• 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

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

It’s hip to be square, part 2.

 Posted on April 19, 2017

The fabulous, generous, and always civic-minded Juan Alonso-Rodriguez is planning a benefit for others for his own birthday. And I have a top-secret piece in it.

He and my other pal Paul D. McKee (of Project 106 and Method Gallery) are hosting a fundraising event benefiting the ACLU, Lambda Legal, & Planned Parenthood. For a tax-deductible $100 donation to one of these three fine organizations, attendees get to pick 1 of 100 original paintings to take home.

They have supplied 100 local artists (including yours truly) with 6” x 6” pieces of Masonite and asked us to create an original work on it. All works are signed on the back so guests are choosing the work and not the artist by name. Many of us will be purposely trying to throw people off, or simply taking the opportunity to try something different.

They will have iPads and laptops set up at the entrances to each space, ready to accept donations to one of these three organizations online. (Checks are also accepted.) After you donate, you get a receipt which you take into Juan Alonso Studio or to Method Gallery around the corner and select an original work of art to take home.

The reception (21 & over) will be Friday, April 28, 5-8 pm. $100 minimum donation required at the door guarantees you get to select an original artwork to take home.

Juan Alonso Studio – 306 S Washington St, Seattle, WA 98104

2nd Chance – all ages
Saturday, April 29, 11 am. – 3 pm. – $5 donation requested at the door
Donate a minimum of $100 and you get to take an original artwork home.

On Saturday, Juan Alonso Studio will also donate 25% of sales of original works by Juan Alonso-Rodriguez to whichever one of the three organizations you choose.

juan alonso studio, pioneer square, lamda legal, aclu, planned parenthood, seattle artists
Cece n’est pas my piece. These are some collages I did as warm-ups. My actual piece is totally top-secret.

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