a way to get that depth without hand inking the plate each time. Repetitive printing is my least favorite part of all of this. I love the designing and carving and tweaking to get the image I want, but once I have it, the rote printing is a chore for me. So fingers crossed.

This press was also made for use with its own type, which rests on rails, so regulation type (.918” for standard North American type) is too short for the inking rollers to even touch. I’ll have to build up the bed to use the type I have. It may be that my old press is better for some of the things I do. But having this size is just amazing, and I’m excited to have it placed in a window with lovely light to work in during the day time. I can’t wait to do a big print for it, though again, I’ll have to go out and find something to lay in the bed and raise the print up to the roller height. That should be easy enough though for a life changing kind of thing.

I played around with it after several really lovely friends helped me move it inside. Here is the first print, a celebration of the press and of this year when all my art ideas seem to be coming beautifully together. You can see that I used the heavy magnets that came with the press to hold the type steady in the bed. They’re not as totally firm as building wood all around it, like a jigsaw, but a lot faster. You can also see that I wasn’t getting a really sold, dark print. This faded look is really cool for some things, but for others I’m going to want something darker.

I was living my best life yesterday, which felt lovely. It was a glorious, warm day in the middle of a rainy winter, and I decided to enjoy it to the full. I worked on the print I’m excited about in the morning (see the bottom photo for a close up — I mostly finished the sky), had lunch, and then went out to enjoy the day. Mr. Darcy and I walked first. I packed my small backpack with sketching gear, so we hung out, painted this glorious curved tree that I walk past daily, and chatted to neighbors as they too got out to bask in the 65 degree weather.

After that I got back on my bike, which has been neglected the last couple of weeks. I did some loops around midtown, enjoying our neighborhoods and looking at the houses, and I stopped at Burke’s Books, Memphis’s 140 year old independent bookstore. Beautifully I happened on a $6 biography of Berthe Morisot. I just ordered a frame my poster from her solo show at the Orsay this past summer, so it was a perfect time to revisit my newest art hero. I looped back through the park for the sheer pleasure of the forest and logged right at 11 miles total. I only learned how to ride a bike this summer, and it has greatly increased my joy. I feel like a kid swooping around. It’s kind of nice to have some pleasures that are delayed to discover along the way.

In the evening I met friends for dinner and a concert by the New Orleans Dirty Dozen Brass Band. So much fun. I’m really grateful for this life I get to live.

I came home from Ocean Springs with three new print ideas in my head. (We’ll see how many look good once they’re actually drawn out on paper.) This was the first I dived into, from my morning quick study looking across from the marina to the Shearwater family complex. I’ve got both blocks drawn and transferred and am in the second (partial) day of carving the left hand one. It’s still going to be a hot minute before I have anything to proof. This is moving pretty slowly, but I’m trying to be really thoughtful and get it right.

Part of my sister’s wedding festivities were in New Orleans, and I just couldn’t get that close without heading to Ocean Springs and the Walter Anderson Museum of Art. I’m a homing pigeon for that place. It was a good choice. I stopped at my favorite antique mall on the way down, spent a lot of the afternoon in the museum, swung through Shearwater Pottery, and was out on the pier for sunset. I forget how elemental water is. I spent at least half an hour just standing and drinking in the sunset, the pelicans skimming right along the surface of the water, and the moon and clouds playing peek-a-boo overhead. I think I grinned ear to ear the whole time. It was a stunning evening. I did a couple of golden hour sketches before enjoying the sunset, one more successful than the other, but sunsets are dicey that way.

The next morning I took my walk by the water and spotted a row of trees looking across the water to Shearwater from the marina (the complex where Anderson’s family lived), so I walked back for my sketchbook. It was cold, but I did a quickish grisaille study for a print — to get the shapes and the black and white.

For those of you who haven’t had the joy of seeing pelicans lately, here is a small bit of joy for you. I’m home and happily working on the print I drew out now.

Y’all. I logged in to do this blog post and realized that it’s my 1001th blog since I started this blog almost exactly 10 years ago. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to stick with it over the long haul, so this feels worth celebrating. Sometimes I’m more regular than others, but I usually manage at least one a week and try for a couple. When I’m traveling and having a lot of sketches, it will go almost daily for a bit.

