Dale Evans was one of six students participating in a hanga printmaking course I taught at the Concord Art Association in Concord, MA last April. Dale has sent to all of us pictures of the teacher student show they have currently on exhibit at the CAA that he visited recently.

I love teaching at this place, and April is a great time of year to do it. Spring is at this time farther along than up our way. There are echoes of the battle re-enactments developing, it is easy to imagine Thoreau at this time of year turning his thoughts and feet towards Walden Pond, or Louisa May Alcott or her Dad (Bronson) turning their thoughts towards gardening . . .

My grandfather grew up in Concord, and I like to visit him where he lays in the beautiful Sleepy Hollow Cemetery not far from the CAA. Its just a little hike down from his little shaded knoll across a low swale and up the ridge where the Emersons, the Hawthorns, the Alcotts, Thoreau, are all laying. It is right next to the plots with Emerson’s white quartz stone that I can find the ancestors to whom I owe my middle name: Whiting.

But for sure my favorite part of the weekend was being able to visit and stay with my friends Peggy and Bill Brace who live along the Concord River not far from the Old North Bridge. Bill and Peggy I have known, or perhaps I should say have known me, since before I was born. (I am older than their oldest son Colin by about two weeks.) Bill is a retired MIT geology professor who makes beautiful wood furniture. Peggy is a great gardener. She is currently starting a new revolution that you can learn about on a little Fox News video clip.

So Dale also included pics of a project he has worked on since taking the class.

Hard to believe a month has gone by since we did the letterpress tour! Bob Metzler of Green Mountain Letterpress set this up for a Saturday, this past May 15. About 20 people, members of the New England Letterpress Guild, came by the shop to visit me and to see what I spend my hours working on here. After talking prints and doing a little printing out in the shop, Lucy and I spent a few moments showing off our skill at moving our four sheep around the pasture.

Antoinette Ledzian of Stonington, CT. posted this photo on flicker and I think she did indeed catch a great shot of Lucy and the sheep.

After Lucy’s show we all had lunch, and in the afternoon we drove over to North Thetford, VT to visit Bob’s shop. His place is real letterpress and it is impressive. I especially like the idea he lives and works in what was once “Grandpa’s Toy Shop”. This man and his home workplace was a major memory and inspiration from my childhood. I can remember the little shop clearly, less so the Santa Claus-looking man who made the place’s wonderful wooden toys. Trucks, bulldozers and steam shovels, a schoolbus, barns and houses, these were the kind of toys you could do real work with out in a sandbox, all painted nice bright reds, yellows, and deep dark green. Is it possible my own worklife, foregoing the advantages of driving off to some other location every day in favor of just tinkering around home amongst wood shavings and colors, was way back inspired by this memory?

Bob took some pictures too, and these show a few of the group chatting away inside my shop. Looking at at myself in them makes me wonder, however, what would I have been worrying about that morning? My memory is that I had prepared a very nice lunch; could it be I wasn’t confident there would be enough for everyone, or was I worrying that some wouldn’t take to the tabouli or the potato salad?

Looking back the high point of my trip to Washington was perhaps meeting up with a very special jewel in the archives of the American University Library.  Bill Mayer, the head librarian of the place, has the idea of getting me to do a series of prints for the University’s 125th celebration next May (2011).  This has come up in great part because of a wonderful collection donated to the University by Charles Nelson Spinks: a collection of Japanese books.  If you are talking Japanese books before 1863 you are talking hanga prints.  Many of the items in the collection made more recently also involve hanga printing, and the collection includes some wonderful folding book sets, including a Hiroshige’s Tokaido series, printed posthumously, probably from new sets of blocks, that are quite wonderful.

Bill wished for me to visit the collection, and Friday morning I went right to work with the help of Susan the Library’s archivist to get a feel for what Charles Spinks, a foreign service officer who lived for many years both before and after WWII in Japan, had been up to.  My interest landed on one particular item, an illustrated book of poems published in 1788 by Tsutaya Juzaburo and designed by Utamaro, called Mushi Erami, or The Insect Book. (Actually Mushi means crawling things, so there are some snakes, lizards, frogs and the like in this book, not just insects.)

