• Skip to content

Primary

  • Paintings
  • About
  • Contact
  • Press
  • CV
  • News
  • Store
  • Back
  • Futures Past
  • I’ll Never Have That Recipe Again
  • Floor Plan for the American Dream
  • Reinventing the Wheel
  • Commissions
  • Archive
  • Pricelist

Jane Richlovsky

Primary

  • Paintings
    • Futures Past
    • I’ll Never Have That Recipe Again
    • Floor Plan for the American Dream
    • Reinventing the Wheel
    • Commissions
    • Archive
    • Pricelist
  • About
  • Contact
  • Press
  • CV
  • News
  • Store

Ham!

 Posted on November 30, 2020

“Hollywood Hawaiian” is available on my shop page.

The third and final (for now) print in my become-a-human-color-separation-machine series (that’s not really what it’s called) is complete, just in time for holiday shopping madness. Or whatever kind of madness it is we’re having right now. But supporting artists is never mad: For every $1000 in sales, I will buy a piece of art from another artist, passing on the love and money. It’s called Artist Support Pledge, a way of getting through this together, and the brainchild of UK artist Matthew Burrows. There are a number of initiatives to buy from artists and other small businesses directly this year, and I hope the sentiment continues. It’s a challenge for anyone to make a living at their craft even when there isn’t a pandemic.

But back to my true love, CMYK printing! This new print is the most chromatically complex of the series, making more use of layering and transparency to render, for example, fat (get it?). Additionally, I was trying to create more space in the picture plane, still using the inherently flat process of cut paper stencils. Inspiration came from looking at lots of still lives—from old Dutch masters to Wayne Thiebaud, with stops at Matisse and Morandi—and I finally settled upon simple repeating elements of circles and lines, along with a gingham ground whose linear perspective would add depth and hopefully tie the whole thing together visually.

The sketch. I traced over selected parts to separate the colors and transfer them to tyvek, which I cut into stencils.

Ham and pineapple recur throughout my vast collection of mid-century cookbooks, always touted as “Hawaiian” in the same way that topping anything with avocado makes it “Californian.” The title, Hollywood Hawaiian, references the general feeling of fakitude attached to the word “hollywood”, as well as a Warren Zevon lyric.

More fat! The pink ham is made from a transparent magenta and a transparent yellow. The intensity of the two colors took a few tries to get right.
The fat is made of the same colors, but with a more transparent magenta.

Earlier this year I was already at a juncture in my painting where I was questioning everything about it that had worked up until now: process, materials, subject matter, scale, context, everything. I was ready for a reset . . . be careful what you wish for, reset-wise. I started this screenprinting project partly to have something physical and technical to work on while I worked all that out. I have since learned that big-ass social and personal upheavals wreak physical havoc as well: they bring about physical neurological changes and we have to kind of re-wire our brains afterward. As it turns out, boiling the visual world down to its most elemental properties—flat shapes cut with a knife, four colors—was the perfect exercise for my pandemic-addled noggin. I still don’t know what it’s going to look like when I resume painting in the coming weeks, but these prints are an integral part of my new wiring.

This is your brain on Tyvek.
Stencils, from top left moving across: gingham, gingham, ham, pineapple, grill marks, pineapple shadow, ham, pineapple, ham shadow, ham cast shadow, FAT!
Production time: Gingham voids await the main course.

“Hollywood Hawaiian” is available on my shop page.

  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Linkedin
  • Share via Email

Left Lane Ends. (They all do.)

 Posted on October 14, 2020

Buy the Left Lane Ends screen print here.

During the last two summers of the Before Time, I made a point of getting out regularly to sketch Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct before, and then during, its planned demise. This hulking hunk of concrete, built in 1950, was basically a wall of noise, darkness, and looming collapse between downtown Seattle and Puget Sound. I had a studio overlooking this monstrosity for ten years, and sometimes I’d draw it out the window. I later made one of the drawings into a series of etchings.

In The Future We Will All Have Flying Cars, drypoint/aquatint 2013

But more often I have experienced this thing from below. Any walk or bike ride from downtown to the water necessitated spending time underneath the viaduct. You would try to get out from under there as quickly as possible, because it was a well-known fact that it would (not “could”) fall down on your head in the event of any reasonably-sized earthquake, which not a rare occurrence in these parts.

