From Tamarind to Takach- the Final Months in ABQ

So... my last update left off with a promise of more results from my senior research project on Century Plates. Long story short- the results with the other two resurfacing methods were pretty terrible and I was a little disheartened about writing about it. Instead I'll just say, if you want to use these plates, just resurface them using grit and a sanding sponge as outlined in the last post- they still take only a few minutes to resurface and can be reused over and over with decent results. The good news is that I've used them pretty extensively for a few prints I've done recently in grad school (oh yeah, I'm in grad school now!) and they seem to be holding up well, but I'll get to all that later. There's a lot to cover in between.

My last few months at Tamarind saw a few more visiting artists including Liliana Porter (who was kind and sweet and made a collection of prints with adorable little rabbits) and the whirlwind of amazing that was Charles "Chuck" Arnoldi. Bill and I made nearly 90 plates (layers) for Chuck in the span of a week and a half during his visit, and printed all day every day trying out different colors, combinations and layers. It was an insane amount of work, but the results were phenomenal.

Tamarind recently published a few of them and I just found out he named each one after characters in Breaking Bad, which is just awesome (one of the ones he and I worked on is titled "Heisenberg"). Here's a link to some of the pieces Chuck made during his visit. Lunch breaks and post-work ice cream visits were spent listening about Chuck's amazing travels around the world, adventures he's been on, books his wife had written and her time as a competitive female bodybuilder, and other incredible people he's met. In addition to being a wildly talented artists he was also near the top of my list of interesting people I've met.

Finally, the last month or so saw another major project at Tamarind, known as the Landmarks project. Four Native American artists and three Aboriginal artists came to the workshop and instead of working with Bill and I (because that's a -lot- of artists in a short amount of time!) the printer training program students were invited to participate and Bill, Rodney and I just helped out, and after so much work over the last year it was really nice to take it kind of easy. Artists involved in the project included Dyani White Hawk (image 1 below), Jewel Shaw, Marie Watt and Chris Pappan (image 3) from North America, and Marie Josette Orsto, Alma Granites (image 2), and Djirrirra Wunungmurra from Australia.

Around the end of my time at Tamarind they had a fantastic graduation ceremony for the PTP students and myself. It was a fantastic night and everyone was really proud of all the hard work we'd done. Bill even got me a trophy! Turns out I now hold the record for the most editions printed by a second year senior printer, which is pretty cool. I realize I'm glossing over a lot of what happened, but it -has- been a while.

After my time at Tamarind was done I was fortunate enough to be able to work at Takach Press for my last few months in Albuquerque. To say it was a fantastic time would be a gross understatement. Takach is very much a family oriented business and they invited me in as a member of their amazing family, which was great. They even invited me to great family functions and one -very- memorable trip up in Keith Takach's hot air balloon, which very well might go down as my favorite day in Albuquerque, and a great send off to head back to the Midwest.

A few days later I packed up and Brody and I took another cross country trip to DeKalb, IL where I was to start graduate school at Northern Illinois University, but that's another full post, and this one's getting a bit full. So, til next time!