More Than Anything

I did something silly when I moved back home. I left my two newest matrices, the one for the print I showed you in the last post and the one I'm about to show you, in the studio of the school I graduated from last month. Luckily my boyfriend is taking summer classes there at the moment, so he is keeping them safe for me until I come to visit.
I don't have any new prints, any progress on previous work, nothing. I've been pretty lame art-wise this last month. Summer tends to get that way for me. Hopefully this blog will help make me create something new.
In the meantime, here's my print(s) that made it into the student show this year (and won the Director's Award). It's called "More Than Anything."

 

It's a pretty big photo there if you click on it. Which you'll probably want to do to see it at all.

This was created mostly with one big sintra relief print, but for the thought bubbles I did xylene transfers. This was done so that each of the though bubbles could be different without me having to make a new matrix for every print.

As with much of my work, it's based on personal experience to some extent. Though for this particular set of three, the thoughts of the woman were brought about because of a conversation I had with my oldest sister.

I was talking to her on the phone one day, as she was preparing to find a way to send blankets to Japan to help in relief efforts after the natural disaster that struck there. She was trying to settle down her three children as we spoke, obviously exhausted. (My sister is a stay at home mom. Both my married siblings are, as well as my own mother.) She told me of how the idea struck her suddenly, and how she was so happy to have something important to work on. Not that she didn't already; being a mom is wonderful. But all she ever wanted was to be a stay at home mom. Now here she was, under thirty, and she didn't know what to do with the rest of her life.

My sister ran into issues trying to send the blankets, and it never happened. This conversation haunted my thoughts for the next few weeks until I could find a way to put the feeling it gave me in an image. Luckily, I was already over half through carving this.

The set of three here, in my mind, shows a passing of time, and a change of answers because of that. At first, the woman wants a diamond ring. After that, she has her ring, and she wants a child. But then what?

The question, "What do you want more than anything in the whole world?" could be answered in a million different ways. It's different for every person, and it changes depending on the moment for the individual. For me, in the original situation, it was the name of another person. For a friend who requested a proof and did a print trade with me, it was a box of Twinkies. For my sister, it was this.