The project of drawing it, however, did one of those things art does: it forced me to appreciate this ugly thing and to acknowledge its perverse beauty. I was surprised to discover that it actually had something that could pass for a style: the repeating buttresses, if you looked at them all lined up together, are almost Art Deco. Almost. On the other hand, I also became more aware of how oppressive it was. You don’t realize how much daylight four lanes of concrete can rob you of, until you go to draw it. Most of the interesting views were from underneath, and it was cold and dark under there on the nicest summer days. I learned to bring along a sweater.

For the second of my 2020 screenprint projects, I decided that I would try to tackle this beast. I pulled out all of the watercolor sketches I’d made and picked one to adapt to a cut-stencil DIY 4-color process.

A watercolor sketch is loose, spontaneous, and often benefits from the accretion of detail. Hand-cut stencils printed in four colors is pretty much the opposite of all those things. Translation required a daunting level of editing and simplification. I started out by tracing the watercolor into a simple line drawing, then scaling that drawing up to the size I wanted. I traced over parts of the drawing again and again, dividing them into sections by color and transferring them to pieces of tyvek. Each of these steps made me lose some extraneous flourishes and helped me get closer to the essence, the concrete hulkitude of my subject.

A technical problem I ran into was that a lot of items were free-floating and would fall away if I tried to cut them out. For instance, I couldn’t block out the yellow signs in the big grey stencil I was making for the freeway, so I had to divide it in two parts. This actually proved to be unexpectedly beneficial when I went to go about creating the layered tones for the receding arches. The farther-away buttresses were made with five successive passes of the same transparent gray; at each pass I would cover up more of the stencil, so that the closest buttress was the darkest. I went through a similar process with a darker gray for the larger parts in the foreground

An early proof of the grayscale.

Beyond the freeway itself, I also had to decide which details were essential to the impulse of the original drawing and therefore would make it into the print. Color, of course: There were those bright yellow signs, in two different shades. I also loved the pedestrian and traffic light icons, the latter echoed in the real traffic light in the shadow of the freeway. But really, my favorite detail, and the reason I chose that vantage point in the first place, was the ominous “Left Lane Ends” sign. The left lane was going to end, all right. All the lanes were going to end.

(I returned to the same spot a year after making the sketch, while the demolition was in progress. Atop a pile of rubble, the “Left Lane Ends” sign was still dangling from its pole, as if to say “I told you so!”)

So I really had no choice but to pour a cup of tea, haul out the economy pack of x-acto knife blades, get comfy and start cutting.

One of two. The first stencil got messed up in the proofing stages so I had to make another one.
Three of five layers of the first gray.

In case any fellow CMYK afficianandos are reading, here’s the breakdown, in order: Nine layers of K (black to civilians), in two different transparencies, for the concrete; one Y layer for the signage; a very transparent M (magenta, to those of you with a life) to warm up some of the yellows; C for the sky; a darker K for the letters and symbols; a stronger M for the red lights, and a final dot of bright C for the green light. A lot can go wrong in 15 layers, which is why this is a very limited edition of 12 prints. They are available for purchase on my shoppe page AND along with the Jello print are part of the Artist Support Pledge: Each time I reach another $1000 in sales of these works, I will buy art from another artist.

  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Linkedin
  • Share via Email

Color separations in my brain

 Posted on September 7, 2020

This print, “Joy of Jello”, can be purchased on my shop page.

When I first met screenprinting, it was love at first sight: The squeegees, the screens, the physicality of pushing the ink through the holes, the feeling of being a human printing press. But mostly I think I fell in love with it because it forces me to reduce images into their simplest, most essential forms and to just go ahead and DO it already. With a painting you can futz around with it for awhile and dither, putting off major decisions. It is nearly impossible to this in screenprinting. Should you lose your focus and start to futz, the punishment will be swift and obvious. And it’s just paper, so you try it again.

If there was anything my pandemic-addled brain needed forced upon it this summer, it was focus. Before any of this nonsense started, I had already been working on eliminating the dithering from my painting. I was wondering if I could paint in big, bold simple shapes of primary colors, and yet somehow treat my subject matter, particularly the people, with the same depth and dimension. The tiny food paintings were a move in this direction: the colors stayed clear and the shapes simple, yet they were also painterly. They were a successful experiment, but also a pretty low-hanging fruit cocktail, being so small and not on fabric. I then started several slightly larger paintings on fabric, but I’ve set them aside for a bit while I pursue the radical simplification of screen printing.

