Duo Katherine Bowling and Paul Mutimear Come to OG

By Teddy Benson Katherine Bowling Paul Mutimear July 29, 2011

We were lucky enough to have BOTH Katherine Bowling and Paul Mutimear come this month. Sue has worked with Katherine on three other projects in the past, and this is the first time we have had two projects running at the same time. Paul came for the second week and worked on his captivating and unbelievable photographs of moths in flight.

Beautiful weather here in Steamboat this July. Complete with sunny mornings (and some full days too), afternoon showers, and warm nights. Perfect for making solar plates outside and spitbiting plates, and in Paul’s case, watching for bugs! Katherine created thirteen monotypes, ranging in size from 20 3/4” x 4 1/2”–31” x 25”, five aquatint and spitbite etchings at 23 3/4” x 25”, $1700 each, and a solar plate print for our Stairway to Heaven series.
Paul complied a series of four solar plate etchings at 16 1/4” x 13 3/4” entitled Mothman, Ready, Bandit and U-Turn, at $500 each as well as a digital photograph for the Stairway to Heaven series.

Katherine hard at work in her artist-nook-as-home for 2 weeks!

A serious Paul working on his moth solar plate print

Katherine’s plan for one of her plates

Sue inking up a copper plate in gold ink

An inked solar plate ready for proofing

One of Katherine’s Snowman monotypes–each with a different personality and intrigue.

Paige precisely tearing down Katherine’s monotypes, another in her Snowman series.

Katherine and Sue are discussing Katherine’s print, Cabin. It takes many proofs and alterations to each plate to get every component working together, and we did countless adjustments to color, tone, and plate order. Katherine would also go back into the plates and re-sand and scratch into them.

Making notes on what needs to be augmented after the initial proof.

Katherine working on her plate for the Stairway to Heaven Series, entitled My Father’s Ashtray.

Katherine is an expert spitbiter; you can see how blue the acid is getting on the copper plate. This indicates that the nitric is really reacting and therefore etching into the plate to get some really deep, beautiful blacks.

Look at all those artistas! (All wearing their OG logo aprons – Thanks David at Grand APPS in Michigan!) This is one of the first proofs for one of Katherine’s print Winter II.

One of Katherine’s completed rich and beautiful etchings titled Winter I.

Paul shooting and blowing away!

His inked up solar plates ready for a run through the press.

Paul set up outside to capture birds, moths, passing airplanes, storms…

His first print! A proof for his Mothman print.

This is one of Paul’s amazingly lovely solar plate prints. It is a photograph of two moths–one in mid flight (the incredible blur) and one perched perfectly in the air. We then transformed the photos into prints using solar plates, and gave each its own lovely shade of black. This one is titled Ready. Paul is able to capture in nature what is impossible to see with the naked eye. The prints alter one’s perspective of motion while enabling one to see into a different realm.

On the last day of the project, deciding to add chine colle to one of Katherine’s prints. Carefully placing Asian paper over one of the plates before gluing and cutting it down to fit the plate.

Paige and Ashley preparing the chine colled plate to be ran through the press.

It was so fun to be able to work with Katherine and Paul at the same time, and it is also amazing how beautiful their pieces look together.

We are having some technical difficulties with the website currently, and are unable to put up prints from this project at the moment. Please check back soon–they should be up sometime next week. Special thanks to Paul for taking so many lovely pictures of all of us working in the studio! Most of the pictures from this blog post were taken by him.

Only one victim left! Staten Islander Farrell Brickhouse will be here in August for our final project of this year…