New post ... keep going. This is my reflective journal. This is my notebook for my MA. If i keep saying it and making myself write it down maybe at some point i will understand what I'm thinking and feeling.
I think my MA honeymoon may be over. I am still over the moon to be studying to have landed in the place i'm at. But reality has hit in. I wrote my first draft RIPU essay and it is rubbish. I'm not exaggerating it rubbish-ness, it's wooly and ugly and says nothing of any worth. Back to the drawing board. Research essays come out of real time research. I think i am researching but have i been sitting back expecting to use what i already know ? 
One of the things that has been hard from the start of the MA has been separating the ASU from the RIPU. We have RIPU lectures in the morning and ASU in the afternoon and often the ASU wipes away the RIPU. So now i am faced with layer on layer of eaten up but not digested learning from RIPU. And that doesn't necessarily mean that the ASU is going well although i know i have learned quite a lot this term and i feel like i've made headway but is it visible ?
I have learned how to use the screen printing tables. I had screen printed on fabric before but it's not the same as screen printing on paper. The process is different, the feel is different. They are sisters perhaps who may look similar but if you get to know them you find their likeness is quite superficial. 
I still have lots to learn about screen printing and i intend to continue but as i was exploring the oil based inks print studio i have discovered etching. I had not thought to get to etching quite so quickly in my studies. I had thought it would be beyond me. But i fell into it by accident.
I began with mono printing. Jess, the technician, showed me how to print from the glass table and then how to print using a matrix (an aluminium plate) that then goes through the press creating a different kind of print to the hand pressed table print. By chance after a morning of experimentation that ended with using the matrix and drawing with my finger tip and white spirit i produced a print of a monkey, very loosely drawn and maybe not clearly a monkey to all or many. With art i find that there is a moment when my heart says yes, i make an awful lot of bad art, stuff that leads up to the yes art but which isn't worth much or any looking at but when something works a gut instinct kicks in and i have a feeling of jubilation. 
So my monkey print worked but being a mono print there was only one. At this point MA fine art and curating students had been told that in a couple of weeks we'd be putting up an exhibition which was a bit of a holy hell moment. Coming into the MA with the intention of learning how to print starting from a base of pretty much no knowledge my printmaking skills were slight to say the least and making work that felt exhibition worthy was a challenge. 
I should perhaps explain why i have monkey's on the brain. As my seed topic for this term's work i decided to use the Ramayana. It's not a story i know much about but had i read Daljit Nagra's epic poem a couple of years ago and loved it and wanted to make the story part of my knowing. Different cultures grow up knowing different stories. In England, in a casually practicing christian family (my mother goes to church) i grew up with bible stories. And on top of that  folk and fairy tales and some of the great children's books; Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, Wind in the Willows, The Hobbit, The Narnia stories, The Secret Garden and so on. But I'd missed the Ramayana as it goes. 
In the Ramayana there is a monkey character called Hanuman who is a key player and hence my mind has been following monkey tracks. I have a feeling that Hanuman has introduced to me a character within myself that i will take away from my reading of the Ramayana and beyond my MA. This monkey character is perhaps the monkey in man. I will sit with him, it seems to be a him, and see what he has to tell me over the course of the next few years i daresay. 
Monkey in me was found by my finger tip when mono printing, unleashed perhaps. I was thinking about using the image as a screen print over the screen prints that i had made from my son's old maths homework and a circle that came from a sanding disc i'd found. But because time on the screen printing tables is limited to availability and i was not sure how it would work i turned to photo etching. This was my path to etching. Now i am hooked. 
From photo etching i went to sugar lift etching using scrap copper plates. Using camp coffee an image is drawn on the plate, left to dry, and then painted with black straw-hat varnish. When the varnish is dry hot water is poured on the plate to lift the sugar up and wash it away which leaves a negative image, this image is then processed with aquatint and acid. That is just making the plate. After making the plate comes printing and in my arrogance i'd thought that would be easy, just put some ink on and run it through the press, but oh no no no, it's easy to rub off too much ink or to rub it off unevenly, it's a skill i'd not clocked that i'd need to learn. And even something as simple seeming as making a black and white print asks the printer to choose the black, the print room has half a dozen blacks on offer. And what paper ? I plumped for snowden white for my test prints my working proofs of the sugar lift because when i printed out my monkey photo etching i'd tried several and snowden tho' not the most beautiful paper is cheapest and gives a clear line but now that i know how they print on that i'd like to try them with other colours on other papers.
Aah and now it is time to get up and go again and i haven't written half of what i hoped to write but this week is looking like a catch up on writing week so i'll be back to this blog desperately trying to note down two and a half months of thoughts and happenings that i wish i had set down sooner.