Andy Warhol famously said he wanted to be a machine. I finally understand what he meant. The particular machine I want to be is a color separation machine, the one that takes a multicolored image and decides how many dots of cyan, magenta, yellow, or black it takes to reproduce the colors. Nowadays that process is done with Photoshop or the like, but back in the day they’d take four pictures of the image, each through a different colored filter and a screen that divided the image into little dots of density.

I wrote a while back about my obsession with CMYK printing. It hasn’t abated. In fact, for the last few years, I’ve only painted with those four colors, closely approximating the printing primaries, but continued to mix them like paint. For this project I am printing with only one color at a time, controlling the density with transparency. The color separations I’m performing are radically simplified from even the traditional photostat process: Each image is made by pressing the ink through a tyvek stencil I hand-cut with an exacto knife. I determine what each color’s stencil will look like by transfering the image by hand on to each piece of tyvek, using only a carbon-paper-like material. It reminds me of using old mimeograph machine stencils. While the local communal printing spaces remain closed, and with them my access to fancier equipment, I’m really enjoying working so low-tech, using tools and materials I have on hand.

Making the stencils: tracing the image on to the tyvek.
The stencils
The Yellow and Magenta stage
Yellow, Magenta, and Cyan layers before the background was added
Penultimate stage: One more layer of magenta will make that tomatoey red

Early proofs
The Jello Factory

The Joy of Jello print is a limited edition—there are only 15!—and available on my shop page. Each print is crafted with by my own inky hands, signed, and numbered. These prints are part of the Artist Support Pledge: To support one another, artists around the world are selling affordable work (under $200 or thereabouts when you convert to pounds, euros, etc.). Once I’ve made $1000 in sales, I will buy some art from another artist (I can’t wait!). This is the first of several print series I’ll be selling as part of the pledge. Stay tuned.

See? Mmmmm. Why? ‘K!

 Posted on June 20, 2017

Process colors: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black. These four dyes are in your home printer, in the printed magazines, flyers, business cards, t-shirts, you name it. Four, just four, colors are distributed on the page in the form of dots which your eye perceives, sending signals to the brain, which mixes the dots into seemingly every color in the visible universe. Which of course they are not, but the agreed-upon fiction in the world of reproduced color is that if CMYK can’t make ’em, we don’t need ’em.

I’m not the first artist to find this fascinating. Most famously, Roy Lichtenstein reproduced the crude benday dots of the Sunday newspaper, but even earlier Georges Seurat referenced them in his paintings. Seurat’s concern, like many of his Impressionist pals, was optical. He liked the idea that your eye (actually your brain) could take these discrete meaningless pieces of color information and extrapolate a whole world: three-dimensional form and even beauty. Lichtenstein blew them up and called our attention to the abstract patterns we were actually looking at when we read an image of a comic book damsel in distress.

Georges Seurat, detail of Trees and Boats

My own interest in them comes from the fact that I’ve been mining old mass-produced color print sources for my work for thirty years. Particularly, I revel in the truly weird and unlifelike photographs of food in cheaply-printed magazines and cookbooks. I sometimes use a photographer’s loupe to see what-all colored dots make up the putty green of midcentury iceberg lettuce or a nuclear cantaloupe.

For years, I looked mainly out of curiosity, then I’d forget about what I’d seen and mix the colors for the painting out of other, more traditionally painterly pigments. Recently I decided I wanted to use the process colors themselves, in the form of their artist-grade oil paint approximations. I think of it as performing the color separations in my brain and putting the pieces together on paper or canvas.

Colored pencils allow for more discreet units of color that mix optically, so I’ve been working with those in life drawing sessions. The first stages of a drawing done this way look really weird, the people all bright yellow with random spots of purple. As the marks accumulate, the drawing starts to resolve itself into something approaching believability.

Watercolors are an intermediate step. They dry faster and can be mixed more loosely and spontaneously than oils, and layered quickly as they dry, maintaining some of their CMYKness. The black (“k”) here is pen & india ink.

Now for the really nerdy part. I do want to paint in these colors in oil. I already tend to work with limited palettes, that is, I mix most every color I need for a painting out of three particular (loosely-defined) primary colors and white. Over the years, I’ve created an extensive reference library of swatches out of many different primary combinations. (That may sound like I have too much time on my hands. Actually, it pays for itself in time spent painting rather than aimlessly mixing.)  So why not try the same process with my four new CMYK pals: a bright turquoisely blue, magenta, a cool yellow, and black.

