Metamorphosing Amberwings and Background

Eastern Amberwings II. Moku Hanga by Ken Januski, copyright  2020. 8x10 inches.

I've just finished the second of two Moku Hanga based on Eastern Amberwing dragonflies. Above is the second version. I got the idea for  it as I was printing the background blue for a second time  on the first version(below) and accidentally printed  it upside down. I'd done  the same thing on my recent Golden-crowned  Kinglets Moku Hanga and both times was intrigued by how it changed the  print.

This time I decided to finish the first print without the upside down overprinting. But when I'd finished  the edition I kept  wanting to explore the overprinting and see where  it would lead.

Eastern Amberwings I. Moku Hanga by Ken Januski, copyright  2020. 8x10 inches.

One of the odder things about both prints is that the first print is printed on much better paper than the second. And yet the  first print looks sloppier, especially in the background. So at the moment I much prefer the second more abstract print. But it's possible another printing of the first  would  make it look stronger.

Something I continue to realize  about my work -- it almost catches me by surprise -- is  that I really don't like traditional space in my own work. Perhaps this is  just a matter of the influences of  the time when I first started making art. Much twentieth century art rebelled against a confined flat space in painting, particularly an illusionistic one. Instead either complete  two dimensional  flatness with no hint of depth was admired or more of a pulsating space, as for  instance in Piet Mondrian or Stuart Davis where  various parts of the canvas/picture, no matter how abstract, seemed to intermittently call out for attention. Similar  to the latter I think  was the popularity of collage where fragments of different pictures or representations were pasted together to create something new.

Though I did go through an abstract period  of wanting absolute flatness  and no hint of space I've always been more attracted to the broken, often pulsating space of collage or painters like Stuart Davis. Perhaps if  I'd never left the small town I grew up in and had spent less time in large cities my perspective  would be different. Certainly large cities do have a more pulsating environment with something new always catching your attention.

And yet when I look, very briefly, at video  games or even commercials during  some televised sporting events their wild  cacophony and chaos make the pulsating space of Mondrian and  Davis  look positively bucolic. That type of  non-stop activity seems to me to lead to mental chaos. No wonder so many people  have short attention spans.

But I digress!!!!! I really went through all of  that to explain why I have what may seem to some to be a perverse desire to ruin a good picture. Again this reminds me of  painters  who made sure that their paintings, even when realistic, showed signs of  process, most noticeably in paint drips.  And of course paint drips eventually became one of  the biggest  cliches in modern art.  It's hard  to say how much  coming  of  age when showing process was de rigeur  in art has influenced my own ideas of  what art should  be. But I'm sure I still have a bias for signs of process and for collage.

All I can say is that there is an intuitive desire to  prevent my own work from having a space that seems too confined, too settled. So I often do things to prevent that. I do it  because  is seems  right to me. It gives the picture the ability to breathe, not to be claustrophobic.

So when I mistakenly printed  the background upside down in my last too prints  I was very happy  with the result. It seemed to open up the space in both, to give the prints some room to breathe. But that in itself doesn't make a good painting or  print. It can just look completely out of place. So  for me the challenge of the second Eastern Amberwings print was to develop  the broken background with the  rest of the print so that it all looked cohesive, like it belonged  together. That is what I think I've done.

I have great admiration for  many artists who work with traditional space. But for  me I always get a bit antsy when I see it in my own work. There is a desire to try for something else.

Would Stuart Davis Be Pleased?

Blackpoll Warblers and Swamp Dogwood. Five-color Woodcut Proof by Ken Januski.

Well I hope so! During my many years as an abstract artist the American artist Stuart Davis was at the top of my artistic pantheon for many years. There was something so vibrant and alive about his work, though he never really reached the heights of fame and appreciation that I think his work deserved.

I wasn't really thinking of him with this woodcut or the last one. But when I pulled this proof a short while ago, black on top of four other colors my first reaction was: Stuart Davis! Right now I'm very happy with this print. In the cold light of day however it may no longer look so good, nor so much like Stuart Davis. But my guess is that I'm going to remain happy with it.

At that point I'll need to decide whether to overprint the yellow block, the very first one, as I've thought about doing. Right now my inclination is not to, though I may just have to try it on a proof, just to see what it looks like. If I don't then I'll print the black on good paper and be done. All the other colors have already been printed on the Shin Torinoko paper.

In my long artistic journey as a bird/ wildlife/nature artist I've continually sought to be honest to birds and nature while still making art that doesn't look like its from 200 years ago. Right now I feel like this is close to accomplishing that. Then again, there is the cold light of day lingering around the corner.

