Last summer during the Rock River Studio Tour, I visited Leonard Ragouzeos‘ studio and watched fascinated as he playfully sloshed ink on shiny paper using unconventional tools to create subtle monochromatic values. But I also noticed that this technique caused the wet ink to form intricate visually interesting organic/cellular textures. I was blown away and wanted to push him out of the way and play with this new toy!
Well, last weekend, I had the delightful privilege of taking a one day ink on paper workshop with Leonard. He uses this medium (he invented) to make gorgeous large scale representational monochromatic paintings like this:
Europa
and this:
Leonard Ragouzeos creating
Using ultra smooth Yupo paper, water soluable ink, spray bottles of water and diluted ammonia, brushes, squeegees, blow dryers and brayers, I happily played for 4 hours. I was not so successful (an understatement) at trying to control the ink and create representational images BUT I had a blast experimenting with creating small scale mini-universes with amazing depth and organic texture and line. These scans don’t really capture it…
ink 1
ink 2
I have a fierce hankering now to try to use the wet ink patterns on the paper to make monoprints onto fabric and even bought a pad of Yupo. Ink comes in lots of colors, too! Anyone out there have any suggestions to help me be successful?
Karen Kamenetzky Fiber Art 
June 9, 2011 at 6:33 am |
Great Karen to open up another possibility for making beautiful fabric using your new techniques! It will be exciting to see.
June 9, 2011 at 1:30 pm |
Thanks Kris! You can be my lovely assistant!
June 9, 2011 at 10:34 am |
Keep going–that’s my suggestion. These are fascinating!
June 9, 2011 at 1:30 pm |
I’ll post more once I get a chance to mess around more with this stuff! Karen
May 23, 2012 at 5:44 pm |
Karen this is a great technique thanks for posting I particularly like the final image in this post.