New Ink and Acrylic on Cotton, Waiting and waiting...

Happy day at McGuffey to find two large cradled boards to mount a new ink painting!  Hurray for the free corner!  Thanks to the universe and thanks to Helen Frankenthaler, from whom all blessings flow...get it?  Flow?!?!?? It's funny!  Really, it is! OK, that's a cheeeeesyyyyy joke, Frankenthaler forgive me.  She was the abstract expressionist who began pouring paint onto unprimed canvas on the floor, so that it stained the canvas, so that it flowed, like time, like a river.  Like the universe.  Hmmm...

So I started with these boards, stretched unprimed cotton over them, and underpainted a layer of creamy butter yellow and Japanese Sumi-e ink, then two pours, 36 hours apart, and still waiting for the second to dry.  But...epiphany!  Epiphany!  These are NOT just paintings I am making.  Not at all.  This is time, and this is magic and beautiful, in the flow of NOW, each instant of water and color and ink moving and becoming.  Each of these moments is part of the art of it, not just the completed painting that hangs on the wall, but the act of making, the act of observing this interaction of water and air and color and time.  I have not figured it all out, but I feeeeel it swirling around in my head.  Documenting the pours and the flow needs to be shared, an integral part of the work that will hang on the wall of some very very lucky art lover. 

Hmmm...

Oh, happy accident! To run out of black sumi-e ink one day and reach out for more color...waiting for days and days for the inks on vinyl to dry and at last, of course, they did. Very happy with these and hoping to come up with a good idea to frame them. The vinyl sheets are approximately 11x14. They are all for sale, and should be up for display at McGuffey in my studio by First Friday! If I keep this up, I may even have enough work for an actual show! Productive, productive! No social life and no sleep makes Nina's studio time pay off. Thank you, OCD.

Monoprints, japanese sumi-e and colored inks, acrylic on mulberry paper and vinyl

words are pictures, too, wittgenstein be damned...

elephant parable, tweet-size

this room in my heart is like this:  one day, after a long drive,

an elephant came to stay (a white one).  maybe a little cracked on the edges, clumsy handling.  needing a rest.  found soft spot, turned three times, lay down (pointing north);  slept. 

don’t mention it.

  

nina frances burke

Ink, Acrylic on Vinyl, Waiting for Evaporation and too much Radiohead

Ink and acrylic experiments continue...investigating various surfaces to find the one that allows the most movement with some element of control. The last photos with the yellow and turquoise colors are still (obviously) wet - been out of the studio for two days with a bad cold and I absolutely cant wait to get back and see how they're becoming! Its the most exciting work I've done so far. The vinyl sheets were a random "found" object from a friend, and I've been thrilled with the results so far. They do take some patience! I'm using so much water that it can take days and days to evaporate and leave the ink behind - and a great deal of "hurry up and wait". Hey, it only adds to the element of "practice" in a meditative, mindfulness, buddhist sense - that same idea I have of guiding the movement of the paint without controlling it...allowing the shapes and lines to be born into space (pictorial space, that is). That, and also I've been listening to too much Radiohead. Lots and lots of Radiohead.
All day, every day, its Radiohead. Its what my brain sounds like, on the inside. There's some sort of magic to it that "sync's" inside my head and makes everything move to the exact pattern of sound that they create. AAaacckkk! Starting to sound too weird even for me!

Ink and Ink

OK, it turns out I suck at blogging. I would like to get more on top of this process, but I'm finding that I keep putting it off and putting it off some more. Absolutely completely in love with ink. Ink uber alles! Wondering if there may be a 12 step program for ink. I discovered that PLEXIGLASS is a perfect surface for the water film dropping technique I'm exploring. The water suspends the ink at differing levels, and the plexi does not absorb it. Therefore, the water evaporates quickly and without the aid of a hair dryer (forget about actually drying hair with it!). I love the transparent quality of the plexi and am hoping to experiment with ways to display this work in a gallery space. The water carries the color through space and time; the ink flows like a river, some on the surface, some on the riverbed, but always it follows its own way. What a perfect combination of meditation practice and art practice. I can control the movement of the ink and the "weight" of the varying inks, but not with the level of gesture possible in brushwork. I've used ink on cradled boards and like that, too, but so far the plexi is my favorite. Think of the possibilities!

More Ink, Ink_Plexiglass