This week has been busy with a family wedding (yay!), so I’m working less than usual, but I’m still managing to work a bit on this new print. It’s based on a recent oil painting of a hurricane tree washed up on a beach. Transitory beauty. You can see from the block at the top right that it extends above what I have carved and printed. I needed to get a feel for what was happening below before I could really decide on the sky. I proofed it yesterday and started carving the sky this morning, but the weekend will be some more wedding celebration, so any more work will have to wait till Monday or so. I also managed another small Mr. Darcy sketch. I’m enjoying doing those. He’s always my best muse.

​I hope all of you have a great weekend. Go celebrate some small personal achievement and enjoy that happy feeling!

I enjoyed yesterday’s dawn sketch so much that painted my new-to-me Frankoma teapot over breakfast today. I’d been collecting the teacups and other bits at antique malls. They feel so good cupped in your hands. But I hadn’t found a teapot (these pieces were made mid century at a factory in Oklahoma), so I treated myself and ordered a small one, just right for one person, online. It’s fun to sketch new tea things, and I love the colors and lines of these.

This was extra important today because I’m in day two of painting my bedroom, so very long overdue, and it’s a big project solo. I knew I’d be working on that with all the rest of the daylight and wanted to make a little art first. The #AmWriting podcast and Facebook community is big on “morning pages” for writers — something that’s purely yours, to loosen up for the day. I don’t mind having the energy to dive straight into good work, the way I did right after breakfast on that print yesterday (before starting the painting marathon), but I do really enjoy the looseness of an early sketch. I love that podcast for how they think about living a creative life but also handling all the business and marketing necessities that go with that. I’ve learned a lot from them and enjoyed their company in the process.

Ok, back to work. Here’s where I slept last night. The gray is primer. Color today and trim tomorrow is the plan. I hope to be done for the weekend and back to painting I enjoy more, but it’s also satisfying to be making my space somewhere I’ll really enjoy being. And doing it myself.

I’ve had a lot of midlife sleep troubles lately, along with a ton of other women, and it’s made it hard to bound out of bed ready to work (at least, after tea) the way I am used to doing. I’ve been working hard to get more sleep — limiting evening screen time, drinking milk with dinner instead of wine, stopping caffeine after 10am, etc. January usually helps anyway, which is a blessed relief after show and holiday stress and generally bad sleep for a while. I’ve gotten myself on track the last couple of weeks, and it’s felt good. This morning I’m having a great day, and I want to write about it and remind myself to at least shoot for this more often.

Instead of lying in bed too long looking at instagram (I do love to scroll through artists I follow and get ideas for new things to try), I got up quite early. It was still firmly dark, so my kitchen, which is very cheerful in the sunlight, was more dreary. I decided to have breakfast instead by the gas log fire, which was a cosy, warm, and happy way to start the morning. You can just see Mr. Darcy next to my chair in the semi dark.

The dawn was gorgeous as I went out to get my paper, and my iPhone couldn’t capture the colors. I decided to do a quick sketch to start the morning. I’ve been concentrating on prints lately and not sketching much, so this was a very happy way to start the day. I’m going to try to remember to build more sketching in, even when I’m doing good work already. And I was still at my table and working on my print at 7:15 to enjoy the morning light. I got the last tweaks (I think) done on my current print, proofed it, and submitted it to a place where I’m dreaming of having a show. A very good morning indeed. Now off to some different work.

It's been a little crazy around here. I'm working on a series of prints, helping my sister plan her wedding, and trying to get some long needed things done around my house. (I'd ALWAYS rather make art than do house repairs/chores.) So I'm behind on scanning in sketches and getting them up here. Here are three from over the holiday season, done while running around with friends and family, plus, of course, sitting with Mr. Darcy in the evening. I'll try to get some more sketches ready to go soon. I've done some that I really enjoyed recently, but I'm not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good today. Here's what I can manage, and I won't save them until later for more...

Update on this one. I’m still tweaking it, but it’s getting really close. I’ve been working on it most of today. I will admit to taking yesterday’s sunny, 63 degree day and cycling through the park a long time with an enormous grin on my face. In January sometimes you just have to seize those days as they’re handed to you and put work aside for a few hours. Today’s windy cold found me back at my work table.

Also here is last night’s sketch of Mr. Darcy. I’m still enjoying having this toned paper sketch book right on the coffee table where I can grab it easily when I’m reading or watching tv.