(More about limited palettes in the post about Color Boot Camp.)

I painted my two fake album covers in this palette, which makes sense, because real album covers would be printed with CMYK process colors. The gimmicky scenarios play on the whole idea of printed vs. painted color.

The piece I made for Juan Alonso’s benefit party also utilized these colors. Like the Ersatz Family Singers, it incorporates a xerox transfer.

 

Color Boot Camp

 Posted on April 25, 2017

This is a re-post from 2014. A new version of this class will be offered soon.

Color Boot Camp, which started in January, is in its final weeks. We’ve had a fabulous session with a group of six excellent painters. Choosing just three pure pigments that fall into the red, blue, and yellow categories, each student mixed a full palette of secondaries, tertiaries, tints, and tones, 81 colors from just 3 colors and white, ending up with a set of useful reference swatches.

jennyorange annemixing

We used that palette to paint this still life, paying particular attention to the colors of the shadows, and how to interpret and make sense of its weird colors with the palette you have. Everyone’s palette was slightly different, since they’re each mixed from different primaries, but each palette has an internal cohesiveness to it, lending harmony to the paintings.

stilllife

Then we ate it.  (The eggs were hard-boiled)

A Poodle Grayscale, a Fake Historical Site and Other Treasures of the High Desert

 Posted on March 16, 2015

In Southern California for my show this winter, we took a little detour to the gorgeous Joshua Tree National Park, known for its fabulous boulders and breathtaking scenery, but also for the oddball collection of artists who have made the area around it home. Looking up into the hills, you might spy a little compound  – an old Airstream, say, a few broken-down trucks and toilets scattered about, a collection of dwellings made of corrugated metal or tires – and you think to yourself, who’s living up there? Artists or rednecks? It’s really hard to tell, and just as likely to be the one as the other. Welcome to Joshua Tree!

Up in the rocks here you can see a little glowing obelisk from the highway.

obeliskfar

It’s a untitled piece by Sarah Vanderlip, made from welded truck bumpers. It’s glowing because the sky and the light of the desert are reflected in its smooth surface.  The whole ten-acre parcel is called Behind the Bail Bonds (which was helpful in locating it) and features some rotating projects as well.

obelisk

Onward to Krblin Jihn Cabin, the promised fake historical site, complete with official-looking plaque and backstory involving a made-up religion (isn’t that redundant?) and made-up religious civil war. It’s an old miner’s cabin, of which the area boasts many, retrofitted for an imagined past. The actual history of the American West is so full of cults, revelations, weirdos, and skirmishes over promised lands that this fake version, with its taboos against certain vowels and nine-pointed compass, really doesn’t seem that far-fetched.

krbncbncbn2

This cabin is the work of artist Eames Demetrios. For his whole constellation of fake history sites scattered around the globe, you can check out kymerica.com.

For some actual history, we proceeded to Noah Purifoy’s Outdoor Desert Art Museum, the artist’s home and studio that have been preserved pretty much as he left it at his death in 2004. Mr. Purifoy was instrumental in recognizing and preserving the Watts Towers in Los Angeles, and himself later created sculpture from the burned remains of the Watts riots in the 1960’s. He decamped to the desert in the late 1980’s and spent the next fifteen years creating the large-scale found object constructions that fill the ten acre parcel. His neatly sorted bins of scavenged objects are preserved there, too, awaiting the next project.

Cafeteria trays from the nearby military base become the spine of an imaginary animal
Cafeteria trays from the nearby military base become the spine of an imaginary animal

purfoytvs

An homage to Frank Gehry
An homage to Frank Gehry

Some of the art you could walk right into. . .

adrianstheatre

. . . and find more cafeteria tray sculptures there.

. . . and find more cafeteria tray sculptures there.

legspurfoybowlingballspurfoyceilingpurfoybikes

Toilets, presumably also military surplus, figure into many of the pieces. Simultaneously creepy and banal, there is something really disconcerting about encountering something so private in such an exposed space.

toilets

Another site, Andy’s Gamma Gulch Parcel, rotates site-specific art projects. We hiked out to, and climbed into, Gradually/We Became Aware/Of a Hum in the Room, a triangular structure with circular holes cut into the walls, framing the desert. The interior is painted with colors that reverse the colors of the sunset, according to the artist’s statement. I can’t assess whether or not they were successful in that intention, as I was there in the middle of the day…

hole hole2

..but the effect of the winter light projected through the circular cutouts onto the painted walls was striking it its own right.doghole

In the town of Joshua Tree itself, we visited Art Queen, the studio and gallery of the lovely and welcoming artist Shari Elf. Shari curates the World-Famous Crochet Museum, a Fotomat-like pod painted lime green and stuffed full of some spectacularly ill-advised craft projects, all crocheted, as the name implies.

crochet

I think we know who is dinner in this Thanksgiving scenario, and it ain’t the turkey. Unless the pink pony or Mother Goose gets to those tasty pilgrims first.