Mergansers and Grebes - Day Two, Block Two

Mergansers and Grebe on Schuylkill River. State Three of Multi-block Reduction Woodcut by Ken Januski.

It may not look like it but there are two separate woodblocks used on this print, well actually both sides of one woodblock, which is effectively two woodblocks. The colors at the moment are too close to one another, black and slate blue/gray. Now that I see what it looks like I know that I'll need to lighten up the slate blue/gray.

I want at least two colors in the water. One, a new lighter gray, will also serve as part of the plumage of both grebes. As I determine how these two blocks interact I'll change each of them. At the moment I've printed the black of the first woodblock on top of the slate blue/gray of the second block. But I need to cut away more of the black so that more of the new improved gray will eventually show through.

There is still the red of the female Common Merganser head and the yellow of the Red-necked Grebe bill to contend with. And most likely I'll try to break the picture plane by adding a second color in the water that makes a zigzag from back to front out towards the viewer. That is my intent. If it works as planned it will take away much possibility of this being read as realistic. That at least is my goal.

As I said in the last post I would like this to look like the 20th and 21st century have actually taken place, at least part of the 21st century, and that I'm not completely blind to them. In a way I hate to do this because it takes liberties with the birds and with realistic space among other things. But sometimes you just have to try something new.

Stuart Davis was an old hero of mine when I was an abstract painter and I always envisioned myself doing something similar to him when I turned from abstraction to birds. But I think that if I were to try something similar I'd feel that the resulting print too drastically flattened space and veered a little too close to decoration. So I'm going to try to avoid it and see if I can get some kind of compromise. Time will tell.

The Bay Area Light Influence

Studio Model at Berkeley. 18x23. Acrylic on Paper by Ken Januski.

I've been rearranging my studio the last few days trying to make it more organized and give me a bit more space. Of course in doing so I've run across some old, and very old, sketches, sketchbooks and paintings.

I'm a bit reluctant to show much of this, mainly because I think items of historical interest are primarily interesting to the person involved and much, much less so to anyone else. But since I sometimes use this blog to explain, or try to explain, some of my artistic thoughts and motivations I occasionally find something from the past that helps in that effort.

Among this morning's findings were quotes from the great American artist, and one time artistic idol of mine, Stuart Davis about how his work avoided the singular focus of much European art in favor of a type of painting that had its interest all over the canvas. I copied out pages of his thoughts on art and I won't repeat them here. But it reminds me of how much my art has always had some sort of theoretical interest in it. As far as paintings with more than one foci I think that's still largely true of my work. I get very uneasy when there's just one thing to focus on. I don't know if this is good or bad, but it certainly is consistent.

When I was living in San Francisco and Berkeley and studying art as undergraduate and graduate at UC Berkeley many years ago I was primarily an abstract artist. And I stayed that way until the 1990s when I started fiddling with insect drawings and then until 2006 when I switched completely to wildlife art, primarily bird art.

But there were a few local giants in my San Francisco art universe at that time, Elmer Bischoff, in whose class the above painting was done, and former San Francisco resident Richard Diebenkorn. Their use of values, particularly in the interest of depicting light, were just irresistible. Though it's been many a year since I've lived in California with its extraordinary light I don't think I've ever lost my love of it, or at least my memory of what it was like. And their figure drawings were amazing, thoroughly of the 20th century and not some older academy.

One of the things I loved about this painting in the past and then again when I saw it for the first time in 5-10 years today is its sense of light. At the time I'm sure it looked like nothing more than a Bay Area Figurative adoring copy. It probably was. But some things deserve to be paid that type of respect.

In any case I only show this as an example of a quasi-realistic painting of mine that is more than 30 years old. I don't think I did any more in the next 30 years until I did a few small bird acrylics over the last couple of years.


To me it's interesting that I was doing this type of painting while also fully engaged with the brash abstraction of Stuart Davis. But I think that's how good art is formed, through the influence of many, often quite disparate influences. I do wish though I could look at wildlife art today and see more that is aware of people like Davis and Diebenkorn. One of the most striking finds in my reading of a recent book  on wildlife artist Bob Kuhn was that on his studio wall he had reproductions of the work of both Davis and Diebenkorn. Amazing and inspiring!

P.S. I'd feel remiss if I didn't mention another influence, at least in terms of color from Berkeley: David Simpson. David was a friend and teacher of that time, one who stuck to his guns with simple geometric lushly colorful paintings regardless of where the whims of artistic taste might go. His paintings always proved that a very strong painting could be made almost entirely of color.