 I kid you not, I feel sure this is the most beautiful book I have ever seen, includes some of the most beautiful prints I have ever seen, and is a work of art on the highest level. My love affair is only three days old, but I am sensing this little book may have more to communicate to me today than, well, even the Rembrandt and Vermeer paintings my Dad and I had visited two days before at the National Gallery.

Why do I think this?  Hmm, maybe this is an idea for another post.

I was somewhat distracted by all the activities to think about both before, during and after the “big event” and I completely forgot to get my camera out to record the moment.  Perhaps the most dramatic moment was running into Steve Wood who owns and operates Poverty Lane Orchards in Lebanon, NH standing side by side at the urinals in the men’s bathroom.  We stepped away and there was a “what are you doing here? what are YOU doing here moment?”.  (Steve and I had gone to school together at Harvard, I had picked apples for him just ahead of my freshman year, and we hadn’t seen each other in maybe 20 years.)  He was there representing NH Wineries, and found himself pretty quickly right in the middle of the action once folks started showing up.

The location for the event was the conference room off the Russell Bldng’s rotunda, the room in which they hold involved big occasions, such as the Watergate hearings! I would say the pressure of the crowd was more intense around the wine table than around myself, but folks did visit my prints and watch me work and take brochures. I enjoyed asking folks of their connection to the event, and noticed lots of people I met were connected with energy issues, such as they were staff on the Senate Energy committee that Sen. Shaheen serves on. One who was quite interested, took my brochure and came back more than once, after my asking shared she is the NH State President of Fairpont Communications. She went on to tell me my town of Lyme would soon be “lit up”. I asked what this meant and she said we would soon be getting DSL in town. Less than a week later I was pleased to hear that she had not lied, and indeed Fairpoint has “turned on” DSL in our town. The next experiment I plan to try is to e-mail her about a utility pole guy wire that for five years has been in temporary mode, tied hastily around a tree, despite repeated calls by me to first Verizon and then Fairpoint about the unfinished installation. She gave me her card and told me to e-mail me. I’ll let you know if anything happens . . . !

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen is the junior senator from NH and a great patron of the arts and things made in her state. After a little coffee get-together Wednesday morning to talk about the “Celebrate NH” event planned for Thurs evening we decided to get right to work hanging the prints.  Like any activity on Capitol Hill (and maybe just about everywhere else if you think about it), there was more to it than one might think.  Tim, the Senate handyman (with years of experience hanging pictures in the various offices), was pretty skeptical when he arrived and found we had our tape measures out and didn’t plan to just do the job “by eye”.  The Senator arrived just as we were finishing up, and her first reaction was not of pleasure.  ”They’re too low” she exclaimed in disappointment.  I tried to talk her into accepting our logic but it became clear she was right. Actually it was only the five prints to the right we had to raise up and we had that job done in a flash.

I think the prints look good and am hoping they will breathe a bit of NH mountain air  into the place.  Hopefully they will bring to her luck in handling some of the problems she is no doubt having to deal with in this room.

Here’s something new for the world of hanga printmaking:

I will be doing a demonstration of the hanga printing method at an event in the Russell Senate Office Bldng hosted by our NH Congressional Delegation for folks in Washington, including senators and congressmen, etc. this coming Thurs eve (June 10).  You can check out a link about the event.  Earlier in the day I will be hanging a set of my prints behind Senator Jeanne Shaheen’s desk in her office!.  Pretty neat, no?  Planning to send more posts, hopefully with pics . . .

A woman who took the class at the shop in 2007 was very free with her camera.  She sent me a CD with lots of pics. Here is a slideshow of a number of them.  Perhaps if you have taken one of the classes here it will bring up for you a few happy memories.

Details about the class are on the Calendar page of the web-site.  Hey with a bit of prompting I might post some of the info stuff here.  Am considering for instance maybe offering a scholarship to just the right student signing up in this last week before we run the course!  Here is a video from a workshop here at the shop back in 2007:

 

Hey! Here we are taking a stab at running a Matt Brown Woodprints blog. Am thinking this might be a place to show some pics related to hanga printing, chat about technical stuff, tell a few stories. Got a question or a discussion starter? . . .  blog away !

Matt