Printmaking Collage
Can’t travel this summer? Art can have a transformative effect on your surroundings and therefore your mental health. Remembering past travels or dreaming about future trips can lift your mood and brighten your day. My latest suite of monoprint collages considers the beautiful destinations of our world and captures them along with patterns in nature, thanks to images I’ve taken on past travels.
The pictures you take on vacation say a great deal about you. What are you interested in? What do you want to remember? My phone isn’t filled with the traditional sites, but rather with patterns and shapes I want to remember. A recent long weekend trip to Chicago yielded no “Bean” pictures; instead I focused my lens on patterns…
Continue reading “Your vacation pictures say a great deal about you” |
| Elizabeth Busey, In Anticipation of Sweetness. Reduction Linocut, 18 x 18in circle, Edition of 16. |
 |
| Elizabeth Busey, Yielding Gracefully. Reduction Linocut, 17 x 25″ |
During my exploration of the sassafras leaf, I was operating under the assumption that the colors I see in the fall were always in the leaf, but became more apparent in autumn. For the yellows and oranges we see, this is basically true. But not for the red. The red that I found so challenging and unfamiliar is in fact produced by the leaves as a sort of battle against the inevitable arrival of winter.
Continue reading “Yielding Somewhat Gracefully to Life and Adding Some Bling”
Everything about our holiday season was late this year. Including this post. It took me until the day after Christmas to dive into a color with which I am not too comfortable… red.
 |
| Deciduous holly berries are the only brightness in my December garden. |
Red is one of those colors in nature that works like an exclamation point. In my yard, outrageously colored holly berries (from a deciduous shrub) are the only bright spot in a garden of muted browns. Red male cardinals fight with grey squirrels for the seed I have set out.
I have been toying with some ideas for a few months. I have visions of layering and new materials. Of well, something different. But something too different can be scary or frustrating, so perhaps something somewhat different would be a good place to start. This was the conversation I had with myself this morning. When you work alone, you have to be your own motivator and artistic therapist.
 |
| Pine Cone on Rives BFK with Chine Collé. |
Continue reading “Adventures in the New Language of Chine Collé”
I don’t know how Thomas Edison did it. Popular lore claims that he discovered 1000 ways to not create a light bulb before he achieved illumination. I’ve been experimenting with encaustic printmaking this fall, and while I have learned a great deal…let’s just say that I have not achieved my light bulb.
I received some nice news this week that one of my favorite prints, Breath Intertwined (a close-up view of two red bud leaves) was accepted as part of the 2015 Delta National Small Prints Exhibition. This print went to Boston last fall, and is currently at the 57th Mid-States Art Exhibition in Evansville, IN. I thoroughly enjoyed creating this print, and this encouraged me to do another up-close leaf print.
 |
| Selfie with me and two layers of ink |
In my last blog I wrote about prints I was fighting with — prints that were intended for the Los Angeles Printmaking Society’s Give and Take Exchange. Here are the two resulting prints:
 |
| Elizabeth Busey. Kaleidoscopic Meristem. Linoleum Reduction Print, 7 x 9in, 2014. |
 |
| Elizabeth Busey, Prismatic Tatting. Linoleum Reduction Print, 7 x 9in, 2014. |
My trusty Tama To needs sharpening after the completion of my latest prints. (For new readers, this is a fabulous tool that cuts small circles in wood or linoleum.) Like my last huge square cellular print, I decided to run two different color series, and the result is two very different prints.
 |
| Elizabeth Busey. Ambrosia. Linoleum Reduction Print, Edition of 13, (28 x 28in), 2013. |
