Title of Exhibit: ODD ENDS:
Selected Prints and Drawings
Dan Castelaz
Printmakers are to be admired. Historically viewed as mere craftsmen or technicians, they have rarely received the attention or the income of painters. The art of the printmaker is intimately connected to a proce Continue
Title of Exhibit: ODD ENDS:
Selected Prints and Drawings
Dan Castelaz
Printmakers are to be admired. Historically viewed as mere craftsmen or technicians, they have rarely received the attention or the income of painters. The art of the printmaker is intimately connected to a process driven by rules, and thus the printmaker himself must possess a particularand fastidious character.
I am not, therefore, a printmaker.
It perhaps goes against my opening statement, then, to say that I do occasionally make prints, for if I truly admire printmakers I should leave their work to them. However, all the images in this exhibit are relief prints, the oldest and simplest form of printmaking, so at least I am not treading in the realm of the master etcher or engraver. In fact, the rubber stamps I used to make these images were cut by someone else; I only did the designing and then the printing. For a few of them, I cut a simple woodblock or piece of linoleum for a background shape, or I slightly modified what was already cut into the rubber stamp. However, I did make these prints and there is a connection between them and the sculptures that I make, and the poems I write. It goes like this:
I have written poems for years.
I was building a sculpture in my workspace in Tien-mu.
I wrote a poem to put on that sculpture using words from a piece of writing that I got with a Moleskine brand notebook.
I wrote more poems using words from that same piece of writing.
Those poems became the book The Moleskine Poems.
Mogu designed The Moleskine Poems book for me and arranged the printer.
And here I am, with a show at Mogu.
The drawings I have included were all made while I was working on my sculptures in the past couple of years. My habit was to take a break from the more physical work of the sculpture to draw on paper I would hang on my studio walls. The drawings in this show all seem to have forms that are organic; I have no explanation for that except to comment that the material. I used to draw was color pencil on watercolor paper and perhaps they tended to bring out a delicacy not found in the sculptures.
