Etsy Shop for BlueChisel

Hummingbird Vine

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 23:27:48 -0500

$125.00
Each summer, a spread of green climbs up the roof of our house and tumbles over the side, hanging heavy with bright orange, trumpet shaped blooms. We call it the hummingbird vine, even though we’ve never seen a hummingbird ever go near it.

It’s a gorgeous vine, people stop to ask about it on their walks past the house, but it’s very invasive and needs to be tamed back each fall. There may actually come a day we have to take it out altogether and all that’ll be left will be a memory. I figured I’d better make a print of it just in case.

Image size: 7.5 x 10.5 inches
Paper size: 10 x 13 inches

Blue Water Pump

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 23:24:07 -0500

$125.00
So much depends on the blue water pump…

I like to think of this print as a play on the first line of William Carlos Williams’s poem The Red Wheelbarrow: (So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow).

The pump stood in the courtyard of a historic farm house in a tiny hamlet in South Bohemia, Czech Republic and the print is based on a photo taken there when we stayed there in 2001.

Image size: 7 x 8.5 inches
Paper size: 10.5 x 14 inches

Texada Sunset

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 23:21:21 -0500

$125.00
We spent a week in a cabin on Texada Island a couple of summers ago. The sunsets, the sun disappearing each night in a literal blaze of glory, were incredible. In the midst of nature, removed from city noises, the silence that comes with nightfall is almost tangible. Falling shadows are almost like velvet curtains dropping down on everything.

This print is intended to be a dialogue between the brilliant light of the sun and the dark shadows of encroaching night.

Image size: 6.5 x 9 inches
Paper size: 10 x 14 inches

Rusalka

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 23:18:28 -0500

$125.00
I’m not a huge opera fan but I get a shiver up the spine, in a good way, whenever I hear the beautiful “Song to the Moon” aria from Dvorak’s opera: Rusalka. In Slavic folklore, Rusalka is the generic name for mermaid or water nymph. Usually, Rusalky (pl) were not benign creatures; they typically lured sailors to a watery death.

In Dvorak’s opera, based on the Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, the Rusalka falls in love a human and ends up sacrificing herself for love of him. The “Song to the Moon” aria is the mermaid’s expression of longing for the man she loves and of her heartbreak at not being able to be with him.

The story of Rusalka, together with the Copenhagen little mermaid, was the inspiration for this print.

Image size: 6.5 x 7.5 inches
Paper size: 10 x 11 inches

Dreams

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 23:11:50 -0500

$75.00
I don’t have a long story for this print. Basically I wanted to present the interplay between sleep and dreams by using only cool tones for one “realm” and warm for the other. That’s about it.

Image size: 6.5 x 9 inches
Paper size: 11 x 14 inches

Dance

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 23:08:57 -0500

$60.00
This print is my tribute to Czech artist Mikolas Ales (1852 – 1913), whose pen and ink drawings were very influential on my artistic development. Ales’s work, rich in folkloric detail, captured Czech small town and/or village life at the time leading up to and following the turn of the century. My print is based on his illustration of a popular folk verse.

Image size: 8 x 4.5 inches
Paper size: 10 x 6.5 inches

Eve and the Serpent

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 23:04:33 -0500

$75.00
The idea for the Eve and the Serpent print was born during our vacation on Texada Island. Standing on the deck overlooking the beach below, this image emerged out of the rocks and driftwood. It was too much of a pull not to turn it into a print.

Image size: 5.5 x 8.5 inches
Paper size: 11 x 14 inches

Village Church

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 22:56:34 -0500

$65.00
The Czech rural landscape is dotted with small village churches such as the one in this print. Often in the midst of meadows full of wild flowers, accessed only by a dirt road that cuts through the fields, the churches are mementoes from an era of simpler (though not necessarily easier) lives held together by a simpler faith.

Also available in a hand-tinded version for $70.

