Silk Trail 47, unique digital print, paper size 11 x 8.5 inches
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This is what happens when a printer starts to run out of ink as you're printing an image: Lines appear in the print field. Less prominent colors in the image appear stronger because the ink for the main color is almost gone. Color gets deposited at the beginning of the print, or along the sides--the cartridge's vain attempt at producing the image it was programmed to do. I used to hate when that happened. Now I live for the ink to run low.
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What you see here is what happened when I exploited all of that by printing, overprinting and reprinting several images on the same page, using the fast draft and normal printing features to vary the amount of ink laid down, as well as feeding the paper so that the images are out of register. I'm not giving you any more specifics except to say that the images I printed are from my Silk Road series. I'm calling this print series Silk Trail. Although each pass is a pale version of the original image--a trail--the image becomes a full and unique print through my printing process. (The images you see here are small-scale digital scans of the originals.)
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What I'm doing with the ink is not all that different from that I'm doing when I paint: laying down successive layers of fairly transparent paint to build up a small color field. You can see some Silk Road paintings here and here and elsewhere on this blog.
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The print series is up to #113. I'm waiting for the cartridge to run out so that I can bring the series to 100. After that, I don't know. Some of these prints will be shown by Conrad Wilde Gallery in Tucson next month. I'll keep you posted. Meanwhile, I'm having a blast.
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Silk Trail 44
Silk Trail 7 
Silk Trail 8
Silk Trail 9
Silk Trail 39
Silk Trail 46
Silk Trail 33
Silk Trail 18
Silk Trail 45 .
Thanks to Julian Jackson for the title, which came in conversation.
Thanks to Julian Jackson for the title, which came in conversation.
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