ASU2. I feel with this blog now a bit how i did months ago when i was at this stage of the term, my head spinning and like i have too many balls up in the air. I was aware that i had done very little for my ASU2 project. Remember, The Stations of the Cross. I'd been thinking the story, walking it through in my mind, the last days, Jesus' in the desert, Jesus' ride into Jerusalem, Jesus at the temple, the last supper, Mary Magdalen washing his feet, the conflict within his inner circle, the shared meal, the feeling of foreboding, Jesus talking about betrayal, "one of you shall betray me tonight", "one of you shall deny me before the cock crows three times", the blessing "eat, drink, this is my body which i give unto you, this is my blood". Who knows if he actually said those things but this is the story that has been passed down through the ages. 
And then Jesus and his disciples leave to go to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray to contemplate or maybe just to hang out, a group of twelve men after supper taking a walk on a warm evening or night, was it warm ? or was there a chill or a breeze ? maybe there was tension in the air, did they feel Judas' absence ? did they care that he was absent ? Was he the fall guy, the mate that got pranked and teased ? Was he fed up with it ? Was he jealous ? Jealous of Jesus ? Jealous of the other disciples ? Jealous of Mary ? Was he a bad tempered lout ? or too stiff for the group ? or too sensitive ? what made him give Jesus to the men of the temple ? what drove him to do that ? his suicide after suggests he regretted it ? was it an impulse ? a fuck you ? a cry for help ? a please see me ? his name has gone down as the name of a betrayer but maybe he too was destined for the role he plays in the story, maybe his life led to his end as inevitably as Jesus' life is led him to his. 
Jesus went with three of his friend to the mount of olives. I guess they were the favoured few, the inner circle. I imagine him looking out across Jerusalem, the sounds of city at night, animals, insects, and the small lights of windows, fires, the smells in the air. I feel him to be tired and sad, worn out with being idolised, by crowds and even his friends, i feel like he is thinking that the show is over. I don't know if he knows he is going to be crucified. Maybe he thinks he will get a hard beating and that afterwards he'll take his girl home and let go of his boyhood. Or maybe the atmosphere is so weighted its hard to ignore the feeling of impending doom, the dark politics that require a sacrifice, a scapegoat, an example to be made, rebel and you'll suffer, see, see how this man you all thought was great can be taken down, can be shamed, can be broken, can be killed if we like. 
At last as dawn is breaking Judas comes with the temple guards. He greets Jesus with a kiss. The kiss is the sign. This is the one. How does that kiss feel ? is there a moment of love between the two ? a warmth from that contact that strikes like a knife ? the guards move forward to arrest Jesus, one of his friends, Simon Peter ? steps forward and strikes the guards ear with a sword or a knife, protecting his master, the leader of the gang. Jesus remonstrates. He knows now that some rough justice is to be handed to him. Does he know that fighting is pointless ? Does he seek to spare others ? Why doesn't he fight ? Why does he yield to punishment ? Does he feel he deserves punishment ? What is his back story ? What is he thinking. The guards take him away. Peter denies him three times before the cock crows, realising only on the third crow that it was he his friend spoke of. Or was the story made up after. Stories are fluid at their beginning, it is only later that certain parts become set, the bones of a myth. 
And I am thinking about this part of the story of Jesus and i'm thinking that i want to make fourteen, or maybe fifteen if i include the resurrection, prints each depicting a station. I am thinking that i want to learn how to do drypoint on a copper plate and also how to make hard ground plate. These are pretty much new to me processes, i have done a little drypoint a good decade ago on aluminium and plastic but nothing really since, hard ground i have never tried. 
I am feeling exhausted and my nerves are rattling particularly because of the collaborative project so i ask to be excused from a taught session because i know i need to drop down a gear, i cannot take in other people's seed ideas and i cannot let mine out without losing it. I should not have asked. I should have just taken. I thought i was being polite. I regret trying. I stop trying. I hate everyone because all i wanted was a moment to breathe and because i asked i have less moments. It is resolved now. covid19 makes before covid19 feel like years ago, another life, but i write it because it was part of the process. 
I took the time tho i was told not to. And let myself scratch into a small copper plate front and back and an aluminium scrap too. Not good work. Resting scribbles.
The following day I took two scrap copper plates of the same size and worked on the back of one in drypoint with Jesus' face showing as Judas comes to him and worked into hard ground on the other with Judas' face as he approaches Jesus. Then after the hard ground was etched and cleaned i printed from them, one print each, and wrote on them to show what i liked and what i didn't, what was a typical drypoint mark and so on. The following week i worked into the plates again rubbing out parts and making further marks. I did not have time to write on them. I had planned to keep working into them. But there is never enough time. I printed on two types of paper the second time to see how that changed the prints. The prints are not good work, they are working work, learning work. I like how they look with the writing.     

SNU. Acetates and etched plate ready for printing, note plate is the photograph reversed so that it prints as the photograph. 

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.