Image size: 5.5 x 8.5 inches
Paper size: 9 x 12 inches

Firebird

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 20:09:39 -0500

$125.00
The Firebird story is a common one in Eastern European/Slavic folklore. The story has manifested in many different variations, written and musical: the Firebird Suite by Stravinsky for example. In all versions, the central theme is the magical Firebird who first appears as a thief in the night, stealing fruit from a farmer’s fruit trees, and then leads the farmer’s son(s) on an adventuresome chase to capture him.

Image size: 7.5 x 8.5 inches
Paper size: 11 x 13 inches

Garden Maple

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 20:06:04 -0500

$60.00
This image is one of the blooms on a plant we call the Dragon Maple. I doubt it actually is a maple, I suspect it’s more likely a member of the Hibiscus family, but that’s what the people who sold it to us at a farmer’s market called it. Each year, throughout the entire summer, the plant bursts into bloom with literally dozens of gorgeous and unique Japanese-lantern-like blooms.

Image size: 5.5 x 7 inches
Paper size: 8 x 12 inches

Bohemia

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:59:41 -0500

$125.00
This is a print based on memories. When I was small and still lived in the Czech Republic, we regularly took the train to visit relatives in different parts of the country. During these trips I loved looking out the train windows, watching the landscape change. Areas between the towns and cities were patchworks of fields bordered by tracts of woodland. I often made up stories about imaginary creatures who lived in the woods we passed.

We visited the Czech Republic in the summer of 2000 and still found small towns surrounded by fields, meadows, and woods. We stayed in an old farmhouse in a remote village where the surrounding landscape still looked much like it did hundreds of years ago.

I’ve tried to capture a sense of that rural landscape: the scattered fields, patches of woodland, meadows.

Image size: 7.5 x 8 inches
Paper size: 11 x 14 inches

Blue Mood

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:48:37 -0500

$60.00
This print is loosely based on the myth of Queen Mab who, according to some European legends, was said to have two aspects to her personality: a benevolent one and a malevolent one. The myth has been a fascination for me since childhood.

My print is clearly not a contrast between benevolence and malevolence; my aim was to depict duality by making one half of the woman’s face a mirror image of the other.

Image size: 6 x 8.5 inches
Paper size: 11.5 x 13.5 inches

Carizzo Plain

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:44:20 -0500

$75.00
This is a study of the Temblor Range in the Carizzo Plain national park, California. My aim was to achieve an impressionistic depiction of the thousands of blooms that carpet the ground in the area.

Image size: 5 x 5 inches
Paper size: 9 x 11 inches

Vrbice

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:37:11 -0500

$65.00
Vrbice is a small rural town in the Czech Republic, bordered by fields, meadows, and vineyards. The surrounding area is wine country and many of the locals supplement their incomes by making and selling wine. Wine cellars, some tucked into the town’s hillsides and some built underground next to houses, are abundant.

The scene in this woodcut is based on a photo we took of the hillside cellars when we visited in the summer of 2000. Above the hills and wine cellars a small village church keeps watch: the spiritual and temporal side by side.

Image size: 5 x 6.5 inches
Paper size: 9 x 12 inches

Memories

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:32:25 -0500

$60.00
This print is a stylization of the baroque architecture I grew up surrounded by, during my childhood in the Czech Republic. Sometimes, it’s things we take most for granted that stay with us when they’re gone. I myself, still miss the old-world charm of European buildings and cobble-stoned streets.

This is one of my few multi-block prints: three separate blocks were carved and printed to produce the image.

Image size: 5 x 6 inches
Paper size: 8.5 x 11 inches

Sentinel

Sun, 03 Jan 2010 19:26:05 -0500

$65.00
Several years ago, I found a metal rooster, spray-painted white, in a “junk” shop near where I worked. Given my attachment to roosters, I bought it, of course. We sanded him, dressed him up in some new colours, and perched him on the outside wall of our water fountain. We dubbed him the sentinel of the garden.

This was one of my first colour prints and is a multi-block print, done from three separate blocks.

Image size: 5.5 x 5.5 inches
Paper size: 8.5 x 10 inches

Hibiscus