I think we know who is dinner in this Thanksgiving scenario, and it ain't the turkey. Unless the pink pony gets them first.

Here is the rest of the poodle grayscale:

poodlepano

And I am wondering how I managed to get through this much of life without having previously encountered a crocheted taco. Genius.

crochettaco

Speaking of tacos, perhaps the most memorable art emporium of all wasn’t in the Joshua Tree area at all but in the middle of Riverside, on the way back to Los Angeles. Tio’s Tacos is both a tasty lunch stop and a city-block-sized art project, the work of artist and restauranteur Martin Sanchez, who immigrated from Mexico in 1984 and proceeded to build this visionary dream house.

Take a stroll on found-pottery-mosaic colored paths and into small chapel-sized buildings made of stacked and cemented bottles.

tiosbottlehouse tiosbottles

Entire palm trees have been made into benign giants who stand guard over all this abundance. These lovely ladies are made of rusty #10 cans: whole ones encased in chicken wire form their torsos, and overlapping flattened ones wrapped into cylinders are their legs. Their hair is made from fishing nets.

tiospalms

Even the lights are anthropomorphic (more can-people) and the palm-tree creature on the left is partly constructed of plastic bottles. I am partial to the cowboy-boot-shod lineman. And of course, Santa-on-a-bike.

tioslineman2tiossanta

The whole desert art tour embodied for me something quintessentially American: Visionaries light out for the wide-open spaces, where they build unexpected paradises of weirdness out of quite ordinary detritus of our throwaway culture, redeeming it, and maybe us a bit, in the process.

Color Schemes

 Posted on February 27, 2014

matisseboth

For our Color Boot Camp final project, each student picked a black-and-white reproduction of a masterwork and imposed their own color scheme on it, repainting the image in the same values with new colors.  Anne chose an analogous color scheme for this Matisse: Red violet, violet, and blue-violet, adjacent colors on the color wheel. The swatches we’d made earlier came in handy for everyone to see what they had to work with:

matiseepalette

The rules were that you had to use one of your previously mixed limited palettes, match the light-dark relationships on the original, and confine yourself to one of three standard color schemes: complementary (e.g., red & green & whatever neutrals you can mix from those two), split complementary (e.g., red, blue-green, yellow-green, and mixed neutrals), or analogous (see above)

Another student covered Wayne Thiebaud, using a split-complementary scheme of green, red-orange, and yellow-orange:

thiebaudpalette

No one was allowed to look at colored pictures of the original until they were done.

Here’s her version of  “Around the Cake” with Wayne’s own on the right:

thiebaudcoverthiebaudAroundthecake

And below left,  Matisse by Anne, and right, Matisse by Matisse. Matisse showed uncharacteristic restraint with his triadic scheme of the three primaries.

matissefinshedmatisse11

In many of his later paintings, one can only classify the color scheme as “All of Them.” (We’ll try that one in Color Boot Camp III perhaps.)

Red Robe and Violet Tulips, 1937
Red Robe and Violet Tulips, 1937

Posts navigation

Older posts

Primary

Recent Posts

  • Ham!
  • Meet Me in Miami
  • Buying art is fun!
  • Left Lane Ends. (They all do.)
  • How to paint a painting
  • Color separations in my brain
  • Farmhaus
  • Square Deal: 50 Artists for a Fair Vote
  • How are artists doing?
  • Update: I’ll Never Have That Recipe Again
  • I’ll Never Have That Recipe Again
  • Yet another panel discussion – but this time with food!
  • Taste of the American Dream

Categories

  • business
  • color
  • commissions
  • composition
  • drawing
  • drawing on location
  • events
  • light
  • new work
  • painting
  • pattern
  • perspective
  • press
  • teaching

Search the site

Newsletter

Follow us on InstagramConnect with us on Linkedin

© 2020 Jane RichlovskyMINIMAL

x